Let’s jump right into: This week we’ve been recommended “Air” by Clozee and Sauvane:
Courtesy of Digital Habit, a hydraulic mechanic and music producer from Vancouver, Canada.
Not ready to read all this? You can find most of the completely human-curated music recommendations in this issue on this playlist.
Air starts with an entrance, and you find yourself in an echo chamber humming with chitters and shimmering synths. The next 60 seconds or so build as more synths are layered in with dramatic effect and Sauvane slips into the mix, singing about a suffocating other. Eventually, the layers fade into a single synth line bridging into an instrumental section. It sounds almost empathetic with Sauvane’s situation, giving her a comfortable landing spot to drop in again for the second verse. Now she’s clearly singing from the perspective of what seems to be God, feeling suffocated by humanity. It’s a song you can dip into that has a deeper meaning without feeling preachy. Plus, a vibe reminiscent of some of the calmer early 2010s so-called intelligent dance music genres.
And, with that era in mind, “Air” reminds me of discovery and a phase when discovering was a pillar of my free time. The act of discovery is interesting in at least one way: it affects brain chemistry.
There are different degrees of dopamine delivery. Drugs can be a dopamine hit. But they offer a temperature sort of like the stereotypical L.A.—so comfortable you get stuck there and start seeing through the facade. Or you become a part of it.
And over a long enough period of time, dopamine can simmer into serotonin. Love is when someone pulls the dopamine trigger enough times to induce serotonin. A burst in the place where your heart beats. This may be the best version of this high, when something simple as reuniting after a long day of work is a sweetness.
But there’s another dopamine hit that can over time stir serotonin: the hit delivered through discovery. That’s what we’re here to discuss today.
Music discovery in the blog era
Discovery brings to mind college amid the EDM wave of the late aughts and early 2010s. Inspired, as the musical historians tell it, by Daft Punk’s legendary 2006 Coachella set, this was when EDM became mainstream and rave festivals started cropping up across the country.
With its analog, backward-looking masterpiece “Random Access Memories,” Daft Punk also symbolically closed out the era as EDM dissolved from the mainstream into a niche genre thriving on the festival circuit.
While I had long been a fan of genre predecessors handed to me by my father, like Fatboy Slim or Moby, this new era of dance music found me during my senior year of high school and stayed with me into college.
So I spent hours crawling websites like Hype Machine for new music. I found songs by artists like Miike Snow and Emancipator on those websites, as well as more mashups than any single person could ever want. I have etched into my mind memories of my tiny desk in my half of the bedroom in my last college dorm, listening to Emancipator after an interview I was sure I bombed.
My future boss called with an offer in the following week or so and on my first day gave me a pile of books about psychedelic drugs, including Terrence McKenna’s “Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution.” But that’s another story for another issue.
One of my favorite discoveries from that era was Ellie Goulding. Specifically, her Sun Sessions. My favorite version of Ellie Goulding is her raspily belting over acoustic guitars. I’m still more apt to revisit this live performance than any of her studio-recorded songs.
Another was “Hooligans” by Don Diablo and Example.
I remember the moment in the “Hooligans” music video when the siren screams an ear-bleeding blare. Then it fades for a quiet bridge of some woo-hoo vocals and synth stabs before giving way to a full blown mosh pit of noise. Just hearing the energy in that moment was a rush. It was peak discovery.
The early 2010s was also when I started the original Tunegrape blog. But with an audience small enough to hotbox a dorm room shower, that project never went anywhere.
I go through phases, but at the moment I think the best song I found through those aggregators (non-live performance division) might just be Bassnectar’s Nelly Furtado remix. “Magical World” remakes Furtado’s 2000s hit “Turn Off the Light,” transforming it into one of the two best songs to come out of the dubstep era in my opinion—the other being the Caspa remix of deadmau5’s “I Remember.”
Now let’s be clear: “Turn Off the Light” is a jam and Nelly Furtado’s music was everywhere when I was growing up. While young, I hadn’t developed the taste to enjoy her on my own, but my still-maturing music fandom could feel what was obviously there. And during my first year skipping summer vacation to stay on campus in Boston and rack up credits with classes like “American Text and Film,” I remember listening to “I’m Like a Bird” while cleaning my apartment. Some things are just undeniable. One is Nelly Furtado.
So finding a song that flipped my childhood Furtado memories over the deep growl of early 2010s dubstep was mindblowing, as were plenty of the strange mashups and remixes of the era. But few reached the peaks that “Magical World” did.
The moment the slow oscillations of Bassnectar’s spiky synths drop, you start sinking into it. And when Furtado’s “follow me follow me follow me down down down down” hits, a trap door drops you into another realm. One where you have no choice but to succumb to the atmosphere that Furtado and Bassnectar create while melding her voice with his thick layers of textured, wobbling synths.
And the bridge? Furtado’s relaxed raps echoing through the valley Bassnectar carves just capture me every time.
I can’t cop to discovering Nelly Furtado on a blog while sitting at my cramped desk next to the mattress on my bedroom floor in my first apartment. But I can say that of “Magical World” and so many other tracks—most of them of the aforementioned weird and wild mashups and remixes variety.
The joy of discovering early is even greater than simply discovering. In fact, it’s more than enough for me to represent that early discovery like I represent my city’s laundry (go NY, go NY, go!). I’m a Rosalía fan like I’m a Knicks fan. I found her on one of my regular music research forays in 2018, shortly after “El Mal Querer” was released. There’s no doubt there’s an artistic depth to her that burrows further down than most of her contemporaries. The dramatic concept album that is “El Mal Querer” is no exception.
And one of the highlights is her flip of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” Her voice floats, angelic, over El Guincho’s immaculate keys and intermittent flamenco-flecked percussion.
