Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork

💭 Thoughts on Raphael Rogiński, Strava’s heatmaps, and reducing your carbon footprint.

Philip Sherburne is a freelance writer, editor, Substacker, and label co-owner. He writes mostly about music, particularly electronic and experimental music. Philip has been a contributing editor at Pitchfork since 2014 (and since 2005 has written more than 500 reviews for the site); you might also see his byline in the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Departures (RIP), Mixmag, etc. Since 2023, he has been publishing weekly roundups of new-music recommendations, plus interviews, playlists, and more, on his Substack, Futurism Restated. In addition to all that, he co-runs Balmat, a record label putting out ambient and ambient-adjacent music, and is a co-host of the long-running Lapsus Radio, a weekly Spanish-language show dedicated to electronic music. Philip grew up in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Providence and San Francisco before moving overseas in 2005, first to Barcelona and then Berlin; since 2018 he has been based on the small Mediterranean island of Menorca and has no intention of leaving. Ever. 

🎯 Current focus

Though I’ve gotten to take on some cool projects in the past year—a weekend in Berlin to profile Kali Malone for the New York Times; a trip to Gruyere, Switzerland, to write about cheese for Departures magazine—it’s hard not to worry that the whole culture-writing racket is rapidly collapsing. (Departures, for instance, shuttered the same week my article went online.) So my weekly newsletter, Futurism Restated, has felt like a really necessary personal corrective to some of the doom and gloom in media. I initially launched it simply as a clearinghouse to write about all the great music I didn’t otherwise have space to cover at Pitchfork. I typically review four albums a month there, yet a hundred potentially interesting releases might cross my desk in a month; I needed some place to take up the slack. 

In the year and a half that I’ve been writing the newsletter—religiously, week in and week out—it’s really become a cornerstone of my writing. It’s a place to cover obscure artists, experiment in tone, and even get personal, when it seems warranted. It feels a lot like blogging did in the 2000s, except without the forced affect that the early blogosphere engendered in a lot of people (or at least in me!), and with the extremely beneficial addition that people are actually willing to pay money for it. I really don’t know where I’d be without it. And from a non-egotistical perspective, Substack and the new wave of newsletters is a very welcome development all around. I love seeing what my friends and peers are writing about, and how they’re pushing the limits of the format. At a moment when so many things seem to be collapsing, it’s good to feel inspired by something. (A few favorites, in no particular order: Ben Cardew’s Line Noise, Garrett Kamps’ Healings, Andy Beta’s Substack, Sam Valenti IV’s Herb Sundays, Matthew Schnippers’ Deep Voices, Dina Litovsky’s In the Flash, Mark Richardson’s Beauty Blew a Fuse, Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor, Stephan Kunze’s Zen Sounds, [past Thought Enthusiast] Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick’s The Culture Journalist, Chal Ravens and Tom Lea’s No Tags, and Max Read’s endlessly entertaining/enlightening Read Max.) 

💡 Reducing your carbon footprint

We just installed solar panels in our house, and I find myself constantly checking out the website that tells me how much energy we’re generating versus how much we’re consuming. What we don’t use gets poured back into the grid, and once we’ve signed up for something called a “virtual battery,” we’ll be able to offset those surpluses against our nighttime consumption. I realize that confronting climate change ultimately has to be systemic, but it still feels good to be reducing my carbon footprint, however symbolic it may be.

🎶 Raphael Rogiński

I’m a huge fan of a Polish guitarist named Raphael Rogiński, who I discovered via Kraków’s Unsound festival a number of years ago. I reviewed his 2023 album Talàn for Pitchfork, and earlier this year I helped set up a couple of small shows for him here on Menorca, including one outdoors at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, on a small rocky island in the middle of the port. Unsound recently released a new album from, Žaltys, and it feels like another step forward for him. His playing is meditative, melancholy, and mystical; his technique continues to morph, encompassing strange inventions and judicious overdubbing. More than ever, he’s pushing deeply into the unknown.

