hear hear: a Fall 2026 playlist commentary
At PAT., we just can’t get enough. So we thought the Fall 2026 playlist we curated with Lav S for Interconnections, the #1 issue of Progressive Architectural Thinking, deserved some heartfelt commentary. You’re welcome.
It is almost too easy open the soundtrack to this issue with Joy Division’s Atrocity Exhibition: a direct explanation of Scott King’s connection quoted in the opening line of the editorial. Tribal percussions and grinding bass pave the way for Ian Curtis to welcome us to step inside and see (the nervous breakdown that will consume him too soon). The title is borrowed from J.G. Ballard’s 1970 experimental collection of fiction, whose liner notes inspired subsequent Ballard novels sited on the French Riviera or the Costa del Sol and our own psychogeographic trips along the Mediterranean coast.
Once set the post punk tone, we were not yet ready to embrace it in full and follow our soundscape consultant Lav S for a full rainy day in East Berlin in 1981. Speaking of a playlist, we thought we might have as well thrown in Play Me, the title track of Kim Gordon third solo effort after Sonic Youth disbanded in 2011, published earlier this year. Being very fond of the nights we spent at the drawing board in the nineties working at our student projects while listening at Goo (with a cover by Raymond Pettibon), Dirty (with a cover by Mike Kelley), we knew that her trajectory between music and visual art feels particularly close to the idea we’re playing with. On top of this Play Me is a critique of modern music consumption, streaming algorithms meant to be passively played, making it a poignant statement for algorithm free, human curated -for good or ill- musical selection.
And being this the soundtrack of the first issue of a magazine which has strong ties with the richness of the mag culture of the XX century, which fueled by the advent of desktop publishing saw a peculiar flourishing in the nineties, we thought almost inevitable move forward with Dazed and Confused. The name of a song which became the name of an era defining magazine. The pattern is not entirely new: 30 years earlier the name of a blues song became the name of a rock band first and the bible of music magazines later. But if Muddy Water’s Rolling Stone Blues became The Rolling Stones and then Rolling Stone magazine, the whole iteration happened within the music world (although RS content spanned beyond, to cover politics and sports through the pens of literary geniuses such as Hunter Thompson). What is interesting with Dazed and Confused the magazine is the jump species from music to a programmatic wider crossover of themes, including fashion, arts and the occasional venture in the realm of architecture.
Well, the history is worth remembering students Jefferson Hack and Rankin wanted to initiate a magazine and were looking for a name. They went to the home of a friend who had been obsessively listening Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused for days. “This is us” they thought, and they had their name. But the very story of the evolution of the song is something which also is worth remembering, because it is exemplary of the kind of influence across geographies and genres, appropriation -if not plain steal- and transfiguration in something new that resonate with the “good artist copy, great artist steal” often attributed to Picasso.
Jake Holmes, an American psych-folk singer was opening for the Yarbirds during their 1967 US tour. He had a song, Dazed and Confused, that was first adapted by Jimmy Page as a live act for the Yardbirds (during his stint with the band in its final period after Jeff Beck had left). Peculiar of his exhibition was the fact that he played the solo with a violin arc, an idea that legend says was suggested to him by actor and music composer David McCallum, here represented by his instrumental The Edge (no relation with the guitar player born David Howell Evans of U2 fame, which we’ll find toward the end in an unexpected collab). Page took the song into the Yardbirds’ repertoire, where it mutated into something considerably louder and more menacing, before emerging in 1969 on Led Zeppelin’s debut album as a monument of psychedelic hard rock. So, a folk song written in New York in 1967 becomes a rock anthem in London, then the name of a British magazine, and eventually part of the cultural universe of a group of young architects in Turin. Not bad for a descending bass line, if not for a casualty: poor Jake Holmes, whose writing credit was attributed only after 40 years. Listening to his original song in 2026 brings us back to an America that seems gone forever, inspiring Mick Jagger to sing “I was madly in love with you before we ever met, I saw all your movies, I smoked your cigarettes … Lady Liberty don’t look so good when she’s wearing a frown”. If in 2026 Kim Gordon sings the betrayal of the American dream from inside, the Stones with Ringing Hollow deliver a rare political statement disguised as a country/folk song about the betrayed love for a country where “there’s always a scoundrel trying to whip up the crowd”. And now, if we consider that social discontent eventually made punk culture inevitable, so we now feel ready to enter Lav’s territory which sits solidly at the centre of this smashburger of a playlist.
