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    He Makes Justin Bieber and the Bee Gees Go Viral on TikTok

    Griffin Haddrill is a founder of VRTCL, an agency hired to turn hit songs into memes.Name: Griffin HaddrillAge: 24Hometown: Bozeman, Mont.Currently Lives: In a four-bedroom house in Las Vegas with walls covered in street art.Claim to Fame: Mr. Haddrill is a co-founder of VRTCL, an agency hired by major record labels to make songs go viral on TikTok through remixes, mash-ups, meme-able chorus snippets, creator partnerships and other algorithmic alchemy. “I usually start with the lyric sheet to see if there is maybe a trend we can capitalize on or maybe a creative idea around the beat,” he said. For Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” that meant devil-themed makeup tutorials and interpretive dance routines set to the track. He also works with vintage hits like the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” which thanks to his efforts, has been featured in more than 279,000 TikTok videos including sunset selfies, boba tea tutorials and cyst removals. The right music “makes influencers feel part of a cool and cultured moment, and they like showing that off to fans,” he said.Big Break: Mr. Haddrill has always had an ear for music and business. At 12, he handed his father a business plan for high-tech earbuds. At 16, he was a music manager for Gregory Lake, an underground hip-hop artist, and 100Tribn, a D.J. act, while he was completing rehab in Salt Lake City for cocaine addiction. At 20, he dropped out of San Jose State to pursue music management full-time in Las Vegas. In 2019, he and Sean Young, a former influencer on Vine, saw how social media algorithms were starting to mold the habits of young listeners, and founded VRTCL.Latest Project: VRTCL, which Mr. Haddrill said brings in $1 million in monthly revenue and employs 18 people, was acquired in July by Create Music Group, a data-driven music company in Los Angeles. Mr. Haddrill, who is staying on as chief executive, is guarded about the terms of the deal. “With earning potential, the acquisition is in the eight figures,” he said.Next Thing: Mr. Haddrill helped turn “Stay” by Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber and “Best Friend” by Saweetie and Doja Cat into TikTok earworms last year. But his dream client list skews older: Duran Duran, Billy Joel and other cassette-era acts. “One song that I always thought could really blow up again is Cher’s ‘Believe,’” he said.Unlimited Data: He recently hired Conover Wang, a former roommate and software engineer at Reddit, to develop a program to analyze TikTok song data, including views, comments and shares. “The software is really a core part of our business, although it doesn’t have a name yet,” he said. “We should probably call it something cool.” More

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    FKA twigs Seeks Angelic Intervention, and 10 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Maren Morris, Stromae, Robert Glasper and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.FKA twigs, ‘Meta Angel’FKA twigs’s new mixtape, “Caprisongs,” is woven through with snippets of conversations with friends, which she has said represents a kind of sonic antidote to the loneliness and self-doubt she was experiencing during the 2020 lockdown. The wrenching, shape-shifting “Meta Angel” is perhaps the purest distillation of this approach: After an introductory pep talk from a friend, twigs confesses her private vulnerabilities (“I’ve got voices in my head, telling me I won’t make it far”), before summoning all her defiance on an artfully Auto-Tuned, Charli XCX-esque chorus. “Throw it in the fire,” she belts, in a conflagration of emotion that sounds like the first step to healing. LINDSAY ZOLADZStromae, ‘L’enfer’“L’enfer” — the “Hell” that Stromae confesses to in this single — is thoughts of suicide. Stromae, whose father is from Rwanda, is a Belgian songwriter, musician, dancer and YouTube creator who has been making a return after releasing his last studio album in 2013. This song suggests the reason for his absence: dark, self-destructive impulses that he has averted. It begins with Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies and moves to four mournful piano chords as Stromae considers how “It’s crazy how many people have thought the same.” A choir, stuttering electronics and a looming beat answer him, but there’s nothing sanctimonious about the song; Stromae sounds like he’s still grappling with his troubles. JON PARELESAldous Harding, ‘Lawn’“Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me,” sings the ever-enigmatic Aldous Harding in “Lawn,” from an album due in March. The track is a wispy-voiced homage to Stereolab, serenely cycling through two-chord piano patterns over breezy syncopated drums, as Harding airily ponders “losing you” and the obligations of songwriting: “Time flies when you’re writing B-sides,” she observes. The video, co-directed by Harding, features human-lizard hybrids and actual reptiles, but she never sounds entirely coldblooded. PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Circles Around This Town’The first single from Maren Morris’s forthcoming album, “Humble Quest,” vividly conjures her earliest days in Nashville, hustling around town in a “Montero with the A/C busted” shopping “a couple bad demos on a burned CD.” Those details may feel lived-in and time-stamped, but Morris knows she’s operating within a long lineage — she was certainly not the first aspiring songwriter to drive circles around Music City in hopes of catching her big break, nor will she be the last. The song’s direct appeal to this country tradition makes it feel like a throwback to the days before Morris’s pop crossover, but she and the producer Greg Kurstin prove twang is no obstacle to a soaring, universally inviting chorus. “Thought that when I hit it, it’d all look different, but I still got the pedal down,” Morris sings from the other side of success, still hungry but now with a mature confidence in her talent. ZOLADZPavement, ‘Be the Hook’An infamous lore hangs over “Terror Twilight,” Pavement’s fifth and final album, from 1999. The alt-rock super-producer Nigel Godrich was hired in an attempt to make the band’s slacker-rock sound slightly more palatable to the mainstream, but his methods ended up hastening the already-fraying group’s demise — or so the story goes. On April 8, though, Matador Records will finally release a comprehensive deluxe edition of “Terror Twilight,” and perhaps enough time has passed since the LP’s polarizing release that it can finally be appreciated on its own terms. The first taste of the unreleased material, the loose and bluesy jam “Be the Hook,” already complicates the received wisdom that “Terror Twilight” was all streamlined melodies and smoothed-over edges, as Stephen Malkmus meta-vamps charismatically atop a crunchy riff: “Everybody get your hands together and cheer for this rock ’n’ roll band!” ZOLADZKing Princess featuring Fousheé, ‘Little Bother’King Princess, a songwriter from Brooklyn, uses a programmed punk-pop beat, U2-style guitar chords, cascading vocal harmonies and the endorsement of a co-writer, Fousheé, to confront an ex who ended up being indifferent, treating her like a “little bother.” Pointedly, she asks, “Do you feel like you should-could have tried a little harder?” PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Killer Mike, Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Black Superhero’Robert Glasper, a jazz pianist who maintains a close connection with hip-hop, works through three thick chords and enlists choir-like backup vocals behind Killer Mike (from Run the Jewels), Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid to call for a “Black Superhero.” The song invokes 1960s activism and current unrest to call for ways to save “every block, every hood, every city, every ghetto.” PARELESDJ Python, ‘Angel’The Brooklyn-based producer Brian Piñeyro (a.k.a. DJ Python) has a reputation for tenderness. Consider the title of his website, a painfully veracious observation on contemporary texting behavior: “sayingsomethingsincerelyandendingitwith.lol.” That kind of soft-focus sentimentality also appears on “Angel,” the latest track from his upcoming full-length “Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2.” Over the course of the 10-minute production, Piñeyro collages oneiric, crystalline synths and drums into a suspended state of astral bliss. The song arrives alongside a custom perfume, whose description — a “gender-spectral” scent that draws on rave culture — only plunges the release further into the universe of daydreams. ISABELIA HERRERAJacques Greene, ‘Taurus’Jacques Greene has always been interested in weaving the textures of all kinds of club music, but on “Taurus,” he takes a more meditative path, perhaps inspired by the film scores he recently composed. Hard-edge drum breaks propel the production, recalling the rush of a distant dance floor, but a softness remains at the center. The vaporous whispers and echoes of the vocalist Leanne Macomber float on and over each other, curling into a small misty cloud, like visible breath on a frigid day. The effect is cold and cavernous, but it offers an unexpected sense of comfort. HERRERAGonora Sounds, ‘Kusaziva Kufa’Gonora Sounds, from Zimbabwe, is led by a blind guitarist, Daniel Gonora, who had been a member of a top Zimbabwean group, Jairos Jiri Band. For years, he made a living performing on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. A documentary, “You Can’t Hide from the Truth,” revived his reputation, and on Feb. 4 he releases an album, “Hard Times Never Kill,” backed by some of Zimbabwe’s top musicians. His style is called sungura, which meshes Zimbabwe’s own traditions — guitar picking that echoes the plinking patterns of thumb pianos — with styles from across Africa. “Kusaziva Kufa” (“Ignorance”) taunts anyone who doubted that his music would survive; between drums, vocals and guitars, it’s a syncopated marvel that shifts to an even higher gear halfway through. PARELESRokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, ‘Kurunba’The Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Koné smiles her way through the video for “Kurunba,” and the beat she and the Irish producer Jackknife Lee — whose collaborative album is due Feb. 18 — worked up meshes a four-on-the floor thump, electronic swoops, quick-strummed guitars and West African percussion, an unstoppable groove. Yet her lyrics, delivered with a tough rasp, are about the ways a patriarchal culture discards women after they have raised their children, protesting with unquestionable vitality. PARELES More