🗺️ Strava’s heatmaps

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I guess you could call rootedness, particularly as it pertains to my life here on Menorca. It’s a small island, with a population of just 100,000 people or so (though it gets much bigger in the high season). Many people live in the same town that their ancestors are from, even though there are only a handful of towns; you can drive from the western side of the island to the eastern side in about 45 minutes, yet there are distinct accents on each side. History is everywhere you look: The town where I live, Alaior, was founded in 1304, and there are more than 1500 neolithic ruins scattered across the island. I’ve lived here for six years, and in that time I’ve gotten obsessed with browsing Google Maps, Wikilocs, and local archives to try to find small rural roads and dirt trails. There’s a vast network of paths and trails that winds through pastures, across scrubland, and between stone walls. I recently began trail running, and Strava’s heatmaps have turned out to be a great resource for discovering routes that even Google can’t show you. Just this past weekend I discovered a tiny dirt trail paved in places with cobblestones worn smooth and shiny. There are records of some of these routes dating back to the 15th century, which means that people have been walking—and driving their mules—over those stones for more than 500 years. I find something really humbling about incorporating those routes into my own daily life, and recentering my own knowledge of the island accordingly.

📝 Being empathetic, wry, self-effacing, and funny as hell

You know who rules? Grayson Haver Currin. For one thing, nobody writes better profiles than he does; just check out his pieces on Shahzad Ismaily, Loren Connors, or Beverly Glenn-Copeland. (His reviews for Pitchfork are also some of my favorite writing on the site.) And nobody lives like he does, either: Grayson (who is also an outdoor columnist) and his wife, Tina Currin, have thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail, and his Instagram is a nonstop cavalcade of insane and frequently life-threatening mountaintop adventures. He’s empathetic, wry, self-effacing, funny as hell, and about as far from New York media navel-gazing as you can get. He’s an inspiration.   

🎉 Fiestas de Sant Llorenç

At the risk of sounding too island-pilled, the upcoming event I’m looking forward to most are the Fiestas de Sant Llorenç here in Alaior. Every town on the island (like most towns in Spain) has its own annual festivities; the celebrations here are heavily rooted in equestrian culture and drunken revelry. Last year was my first proper experience of Alaior’s fiestas and it was just madness. Very much looking forward to brewing up a big six-liter batch of pomada (gin and homemade lemonade) and throwing myself into the fray. 

(Update: The fiestas took place in between writing and publishing these answers; you can read a recap and see some photos on my newsletter here.)

💿 Collecting offline music

The one thing I couldn’t (or at least would very much rather not) live without is my offline music collection. Once upon a time that would have meant vinyl LPs, of which I still have several thousand, despite having unloaded great quantities at various points over the past decade or so. But these days the real meat of it is in the terabytes of AIFFs and WAVs and MP3s that I keep stored on a double-disc NAS drive, with built-in backup. Like most people, I also utilize streaming platforms, but as an at least occasional DJ, it’s always been important to me to own my music, to have access to it whenever I want, regardless of whether it disappears from corporate platforms. I’m a heavy Bandcamp user, though for the most part I just purchase digital files; shipping has simply gotten too expensive for me to justify most vinyl purchases, and in any case, my listening habits are entirely digital anyway. That said, I’ve still somehow amassed several shoeboxes full of cassette tapes over the past decade—and don’t get me started on all the CDs, some of them decades old, in boxes stored beneath my desk. 

🏃‍♂️ A novice’s journey into running

As I mentioned above, I’ve recently gotten into running—by recently, I mean like five weeks ago, but I’ve been surprisingly diligent about it, and I’m more excited about it than I ever expected. As part of my novice’s journey, I’ve become a huge fan of Strava. It’s an app that tracks your stats—mileage, pace, personal bests, etc.—but it also has a social component, which I find really useful. Running is mostly a solitary thing for me, so to have a space to compare experiences with friends is a great motivator to keep going. And as silly as it may sound, just seeing those stats—hey, I ran 100 kilometers this month!—also helps keep me from slacking off. My favorite features: the ability to create and share maps, or view heatmaps to see where others have run or biked in my area, and the ability to share photos. Since I’m doing most of my running in pretty astonishingly beautiful landscapes, sharing hasty, sweat-streaked snapshots of coastal trails or neolithic ruins is a handy way to distract from my (so far) painfully slow pace. 

One related corollary here, too: Satisfy Running, a brand of gear that a few friends have recommended to me. Their branding is really sharp, their designs are gorgeous, and their blog, Possessed, is really witty and unexpected; I certainly don’t know any other sports brands that publish playlists curated by the doom-metal band Pallbearer. I have yet to actually invest in any of their pieces but they look amazing—high-tech but also stylish as hell. Maybe when I hit my second hundred kilometers I’ll splurge on something for myself, as a treat.

Follow Philip on Instagram, Linkedin & Twitter and check out his Substack here.

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