Brian Eno’s Third Uncle sounds like somebody accidentally invented post-punk in 1974 and then forgot to tell anybody. Before becoming the patron saint of ambient music and architecture exhibitions, Eno made some genuinely deranged records. Third Uncle is frantic, abrasive and almost ridiculously ahead of its time. It leads straight into Wire -established in London in October 1976, cheers to you- who approached rock music as though it were a machine with far too many unnecessary parts. Then T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty) from Long Beach, California, dragging Southern California hardcore punk into darker territory, and Wipers from Portland, Oregon, whose Greg Sage helped invent a vocabulary that would become considerably more profitable in the hands of younger musicians (read: Kurt Cobain).
By this point, the temperature has dropped several degrees. Fortunately, Saâda Bonaire arrive from Bremen with You Could Be More As You Are, a peculiar mixture of dub, disco, electronics and Middle Eastern influences. It sounds like something recorded for a nightclub that is almost ready to exist in the cyberpunk future ahead. Then The Gun Club. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was one of rock’s great damaged romantics. He took the blues, dragged it through Los Angeles punk and left behind some extraordinary records before dying in 1996. There’s a small story here.
Around the turn of the millennium, a live Blondie album was rotating heavily in the space that would soon become our first studio. There was a moment when Debbie Harry introduced “a song that Chris wrote for an old friend of us who had a little band called The Gun Club”. At the time we never actually ventured to listen to the Gun Club, but it was a pre-Spotify era when each discovery required some amount of effort. Twenty-five years later, Lav S selected The Gun Club’s Yellow Eyes for this playlist, the memory surfaced, and here is Blondie’s Under the Gun recorded live in Chicago in 1999.
And since with this we have re-appropriated the reins of the playlist, we might as well continue with another face of the post-punk scene, the lipstick smeared Robert Smith who spent the summer performing live to celebrate The Cure’s 50 years. A remarkable achievement, particularly when one considers that the band began in the late 1970s, when looking miserable was a professional qualification. A Fragile Thing, taken from Songs of a Lost World, demonstrates that Smith hasn’t surrendered to the temptation of becoming his own tribute act. The version here is live, recorded at London’s Troxy.
We could end here, but the temptation for a last bunch of connections is too strong to resist, and there’s a Cure side story lurking around the corner. Lol Tolhurst, Robert Smith childhood friend and band cofounder, was fired in 1989 after his drinking had become so severe that his ability to perform was seriously compromised. Tolhurst survived, relocated to California, recovered and eventually found his way back into music. In 2023, he joined forces with Budgie, the former drummer of Siouxsie and the Banshees (the band whom without the Cure wouldn’t look quite the same), and producer Jacknife Lee to make Los Angeles, an album of contemporary electronic music that sounds remarkably uninterested in reliving anybody’s glory days. Out of the bunch of moody compositions, we singled out Noche Oscura -featuring The Edge on guitar- a track inspired by a poem by St John of the Cross that celebrates the religious power of the night over the day: a reminder of how the goth subculture was influenced by the imagery of catholic religion. It seems that during the recording of Disintegration Smith was pissed off at how useless his old mate had become: so fucked up that he could not even old a note.
This makes closing with La Monte Young especially apt: the avant-garde musician and performance artist -who is quoted by Brian Eno as a crucial influence and has been involved with Joseph Kosuth in the conceptual periodical Shit Must Stop- is best known for his exploration of sustained tones. 7 Composition 1960 No. 7 is made of two notes: B and F-sharp. The score contains a single instruction: “To be held for a long time.”
