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the first and the fifteenth
by dustin for kuhns, inc. 

The First and the Fifteenth is a semi-monthly newsletter. It is a dégustation of ideas, reflections and senses curated by a political alien and religious orphan. This includes book reviews, reflections on quotes, social critique and curious intellectual bric-a-brac you likely won’t spelunk upon yourself. 

web spelunking gems

Internet-connected devices have fundamentally changed music itself: both its expression, and our engagement.

Music, in its current way, is consumed—at its best—as a session plate curated by a chef de cuisine familiar with his or her local edibles and dishes. At its worst, it is programmed and engineered like nuclear-holocaust-stable army food rations fabricated instead of cooked and served to us on driveby through a hole in the wall. 

Our relentless lives persist, so we subsist on sustenance without nourishment and satisfaction without fulfillment.

Noticing he always put it on over the speakers in a coffee shop, I struck up a conversation with a young man who worked there about “lofi” music. He told me he leaves it on all the time, even once he’s gone, so that when he returns, “the vibe is already set.” Turns out, his favorite compilation was this one. 

With over one million views, this compilation is something like a “lofi” standard.

For me, there is a more complex storyline here. For starters, STEEZYASFUCK has been a mainstay in the burgeoning online community of electronic “lofi” music. The channel even has two 24/7 live stations dedicated to a constant stream of curated music. (Perfect for my barista friend, no?) Radio Juicy, on the other hand, is an independent music label based in Germany serving the new hip-hop electronica we affectionately call “lofi” these days. All of the artists on this compilation have some relationship to tracks or collaborations published by Radio Juicy.

STEEZYASFUCK has over a million followers on YouTube. Radio Juicy has about six thousand. The artists on this compilation are lucky to have a few thousand followers on Twitter who pay attention to their new releases. Some I have researched and downloaded their entire albums to support them. Others I can’t even find releases for. Many don’t have a serious social media presence.

This is a compilation, assembled by an independent label, promoted by a curator of “lofi” which is, in and of itself, a musical form which primarily borrows, samples, deconstructs and reassembles extant recordings using primarily electronically simulated instruments.

My question is simply: where in all this is—or was—the value created?

co-reading the terminal post

For more music like this from the best “lofi” curator on the internet, check out the editors reviews on The Terminal Post.

visit ttp://
from the quote bin

“We see Art proliferating wherever we turn; talk about Art is increasing, even more rapidly. But the soul of Art—Art as adventure, Art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting up an ‘other scene’ in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of rules, a transcendent figure in which beings, like line and colours on a canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d’être, and, in an urgent process of seduction, to rediscover their ideal form (even though this form may be that of their own destruction)—in this sense, Art is gone. Art has disappeared as a symbolic pact, as something thus clearly distinct from that pure and simple production of aesthetic values, that proliferation of signs ad infinitum, that recycling of past and present forms, which we call ‘culture.’ There are no more fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own. Or, to use a different metaphor, there is no gold standard of aesthetic judgement or pleasure. The situation resembles that of a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float, its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth.”

—From "Transasethetics" in Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil
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