How long have you been collecting digital music or any sort of digital files, really?

I don't really think about music as something I “collect.” Compared to the Pokemon cards I cherished as a kid, music is so wispy. But the other day I randomly got locked out of my SoundCloud and it wouldn't let me log back in, and I felt panicked for a second, like I was on the verge of losing an archive I'd spent years building. Platforms make all these processes of meaning-making and personal memory feel so invisible and abstracted, relinquished to companies that could lock you out in an instant ... I should download more. I used to have a massive collection of sound effects, green screen edits, and screwy images I would use for montage parodies on YouTube.

How did you first find out about Nina?

I got a DM from Emilie Friedlander asking if I wanted to write a piece for Nina (I did).

Could you describe your taste? Is your casual listening different from the music you dig for?

I dunno really, I used to think my taste was fixed. Then I realized it's all contextual, based on my knowledge of a scene or sound. It cuts both ways—sometimes I like something more once I've grasped its sonic coordinates, other times I spend 30 hours writing a review of a tape I enjoyed and then I can never listen again. Certain things I gravitate against, like theater-kid melodrama, complexity for complexity's sake.

Generally, I like things that are a bit fucked-up and disheveled, the dirty bliss and the endearingly dorky. The raw moxie of The Femcels or Bassvictim; the sardonic chic of Brat Star and Dry Cleaning; MfanaTouchLine and Dizzee Rascal's disjointed swag. I like the music that pierces through the suffocating fog of the pristine mid. It can be a matter of identification, where bits of the music and the biography of the artist intersect with my own life. My favorite music as a kid was the champion theme in Pokemon LeafGreen, which I thought was so epic.

What is your preferred way to surf around Nina and look for new music?

I don't have "standards" in a sense. Spencer Kornhaber was dismayed when I told him I sometimes only play songs for 30 seconds to taste the texture. I don't do this a lot, but it's really just a response to a different kind of music—it's like letting my ears frolic nude in a field of non-monogamous pleasure, hopping between partners. Some of my favorite music comes down to that one little moment of texture. Other times it's about the buildup, or the experience of the song in its duration. I go through periods of ravenous discovery where I replay the same 15-20 songs endlessly for a week, and sometimes I'm digging for music that I wouldn't casually listen to—anything that could teach me about a scene or tell a worthwhile story.

Is there a release you discovered on Nina that is particularly close to your heart?

I've found some cool artists through Nina's essays and interviews, and the semi-ironic cloud rock iceberg (someone's gotta be brave enough to coin new genres) helped me put together ideas I had about post-pandemic rock music. I'm impressed by how whenever I find someone weird and exciting from, like, Latvia with 700 followers on SoundCloud, they already have a Nina link in their bio.

300SkullsAndCounting's Q&A he did was sick. The phrase "Undertale on fent" lodged itself in my brain. I figured he was the pioneer of this twee-mo style, but then it sent me down a rabid hole of people like Fizzy Dino Pop, who were defacing Nintendo-core cuteness with serrated screams decades ago.

What is exciting you the most about music in 2026?

Has rage reached its limits, or are we only at the start of a cataclysmic plunge into gore-noise and power electronics? When will the first NYU dissertation titled "2slimey and the Radical Rewiring of the Millennial Mind" drop? Are ocelot and 3c876 the true pioneers of this generation? There was a moment when it felt inventive to make music that sonically captured the manic insanity of digital overstimulation. But there's been so much good sound collage and mashup mayhem that it feels like we need something else. I'm curious what this post-overload style would look like, how music can take us beyond imitating the deluge. I don't think it is just ambient soothing stillness. It'll be demented and unholy, but instead of skimming the surface of raw affect, it will offer another vantage point inside the storm—perhaps something like the crowdsourced communal outpouring of Folx or the shuddering emo immediacy of zayok? Or maybe the music will just accelerate and decay into a sickly buzzing drone. Whatever deranged shit people come up with next, I'm pumped.

Favorite recent non-musical rabbit holes?

The Minecraft speedrunning scene; s/o MCSR Vault.

You label yourself as a “professional brainrottist” in your Nina bio. How would you describe the profession of brainrottism? What is the cultural utility of brainrot?

In the beginning, I really took pleasure in arguing for "internet culture." There's both genius brainrot and crap brainrot—increasingly, the brain-snot is leaking its putrid goo over everything. A while ago I linked brainrot to my idea of shitpostmodernism, this thrilling collapse of conventional etiquette, where people were taking the form of memes and applying it to music—defacing longstanding genres with glitched-out gibberish, lowering the bitrate until the mix became a blissful blur, caterwauling in Auto-Tune like a pubescent boy in the shower. Essentially, shitpostmodernism just meant tactical or inspired rule-ravaging, pushing beyond what is typically acceptable into the realm of scandalously strange. I think some people see the term "brainrot" as a degrading gesture—it sounds like you're calling something shite, low-effort, fast food to nuke your intellect. But so much established knowledge is bullshit. We could stand to undo many of the lessons we've internalized about what is supposedly proper and justified in this world.

Ideally, brainrot offers a means to rethink what can be considered art, and a reflection of the anything-goes consciousness of the times. But it's harder to appreciate tweaked-out schizo-core when there's so much genuine garbage everywhere—the White House is doing jugg edits about drone strikes, and it feels like brainrot is only promoting further collective degradation, hollowing us out into thoughtless husks. Probably same as ever, the job of a "professional brainrottist" is to separate the revealing gems from the mercenary sludge. It also suggests someone who is themselves a little too far gone, elated and troubled, a walking infohazard.

(Photo Credit: Dillon Edlin)

Digging - Kieran Press Reynolds

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