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    How Disney Created the Hit Single 'We Don't Talk About Bruno'

    “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from “Encanto” is a surprise chart topper and TikTok darling. Here’s how Disney created its biggest smash since “Let It Go.”“A seven-foot frame! Rats along his back!” a curly-haired teenager draped in a cloak lip-syncs for the camera.“I associate him with the sound of falling sand,” a busy mom nods appreciatively, bopping along with a vacuum as she embarks on a kitchen dance break.“I’m sorry, mi vida, go on!” a pair of sisters screech, perilously off-key.“Encanto” cautioned against talking about Bruno, but a whole lot of people are obsessed with a song about him.Since that animated Disney film opened in theaters in November and arrived on Disney+ on Christmas Eve, its playful song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has steadily grown into an international hit. Unlike most Disney breakouts, “Bruno” is not a wistful hero’s solo or a third-act power ballad. It’s a Broadway-style ensemble track that revels in gossip about a middle-age man.Yet the song recently topped the Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes charts in the United States, reached No. 1 on the global YouTube music videos chart and currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first original song from a Disney animated film to rank that high since the “Frozen” anthem “Let It Go” in 2014. Other “Encanto” tracks, like “Surface Pressure” and “The Family Madrigal,” are also rising. And this week, the film’s soundtrack bumped Adele’s “30” from the top spot on the Billboard 200.“Bruno” has been bolstered by its popularity on TikTok, where tribute clips from the likes of that cloaked teenager, those screeching sisters and that bopping mom have racked up millions of views.“I could look at the TikToks all day,” one of the “Encanto” directors, Jared Bush, said in an interview. “Everyone is finding a different entry point, whether it’s a specific moment or character dynamic. There’s something in it for everybody and, honestly, it’s just delicious.”Explore the World of ‘Encanto’Disney’s new film, about a gifted family in Colombia, pairs stunning animation with spellbinding songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Review: “Encanto” charms with its focus on family dynamics, fantastic feats of wizardry and respect for Latino culture, writes our film critic.The Voice of Mirabel: Stephanie Beatriz, who won over fans with her role in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” discusses taking on the lead role in the film.An Enchanting Soundtrack: The film’s album of music recently climbed to the top of the Billboard 200, displacing Adele’s “30.”A Slice of His Homeland: A Times reporter watched “Encanto” with her Colombian father. Here’s what they thought.In the movie about a Colombian teenager named Mirabel Madrigal (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) and her supernaturally gifted family, Bruno (John Leguizamo) is a mysterious, outcast uncle whose ability to see the future earns the abject scorn of all those receiving bad news. His family and the townspeople share their colorful, often bitter, anecdotes about his prophecies in the song.Germaine Franco provided the “Encanto” score, while “Bruno” and the rest of the songs were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who had worked with Disney on the soundtrack of the 2016 film “Moana.” The “Encanto” filmmakers said he had delivered the infectious “Bruno” virtually on command.In spring 2020, the directors Bush and Byron Howard; the co-director Charise Castro Smith; and Tom MacDougall, then head of music at Walt Disney Animation Studios, hopped on one of their weekly video chats with Miranda to brainstorm an ensemble track about Bruno that could provide a jolt of energy midfilm.“We could see Lin thinking, and he looked at us and said, ‘It feels like a spooky ghost story, like a spooky montuno,’” Howard said, referring to a Cuban musical pattern. “And he turns to the piano and plays the first three chords. We literally saw him put it together and compose in that very moment. I’ve never had that happen before.” (Miranda was unavailable for an interview.)The character of Bruno had already evolved during the film’s creation. In an early iteration, he was much younger, someone Mirabel’s age. He was also originally named Oscar, but Bush said a legal snag over the existence of a number of real-life Oscar Madrigals in Colombia, led them to explore other name options. He sent Miranda a list of five alternatives, to which the songwriter replied, “Definitely Bruno.”“I couldn’t figure out why he was so definitive,” Bush said, “until two days later when we heard, ‘Bruno, no, no, no.’”Miranda then recorded a demo track in which he sang all 10 parts. “It was like Lin-Manuel on steroids,” said Adassa, the singer-songwriter who voices Dolores, the Madrigal cousin with exceptional hearing. (That demo has not been released, though a popular Miranda impressionist has taken a stab at what it might sound like.)With only storyboard sketches and Miranda’s audio to guide them, the film’s choreographer, Jamal Sims, and his team spent about two weeks in a Los Angeles studio creating the “Bruno” dance moves for the animators to render digitally. Incorporating elements of cumbia, the Colombian national dance that features African, Indigenous and European influences, along with salsa and rumba, they mapped out every moment of the song and shot a reference video in one take as if part of a live musical. Even Bruno’s rats perform intricate steps. (The animation team would later film the dancers from different camera angles.)“We had to build this all from our imagination,” the assistant choreographer, Kai Martinez, said. “What helped make this piece unique is that we had a group of Latinx dancers from Colombia, from Cuba, from Puerto Rico — people who understood the assignment.” (Clips of their choreography shared by Martinez on TikTok have amassed more than 23 million views.)Martinez, who is a first-generation Colombian American, also served as an animation reference consultant and provided the filmmakers with crucial insights into cultural nuances and mannerisms.“It was bigger than a job,” she said. “Being a Colombian woman, this is the kind of film that I would have wanted to watch when I was a kid.”Meanwhile, because of Covid precautions, the voice actors recorded their parts separately in studios across the United States and Colombia. Rhenzy Feliz sang the shapeshifting cousin Camilo’s lines in a rented space near San Luis Obispo, Calif., and said he channeled “theater kid” energy in his character’s dramatic delivery. Adassa recorded in her home studio in Nashville.“At first my rap was going to be an octave higher,” she said of her whispery bars. “I thought, she’s such an intimate speaker, I’m going to do it an octave lower. And it worked.”Despite its huge popularity, “Bruno” won’t get any Oscar love: The studio submitted only “Dos Oruguitas,” an emotional Spanish ballad performed by Sebastián Yatra, for awards consideration. That song, while not as ubiquitous as “Bruno,” made the academy’s best original song short list last month. Should it go on to take the statuette, it would make history as Disney’s first non-English-language winner.“‘Dos Oruguitas’ was so central to the emotional theme of the movie,” Howard said when asked if they had considered submitting “Bruno.” He added, “It’s probably the most critical bit of musical storytelling in the whole film because it has to do with the history of the family and Mirabel understanding her grandmother.”In fact, betting on “Bruno” would have been a bold strategic departure. You’d need to look as far back as “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to find a Disney Oscar winner with a similar theatrical quirkiness. Since then, when the studio has wowed the academy, it has been overwhelmingly for ballads, including “A Whole New World” (“Aladdin”), “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (“The Lion King”), “Colors of the Wind” (“Pocahontas”), “Let It Go” (“Frozen”) and “Remember Me” (Pixar’s “Coco”), along with the occasional Randy Newman ditty.Besides, multiple submissions could have risked the possibility of splitting votes, and Miranda lacks only an Oscar to achieve the rare career E.G.O.T. This wouldn’t be his first nomination: His “Moana” track, “How Far I’ll Go,” lost to “City of Stars” from “La La Land.” (In addition to his work on “Encanto,” he also directed “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and could potentially land a nomination for that film.)Beyond awards season, the “Encanto” directors said they were open to the possibility of a sequel, stage show or spinoff series. “I would love for there to be continuing stories of these characters because they’re real people to us,” Bush said. “Ninety minutes is not enough time to spend with the Madrigals.”And despite some fans’ theories that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” — and the repeated reprimand “Silenzio, Bruno!” in the Pixar film “Luca” — show Disney has an anti-Bruno agenda, the filmmakers insist it isn’t so.“At the end of ‘Encanto,’ Bruno turns out to be a great guy,” Bush said. “So, you know, we’ve resurrected that name. I think Bruno should be proud of that.” More

