A Fred again.. summer

For ages, I’ve leaned on “eclectic” to describe my musical tastes because if you look at my records, no other word could quite sum up the assortment. Like a technicolor dreamcoat, it’s a collection of many colors. But, truthfully, there was one genre that always stood out in the cold: electronic. I can’t offer any reasonable explanation. It just wasn’t my thing. Until it was.

I credit the Canadian television series Shoresy with helping my ears evolve. The soundtrack, compiled by creator Jared Keeso, spans styles but has an overt fondness for electronic music and its ability to underscore an emotional crest. After sinking into the show’s surprisingly tender-hearted view of “senior whale shit hockey,” I compiled some of my favorite songs into a soundtrack of sorts and dove in.   

Thanks to that, I was fortuitously prepared to appreciate a last-minute replacement at Eaux Claires—the Wisconsin-based festival by Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner—which would return in July after a six-year hiatus. I’d attended all four iterations since the inaugural event in 2015, even making Chicago buddies there who kept me laughing in a group chat we carried on despite the festival’s purported end. When we heard the announcement about ExC V, we weren’t about to miss it.

The swap occurred when British producer Fred again.. (Fred Gibson) and Dessner stepped in to fill the programming hole left by headliner Daniel Caesar, who dropped out of the lineup with just weeks to go. Even though I’d written about Gibson’s song “ten” two years ago, I wasn’t familiar with his catalogue. I corrected course in advance of his performance and quickly understood the appeal—an electronic producer who turned found sound into moments of explosive grandeur. 

By the time Friday evening rolled around—at the festival’s new home in the baseball complex Carson Park—I stood alongside those three guy friends, not just listening to but viscerally floating along Gibson and Dessner’s wending collaboration. They borrowed from their respective music, finding ways to create new shapes out of familiar sounds. In one instance, Dessner played the melodic bass line from “This Is the Last Time,” while Gibson wove the sample into his track “Danielle (smile on my face).” I stood mesmerized at the interplay.

But I absolutely melted when Gibson performed “Cmon,” a song he and Dessner produced for Secret Life, the 2023 ambient album he released with Brian Eno. “Cmon” carves up a singer’s voice, transforming her wordless melody into a stone that percussively skitters across the water while gauzy synths eddy behind it. Gibson is a recursive producer, pulling threads from music past to stitch into songs present, which casts a palimpsestic quality over his artistry. “Cmon” continues that tradition, borrowing briefly from “Lydia (please make it better),” off 2020’s Actual Life, and using the idea of the central lyric (“please make it better”) to generate a new prayer. 

For the live version, Gibson invited the classical punk duo KatzPascale out on stage. One sat next to him, singing the melody, while he added beautiful curlicues as if her voice were a letter and he the calligrapher. Dessner appended subtle electric guitar, shifting the original version’s plea into something otherworldly. 

Shortly after the festival, I traveled to Lake Nipissing for my annual solo week, where I returned to the song—both the live version, which I’d found thanks to an intrepid attendee, and the original studio version—again and again. I don’t often play one track on repeat endlessly—some gluttonous sensibility tends to stop me—but I couldn’t help from nestling into the feelings—of light, of promise, of transformation—I found there.

Despite spending two days with those dear Chicago friends, a bit of co-regulation my nervous system cherished, I couldn’t wholly cast off the sense of agitation I’d been carrying for the last month when I started a new job I shouldn’t have. After nearly five years at one company, the increasingly toxic atmosphere there sent me looking for something new. I found it but at a high cost. Things quickly devolved over the course of my first week, and it became evident that I’d been sold one image during the interview process and had to live with an entirely different, far more chaotic reality. I couldn’t shake the outsized roar that I’d made a terrible mistake—and that mistake was making my long covid flare. As typically happens when I make the wrong choice, I wanted to fix it. Immediately. I felt a yawning chasm open up between my health reality before I accepted this new role and my health reality after starting it, and I could not see fit how to close the gap and get back to baseline. Absent quick remediation, some new need crept in: I wanted someone to come along and tell me everything would be okay.  

The song’s primary supplication, “Please make it better,” captured that desire. I chased the salve it offered through more of Gibson’s music, finding equal comfort in the mournful tension of “I Saw You” and the stammering exhilaration of “Angie (I’ve Been Lost).” It shapeshifted into a fragile sense of hope and gave way to unexpected strength on the bold “fear less,” featuring Sampha, and the fast-paced defiance of “Delilah (pull me out of this).” I danced around my cottage to Gibson’s albums, and when I returned to Buffalo, I sat out on my balcony and sank into others.

Considering the way I once dismissed electronic music, I never thought it’d be the genre I’d turn to in the final weeks of summer. But I found something in its spaciousness—the way it could hold a feeling at its highest pitch without crumbling under the weight of that intensity. I needed a balm to soothe the burn of a decision I couldn’t easily undo—one I’d have to endure until I could.