There is something spectral about today’s independent music scene. The acts at the center of the stage are producing a sound that enmeshes the eerie and the digital. The typical pop structures are deconstructed, fragmented, spliced open, and splayed out on the computer. The sounds of the online world come in: scratchy voice notes that sound decades old, whirring synthesizers that sound like old phone lines, samples remixed and remixed till they are no longer recognizable.
The voices are always slow and soft, entering the tracks as if from another plane of existence entirely. They are a touch of humanity stretched over a glitchy, digital landscape. The resulting tracks are deeply liminal, a modern sound emerging from a seemingly endless loop of references. Perhaps no group embodies this spectral sound more than the American electronic duo Ear. Their music acts as a perfect sonic case study for what late cultural critic Mark Fisher called the ‘slow cancellation of the future.
For Fisher, the twenty-first century became trapped within its own archives, endlessly recycling and reimagining the aesthetics of previous decades not for culture’s sake but for commerce. New cultural forms are obsolete. Fisher believed this was not merely a stylistic issue but rather a symptom of a broader historical condition. The erosion of the collective belief that the future could be fundamentally different from the present.
The duo that makes up Ear, Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, embrace “laptop twee.”
But this future doesn’t disappear entirely. Instead, it survives as a ghost, haunting a culture that is unable to imagine alternatives to its current reality. It leaves spectral traces. Fisher wrote Ghosts of My Life in 2014. The critic never got to see just how accurate his assessment of our future, or lack thereof, truly was.
Ear was formed by musicians and producers Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan. Earlier this year, they released their sophomore album Rumspringa. Ear creates music that glitches and crashes, similar to an old camcorder sifting through memories. Distorted memories blur into distorted guitars, which bleed into the sounds of digital processing. Think of Postal Service’s Give Up if it were recorded on a glitchy iPhone.
Since bonding over “twee shit” and “digital hardcore” music at Bard College, the pair have become cynosures of “laptop twee.” This is a genre that balances youthful bliss in tension with digital debris. Their debut single, “Nerves,” was recorded on Avtan’s iPhone in their university library.
Their debut album, The Most Dear and The Future, paves the way.
The band’s signature sound could only emerge from a generation raised entirely within a digital culture. A generation for whom the internet is not a novelty but rather the very fabric of social life. The duo’s sonic texture calls back to the early internet era, a time when the boundary between the Internet and our daily lives wasn’t so seamless.
Ear’s first album, The Most Dear and The Future, was a straightforward, sentimental look backward. The album intensely relied on everyday, domestic samples. This includes rain splashing on a windowpane and the gentle chime of the wind in a backyard. Clinking kitchenware from the other room, and low-fidelity recordings that sound like they are from old family camcorders.
“Aim” begins with the soft patter of a rainstorm. “Give Way” features the soft crunching of footsteps through a field. On The Most Dear and the Future, the electronic duo creates an auditory mismatch, weaving soft, hyper-domestic, comforting textures into digital, oscillating 808 beats. The album functions as an archive, intertwining memories with the digital debris of the early internet era. One feels like they’re sifting through old childhood videos and photo albums, but through a heavily pixelated screen.
Rumspringa leaps into the unknown.
What emerges is a “Hauntological” sound. Across his blog k-punk, Mark Fisher popularized the term hauntology to describe electronic music of the 2000s. Fisher posits that hauntological music takes pieces of our canceled futures, all the possibilities that never came to fruition, and places them into the eerie timelessness of the early 2000s.
Fisher often cited the digital recording of the record player’s “crackle” as hauntology’s sonic signature. Still, ear reworks this, replacing the sound of the record player with the sonic soundscapes of the early internet — digital stutters, buffer glitches, and pixelated voice notes— all enmeshed with the textured memories of early childhood. Ear’s first album is all about mourning childhood and looking back at an era when the boundary between our digital lives and our daily lives wasn’t as blurred.
