Episode 31 of On The Record ranges from Spielberg’s latest extraterrestrial spectacle to Icelandic cocktail jazz, via Australian festival programming, political songwriting, BBC football commentary and the fragile magic of shellac records.
It is a wide-ranging conversation, but not a random one. Beneath the digressions sits a recurring question: what makes art endure when fashion, technology and attention spans keep moving on?
Brian Wise and Michael Mackenzie begin with the film Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien-contact drama.
Both find much to admire in its scale, visual ambition and performances—particularly Emily Blunt and Coleman Domingo—while remaining divided over the ending and frustrated by familiar Spielberg habits: uneven pacing, explanatory dialogue and aliens that seem to have wandered in from the extended E.T. family tree.
It is, they agree, still worth seeing. Spielberg’s gift for spectacle remains intact, even when his instinct to make the unknowable reassuringly human gets in the way.
Science fiction continues with Star City, the Apple TV series that imagines an alternative space race in which the Soviet Union reaches the Moon first.
Wise is taken with its recreation of Cold War Russia and its story of surveillance, state control and scientific ambition. The pair also make room for Silo, another example of Apple’s increasingly confident investment in dystopian, high-concept television.
Then comes the episode’s most encouraging musical discovery: Icelandic singer Laufey – her remarkable Melbourne success, including sold-out Rod Laver Arena shows, surprises the hosts less than the music itself.
Laufey’s polished, jazz-inflected pop recalls the lounge, cabaret and vocal traditions of earlier decades, yet her audience is overwhelmingly young.
For Mackenzie, it is an encouraging reminder that younger listeners have not abandoned good music; they are simply finding it through artists who feel personal and present-tense.
That thought follows neatly from Tim Rogers’ observations in the previous episode about the musical curiosity of younger fans.
Wise puts the theory into practice with composer Dylan Mattingly’s The Wild Heart, performed by Contemporaneous and featuring Irish vocalist Eala O’Lionard.
The work, drawing comparisons with Steve Reich and Philip Glass, is admittedly a more demanding proposition than easy-listening jazz-pop. But Wise’s experience is telling: listeners responded when invited to meet unfamiliar music with open ears.
There is also time for guitarist Julian Lage, whose recent and brief stint playing with Bob Dylan is discussed ahead of an Australian visit for the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
A musician admired by peers from John Zorn to Nels Cline, Lage’s solo dates promise something more exploratory than the standard guitar-hero exercise.
The Melbourne International Jazz Festival itself becomes a point of lively disagreement. Wise welcomes the breadth of its early announcement—among the names discussed are Aja Monet, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Fred Wesley & the New JBs, Emily Wurramara and The Teskey Brothers.
Mackenzie, however, takes issue with the latter’s reverent revivalism, arguing that affection for classic soul and R&B does not automatically produce a fresh contribution to it.
It is a fair argument, even if Wise counters with the simplest defence available: The Teskey Brothers have seen international audiences respond to them with real enthusiasm, and Josh Teskey possesses a formidable voice. Mackenzie remains unconvinced, though he concedes that Fred Wesley, still carrying the authority of the James Brown legacy, is an entirely different proposition.
From there, the conversation turns to Margot Price’s politically charged Days of Unrest, including her version of Woody Guthrie’s migrant-worker anthem ‘Deportee’.
Alongside recent work by Mavis Staples, Lucinda Williams and others, Price represents a renewed willingness among American artists to speak plainly in a climate where political expression can still carry professional risk..
A detour through World Cup broadcasting finds Wise praising SBS’s coverage and, especially, the BBC’s wonderfully eccentric radio commentary—where a drawn football match can inspire a comparison with Heat, the Pacino–De Niro crime classic.
It is exactly the sort of left-field cultural link that gives the podcast its charm.
The episode closes with the most evocative subject of all: recorded sound itself. Mackenzie previews a feature on DJ Mono, a 78 RPM devotee with roughly 1,000 gramophones, a former Glasgow punk-shop owner and a champion of the pre-microphone era.
His forthcoming live event, combining musicians with original 78s, offers a reminder that the history of recorded music is not merely technological.
It is tactile, mechanical and full of human compromise—from Dame Nellie Melba resenting the need to holler into an acoustic recording horn, to the single-use steel needles required to play old shellac discs without damaging them.
In an era of frictionless streaming, that feels almost radical: music you can hold, hear wear out and, if necessary, replace one needle at a time.
Show Notes
Disclosure Day | Official Trailer
Star City — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Laufey – From The Start (Official Music Video)
k.d. lang – Miss Chatelaine (Official Music Video)
Dylan Mattingly: The Wild Heart The Transmutation Notebooks: II. Notes for Another Life
Julian Lage Talking Drum ft. John Medeski, Jorge Roeder, Kenny Wollesen (Official Video)
The Teskey Brothers – I Get Up (Official Video)
Fred Wesley & The New J.B.’s | Live at Moods
Melbourne International Jazz Festival website
Margo Price – San Marcos (Official Audio)
Heat Restaurant scene || Deniro, Pacino