Drew Austin on high/low-brow music, how it fits into album reviews and club culture, and how all that has shifted in our current state of distance. Energy Flash:

“For Reynolds, “at home and at album length” refers to a process of decontextualization, the musical equivalent of the modern gallery’s white cube: a belief that any cultural product meriting serious appreciation must prove that it can survive outside of its native habitat by becoming a fungible unit of culture, fitting into the standardized format of Pitchfork album reviews and solitary, focused listening. If music sounds good in a packed nightclub at 3 a.m. but not through headphones on your couch, is it real in the same way that Kid A is real? Right now in quarantine, the contextualizing environments in which culture traditionally incubates are closed off and dormant, so everything has to sound good in the living room whether it’s meant to or not. We live in the white cube now; anything that relies on a specific source of external context is an endangered species. We’re one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.”