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    Elvis Costello & the Imposters Are Still Blasting Away

    With his longtime bandmates, the English songwriter noisily demolishes illusions on “The Boy Named If.”During the pandemic, plenty of musicians have unveiled their quieter, scaled-down, more reflective sides. Elvis Costello, typically, had other ideas.His 2020 album, “Hey Clockface,” was a high-contrast miscellany: urbanely retro acoustic pop, bruising rockers, otherworldly electronics. For “Spanish Model” in 2021, he gathered Spanish-speaking rockers to translate lyrics and replace his own vocals on the tracks from “This Year’s Model,” his fierce, punky 1978 album with the Attractions. Apparently revisiting the Attractions at their most aggressive sparked something. On “The Boy Named If,” Costello is rejoined by his perennial band the Imposters — the original Attractions with a replacement bassist — for songs that kick hard and deep. It’s anything but quiet.“The Boy Named If” has an elaborate superstructure. Its deluxe version adds an 88-page book written and illustrated by Costello: “The Boy Named If and Other Children’s Tales.”It’s not made for children, though. Each song gets a prose vignette — sometimes fleshing out the lyrics, sometimes sketching alternate scenarios — alongside bright, blocky, big-eyed drawings. The vignettes, like the songs, are full of Costello’s jumpy wordplay, and they involve lust, infidelity, violence, predation, betrayal, deception, self-deception and other grown-up pastimes.The situations and wordplay are knotty; often, they crash youthful illusions into adult disillusion. The album’s stomping title track posits a lucky, seductive, elusive imaginary friend, “the boy named If,” who always escapes consequences. In “What if I Can’t Give You Anything But Love?,” over a swaggering beat, a cheating husband struggles to figure out where he actually stands with his paramour: “Don’t fix me with that deadly gaze/It’s a little close to pity,” he chokes out. And in “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” a duet with Nicole Atkins, a screenwriter in a diner tells the waitress about envisioning her in movie scenes; she’s skeptical. “I’ve seen your kind before,” she observes, “in courtroom sketches.”While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. Costello, on guitar, worked together with the drummer Pete Thomas; then he and the co-producer Sebastian Krys layered on parts by Davey Faragher on bass and Steve Nieve on keyboards.Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002. “Farewell, OK” opens the album with Costello shouting through a distorted rockabilly boogie. “Death of Magic Thinking” meshes a pummeling march with a Bo Diddley beat and multiple jabbing, scrabbling guitars, steamrollering through a skewed chord progression and a tale of adolescent bewilderment.“The Difference” — based, Costello has revealed, on the bleak love story in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 film “Cold War” — has Costello’s guitars and Nieve’s organ tossing bits of dissonance back and forth in the verses, then veers into a poppy major-key chorus that asks, “Do you by chance know wrong from right?”Over more than 30 studio albums, Costello has regularly tested himself against new genres and new collaborators: classical, country, R&B, hip-hop, jazz. But some of his strongest albums, like this one, have been his reunions with the Attractions/Imposters. Inevitably, there are echoes of Costello’s past on the new album.“Magnificent Hurt” harks back to the pounding garage-rock and nagging organ of old Costello songs like “Pump It Up.” But the guitar solos are untamed, and there’s a smart Costello twist in the chorus, using just a pause: “It’s the way you make me feel magnificent/Hurt.” With Costello and the Imposters, familiarity breeds audacity, not routine. Some youthful pleasures weren’t illusions at all.Elvis Costello & the Imposters“The Boy Named If”(Capitol) More

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    He Was an Important Conductor. Also a Great One.

    Hans Rosbaud was renowned as a modern-music specialist. But newly released archival recordings demonstrate his gifts were far broader.There is precisely one famous story about Hans Rosbaud — though, like its subject, it is not quite as famous as it ought to be.This Austrian conductor was asleep at his home in March 1954 when the telephone rang. On the line was a producer at Hamburg Radio, a little desperate. Could Rosbaud come to cover for the injured Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, and oversee the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a gargantuan opera unperformed since being left unfinished in 1932?Rosbaud had never seen the score. His mind likely drifted to the 1930s: Back then Schoenberg had told Rosbaud forebodingly that he had “not imposed at all any reserve concerning difficulties of execution” in writing the opera. He clearly assumed no one would dare perform it.When was the premiere scheduled, Rosbaud asked the radio producer, fearfully? In exactly one week.This was a difficult prospect, but not the impossible one it would have been for almost anyone else. “One is almost forced to apply the word genius to Hans Rosbaud’s masterful control of the work,” The New York Times later reported of the performance. Genius enough, indeed, that the broadcast was released on record in 1957, the year Rosbaud led the staged premiere of “Moses und Aron” in Zurich — surpassing “even himself,” as a critic wrote.The recording still holds up, a fire coruscating through its lucidity. Had Schoenberg lived to hear it, he might have repeated the thanks he had offered Rosbaud in 1931 for a performance of his “Variations for Orchestra,” when he wrote in awe at having heard his work performed “with clarity, with love, with design.”Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron”NDR Symphony Orchestra, 1954 (Sony)No musician of Rosbaud’s generation did more to canonize its avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky offered a letter of recommendation for “this high-minded musician, this aristocrat among conductors.” Paul Hindemith was a classmate and lifelong friend. Anton Webern was a house guest.“When a composer speaks of Rosbaud the conductor,” Pierre Boulez wrote of the man to whom his masterpiece, “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” is dedicated, “he is speaking in the first place of a friend.”Joan Evans, a musicologist and Rosbaud biographer, has listed 173 premieres that he gave from 1923 until his death in 1962, the beneficiaries running from Fritz Adam to Bernd Alois Zimmermann by way of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gyorgy Ligeti and Luigi Nono. The Musical Times of London eulogized him simply as “the greatest conductor of contemporary music.”Webern’s “Sechs Stücke” (Op.6, No. 4)SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (Universal Music France)But this “dream figure” who would “always give the future the benefit of the doubt,” as Boulez wrote, chafed at his formidable reputation.“I am not a modern music specialist,” Rosbaud told a German newspaper in 1956. “In Aix-en-Provence I am characterized as a Mozart expert; in Munich, I am regarded as a specialist of Bruckner. It is dangerous to classify musicians in this manner.”Particularly so, for Rosbaud’s own fate. His public stature has never approached the private respect in which musicians held him, in part because of his advocacy for music that has never really caught on. Quiet and scholarly, this “grim, Lincolnesque” man, as a writer once described him, seemed to be the antithesis of a celebrity maestro. His major positions were not with big-name symphonies, but less-prominent radio ensembles. He made few commercial records, superb though those few were. He had no interest in fame.Few conductors, then, have more to gain from an opening of the vaults. More than 700 of Rosbaud’s performances have been languishing in archives, most of them at SWR, the successor to Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.Rosbaud leading his radio orchestra in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.SWRSince 2017, SWR has released 59 CDs from those tapes, in a project that covers Rosbaud’s work in composers from Mozart to Sibelius. Much remains still to materialize, not least what should be essential boxes of 20th-century music. But despite variable, usually mono sound, what has already emerged is plenty to prove he was far more than his legend. Without question one of the most important conductors of his century, Rosbaud was also one of the finest.He saw his task as primarily to help composers state their own case. But unlike others who have aimed for a similar interpretive modesty, Rosbaud’s approach was never clinical or didactic. It always had at its core that love that moved Schoenberg. His Bruckner had humanity as well as structure; he took Haydn seriously, early and late alike; his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were not just intelligible, but blazed with intensity.Claudia Cassidy put her pen on Rosbaud’s typical style in 1962. “Rosbaud gave us a blueprint,” this ordinarily truculent Chicago Tribune critic wrote after hearing him lead Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “Not the kind that lies inert on the drafting table, but the kind that sets skyscrapers soaring, flings bridges into space and sends imagination spinning into orbit.”Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (SWR)Rosbaud had music in his blood. He was born in Graz, Austria, on July 22, 1895, to Anna Rosbaud, a piano teacher who had taken lessons from Clara Schumann. A single mother who died in 1913, Anna never told her four children who their father was; Arnold Kramish, the biographer of Hans’s brother, Paul, traced their paternity to Franz Heinnisser, at one point the choirmaster of the Graz cathedral.Growing up in a musical family, if a destitute one, Hans played at least four instruments. He attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and his first appointment as a conductor came in 1921. He later recalled getting used to “the whistling, ranting and raging” with which audiences would greet his Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the Mainz Symphony in Germany.Rosbaud’s main task in Mainz was to run its music school, and he continued this educational approach to his career after 1929, as conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Rosbaud gave talks on the orchestral instruments, writing pieces like a fughetta for three bassoons as illustrations, and he lectured on Wagner before giving act-by-act broadcasts of the “Ring.” Bartok, Stravinsky and other composers came to perform; Schoenberg spoke on his “Variations,” with Rosbaud giving examples, and also sent in thoughts on “Brahms the Progressive.”Stravinsky, left, and Rosbaud, who was one of that composer’s most devoted interpreters in the Germany of his era.SWREven before Hitler took power in 1933, Rosbaud’s tastes were drawing the attention of what he told Stravinsky was a “chauvinistic movement.” Forced to enlist a family friend in Graz as a fake father to demonstrate his Aryan ancestry, Rosbaud found his once-lauded support for a certain strand of new music now brought him trouble, not least when a disgruntled subordinate reported him to the Gestapo in 1936 for seeing music “in a Jewish sense.” He reassured banished composers that he remained on their side, and tried, without success, to find a job in the United States. He left Frankfurt in 1937 for Münster.Rosbaud despised Nazism, and he likely knew that Paul, his brother, was spying on the German nuclear program for Britain. Still, Hans put his abilities to work for the Nazis, reconciling himself to that service with small acts of resistance. To Berlin, he seemed sound enough to be appointed general music director of occupied Strasbourg, a city that the Nazis sought to turn into a colony for their idea of German art, in 1941. But Rosbaud endeared himself to the Alsatians, speaking French, protecting the musicians and acting with sufficient decency that even Charles Munch, the fiercely antifascist Strasbourgian conductor, thought him beyond reproach.Despite Rosbaud’s work in occupied territory, the American military rushed to clear him in denazification proceedings. Shorn of any unfortunate ideological associations in either his politics or his aesthetics, he was general music director in Munich before 1945 was over: a brief, frantic tenure that saw him give Beethoven and Bruckner cycles in bombed-out halls, and reconnect German musical life to its international context, with Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky given pride of place.That work would go on, but not primarily in Munich. An offer in 1948 from Baden-Baden could not be refused, coming as it did with the opportunity to imagine an ensemble from scratch and to fulfill a special mandate for new music, which after 1950 included the Donaueschingen Festival, a hotbed of the avant-garde. An energetic Beethoven Violin Concerto with Ginette Neveu from 1949, as well as a lacerating Hartmann Second and a courageous Messiaen “Turangalîla” shortly after, show that Rosbaud quickly brought the orchestra to a high standard.Haydn’s Symphony No. 104SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1952 (SWR)But he never aspired to the ensemble virtuosity of the more commercially-driven orchestras of the day. His vivacious 1957 account of Haydn’s “London” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic might be crisper than his 1952 and 1962 efforts in Baden-Baden, but what matters about them all is how their warmth and drive enliven Haydn’s structures, without drawing attention to themselves.The joys of what SWR has unearthed are subtle, not sensational. Those who need grand statements in their Beethoven might be disappointed, whatever the grinding insistence of his Fifth Symphony, the liquid flow of his Sixth, the effervescence of his Eighth. Those who want bombast in their Tchaikovsky will doubt his unmissable Fifth, so full of dark psychological shadows that it is almost redolent of Mahler. And in Mahler, Rosbaud’s early advocacy for whom was characteristic of a conductor so often half a beat ahead of his time, he comes close to ideal.“Mr. Rosbaud does not cut it to pieces or disguise it by ‘interpretation,’” Cassidy wrote of a Mahler Ninth in Chicago in December 1962, in words that also apply to Rosbaud’s Baden-Baden recording from 1954. “He gives it clarity, precision and understanding, which is to shed light on it without blinding its mysteries.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 9SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1954 (SWR)The Chicago Symphony, where Rosbaud had long spells as a guest conductor between 1959 and 1962, considered him to succeed Fritz Reiner as music director. This offered American recognition for the first time, and a chance to develop a craft honed not just in Baden-Baden, but also in Zurich, where he held positions with the Tonhalle Orchestra, and in Aix-en-Provence. There he directed the annual summer festival from 1948, leading operatic Mozart that Virgil Thomson once called “perfection” in its “animation and orchestral delicacy,” and venturing into Gluck and Rameau.But Chicago was not to be. Rosbaud had been weakening since kidney surgery several years before, and after that Mahler Ninth and a brief stop in Baden-Baden, where he gave a serene farewell with Brahms’s Second, he died on Dec. 29, 1962, near Lugano, Switzerland. He was 67. More

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    Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Some years back, an earthquake broke the chimney off the novelist Sjón’s writing hut. He was in the bathtub when it hit — he clung to the tub’s edges as it bucked and jerked, sloshing water onto the floor. This was unpleasant but not terribly strange. Iceland is one of the most geologically volatile patches of land on Earth — it sits (like Hawaii) on top of a geothermal hot spot but also (unlike Hawaii) on top of a seam where two tectonic plates are pulling apart. The threshold between inside and outside is very thin. You never know when some mysterious force — earthquake, geyser, volcano — will come bursting out of the middle of the planet into your everyday life.What made this earthquake unusual, in Sjón’s experience, were the whales. In the weeks following the tremors, whales started beaching themselves all over Iceland’s South Coast. The shock waves, he speculates, might have thrown off the animals’ navigation systems. One day, on a writing break, Sjón wandered down to the ocean and discovered that a whale had beached itself just a few minutes from his front door.“What kind of whale?” I asked.“I don’t know the species,” he said. “A medium-sized whale?”“How big is medium? Like the size of a car?”“No no no,” Sjón said.“The size of a dolphin?”“Much bigger!” he said. “The size of a bus.”Well, the bus-size whale died on the beach. The smell, Sjón says, was incredible. Day after day, week after week, he would take writing breaks to stand by the ocean and watch the flocks of seabirds working on the carcass. The biggest birds ate first. Then the smaller birds moved in. Finally, Sjón went in, too. He entered that rotten world — bone, blubber, organs, gristle — and saw, sticking up from the mess, like an elegant carving, a whole rib, tapered and curving, roughly the length of his arm. He grabbed the bone with both hands. It was rank and slippery. He yanked and twisted until, with much difficulty, he was able to wrestle it free.Elsewhere in the carcass, Sjón noticed a shoulder blade — a gorgeous flat half-disc that looked like the head of an ancient ax. With a little more work, he managed to extract that too. By the time Sjón made it back to his writing hut, he was covered in death-slime. He had to strip off his clothes before he went inside. He left the whale bones out in the garden. It took the harshness of Iceland three full years to scrub them clean.Sjón was telling me this story in the little cottage where he writes his books: an old fisherman’s house plated with black corrugated steel. (Icelandic houses tend to wear armor to survive the winters.) In person, Sjón is a perfect avatar of the International Man of Letters: thick black glasses, tweed hat, faint graying goatee. His manner is gentle, thoughtful and unfailingly polite. He speaks fluent English with a strong Icelandic accent. That afternoon, he appeared to be wearing, over his button-up shirt, two sweaters — a cardigan over another cardigan. Trying to imagine this man wrestling bones out of a whale carcass was absurd.But Sjón had proof. He pointed to the wall behind us. “This is the rib,” he said.It hung there, like the back end of a set of parentheses.He pointed to the opposite wall. “And this is the shoulder.”There it was, hovering like a spaceship over the bookshelf.