Jordan Lee (dot) Life

A small pleasure among the many indignities of freelancing in NYC is using my movie pass to see a free matinee movie in the middle of the week. Most recently I saw Sound of Falling, the loosely intertwined and century-spanning story of a German farmhouse and the generations of girls who grew up there.

The movie also functions as a haunting, with the viewer not able to initially discern exactly how the disjointed timeline relates to itself or whether there are supernatural elements or simply historical reverberations. A running theme is the casual violence of the male gaze which leads to an atmosphere of dread not just permeating the dank 1900’s cellars but also sunny open fields.

In the 149 minute runtime director Mascha Schilinski develops vivid sensual languages. Eschewing a soundtrack or score, Falling still uses sound quite effectively by pulling it away to develop tension then homing in on a single element like a pig eating or fly buzzing. Through the lighting we see how drastically society has changed in this century. The farmhouse is introduced as a candlelit semi-feudal agricultural dwelling for a family and servants at the onset of World War One, then followed all the way to the present where a Berlin family seems to have picked it out as a country fixer-upper project.

I left the theater thinking this movie was long, bleak, and really well done and tried to get my frayed nerves to feel normal again. But waking up this morning I could not stop thinking about it. I think my dreaming brain had been mulling it over all night, finding more connections, thinking about how the sense of touch was portrayed, noticing the brilliant rhythm of the sequencing of scenes.

The foregrounding of the German farmhouse and my reaction to this movie itself reminded me of the book The Poetics of Space where French philosopher Gaston Bachelard uses the analogy of rooms of a house for how we store memory and impression in the subconscious. He makes an argument that certain art, like poetry, can bypass the language-based brain, enter the house of the subconscious, affect the reader, and then re-emerge back out into the consciousness in a translated yet diminished state.

Although it was a difficult watch I’m ultimately glad to have allowed my inner house to be haunted by Sound of Falling.

I haven’t had a chance to go over Luminate’s data from how music was listened to and monetized in 2025 but I always appreciate Damon Krukowski’s analysis. Below is a handy graph which shows that only tracks in the top two sections (white and light blue) collect ANY royalties from Spotify. That means 88% of the tracks on Spotify are listened to less than 1000 times a year and are therefore exempted from payouts. This money is then reallocated to those above the 1000 play threshold in proportion to their percentage of total plays.

It boggles my mind that 250 million new tracks were uploaded last year. As a musician, I am actually part of the lucky tier that makes a small portion of my income from this system. But because it is “pro rata” (meaning that the total amount of money set aside for royalties is split in proportion to total listens on the platform) I am in direct competition with any new track on the platform since it dilutes the pro rata pool.

All of this makes me think about how when I started this band 18 years ago there was a separate “indie” ecosystem, often local or regional, with its own publications, venues, record stores, college radio stations. Part of being a non mainstream band was finding these networks and contributing as a performer and as a participant. Maybe I’m just old but I think there is something existential about the main place for listening to music pitting everyone against each other for a sliver of the royalty pie. For most of my life I didn’t have any reason to know or care about the billboard charts yet now, in a strange way, I feel part of that system. Not to mention Universal Music Group, the largest label in the world, has bought the company that publishes my music so now I have truly and unwittingly joined the major label system.

I know that exciting indie ecosystems still exist and I’m grateful for them but I think the main difference is that they don’t exist out of necessity anymore where in the past they were actually needed if you wanted to find literally anything outside of the mainstream. That being said, if you’re doing the good work of making/participating in different systems than the easy/default ones I appreciate you!

I’m glad I finally got around to reading Annie Dillard, starting with a collection of her narrative essays. I love the way she often starts with small details, weaving them together until they take on new meaning. Below is a particularly rich paragraph from the essay “Paganism”.

“The room where I live is plain as a skull, a firm setting for windows. A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. But this room is a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty. Of itself it is nothing, but the view, as they say, is good.”

I’m finding part of the point of this blog is not only to share music I’ve been enjoying but to document how I found it to show all the non-algorithmic vectors of music discovery. There are millions of good songs out there but I’m more interested in it being part of an interesting community or connecting in some way to deeper ideas. Having extra context gives music so much more power.

So with that said, I’m a big fan of the curation of Mississippi Records and the care they put into their reissues of music from all over the world so when they emailed their year end reflections I made it a point to go through the recommendations (which unfortunately don’t seem to be archived anywhere online). My favorite rec so far has been the Reimagining Country radio show on NTS online radio. I was immediately pulled in by host Jamal Khadar’s conversation with musician and educator Valerie June about the African roots of Americana music and the porous boundaries of genre histories. Plus the music selections interspersed throughout were really on point, I’m excited to follow future episodes.

One track that stuck out to me was the minimalist hill country blues of Jessie Mae Hemphill so I’m including her song Standing in the Doorway Crying

🎵

Eyvind Kang - Riparian (2025)

This record was a gift to my partner from Kou Records, a new and promising experimental record label. The album consists of two solo longform improvisations performed with a baroque oddity known as a viola d’amore. Kang switches between bowing and plucking while also flowing on the margins of musical traditions ranging from middle eastern, to Chinese, to many others that lay beyond my knowledge. I couldn’t believe he was creating all of these textures on one instrument.

There is something about the spacious, contemplative way Kang plays that invited my full attention in a way that many longform solo performances don’t. Perhaps that says more about my need to work on my attention span but nevertheless, it was very much worth braving the cold for this beautiful surprise LP in our PO Box.

Juana Molina - caravanas (2025)

Yesterday we held a rare party in our tiny apartment where we cooked pots of vegan soup to nourish our friends for the new year. At some point I played Juana Molina’s album DOGA and it felt like a perfect fit for the warm buzz of the gathering. The hypnotic sing-songy pop experiments stay mostly even keeled but bursts of well-placed sound design made it rise back into awareness prompting many to ask “what is this?” and writing it down for a closer listen later. I recommend her whole discography!

Today’s song is Love Me Or Leave Me by Nina Simone (1965)

I love our local radio here in NYC and one tradition that has become a big part of our holidays is WKCR’s Bachfest which airs non-stop Bach and Bach-related music from Christmas Eve to the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Although it has run for 48 years, it only became a part of my life during a COVID lockdown when we were stuck inside and used the radio to feel more connected to a sense of place. The moment stayed with me deeply and now gives tradition, texture, and a bit of an endurance challenge to the year transition.

This year, amid the organ fugues and piano suites I was surprised to hear Nina Simone’s voice but then it made sense. Her training in classical piano before moving on to her multifaceted blues/jazz/soul style was in full force as she interpolated Bach’s piano style into a remarkable solo in the middle of an already great swing song.

Happy new time spiral!