The duo’s sophomore album, Rumspringa, is an attempt to leap into the unknown. Ear sheds their former soft bedroom soundscapes for a skittering IDM breakbeats, erratic glitch-work, and synthetic basslines. Their lead single “Ne Plus Ultra” begins with Avtan’s lilting voice but quickly breaks down into a maze of digital clutter as the bass transforms into a squeaky, squelchy, and rattling trap-style 808 glide.
Breaking free from nostalgia.
Those organic, comforting background soundscapes are gone. Instead, the duo’s signature vocals are buried inside a digitized audio field, giving the entire record the mechanized, frantic quality of growing up in today’s age. Ear’s new tracks feel like a recognition of how the boundaries between “IRL” and online have collapsed: memories are replaced with photographs, identity is distributed across apps and established through algorithms, relationships unfold across platforms and virtual threads. In the same way that our society has been deconstructed by the internet, ear has produced an album where the normal structure of a song is completely reshaped and interrupted by the online sphere.
In this way, Rumspringa wants to be a break from the hauntological nostalgia of their first album. It wants to be an album concerned with futurity, centered on a more textured, digital sound. Ear has commented that they intended for Rumspringa to be a “Choose Life” album, one centered on navigating and embracing the difficult textures of youth instead of childhood.
The band is trying to look ahead. The album title itself is a reference to the Amish rite of passage marking adolescence. At the end of this period, the youth either decides to remain in the Amish community or to leave. The Amish concept of Rumspringa is entirely about the threshold of the future. You step out of your protected past to decide who you will become.
Digital decay and the early aughts come together for something sonically haunted.
Yet, despite this striving for futurity, the album still remains haunted by ghosts. The title reads as a departure but also a connection to a traditional culture, one that is hard to disentangle from. While ear experiments with their digital sound more in the album, they also bring in more negative space. Within the heavy digital clutter of the breakbeats and basslines are quiet, hollowed-out soundscapes.
These spaces remind audiences of nights on empty highways, frozen fields, and gas stations at dusk, those strange, liminal spaces of youth. In “Amsterdam,” Avtan sings, “It no longer exists/The place you thought you left.” While The Dear and Most Future was the nostalgic desire to return to childhood, Rumspringa attempts to encompass the realization that one can never go back.
In the same instance, Rumspringa’s sonic language remains built on the architecture of past digital decay. This proves Fisher’s point that even supposed sounds of the “future” are just recycling the past. Rumspringa tries to leave the past behind, but the very tools it uses to construct “the future” are from the trash heap of early-2000s internet aesthetics.
Failing to break the loop.
The grain of the audio clips, the low-bitrate compression, and the fragmented monologues are not futuristic. They are the ghosts of a digital past that we have never properly laid to rest. When the bass transforms into a squelching, rattling 808 glide on tracks like “Ne Plus Ultra,” it feels less like an innovation and more like a desperate, mechanical flailing against the walls of the archive.
This is precisely what Mark Fisher meant by the “slow cancellation of the future.” The tragedy of Rumspringa is that it is an album intensely concerned with futurity, yet it is forced to speak in a language made entirely of historical remains. It proves that in our current cultural moment, the “future” cannot be genuinely imagined. It can only be simulated by rearranging the debris of previous digital eras.
Ultimately, Rumspringa fails to break the loop, and that failure is exactly what makes it a genuine reflection of our modern age. By showing us a youth culture that is deeply discontent with the present, yet entirely dependent on the aesthetics of the past to express that discontent, ear has mapped the exact boundaries of our cultural prison.
Marrying the past, the present, and our distant selves.
Between the computer glitches and interrupted voice memos from the past is longing. Longing to depart from the past and move forward. Longing for an existence apart from the online sphere. Of course, the very sound that emerges from that longing is one that continues to be haunted by both past selves and past digital landscapes. In doing so, this new spectral sound mirrors the in-between we find ourselves in today. Replaying the past because we’re continually discontent with the futures offered to us, the very futures we’ve created.
Album cover courtesy of A24 Music.
