BANG BANG BANG

When I first met Jack Lutsky, top dawg of internet music label D e l e t e d, all-around real dawg, and mixmaker par excellence under the name Forever FC, it was like dancing the French Cancan to Kankan. He told me of a formative series of months in Paris squats that housed the label Sahara Hardcore (who notably brought Goth Money Records to Paris for the first time), before the conversation meandered to Stendhal, the idiocy of certain pedagogical approaches, and our favorite Chief Keef tracks. This was in Los Angeles, where Lutsky and a number of the D e l e t e d affiliates such as wish (Nick Fopeano), Lilic (Ezra Kahn), Glint (Clay Hillenburg), and fall river music project (Isa Milefchik) originally hail from, my mind flitting between riding through Laurel Canyon and the Valley. Shit had me geeked. Almost a year later I’d hear Sosa’s autotune-drenched crooning about “hoes from the Valley” and “smoking on a whole bunch of Cali” open up a mix that wish and Lilic premiered at NTS’s London studios while touring Europe—only this time it was an a capella, layered over Norwegian composer Fredrik Rasten’s “Circling,” which then bled into Panphilia’s “Billow,” and once again, shit had me geeked. Shortly after the tour finished, I linked with them in New York, where Lutsky, wish, and Lilic are now based. The conversation that followed… shit had me Geeked.

LE BRASSEUR ROYALE

“I’m obsessed with being a pop label,” Lutsky said between glasses of Hofbrau at a bar in Queens. He mentioned Agnès Gayraud’s Dialectic of Pop, which works from Adorno’s critique of the popular as a fetishism of the culture industry towards a definition of popular music not focused on origin or form but instead as a destination of utopian immediacy, as a foundational read. Realizing that almost everything on platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, save for the far-most stretches of experimental works, could be classified as “Pop Music” in Gayraud’s conception of the term, he decided that’s what he wanted the label to be about. There’s a moment in Gayraud’s book where she refers to Drake’s “Hotline Bling” as “a poetry of the cellphone which no other musical art could express so simply and directly.” Similarly, part of what D e l e t e d—which Lutsky has referred to explicitly as an “internet label” (they’re currently best known for releasing digital music and physical perfumes)—does is express the poetics of the internet, at times simply and directly like in the title of Lilic’s “Do You Want To Enter The Talking Stage,” but also through a work like wish’s “live at 123,” which stretches Cafuné’s viral TikTok hit “Tek It” (most popularly heard sped up) into eternity, as the sound of Discord notifications enjamb and then overwhelm the sample.

YEARNED IT (I’M IN THE KITCHEN COOKING JUSTIN BIEBER Y’ALL)

The seeds of D e l e t e d took root in 2019, when a friend sent Lutsky a picture of a thrifted lime green hat that simply read: “Deleted.” He began experimenting with typefaces and aesthetics, knowing that this would lead to the music. In the years that followed, tracks slowly and deliberately trickled out onto the label’s Soundcloud, ranging from compositional pieces to mixes to live sets, all indicative of the unique tastes and impulses of the label’s affiliates. Some of the earliest standout pieces include wish’s rainbow bridge to maspeth and the Lilic x Glint collaboration summer ends (in twos), along with mixes from other artists such as Yyed and Natalia. Their collective approach to the mix as a form also reflects their approach to sampling—using the space as a playground to experiment with concepts and ideas on the scale of songs and hours, rather than fragments and minutes.

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