“So if you’re here” — now Sjón gestured to the table itself — “then you’re in the belly of the whale. So I sit here and write.”He smiled, in a way that his books sometimes seem to smile — a way that suggests something funny might have happened, but also possibly not, and anyway let’s move on to whatever story is coming next.The belly of the whale, in traditional storytelling, is a place of divine transformation, a cave filled with dark magic. This makes it the perfect place for Sjón to do his writing. His wide-ranging work — nine novels, two films, numerous poetry collections, dozens of song lyrics for his close friend Björk — carries a whiff of the unreal. The novels often feature bizarre events, usually involving sudden transformations: One fox becomes four foxes, a stamp collector turns into a werewolf, a young man morphs into a black butterfly. Like Iceland itself, Sjón’s books are simultaneously tiny and huge, weird and normal, ancient and modern. Reading them feels like listening to that story of the beached whale: a wild invention that is actually a straight-faced confession. His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.‘His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.’Sjón’s fiction has long been celebrated in Europe. The books started appearing in English in 2011, and soon they were drawing high-profile raves. “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head,” A.S. Byatt wrote in The New York Review of Books. Although Sjón has not quite become an international literary Nordic megabrand, à la Karl Ove Knausgaard or Stieg Larsson, he has amassed a deep and passionate following, especially among other novelists.“I am amazed he’s not better known than he is,” Hari Kunzru told me. “I thought he was going to turn into something like the Bolaño cult.” Kunzru said that he admires both Sjón’s erudition — his novels cover such diverse subjects as whaling, alchemy and the history of cinema — and the way he folds that deep knowledge into swift, effortless stories.David Mitchell, another fan, told me via email that he admires Sjón for his “ticklish, full-moon sense of humor” and the poetic simplicity of his style: “spaciousness and absence” that make him think of Taoism. What Sjón leaves out of his work, Mitchell wrote, is as powerful as what he puts in. “His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.”The type of wild transformation Sjón loves to write about — all these creatures unpredictably changing states — also applies to his own work. From book to book, he radically varies his style, setting and subject matter. He can write a slim fable about a 19th-century fox hunt (“The Blue Fox”) or a rolling monologue by a 17th-century alchemist (“From the Mouth of the Whale”) or a multigenre epic about the Holocaust, nuclear explosions and DNA (“CoDex 1962”). Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is a clinically realistic portrait of a young neo-Nazi. And yet, despite its range, the writing is always recognizably Sjón.When talking about his work, Sjón rejects the word “fantastic.” Fantastic, he says, implies unreality. Even the most improbable events in his books, he argues, are not unreal — they grow from the soil of Icelandic history, and they are real for his characters, even if they happen only in their minds, as misperceptions or hallucinations. Instead, Sjón prefers the word “marvelous.” His work, and his country, are full of marvels: strange things that emerge and flow, all the time, over the bedrock of reality. The marvelous is all around us, he insists. We just need the vision to see it.Sjón’s full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson — a cascade of soft G’s and rolling R’s that sounds, when he says it, like a secret liquid song, sung deep in his throat, to a shy baby horse. He was born in 1962, into a Reykjavík that was, in many ways, still a village: small, dull, remote, conservative, homogeneous. Iceland felt like the edge of the world, and Sjón grew up on the edge of that edge. He was the only child of a single mother, and they moved, when he was 10, into a freshly poured neighborhood on the outskirts of the city called Breidholt. (By the miniature standards of Reykjavík, outskirts means about a 10-minute drive from downtown.) Breidholt was planned housing: a big complex of Brutalist concrete apartment blocks standing alone in a muddy wasteland. Every time it rained, the parking lot turned into a brown lake. And yet that wasteland was surrounded by ancient Icelandic beauty: moors, trees, birds, a river full of leaping salmon. Sjón often thinks about this juxtaposition: those two vastly different worlds, which he toggled between at will. The fluidity of the landscape, he says, helped create a similar fluidity in his imagination.As a boy, Sjón was precocious, hungry for world culture. He remembers watching “Mary Poppins” at age 4 and being shocked by an uncanny moment at the end when her umbrella handle, shaped like a parrot, suddenly opens its beak and speaks. (“I still haven’t recovered,” he says.) As a teenager, Sjón fell in love with David Bowie, and for years he studied Bowie’s interviews like syllabuses, tracking down all the artists he mentioned, educating himself about international books and music. Finally, he discovered Surrealism. It felt exactly right: discordant realities stacked on top of each other without explanation or transition or apology. Sjón became obsessed — a Surrealist evangelist. This is when he adopted the pen name Sjón. It was a perfect bit of literary branding: his given name, Sigurjón, with the middle extracted. In Icelandic, sjón means “vision.”Iceland, in the 1970s, was a strange place to be a teenager, especially one with artistic ambitions. Reykjavík, the country’s only real city, had two coffee shops and two hotels. Sjón told me that the most exciting event, for young people, was a ritual known as “Hallaerisplanid” — a word that translates, roughly, as “Hardship Square” or, more colorfully, “the Cringe Zone.” Every weekend, huge masses of teenagers would mob the city’s shabby little central plaza, then walk around for hours in loud, rowdy packs, looping over and over through the narrow downtown streets. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, on a visit to Reykjavík, watched these thousands of kids from their hotel window with fascination. It would have been a perfectly existentialist spectacle — restless hordes, in the face of a vast nothingness, creating meaning by fiat, through an absurd, defiant, repetitive, arbitrary ritual.For Sjón, the bleakness of Reykjavík was both impossible and ideal. He didn’t have much help, but he was free to become whatever he wanted. So he did. At 16, he self-published his first book of poetry, then sold it to captive audiences on the bus. From his Brutalist apartment building, he wrote grandiose letters to Surrealists all over the world, declaring a new Icelandic front of the movement. His mailbox filled with responses from Japan, Portugal, Brazil, France. Eventually, Sjón got himself invited to visit old Surrealists in Europe. On a stay with André Breton’s widow, in France, he swam in a river and had a visionary experience with a dragonfly: It sat on his shoulder, vibrating its wings, then took off — and in that moment he felt he had been baptized into a new existence.Back in Reykjavík, Sjón helped found a Surrealist group called Medúsa, into which he recruited other ambitious teenagers. One of these recruits was a girl from his neighborhood — a singer who would go on to become, by the end of the 20th century, probably the most famous Icelander in the world. Björk was a musical prodigy; she got her first record deal at age 11, after a song she performed for a school recital was broadcast on Iceland’s only radio station. She met Sjón when she was 17, when he came into the French hot-chocolate shop where she worked downtown. Björk told me in an email that she was, at the time, a “super introvert.” She and Sjón formed a loud, stunty two-person band called Rocka Rocka Drum — “a liberating alter ego thing” for each of them, she remembers.The members of Medúsa made noise all over Reykjavík. They argued about literature and put on art shows in a garage and flung themselves into bohemian high jinks. One time, all the Surrealists got drunk on absinthe and proceeded to walk around Reykjavík entirely on the roofs of parked cars — a night that ended at a popular club, where Sjón bit a bouncer on the thigh, then recited André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” while lying face down in a police car. The Surrealists considered it a great victory when they were denounced, in newspapers, by Iceland’s conservative literary establishment. In one of the great thrills of his life, Sjón once heard himself attacked personally, on the radio, while he was riding the bus. Björk found all of this exhilarating. “It was,” she told me, “like being absorbed into a gorgeous D.I.Y. organic university: extreme fertility!”This wild artistic ferment yielded not only Sjón’s literary career but also the Sugarcubes — the alternative-rock group, fronted by Björk, that became Iceland’s first international breakout success. Although Sjón was not an official member, he sometimes joined the group on tour, dancing wildly onstage under the name Johnny Triumph. (This was another play on his name: Sigurjón can be translated as “Victory John.”) In the 1990s, when Björk began her solo career, she turned to Sjón for help writing lyrics. And so his words, set to her music, began to circle the world. “I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl,” Björk