Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
The Los Angeles–based musicians explore the spaces between their respective styles, yielding an ethereal, richly textured fusion of neo-classical and musique concréte.
Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann’s personal and artistic lives are intimately intertwined. Working out of their shared home in Los Angeles, both artists carve out marbled slabs of sound art, each taking their own unique approach to neo-classical music. McCann has styled himself as a sort of DIY Gavin Bryars, overseeing his label Recital Program and assembling ornate passages of home-recorded chamber music to create a new kind of basement-show Baroque. Davachi takes after deep-listening gurus like Pauline Oliveros and Randal McLellan, hanging her songs on endless strings of soft organ and Mellotron chords that wrap the listener in a velvety analog glow. On Mother of Pearl, their first record together as a couple, Davachi and McCann explore the spaces shared between their respective styles of music, yielding a warm, ethereal vision of musique concréte stripped down to the very bone.
An animating principle of both Davachi and McCann’s music has been a devotion to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, whose philosophy might be best summed up by founder George Maciunas: “Coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music.” In this fashion, Mother of Pearl uncovers epiphanies in the duo’s kitchen sink as Davachi and McCann combine farmhouse field recordings, tape distortion, plinking keys, and silence itself to create an autumnal bath of golden tones. The music on Mother of Pearl is just barely there, yet its spectral ebb and flow conjures blurry images of dim, candle-lit rooms, or suns setting on ancient buildings that haven’t felt footsteps for centuries. As slight as the album may seem, Mother of Pearl’s greatest rewards come from listening closely, where all of Davachi and McCann’s textures can reveal their delicate wrinkles.
Throughout Mother of Pearl, McCann and Davachi find a gentle middle ground between the dizzying surrealism of the former’s work and the subtly hypnotic drift of the latter’s. “LA in the Rain” spends eight minutes hovering over a veil of creaking violas and twinkling piano, dancing like dust particles settling in the sunlight. Davachi and McCann constantly keep their sounds at the edge of tangibility, reveling in the tension of their elegant in-betweenness. The most sublime track is the album’s centerpiece, “Lamplighter,” where the two musicians plunge into a ghostly reverie of rumbling bass, softly ringing bells, and cycling waves of tape hiss. On the surface, it seems to convey an all-encompassing emptiness, yet there are details—like the strangely soothing tapping timbre that appears around six minutes in, or the cows that begin to moo toward the end of the track—that turn the whole piece into a balancing act between darkness and light, a richly layered world heard from the deepest possible depths.
There are limits to how microscopic Davachi and McCann can make their music while still achieving something profound; on “Band of Gold,” two guitars spiral aimlessly without ever quite achieving the textural complexity of the rest of the album. But for much of Mother of Pearl, Davachi and McCann continually create musicality from the barest of fabrics, spinning them out into loose tapestries. It’s the kind of music that seems to disappear when you first put it on, but will slowly transform your entire environment. Like reading old love letters from couples long ago, it seems to speak a private language all its own.
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On June 7, 2023, the sky above New York turned an eerie orange. People across the city looked up to see the air thick with smoke, carrying the sharp scent of wildfires that had drifted down from Canada. It was a startling moment, more alarming than a strangely warm November day but less directly dangerous than an active blaze in your own neighborhood. For many living on the East Coast, it was simply surreal. The air felt heavy and golden, and yet, everyday routines continued without pause.
“Something in the Air,” the second single from the Antlers’ new record Blight, depicts this environmental event, or at least one that mirrors it closely. If the Antlers have been unfairly labeled a “sad” band, this song won’t do much to change that. Peter Silberman, the group’s longtime creative force, sings with a trembling voice, “Oh, keep your window closed today.” Rather than fully grasping the strange intensity of the moment or facing its unsettling implications, the song leans into ordinary habits: “Oh, be sure to charge your phone today/Oh, maybe work from home today,” he sings softly.
Since their rise to prominence, the Antlers have specialized in songs that linger in deep emotional pain. Titles like “Shiva,” “Wake,” and “Putting the Dog to Sleep” offer a glimpse of the grief they’ve often explored. Back in 2009, their breakthrough album Hospice used a cancer ward as a backdrop for songs about a crumbling relationship, becoming a defining blog-era classic. Silberman now widens that lens, shifting from personal sorrow to collective mourning—what’s often referred to as “eco-grief.” Blight, the band’s seventh album, is presented as a song cycle about the climate crisis. Its nine tracks dwell on pollution (“Pour,” “Calamity”), complacency (“Consider the Source”), and looming environmental collapse (“A Great Flood”). Yet despite the weight of its subject, the music often lacks the sense of urgency or emotional release that once defined Silberman’s most powerful work.
Silberman wrote much of the album while walking around the land near his home studio in upstate New York. During those walks, he noticed a neighbor clearing part of the forest to make space for vehicles. That observation sparked songs like “Carnage,” which starts with spare synth and voice before exploding into a stormy full-band climax, packed with striking imagery—a decapitated snake, a toad crushed under a tire. “Accidental damage,” Silberman sings as the music breaks open in a rugged guitar solo. The title track reaches for the same vividness, describing “chawed up trees with skeletal leaves.” It also hints at his growing interest in electronic sounds, as skittering drum loops by drummer Michael Lerner weave through the latter half of the track, twisting like something alive and mutating.
That raw, immediate energy doesn’t carry into the longer pieces like “Something in the Air” and “Deactivate.” Those songs drift along on delicate arpeggios and mournful vocals but never find their shape. The Antlers have always embraced slow, ethereal soundscapes, but on earlier records those sounds still carried high emotional stakes and bursts of intensity. Here, they look straight at the scale of environmental disaster and end up with little more than a quiet sigh.
Throughout the record, Silberman circles around the question of responsibility for the climate crisis. He often points the finger at himself—or at people like him—everyday consumers who toss out disposable items without a second thought. There’s sincerity in that guilt, but it doesn’t always translate into compelling lyrics. “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?/Well, if you don’t know where to start, consider the source,” he sings on “Consider the Source,” an opener that echoes the warm, glowing mood of 2021’s Green to Gold. A few tracks later, the opening verse of “Blight” takes a more pointed tone: “Quickly, I need it!/Shipped in a day/Oceans away.” The words are blunt, leaving little room for interpretation.
This kind of introspection has merit, but it’s hard to ignore what’s missing. The album shows little anger toward the corporations, fossil fuel magnates, and politicians who have driven the climate crisis for profit. Everyday consumers are not without fault, of course, but there are far greater powers at play. In contrast, Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station painted a chilling portrait of those forces in “Robber” from 2021’s Ignorance. That kind of confrontation is largely absent in the Antlers’ view of the world.
Perhaps that’s why Blight feels oddly detached for a record about an inherently political subject. In 2025, when the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted and national parks stripped of funding by a science-denying administration, the quiet ambivalence in Silberman’s writing stands out. The album contains flashes of anger and guilt but not a clear sense of resistance. On the final track, “A Great Flood,” Silberman sings gently, “Of this I’m uncertain/Will we be forgiven?” The question hangs heavy, like the smoke-filled sky it reflects. Another, more pressing question lingers behind it: Who exactly is “we”?
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