Cool Hunting—
“Ghostly enthusiasts will know that Valenti has a penchant for thinking holistically about projects, and Herb Sundays is no different. In addition to the extensive Substack stories, each playlist also gets its own cover art created by longtime Ghostly collaborator Michael Cina. The project gives them a “low-stress way to geek out” while oftentimes further highlighting the personality behind each curator. “I never show the curator the cover in advance,” Valenti says, “so it’s sort of a surprise of sorts, but we do our best to make them interesting. There’s def a lot of easter eggs and double meanings in the covers.””Season
04
07.22
—
12.22
S.04 E.45
Parris
Ex. 1
Parris’ Herb Sundays takes this love of pop and indie even further. Instead of a club survey, we get a view of the artist at home, from the adventure-pop of Bat For Lashes, to the low-key charge of The xx, and onto the magisterial Mystery Jets. It's summer fun and yet another unexpected twist from Parris. - SV4
S.04 E.46
MJ Lenderman
The countrified rock of Boat Songs is echoed on this playlist (Crazy Horse, Meat Puppets) and the set feels like a periodic table of the elements that make up the Lenderman universe. There’s the hard-living, semi-remorseful George Jones, the Kranky blasts from New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery, and a few pontoon rockers for good measure. The more recent additions were my fave discoveries here: Nyxy Nyx and Court Passion, far on the other edges of the grid. High and low, left and right, this is how Herbs fight. - SV4
S.04 E.47Gia Margaret
“I wanted to capture the feeling of a truly strange time in my life, even though I would prefer to forget it altogether. This process helped me understand something about myself, & hopefully it can help others, too.” -GM
The music of Gia Margaret indeed takes me to a place and self that I’d sometimes rather forget but then realize it's impossible. It tugs at the times in youth when your feelings are bigger than anything.
Quiet summers in the city over the past couple of years have brought this feeling back to me, all long shadows stretching by closed newsstands. The pain of summer is not that nothing is good, it's that somewhere, something is great and you aren't a part of it. Your would-be lover is sitting on a striped towel on a creaky dock, taking carefree selfies with someone else. The subway train has left the station, and it’s not coming back any time soon. You're alone and you can't make good on the promise-filled light that seeps into your room. It's these feelings of sweet dread that we have, as a culture, filtered into memes (“I should call her/him..” etc.) but are actually excruciating in practice. Nothing is heavier than the young heart, the rawest nerve. This is the stuff Gia Margaret is made of.
-SV4
S.04 E.48Mark Leckey
There's a bridge in my mind I hope to find again. I believe it's an early '80s Martha Cooper or Henry Chalfant photo (or a composite of multiple in my mind) of 2 off-duty graffiti artists on a summer's day entering the darkness of a wide NYC underpass. When I think of this image (or create it in my mind) it fills me with a deep calm. It probably is the confluence of a few things: the heat and relief from the heat on a hot day, an image of a lost place or a city you could spelunk in somewhat freely, and the idea of being untethered, or that without phones, no one knows where these people are. -SV4
Alts
Photo of museum goers I took at MomaPS1’s 2016 Leckey show
S.04 E.49Rob Harvilla
This flow only works because Rob is someone whose ego death reaper is already on to the next town. He has abandoned hope of being cool and left it amongst his Ikea on the curb in New York. It is only because of this that he can now truly get to work. As a fellow ego-crushed midwesterner, I can relate of course. The "gunmetal sky" in Ohio is the same one in Michigan and I know for a fact we've meditated over the same lonely bundle of dirty snow while the churn of our Discman cassette adapter whines in the car stereo. -SV4
S.04 E.50Félicia Atkinson
With a focus on nuance and mood, Atkinson’s work, and this mix, have a similar meditative quality. In an era of push communications and a fixation on the character analysis of artists, sometimes the artists themselves can achieve more by not being a propulsive force of biography. In able hands, art can be a conduit to a deeper and quieter feeling, which is more than personal enough. -SV4
Alts
S.04 E.51Sam Valenti IV
If my mix above, which is intended to throw off slight fromage fumes like a double-disc CD compilation purchased at a Fin de Siècle high street HMV, is too much for you, then check Alexis Arp’s gorgeous Herb Sundays 10 mix for a slightly more refined Ibizan voyage that is truly sublime. -SV4
S.04
Despite my cynicism, artists always prevail and upend expectations, so I stay interested. Artists using AI are already becoming commonplace, and we need great artists to unlock the explosive potential of the tech and point out the darker truths of the space, in a way no one else can or will. -SV4
