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Aarik Danielsen

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April 19, 2024

April 18, 2024

1) Maggie Rogers, “Don’t Forget Me” / Look—Maggie Rogers doesn’t need my approval. But I so love what she’s becoming. Rogers’ latest further establishes her as the torchbearer for lush, textured, momentum-filled pop a la Sarah McLachlan and Annie Lennox; and yet Rogers’ songs come with a lived-in looseness that is generational and purely her.

2) Khruangbin, “A La Sala” / A new Khruangbin record always causes rejoicing—rejoicing at the knowledge that something reliable yet surprising, effortlessly cool yet intentional is about to touch your ears. The Texas trio once again delivers on their promises, creating rock that’s funky without being obvious, silky while still challenging.

3) The music of DIIV / Prepping myself for their forthcoming release, I plunged back into previous records by this NYC band and was reminded of the deep wells of sublime melancholy and shoegaze-adjacent songcraft waiting there.

4) Kaveh Akbar, “Portrait of the Alcoholic” / After hearing Akbar (twice!) in person—and raving all over my social media feeds—last week, I began filling in my few gaps with his body of work. This chapbook transmission about recovery and desire and straining belief is full of soul and power.

I read through the book, copying quotes down like proverbs of who I am and might have been:

“Lord, I meant to be helpless, sex-less as a comma, quiet as cotton floating on a pond. Instead, I charged into desire like a tiger sprinting off the edge of the world.”

“Bear with me / it wasn’t long ago I was brainless / lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth / chewing them / into pure light”

“I live in the gulf between what I’ve been given and what I’ve received”

5) Joely Fitch, “Contradiction Study” for Dilettante Army / My friend/trusted voice Jo Fitch is doing so many things, all of them vital and remarkable, in this textured essay: interrogating gender and/as nostalgia, considering the ethics and emotional truth upholding memory, and—perhaps most simply but most significantly—asking after how we see what we see.

The frame (pun only mildly intentional) of this piece—photographing one’s old photographs—is a wondrous sort of seeing unto itself.

“When I am photographing the photographs, the same instinct kicks in that does when I’m editing a paragraph, my own or someone else’s: an intuitive sense of arrangement that I can’t quite explain.”

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About

Aarik is a Midwestern journalist, essayist and poet whose writing exists at the four corners of literature, human dignity, pop culture and theology.


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Pop Culture
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The (Dis)content
The (Dis)content
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