sings at the beginning of her 1997 song “Bachelorette” — an image that would work equally well in one of Sjón’s novels. In 2001, Björk and Sjón were nominated for an Oscar for a song they wrote for the Lars von Trier film “Dancer in the Dark.” (Björk showed up to the ceremony wearing her famous swan dress.) In 2004, Björk performed their song “Oceania” at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens.Sjón (left) performing as Johnny Triumph with the Sugarcubes in November 1987.Sigurdur Mar Halldórsson/Reykjavík Museum of PhotographySjón’s lyrics, Björk told me, have a poetic quality that is very different from her own. Certain lines, she said, feel incredible in her mouth, even after decades of performing them. Many of his sentences, as she put it, “feel like a whole universe every time I say them.”Today Sjón lives in central Reykjavík, just a couple of minutes away from Björk, in a leafy neighborhood famous for its cats. (Sjón has a cat named Reverend Markus — please trust me that I do not have nearly the space or time to tell you its full story here.) At 59, he lives a quiet life with his wife, an opera singer named Ásgerdur. They have two grown children, a photographer and a producer of Icelandic rap.One afternoon, I met Sjón near his house. A big orange cat happened to be sprawling in the middle of the sidewalk. Sjón stopped to pet it, and as he did so, he poured out a soft stream of affectionate Icelandic — vowels stretching and plunging and leaping, R’s rolling like creekwater over stones. The cat flopped onto its back, meowing. I listened, fascinated, understanding nothing.The Icelandic language, in which Sjón writes, is notoriously difficult. It is spoken by just over 350,000 people — something like the population of Anaheim, Calif. (French, by comparison, is spoken fluently by around 300 million, English by 1.35 billion.) The language has long been a point of pride for Icelanders — a kind of sacred national heritage site that lives in their mouths. In many ways, the language is the culture. Modern Icelandic is often spoken of as a linguistic time capsule — a cryogenically frozen version of the language the first settlers of Iceland spoke 1,200 years ago, when they landed on this island populated by only birds and arctic foxes. Without too much trouble, Icelanders can still read the great sagas written 800 years ago. Much energy and political capital has gone into freezing the language in place, trying to keep it pure: rejecting loan words, mandating public signage, upholding traditional naming conventions. I tried, before my trip, to teach myself Icelandic using an app on my phone. But I gave up almost immediately.Sjón’s longtime English translator, Victoria Cribb, told me that Icelandic is difficult for many reasons. Its words combine easily, playfully, to become new words; its nouns shift form depending on their position in a sentence. “It means you can get every single word slightly wrong,” Cribb told me. “The chances for social embarrassment are enormous.”Sjón, however, tends to cheerfully play all of this down. Throughout our two days together, he insisted, again and again, that his native language was not so special. Like much about Iceland, he says, the uniqueness of Icelandic has been fetishized, exaggerated.We sat outside at a small cafe. Sjón pointed across the street to a bus stop, one side of which was covered by an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios. I recognized the imagery — cartoon bee, wooden dipper drenched in honey — but the text was completely alien. Letters, hatched with odd lines, clustered together into incomprehensible shapes.Sjón read the ad copy aloud: “Hafdu pad gott alla vikuna!” “Hafdu,” he said. “ ‘Have.’ Pad — OK, ‘that,’ you know.” He went on like this, word by word, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, until he had decoded the whole message for me. “Have that good all week.” The Honey Nut Cheerios ad, Sjón said, may as well have been written in English. “You should say to your friends in the States, ‘Go to Iceland — you speak the language anyway,’” he said.Over the course of our time together, Sjón would do this many times. He translated the Icelandic on road signs and billboards and menus and credit-card machines — always pointing out that much of what struck me as strange was, in fact, secretly familiar.This, I came to understand, is typical Sjón. He insists, always, on interconnections, cross-pollinations, porous borders between overlapping worlds. He is an enthusiastic mixer. The impulse, for him, goes far beyond language. It applies to every aspect of human culture: art, food, dance, film, music, literary genres.And even beyond all that, it is a moral position, a deliberate challenge to one of the great historical pillars of Icelandic identity: the notion that Iceland is a pure nation — culturally, ecologically, linguistically, genetically.Or, as Sjón refers to it, “this purity nonsense.”“It’s quite ingrained in Icelandic culture,” he told me. As a child, Sjon says, he was taught to revere Iceland’s unique and glorious history, its people’s inherent goodness, the ancient sanctity of its language and the special native genius of the sagas — the 13th-century texts that helped preserve Scandinavian lore (including Norse mythology) that otherwise would have been lost forever.Most of this, Sjón says, was a historical fantasy — at best an exaggeration. “So much of what is good in this society is things that were brought here from abroad,” he told me. Iceland, from its inception, was multicultural. It was founded, 1,200 years ago, by a wave of immigrant Scandinavian farmers, along with people from Ireland and the British islands. As skilled sea people, early Icelanders worked hard to maintain contact with the rest of the world. Culture, inevitably, flowed both ways.“Right from the beginning, when the Icelanders start telling stories and writing stories, they are always about this contact with the continent and with world history,” Sjón says. “They’re always connecting themselves with the Norwegian kings, with events taking place in Ireland, with someone going all the way down to Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was called then — or Mikligardur, as it was called in Icelandic. They had names for all these places, because they had visited them. Moorish Spain. The Mediterranean. They’re everywhere. So when they tell stories, their stories always leave this place and go out into the big world. And they do not only go out into the big physical world, they connect with the big cosmological world of the myths.”The idea of Icelandic purity, Sjón says, is a relatively modern invention: It dates back only about 200 years, to a group of German intellectuals who, obsessed with racial origins, fixated on a category of whiteness that stretched up to Scandinavia. Iceland, in its supposed isolation, was cast as a direct link to that deep ancestral history. (Later, for obvious reasons, the Nazis would be crazy about Iceland.) Although this was largely a pseudoscientific fantasy, it was flattering to Icelanders. Purity, after all, is an excellent brand: It can sell everything from bottled water to dog food to fish oil to nation-states. The purity myth helped to infuse this poor, beleaguered, neglected island — a tiny nation harassed by volcanoes and famines, dominated by its powerful Scandinavian neighbors — with a sense of national pride. In the late 19th century, Icelandic nationalists wielded the purity myth as a weapon against Denmark in the fight for independence. (Iceland officially became a republic, finally, in 1944.)The Iceland Sjón grew up in, he says, was stiflingly bigoted. In the middle of the 20th century, when the United States established a permanent military base near Reykjavík, Iceland allowed it only on the condition that no Black troops would be stationed there. (This ban was not lifted until the 1960s.) During his childhood, Sjón remembers, there were exactly two Black children in the city, and everyone knew who they were. A famous gay musician — the first Icelandic celebrity to come out of the closet — was pelted with snowballs and eventually driven from the country.Things are better now, Sjón says, but not entirely. Iceland’s immigration and citizenship laws remain extremely strict, and resistance to outsiders can be strong. Sjón gets passionate when he talks about this. His gentle demeanor swells with outrage. It angers him on many levels at once.‘I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity. I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous.’Kunzru told me that he can still feel, sometimes, the younger version of Sjón lurking — the anarchist surrealist bohemian rebel. “The Sjón we meet now is this urbane gentleman,” he said. “He’s got this tweedy Edwardian thing going on. But he’s still there underneath. There’s a punk.”Sjón’s books — sometimes explicitly, sometimes with playful indirection — are always fighting off the forces of constriction, narrowness, Icelandic exceptionalism. They tend to center outcasts and exiles, characters who don’t fit into dominant norms and are punished accordingly. “Moonstone” tells the story of a queer, dyslexic teenage boy in 1918 Reykjavík. “From the Mouth of the Whale” channels the wild mind of a blasphemous 16th-century scholar sent off to a freezing rock in the middle of the North Atlantic.