S.04
If every atomic unit of culture (TikTok, Instagram, meme, Tweet) is a vessel of taste, then we’ve become intense readers of the nuance of each moment. The book’s fourth chapter is on “taste” in general which this newsletter/series is about. Herb Sundays (working slogan: “there are no guilty pleasures, only guilty people”) is a study on taste, not necessarily seeking to find the socially accepted Best Taste which usually leads to commonly held ideas, in both academic or “poptimist” zones, both which both feel too surefooted for the current quicksands of culture for me. -SV4
S.04 E.54Piotr Dada
Orlov is a music lifer. When I think I’m a music fan and then think of his story, I move myself down the ladder. He’s also been gracious with his time and thinking back to most of the pivotal ghostly events, he was present, like a proud uncle. I look up to Piotr in many ways, including that he was an early dad in my peer group, and seeing him and Kate on the town, even when they were new parents, gave me hope that it could be done. I also love that he lives emotions out, on his sleeve as it were and that he's all in. No one is more passionate. Let's dive in, shall we… - SV4
Promo/Sketch
S.04 E.55Oskar Mann
With clothing or any product really, it's all about how you make something simple stand out to the right people. Streetwear, or whatever you want to call it, trades on references. Mann’s love of jazz informs the brand and it ties everything together. You can enjoy it at face value or you can dig deeper, which is what this series is about. His mix carries this passion through and is a great way to kick off Fall. -SV4
S.04 E.56Dan Charnas
S.04 E.57Allison P. Davis
“Once you’re done with the emotional cleansing, there’s a reset period before you go on to do the things you have to do (cook, eat, cook, eat) with a new lightness. So, in the middle of the mix, some songs for bursts of energy (songs to make you groove, but still with a touch of dramatic maudlin). And then songs to take you into dinnertime, wine time, TV time, and bedtime where I like to snuggle up with all of my Sunday feelings (except the Sunday scaries.)” - APD
As kids, we used to play basketball in his driveway with the wonky spray-painted three-point line that curved in suddenly because whoever painted it (Reilly?) cut the arc too wide for the ensuing grass. There was always music playing from a cassette boombox of some sort and on it, he played The Low End Theory (1991) and other tapes while we shot around.
- SV4
S.04 E.59Galcher Lustwerk
“There is a pure confidence in his taste authority, unperturbed by the signals certain genres might throw off (HS59 includes Sting, Nelly Furtado, Korn, and more), which makes him a true terminator. He’s someone who scans through the noise and sees the tune for what it is, and quickly knows if it’s actually good or not, in a way most can’t even explain. That’s the Herb Experience.” - SV4
S.04 E.60Dean Kissick
Across the aisle in music, we’re seeing some reprisal against critics, who fans shame for not lionizing everything they want. Only certain artists win their favor but it can be a huge boon. “A critic,” Tom Wolfe wrote, “can also be an artist’s best publicist.” Music criticism has especially been under fire with the emergence of fan armies/stan culture looking to punish critics of their beloved, via their internet prowess and vigilance. Artists themselves hit back like Lana Del Rey did in 2019 on Ann Powers’ piece. This felt sort of shocking, and maybe a bit close to nationalistic impulses in other forums of life. -SV4
S.04 E.61Michael Cina
Easy listening is a music genre that was most popular during the 1950s to 1970s. It encompasses instrumental recordings, almost always “with strings” and pulls inspiration from all genres of music, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. Easy listening eventually snuck its way into every genre possible. It is often considered a sibling of genres like exotica and lounge music.
Growing up in the 70’s, the dying remains of the “easy listening” genre was strewn all around. I can’t remember where I heard it first but you would get tastes in old people’s houses, the dentist office, momentarily while changing the radio station to find something else… -Cina
There’s an irony that music is about science that needs science itself to resuscitate itself. There’s also the magical idea of saving something from loss or ruin, or that these “lost tapes” which have gained moisture (and a beautiful patina) over time, are actually deteriorating. The binders/glue in magnetic tapes holding the iron oxide or magnetic coating to the tape are falling apart, which often has rendered this music unlistenable. The label functions as a rescuer of these would-be lost feelings and micro-documents of the home recording boom. -SV4
Promo Teaser
S.04 E.63Chris Black
S.04 E.64Them Jeans
Photo by Lexi Moreland
S.04 E.65Sam Gendel
x End of Season 4