6 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY GABRIEL HOLLINGTON
Lil Uzi Vert’s otherworldly new album, “Eternal Atake,” (and its deluxe ver-
sion, “LUV vs. the World 2”) crash-landed onto Earth, much to the delight
of anxious fans, and immediately sucked up all the oxygen. The breathless-
ness of its reception—almost as ebullient as Uzi’s raps themselves—cap-
tures the energy of a moment that some had begun to believe would never
come. Label trouble had beset the Philadelphia rapper for nearly three years,
making “Eternal Atake” feel like a freedom song and a well-earned victory
lap. One of music’s most intriguing figures, Uzi both absorbs and creates
trends and spits them out as magic: his melodies are more syrupy, his flows
more slippery, his beat selections more irresistible. Above all, it sounds as if
Uzi is having more fun than anyone else, and, in the midst of actual con-
tagion, his is the kind of infectiousness we could all use.—Briana YoungerHIP-HOP
1
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MUSIC
Selections to listen to online.Anastassis Philippakopoulos:
“piano works”
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL With tension on the rise,
“piano works,” a mesmerizing new collection
of a dozen brief pieces by the Greek composer
Anastassis Philippakopoulos, offers a needed
refuge from turmoil and anxiety. Philippakopou-
los is a member of the Wandelweiser Collective,
a loosely knit international aggregate whose
members are bound by their fascination with the
philosophical weight and dramaturgical potential
of silence. Each of his compositions, ranging
from two to four minutes in length, reflects
long months of labor and notes selected with
a jeweller’s exactitude. The album begins with
seven works written between 2013 and 2018, in
which single notes hang like pearls in monodic
strands; in the first of “five piano pieces” (2005-
2011), stark, dissonant clusters register with
an almost shocking impact. Melaine Dalibert,
himself a composer whose works similarly dealin patience and space, is an ideal interpreter of
such beguilingly modest music, and this sensitive
recording lets every detail resound.—Steve SmithEllen Reid: “p r i s m”
OPERA Ellen Reid won a Pulitzer Prize, in 2019,
for her first opera, “p r i s m,” an exploration of
the shattered pieces of a sexual-assault survivor’s
world. The work opens with a cryptic spoken
chant—misremembered words from the night of
the attack—followed by a game called Rescue, in
which the survivor, Bibi, and her mother, Lumee,
replay the incident and give it a fairy-tale ending.
These passages trigger momentary fantasies of
intoxicating melody, but the comfort is short-
lived, and the toneplunges again into paralyzing
despair. This recording, from the Decca Gold
label, tells the story as vividly as James Darrah’s
staging did at New York’s Prototype Festival,
last year. Reid’s music is specific—the sound of
bruised innocence struggling to heal—and the
conductor Julian Wachner, leading NOVUS NY
and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, renders
it incisively. Anna Schubert (a delicate Bibi)
and Rebecca Jo Loeb (a monstrous Lumee) are
responsive to the trauma swirling beneath the
music’s surface.—Oussama ZahrFour Tet: “Sixteen Oceans”
ELECTRONIC Kieran Hebden, the prolific En-
glish producer known as Four Tet, recently ex-
tended his already prodigious catalogue with
“Sixteen Oceans,” a record that plunges deep
into a weightless space between ambient radi-
ance and minimal dance grooves. Songs such
as “Baby,” molded from the spliced vocals of
the singer Ellie Goulding, drift into gleaming
pop, a sound Hebden has always treated with
tenderness, but the album soon careens into
wistful, meditative abstractions that prove him
to be electronic music’s most deliberate day-
dreamer. His closing soundscapes are sparse
and hypnotic, woven from lulling vocal samples
and spangled synths that practically slow down
time—a temporary sedation in this moment of
sheer panic.—Julyssa LopezHoward Merritt:
“Live at the Flamingo”
DISCO Under the name San Francisco Disco
Preservation Society, the d.j. Jim Hopkins
has spent the past several years digitally ar-
chiving club, radio, and promo mixes going back
to the seventies—including, in some cases, a
full night’s audio. DJ Howard Merritt’s “Live
at the Flamingo (NY), New Year’s Eve 1979-
1980” is a prime example. Merritt played at
several legendary gay venues, including the
Flamingo, New York City’s first exclusively
gay disco, and, at more than five hours long,
this set is as fascinating as documentary as it is
as music. In the era before automation, lengthy
overlapping segues between records were rare,
but he executes several with aplomb here. His
handoffs are smooth and surprising—Prince’s
quicksilver “Sexy Dancer” morphs into Michael
Jackson’s equally slippery “Off the Wall.” It’s a
disco smorgasbord that helps make up for the
Brooklyn Museum’s Studio 54 exhibit being
unavailable.—Michaelangelo Matostional portraiture to one of artful photojournal-
ism.—Helen Rosner (@subwayhands on Instagram.)snowbanks. Inevitably, they age. A few pictures,
cropped to include the car’s interior, convey
the parallel progress of Dikeman’s own life.
Early images show the blurred face of a baby,
who, in later shots, as a young man, takes the
wheel while Dikeman photographs her elderly
parents from the passenger seat.—Eren Orbey
(deannadikeman.com.)
Hannah La Follette Ryan
Since moving to New York City, in 2015,
La Follette Ryan has photographed the hands of
subway commuters: fists gripping bags, phones,
and cash; lacquered nails and bitten cuticles;
fingers curled around straps and splayed out
protectively against another body. The images,
which the artist posts to an Instagram account
(@subwayhands), are not staged; she shoots
the series primarily (and stealthily) with her
iPhone. As one scrolls through the river of pho-
tos and videos—there are more than a thousand
in all—the hands become alien and abstracted,
assuming the air of uncanny sculptures. Re-
cently, asthe coronavirus pandemichas accel-
erated in New York, La Follette Ryan has begun
to share emerging patterns: hands squeezing
small plastic bottles of sanitizer, vigorously
wiping down phones, wearing latex gloves, and
clutching tissues. The urgency of the moment
has shifted her series from a work of unconven-