Discovering music in person
But one of my favorite types of discovery is the type that happens in person. When you go to a show expecting one thing, and walk back out of the venue soaked in beer and sweat, grinning about something new.
That brings us to Against Me! Like Furtado, I can’t cop to discovering them on an online blog. Against Me! was sewn into the tapestry of my teenage years by the few circles of friends I found, as well as my beloved Fuse, a music video television channel that peaked in the mid-aughts. They’re one of my all-time favorite bands, and their “Acoustic EP” is one of my all-time favorite albums.
My roommate in my second college apartment (and, after that, first post-college apartment) may have been an even bigger fan. So in 2015, after I moved into my first studio apartment, him, his girlfriend, and I drove from Boston to Brooklyn to see them play McCarren Park.
The sight of her cuts through my memories of that trip like a snapped guitar string lashing my arm. In her white shirt draped with a bundle of chains and black pants, with a neon pink bass guitar hanging from her neck, she boomed like an opera singer over heavy bass and crunchy guitars.
Her stunning vocals soared above waves of distortion reminiscent of the punk and grunge music I loved. The image is burned into my mind. I have been to many shows in the years since I saw Patent Pending in the basement of a church on Long Island in the early 2000s. Few stand out to me like the first time I saw Mitski when she opened for Against Me! that day in McCarren Park.
I saw her again in 2019 at a free concert in Stern Grove Park in San Francisco. This time I didn’t have to road trip from a 90-square-foot apartment in Boston. Instead, I waked from my Sunset District SRO to the park. This was after her tour with Lourde, with Mitski on the precipice of riding the TikTok trend wave to a more solidified status.
I sat toward the back of a crowd many times the size of the one we were part of in McCarren Park, nestled next to a tree on a hill and overlooking the stage. There was no need to mosh my way to the front and, come to think of it, there wasn’t even a mosh pit.
She felt more practiced and comfortable as a performer, although she was already a touring veteran by the time I saw her in Brooklyn. She stood further from her band as the show began, dressed in all black with nothing but a microphone in hand. But by the middle of the show she had shed the hoodie she wore as protection from the San Francisco cold, warmed by her performance as she thrashed about on top of a white kitchen table behind a white chair.
I would welcome the chance see her a third time and 2023’s “The Land is Inhospitable And So Are We” may have surpassed “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” as my favorite album by her. Furthermore, these days “Heaven” competes with “Townie” for my favorite Mitski song.
But I would have none of these songs and memories without that day banging bodies to her music on a hot square of asphalt. We were both 24 years old then. I’ve grown as her music has grown, as she has grown. There’s maybe nothing sweeter about discovery than savoring memories with an artist accumulated over years. I’ve hit one decade with Mitski. All I can do is hope for another and enjoy what I have. Nice job if you can get it.
Song suggestions through newsletters
One of my favorite recent discoveries comes from a newsletter made to lubricate the wheels of discovery. I don’t think Perfectly Imperfect makes its playlists as available as it once did. But when they were widely available, shortly after I moved to Queens in 2022, I found Fcukers on one of them, sitting at my oversized desk in the first one-bedroom apartment I could call my own. And when the “Homie Don’t Shake” single dropped, I was hooked.
This summer the it-kids of New York City released an EP of remixes of songs from their album “Ö,” from earlier this year. Most of my gym sets and cleaning sessions the last couple weeks have been soundtracked by songs like Eli Escobar’s remix of “if you wanna party, come over to my house.”
So much of discovery consists of finding other people mining the same nostalgia you are. I think about this in my apartment specked with the design sensibilities of my mother. I consider it while sitting on the same couch I sat on while I rooted for the Knicks during their 2026 finals run, a team inherited from my father and his father before him. It’s no surprise that nostalgia itself is another trigger for dopamine release.
I’ve heard Mitski evolve from punk influences to folk music—in other words, from one end of the Against Me! spectrum to the other, albeit with a foray into pop music between them. Bassnectar, of course, flipped a childhood hit. I can trace a line from “The Rockafeller Skank” on the FIFA 99 soundtrack to Nelly Furtado’s early-2000s radio hits and on to Bassnectar’s “Magical World” further on through to Fcukers. And I can do the same from Caspa’s “I Remember” remix when I listen to “Air” by CloZee and Sauvane.
These songs are building blocks of an accumulated history. Each one adds to the previous, constructing a comfort zone kept warm by a nostalgic flame. A place we retreat to in times of need, rush to in times of joy, or even use to get the chores done.
Some things never change, even if we wrap them in new packaging. Like what makes great music. Or the fact that I still blast that music as I clean my apartment, whether it’s a cramped old unit it Boston, a beachside SRO in San Francisco, or a one-bedroom in Flushing.
Discovery & nostalgia: two sides of the same coin
As I shed old lives for new ones and grow more comfortable in myself, these stages reflect the music I loved in each. I see my early chapters of my story in Mitski draped in gold chains and a pink bass guitar on a small stage on a patch of concrete. And as I grow older I see myself in Mitski doing interviews with The New Yorker and having her own Criterion Closet segment.
Now, a decade later, early Mitski is nostalgic for me in the same way Against Me! is—they’re each wired into my brain. Discovery sparks a short dopamine hit tied to memories. But the over time, with repeated exposure, the increasingly familiar dopamine transitions into the sweetness of serotonin. A love rooted in memory and in nostalgia.
I don’t dance much, but my love for a danceable beat has always been there.
Life, in that way, is a series of remixes and mashups of memories and experiences, each building on the next. When we discover a song that strikes just the right nostalgic chord, we’re hooked for life; a new soundtrack for the next stage, specked with the just-right strands of old.
Today’s Playlist
What’s your favorite discovery? Tell us below for a chance at a future feature:
See you next week with a song suggested by another human.