Music Archives - Public Seminar

Music

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

March 25, 2026 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

For Rox Eckroth and August Simon, the idea of putting together a tape compilation of songs from trans artists came as much from their interest in the history of cassettes as it did from a desire to collate trans art. “You put a tape in the machine, you hit play. It ...

Literature

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

Cloud Variations presents performers, chamber orchestra, and poetry in a prismatic exploration of language, translation, and mother tongue

December 18, 2025 • by Grace Dignazio

Poet and performer J. Mae Barizo’s monodrama Cloud Variations is a transdisciplinary foray interweaving poetry, chamber orchestra, visual art, and theater. The piece places Barizo’s “Cloud Pantoum,” a poem previously published in The Atlantic, in conversation with Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3 to create a kaleidoscopic meditation on body, technology, ...

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Music

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

November 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing. This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...

Gender

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

On making music for girls

October 9, 2024 • by Shelley Martin

When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor ...

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

Memory

Archiving My Life Through Playlists

Feeling and remembering with music

May 22, 2024 • by Robert Noble

In so far as they are imbued with such emotion, playlists quickly become vignettes of pivotal moments. ...

Music

The Call

A jazz trumpeter recounts his time with the Sun Ra Arkestra

May 21, 2024 • by Ahmed Abdullah

I would come to understand that there was a profound methodology at work. Sun Ra was a genius who allowed a person to exhibit the full breadth of his capabilities before he decided where that person would fit best for maximum impact. This was real leadership...

Music

Mitski’s Notes of Yearning

On being a sympathetic fan

April 17, 2024 • by Miranda Young

The liminality of Mitski’s work and its diasporic quality are related both to her mixed-race heritage and her scattered cultural upbringing....

Music

“I was concerned for her knees”

Mitski transported the crowd at King’s Theatre with a cathartic physical performance

April 16, 2024 • by Hannah Burns

I had been worried that “My Love Mine All Mine” was the only song some people had come to hear, just because it blew up on TikTok. ...

Podcast

MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth

Episode 51: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America

April 12, 2024 • by Claire Potter

Slotkin examines the history of the two Americas that exist side-by-side today, with their clashing and common myths, two American cultures that will meet at the ballot box in November 2024 to decide the fate of American democracy....

MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth

Film & Performing Arts

A Band on the Brink of Collapse

David Adjmi’s Stereophonic heads to Broadway

April 9, 2024 • by Emma Minor

The image of musicians in a recording studio beset by interpersonal tensions—while making their best music—is so familiar it leads a listener to wonder, Is the strife all somehow necessary?...