“One of the things I appreciate about him is that, along with the playfulness, and the lightness of touch, there is a deep moral seriousness,” Cribb told me. “A great anger. It’s decently hidden, but it’s very much there: a moral anger.”When Sjón was a teenager, he learned a shameful family secret. His mother, he writes, “grew up knowing only that her father had been in the news when she was 7 years old because of something so bad that no one in her small fishing village would tell her what it was.” It turned out to be this: During World War II, Sjón’s grandfather lived in Germany, where he was trained as a Nazi spy; he came back to Iceland on a U-boat in 1944 and was arrested for treason. He served a year in prison. Sjón’s uncles, too, were card-carrying members of the Nazi Party.Although Sjón was not close to any of these relatives, he has grappled with that legacy throughout his career. The narrator of his novel “The Whispering Muse,” for instance, is in part a satire of his grandfather: a tedious man who opines, endlessly, about how the Nordic race’s fish-based diet has made it superior to the rest of the world. Sjón shows us that bigotry is, in addition to all its other faults, a crime against storytelling. The narrator is a gasbag, and no one has any interest in his speeches: “I was becoming used to the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible, to remain silent for just as long as I was speaking, then carry on from where they had left off, treating me like some guano-covered rock that one must steer a course around.”Unlike ancient myths or actual history, nationalist fantasies tend to be flat and static and dull. This is why fascist movements, Sjón says, always have a shelf life. Cultural richness will not be constrained.“I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity,” he told me. “I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous. Wherever you go in human culture, at whatever point in history, you can see that culture means complexity.”Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is his most direct engagement with Nazism. It started when he discovered that a neo-Nazi cell thrived in Reykjavík around the time of his birth. One member, in particular, caught his attention: a young organizer who died of cancer.This was, for Sjón, an irresistible storytelling challenge. “Red Milk” imagines this mysterious neo-Nazi as an ordinary boy named Gunnar Kampen. It follows him from his first memory (a family car trip that buzzes, like all human experiences, with color and life) to his radicalization (“Only white people let the light into themselves,” a woman tells him, holding his hand up to a lamp) to his lonely death on a train. The novel isn’t a satire or a screed. Its style is clinical, provocatively spare — it resists, almost completely, the hallmarks of Sjón’s previous work: the marvelous, the bizarre, the mystical.Too often, Sjón says, we think about fascism and Nazism as extraordinary. In fact, they are the most ordinary things in the world. “Red Milk” captures the pathetic human reality of a boy who, by attaching himself to a poisonous ideology, hopes to make his own small life feel important. (He calls his group the Sovereign Power Movement and names his newsletter, in good Icelandic style, after Thor’s hammer.) The boy’s cancer and his Nazism advance in tandem. Sjón makes us watch, pitilessly, as the richness of a human life gets reduced and reduced and reduced until it finally disappears. As he writes in an afterword: “We must start with what we have in common with such people. Not that I think a proper conversation can ever be had with someone whose ultimate goal is to get rid of you for good. But we can at least show them that we see them for what they are, that we know they come from childhoods fundamentally similar to our own … that a neo-Nazi is no more special than that.”One of the strangest things about Sjón’s fiction is its power of prediction. He seems to be able to summon things, magnetically, across the threshold between reality and imagination. The summer that the earthquake hit, when that whale washed up outside his door, Sjón was about to finish a novel that ends with its narrator in the belly of a whale. Not long after the publication of “Red Milk,” neo-Nazis demonstrated in downtown Reykjavík for the first time in decades. “Moonstone,” maybe my favorite novel, is set in Reykjavík in 1918, during the unlikely confluence of a global pandemic and a volcanic eruption — a situation that recurred, to Sjón’s disbelief, in 2021.In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a volcano called Fagradalsfjall unexpectedly erupted — the first eruption in that region in 800 years. It launched spectacular spurts of lava more than 1,000 feet high. People in Sjón’s neighborhood lined up, at night, to watch it like a fireworks show.“It was crazy,” Sjón says. “I thought, OK, now I’m living in the times I described in my novel. For that to happen to an ordinary novelist, not someone who’s working in science fiction — it’s amazing. The novel has completely changed in nature.”Before I left Iceland, I drove over to see the volcano. It was erupting, conveniently, right near the airport. As I walked the hiking trail, alongside the rest of the tourists, I prepared myself to witness, in real life, something sublime — a level of pure natural power I had only ever imagined or watched on screens. My spirit was trembling with a sort of Viking sublime, a Wagner aria of the soul.After about 20 minutes, the path turned — and I stopped, shocked. What I saw was nothing like what I had been expecting. The volcano was no longer visibly erupting. This was the aftermath. The whole valley was filled with, absolutely choking on, a huge black mass of dried lava: a hardened flood. It was brutal and vast and blunt and ugly — majestic, somehow, in its ugliness. It filled the valley the way a tongue fills a mouth. The black rock still steamed in spots, and everything smelled like sulfur, and if you looked in certain crannies you could see an orange glow that made me think of charcoal in a barbecue. It was, in other words, an absolute mess — the biggest mess I have ever seen in my life. There was something slightly embarrassing about it. I had never thought of a volcano like this before. It felt like walking into a ballroom the morning after a decadent party.Some of the tourists were audibly disappointed. They couldn’t believe their bad luck. As a Google review would put it: “No red-hot and flowing lava = not 5 stars.”As I stood there, I couldn’t help thinking of Sjón’s distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous. This volcano was that distinction made real. It was not anything like the fantasy of a volcano we all imagined when we flew to Iceland. It was weirder, dirtier, more complicated. It was a marvel. I put my ear down to the black stone. It was making noise: a hiss, a crackle. Somewhere deep, a force began to click.Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. His last feature was about the artist Laurie Anderson. Matthieu Gafsou is a Swiss photographer based in Lausanne. In September 2022, he will have a midcareer retrospective at the Pully Museum of Art in the suburbs of Lausanne, along with an exhibition of new work, titled “Vivants.” More

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    Alex Ebert, a Neo-Hippie Pop Star, Becomes a Guru

    Alex Ebert, the lead troubadour of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, flips to the B side of his career: philosopher.“No matter what any rock star tells you, they’re all conscious of the cult of personality,” Alex Ebert said, looking like a tenured musicology professor with his tan button-down shirt, shaggy beard and horn-rimmed glasses, while seated amid grand pianos and organs. “For a lot of them, that’s their primary occupation.”Mr. Ebert, 43, would know. In 2009, the founder of the Los Angeles folk-rock band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros led a 12-member troupe of neo-hippie troubadours into rock n’ roll satori with the seismic single “Home.”Maybe you’ve heard the ebullient chorus, “Home is wherever I’m with you!” Or perhaps you can recall the almost revival-choir hook, “Laugh until we think we’ll die, barefoot on a summer night, never could be sweeter than with you,” set to accordions, trumpets, and Seven Dwarfs-style whistling.The band got big overnight, hitting the late-night talk show circuit and leading giant singalongs at festivals, to adoring fans with actual flowers in their hair. “Home” was such a runaway hit that it even popped up in commercials, including one for the N.F.L.The band cut four studio albums and toured for a decade. But it wasn’t enough for Mr. Ebert.“A few years back, I knew I was dying inside,” he said in a videoconference call from his recording studio in New Orleans. “I told the band I had to stop touring. I just had to allow for some space to jump.”He felt like he couldn’t do it anymore. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out,” he said. “How many times can you do that? How many times must I force myself to rhyme bed with head?”And now the pop star has taken a leap indeed. A decade after his breakout musical success, he’s aiming for an unlikely second act: public intellectual.“Is avoiding death killing life on earth?”Mr. Ebert, who takes private lessons in theoretical astrophysics from a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology instructor for fun, has been producing a cerebral Substack newsletter, Bad Guru. It explores, well, um, how to define?When asked for an elevator pitch on the newsletter’s focus, he launched into a minutes-long exegesis about the “commodification of spiritualism” and “the religion of self” that name-checked Descartes, Norman Vincent Peale, Galileo and Kellyanne Conway.Broadly speaking, Bad Guru is a blend of philosophy and cultural analysis, with a smattering of self-help. Reading like a series of manifestoes from a highly caffeinated cultural omnivore, the newsletter takes aim at Silicon Valley self-empowerment mantras, for-profit spins on Eastern religion by wellness gurus, and sugar-high promises from reality-denying politicians.