ecosystems are composing the music now
A24, Ottomilo, and the rise of creative director music
Some songs arrive fully formed. Others accrue meaning through context. They pick up sediment as they circulate—emotional residue, cultural reference, atmospheric charge—until the track becomes something more than itself. Not just a piece of music, but a node in a system of significance.
I’ve always loved Moses Sumney. His music feels both solitary and operatic—weightless yet intense, cerebral and tender. Doomed was one of my favorite tracks from his first EP: spare, devastating, suspended in falsetto just above collapse. But after I saw Lena Waithe’s Queen & Slim, I can’t listen to the song anymore.
It plays during one of the film’s most emotionally brutal scenes—a moment so intimate and raw that it restructured my sense of the song entirely. Now, when I hear it, I don’t just hear the music; I see that scene. I feel a grief that isn’t mine but somehow lives in the sound anyway. The track hasn’t changed, but its meaning has. It is no longer just a song—it is a cinematic residue, a memory vessel, a node in a system of collective feeling.
This phenomenon isn’t new. Music has long gained meaning through placement. But something feels different now. Increasingly, music is not simply shaped by context; it is made for it. It doesn’t wait to be reinterpreted by film, fashion, or ad campaigns. It is born already entangled in them. The context arrives before the sound.
In a media landscape where music gives films emotional shape, where music videos sell singles, where singles sell merchandise, and where merchandise in turn sells lifestyle and brand identity, authorship becomes increasingly diffuse. All art is now multimedia. And increasingly, ecosystems—not the individuals within them—are the ones doing the composing.
Ottomilo and Aesthetic Pre-Framing
I’ve been listening to the first few singles from Ottomilo, the solo music project of Archie Lee Coates IV. His debut album, Surrounded, will be released later this month, marked by a listening party at the Authorized Dealer gallery in Los Angeles.
Coates is not a musician by trade. He is a creative director and co-founder of PLAYLAB, INC., the studio behind everything from Louis Vuitton activations and Virgil Abloh collaborations to urbanist interventions on the High Line. His métier is not music—it is framing. He designs atmospheres, choreographs experience, and engineers attention. That is what makes this turn to music so compelling, and so immediately legible as ‘cool.’
The Ottomilo project does not look like a debut; it looks like a culmination. The black-and-white promo images, the brutalist stage setups, the performative deadpan—all draw from a lineage of post-conceptual agitators turned cultural icons: Bruce Nauman, David Byrne, Frank Ocean. The only live show Coates has played featured absurdist choreography and an architecture of gesture—part construction site, part contemporary art gallery, part modern dance. It is not just stylized; it is pre-stylized, an aesthetic inevitability dressed as emergence.
This is not to say the music itself is irrelevant. From what I’ve heard, it is quite good. But that also feels beside the point. The project has already been granted cultural legitimacy—not by accident, but by ecosystemic design. The scaffolding is in place. The audience has been summoned. The critical framework has been established. What remains is reception.
This isn’t a critique so much as an observation of changing conditions. The Ottomilo project does not express an inner world so much as it deploys an outer one. It does not seek meaning—it distributes it. And in that sense, it offers a near-perfect case study in how contemporary creative ecosystems not only shape what gets made, but predetermine how it will be understood.
A24, Soundtracking, and the Branding of Feeling
If Ottomilo represents the insider-turned-musician, A24 represents the inverse: a media company becoming a musician by proxy. This spring, the studio formally launched A24 Music, a record label that builds on years of obsessive soundtrack curation. The move feels less like a pivot and more like a continuation. A24 has not merely produced films—it has shaped a dominant aesthetic, one so coherent and recognizable that it now extends effortlessly into music.
Because all art is now multimedia. Music gives films their emotional architecture. Music videos sell songs, songs sell merchandise, merchandise sells identity, and identity becomes a distribution mechanism. In this environment, soundtracking becomes a form of authorship. The pairing of image and music doesn’t merely support narrative—it generates it.
A24 excels at this. For years, the studio has used music to code interiority, making a particular kind of emotional ambiguity legible through tone and texture. They have collaborated with Mitski, Moses Sumney, and Daniel Lopatin. They have released deluxe vinyl editions of original scores, built mixtapes for imaginary films, and cultivated an audience fluent not only in genre but in mood. There is now such a thing as the A24 sound: muted synths, analog warmth, delicate vocals, and existential heft.
So the launch of a label is not just a business expansion—it is the logical unfolding of a fully formed aesthetic logic. The soil was already rich and the songs were inevitable.
What’s striking is not that A24 moved into music, but that it waited so long. Because once you’ve built the world, why not release the soundtrack?
The Studio as Environment
None of this feels hypothetical to me. I’ve worked on branded projects. I’ve scored a short film. I recently did commission for I Love You Always, a documentary film by Stuart Sox that is currently making the festival rounds. And I’ve made music entirely on my own—no brief, no client, no deliverable.
So I am not here to romanticize artistic isolation, nor to critique those working across disciplines. I admire what Ottomilo and A24 are doing. But I do think we are witnessing a shift—not just in who gets to make music, but in what music is understood to be.
When I sit down to work in the studio, I try to follow instinct. I try not to think about audience, at least not right away. But even in that solitude, I am surrounded by ambient expectations: what music should sound like, what styles mean, what my own output represents. The ecosystem seeps in—not as a directive, but as atmosphere. And if I am not careful, it can start to write the song for me.
In a landscape saturated with algorithmic noise, sync-bait pop, and AI-generated slurry, it makes sense that we lean on curatorial ecosystems to help us make decisions. There is too much content, too little clarity. So we reach for coherence, for mood, for narrative structure, for context.
That is not inherently bad. But it raises the stakes of self-awareness. The more saturated our environments become, the easier it is for those environments to shape our output—subtly, unconsciously. Without realizing it, you may begin composing music that mirrors the ecosystem you inhabit—not because it reflects something essential to you, but because it reflects what surrounds you. Style, in that case, becomes imitation rather than expression.
And that is fine, until it isn’t. Because if you are not paying attention, your work can begin to feel like an audition for a world you’re not entirely sure you want to belong to.
Where Are You Composing From?
If music is increasingly shaped by the environments it is made for, then perhaps the role of the artist is shifting as well. Less solitary originator, more translator. Not someone generating meaning from within, but someone fluent in the codes of a broader system—someone who listens closely, and chooses how to respond.
Ottomilo’s music makes sense not because it follows trends, but because it speaks the language of the world it was made in. It is fluent. The challenge, I think, is to maintain that fluency without becoming automatic—to let influence speak, but not speak for you.
When I think about Doomed now, I don’t hear it as a standalone track. I hear it as part of a larger structure of feeling: a cinematic sequence, a cultural residue, a specific kind of grief. That doesn’t diminish the song’s power. It situates it.
Maybe that’s where we are. Music is no longer something we simply release into the world—it is something we place, absorb, and reencounter. It is not just personal expression, but infrastructure. A node in a looping system of signals. A sound that was never really alone.
P.S. If you’re interested in the ways taste, culture, and aesthetics show up outside the studio—in restaurants, wine lists, party circuits, and the rituals of summer leisure—I’ve started a second newsletter called Thirst Behavior. It’s more voicey, a little messier, and leans into the social performance of drinking culture, especially as it plays out in places like the Hamptons. Where Open Studio tends to stay reflective and practice-based, Thirst Behavior is closer to cultural anthropology with a splash of gossip. If that sounds fun, you can check it out here.