conventional scaffolding
thoughts on a record, a show, and a novel
Audacity Files
2026, Department, 37 min.
Plunderphonics, as they call it—a kind of hyper-sampling, music made through recombination—came as a departure to my usual listening of late. I’m not well-versed in the genre—the last time I did something resembling real listening to it was at a 2010 Girl Talk show to which I designated-drove a Chevrolet Tahoe illegally full of 22-year-olds—but what’s remarkable about Audacity Files is that you don’t really have to be to appreciate it. Adam Kyriakou, the Macedonian-born, Australia-based producer behind Department, has created a sonic landscape so full and coherent that it doesn’t quite matter where its parts come from. The record is so entirely itself that it preempts any desire to go sample-identifying; it would be impossible to, anyway, or at least highly dampening of the pleasure of simply submitting, surrendering. There’s a certain soothing effect, too, in the act of listening to the expression of reactions to music that already exists; you turn suddenly into a baby chick being fed by its mother.
Mira Dayal and Tatiana Kronberg
Sculptures by Mira Dayal and photograms by Tatiana Kronberg, ILY2, January 23 – March 27, 2026
A concave, surreal ladder leans up against a wall that appears to dissolve behind it. A compass rests uneasily on its two legs, leaning to one side, a trail of something loose unspooling along the floor. In the space between them, a bull, or a steer, or, as the title of the piece suggests “A House, Before Completion,” sits somewhat uneasily. The forms of Dayal’s steel-rod sculptures emerge from her interpretations of instructions for string figures, the multi-person hand games most popularly represented by cat’s cradle; they are fragments of language, both verbal and pictorial, static expressions of physical relationships. Dayal bends steel impressionistically, at times curving it with exacting precision into a shape resembling the wires of a whisk and, at others, winding it around itself into unruly knots. The material’s ductility is both asset and threat—manipulate it too much, and it becomes brittle, a condition legible in the sculptures so that, paradoxically, the densest moments read also as the weakest, while the thinnest, most delicate, register as confident, secure. There is an unlikely correspondence between Dayal’s work and Kronberg’s, not least because of their use of line: curving, jagged, bunching. Kronberg’s lines, made with lasers on photo paper, most often describe rudimentary flowers, like ones that would be drawn by a child, and bind themselves thematically and visually to Dayal’s string-figure sculptures. In the white space of the gallery, Kronberg’s layered landscapes (in particular one arresting piece titled Cave) and Dayal’s three-dimensional line drawings oscillate, at different speeds, between depth and flatness.
The Lucky Ones
2003, Rachel Cusk, 228 pp.
In Cusk’s early work, plot and other novelistic conventions sometimes appear as necessary scaffolding for the author’s observations, her begrudging concessions to the form. This is less true in The Lucky Ones than it is, for example, in The Bradshaw Variations—which came out in 2009, five years before the radical formal departure of the first volume of the Outline trilogy, and is perhaps a document of an increasing frustration with the limitations of the novel—but still, the book’s truly exciting moments arrive in the long passages in which nothing happens and instead Cusk dwells for a while inside someone’s mind: the aging grandmother convinced that her daughter has caused her harm despite the facts, even in her own recollection, suggesting that the vector of hurt actually ran in the opposite direction; the young-ish mother threatened by the idea of freedom; the single woman in her forties reflecting on her childlessness and surfacing a dozen diffuse insights but reaching no particular conclusion. Characters recur and overlap in what could be taken as chapters or as braided short stories, but it’s really Cusk’s precise and often recurring metaphoric images—steel, frost, glass, countries—that bind thought and feeling across the pages.