“Is avoiding death killing life on earth?” he asked in an essay called “A Void Dance” last June. Expanding on the familiar humans-as-a-cancer-on-the-planet idea, he noted how cancer cells avoid programmed cell death — apoptosis — and thereby kill the host, much like humans, who try to deny death by spending trillions on plastic surgery, wellness products and private space rockets, all at a cost to Earth. “What a tremendous irony it would be if avoiding our mortality posed the gravest threat to our collective survival,” he wrote.While unflinching in its views, Bad Guru steers clear of the hyper-partisanship and self-righteous vitriol seen across Twitter, and offers Mr. Ebert’s take on human folly from a distance, like a scientist peering into a Petri dish.He acknowledges that he has his own philosophical contradictions to deal with. “My ideology is more anarcho-communist than anything else,” he said of his political leanings. “But I’m also sitting here eating Whole Foods popcorn.”Mr. Ebert in his studio in the Bywater district of New Orleans. Giancarlo D’Agostaro for The New York TimesMr. Ebert owns a quaint Victorian house in the Bywater district of New Orleans. In 2014, he bought Piety Street Recording Studio, a studio in an abandoned post office next door where U2 and Arcade Fire have recorded, for $750,000.“New Orleans feels slightly removed from the capitalist hustle,” said Mr. Ebert, who moved to the city from his native Los Angeles in 2012. “The rungs of the ladder only go so high here, so you’re forced to find other kinds of meaning in life.”Unlike some Substack writers who have turned their self-published missives into a source of subscription income, Mr. Ebert does not charge for Bad Guru, saying that he is “pretty much set” financially from his music. “Otherwise, people are going to be like, ‘What, this rich musician is going to charge me $10 a month?’” he said.Mr. Ebert draws inspiration from other newsletters blending culture, technology and philosophy such as Astral Codex Ten, by Scott Alexander, the psychiatrist who ran the popular but controversial Silicon Valley blog Slate Star Codex, and The Stoa, by the writer and podcaster Peter Limberg, a devotee of Stoic thought.His audience includes seekers, armchair philosophers, Big Tech skeptics and New Age types looking for meaning beyond wellness-industry platitudes, he said. Others are lured in through Instagram, where he posts heady photo carousels on topics like “the story of the spiritualization of capitalism.” And some, he acknowledged, are Edward Sharpe fans who are “just putting up with me for the moment and waiting for more music.”“We are in a time when what some call ‘sense-making’ has become a fraught, ambiguous enterprise,” said the writer Daniel Pinchbeck, an admirer of Bad Guru. “We need more people like Alex using their voice and intellect to define a level of coherence that is beyond the current dichotomies of left and right, spiritual or atheist.”A year in, the Bad Guru audience is still small but growing; the most popular essays attract around 5,000 views on Substack.But again, profit is not the point. Mr. Ebert had been writing for years — the name “Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros” is taken from an unfinished novel he was writing in his early 20s (the “magnetic zeros” themselves were a phrase from a mathematical theory he devised). The 2020 lockdown finally gave him an opportunity to cut out music-industry distractions and focus on the ideas themselves, without trying to cram them into song lyrics and come up with a head-turning stage concept that will work on Colbert.“I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now,” he said. “For years, I kept all of my intellectual pursuits private. I was afraid of letting my ideas speak, without the window dressing of melody or flash and spectacle.”“Completions themselves are deaths.”His intellectual tendencies have landed him in awkward spots. In 2014, for example, he won a Golden Globe for best original score for the Robert Redford sailing film “All Is Lost.” After the ceremony, he found himself chatting with Mr. Redford and Bono when the former declared, “You know who really understands silence? This guy,” in reference to Mr. Ebert’s hauntingly spare soundtrack.“Immediately I launch into this theory about interstitial space in poetry, the negation between objects and Eisenstein’s theory of montage,” he said. “They just kind of looked at me. I realized I have no understanding of silence.”His obsessions themselves are obsessions, to the point that he recently asked his sister, Gaby Ebert, who is a psychotherapist, if he might be diagnosed with narcissism or some other condition.Mr. Ebert released a solo album, “I vs I,” in 2020, and is working on another. Giancarlo D’Agostaro for The New York Times“If there’s anyone on the planet who would take a potshot at me — in a sisterly way — it’s her,” he said. But to my surprise, she said, ‘No, Alex, you’re just different. You get turned on by starting over.”This is not to say he has abandoned music. Mr. Ebert released a solo album, “I vs I,” in 2020, and has two more in the works. And he is proud of his band’s legacy.“People get married to ‘Home,’” he said. “It’s been the soundtrack to peoples’ lives. Every time someone has come up to me on the street, their overt expression is ‘thank you.’ It’s beautiful to think that I’ve contributed to making life more magical for people.”But Mr. Ebert never intended that moment to last. Nothing does. Nothing should. “The Magnetic Zeros was really no fun once it was completed, because it’s dead,” he said. “Completions themselves are deaths.”Having killed off that persona, Mr. Ebert has little interest in forging a new one.“If the Bad Guru thing does end up accidentally with some cult of personality,” he said, “I’ll burn that too.” More

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    Coachella Lineup: Kanye West, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles

    The California festival and Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, both announced lineups this week as the live-music industry looks ahead after two years of events scuttled by the pandemic.Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Kanye West will headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, as the music industry takes hopeful steps toward the return of festivals and touring in 2022.Coachella, set for its usual two-weekend format, April 15-17 and April 22-24, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., will be returning after two years mothballed by the pandemic. On Wednesday, after weeks of speculation and leaks in the music press, the festival announced its complete 2022 lineup, which will also feature performances by Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Baby, Doja Cat, Phoebe Bridgers, the reunited electronic dance group Swedish House Mafia and dozens of others. (West is billed on the official festival poster as simply Ye.)The event is expected to run at its full capacity of up to 125,000 concertgoers a day.Coachella has long been the country’s most influential festival, hosting viral moments like Tupac Shakur’s hologram in 2012 and Beyoncé’s 2018 tribute to the marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities.It has usually been the first big festival to announce its lineup each year, ushering in the touring season. But this week Coachella was scooped by the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., which on Tuesday said that it would return in June with Tool, J. Cole, Stevie Nicks, the Chicks, Machine Gun Kelly, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and others.Coachella was one of entertainment’s first major casualties of the coronavirus. Its 2020 edition — which was to have featured Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean — was shut down by health officials on March 10 of that year, two days before Broadway and the concert business at large went dark.Goldenvoice, the promoter that puts on Coachella in partnership with the corporate concert giant AEG Presents, had hoped to bring the festival back that fall, then in spring 2021. But each time the pandemic forced the plans to be kicked further down the road. Bonnaroo, which is presented by Live Nation, AEG’s corporate rival, had scheduled a full-scale return last September, but it was canceled after heavy rains flooded the festival grounds.About half of the ticket holders to Coachella’s 2020 edition requested refunds, Paul Tollett, one of the festival’s founders, said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in August. Tickets cost $449 and up, not counting fees.Despite a slew of recent cancellations related to the coronavirus, like Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand festival in Cancún, Mexico, the music world is viewing Coachella with hope as a bellwether for the full-throttle return of the multibillion-dollar touring industry. Major tours by Dua Lipa, the Weeknd, Elton John, Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber are expected this year.As recently as last summer, Goldenvoice had hoped to bring back most of the headliners planned for 2020. But while Rage Against the Machine has an extensive tour planned this year — with five dates booked at Madison Square Garden in August — it is not playing Coachella. Ocean will return to Coachella in 2023.And since the disaster at Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston in November that left 10 people dead, the rapper has largely withdrawn from public appearances, canceling his performance as a headliner at the Day N Vegas festival, which is also presented by Goldenvoice. More