Signal to Noise: a column by Max Ludlow
March 8, 2026
I'm Max Ludlow, communications manager and associate curator for Montez Press Radio, an artist-run performance space and online listening platform in Lower Manhattan. Each month, we curate and broadcast conversations, performances, radio plays, and live music for free, facilitating experimentation and dialogue between artists, writers, and thinkers globally.
As a curator, I have a deep appreciation for conceptual art, media theory, performance, and fiction—but what excites me most is finding new music. Signal to Noise explores New York's underground music scenes, from warehouse shows to art galleries to dive bars and office spaces. In great music, you can't tell where the signal ends and the noise begins.
I've recently started taking piano lessons again. I stopped when I was in fourth or fifth grade—shortly after my first recital, where I dueted the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme with my teacher and basically gave up halfway through in front of an audience of 30 other students and their immediate families. I loved the Hanon exercise book: bouncing, repetitive, scalar motions up and down the piano that felt to me more like playing games with my fingers than learning how to play music. The harmony majorly opened my mind's eye at an early age and made music feel inseparable from the visual world. I’d imagine rabbits bouncing down woodland pathways with a childlike sense of wonder, that in some ways, I feel I’ve never lost. Unfortunately, I was much more interested in video games than music at the time, and my piano lesson was scheduled for Saturday mornings, when new episodes of Pokemon the animated series aired. I gave up piano then, but I do remember a painful twist of jealousy when an elementary school friend mentioned they'd recently learned a song using the sustain pedals (which I had been forbidden to touch).
I stopped taking piano lessons again when I was a freshman in high school. I cared deeply about computer music, SoundCloud, and the r/trapproduction Reddit page, completely disregarding the tangible world of music laid out before me by Fairfield public schools’ robust music curriculum: jazz band, chamber choir, music theory 101. I thought my music technology class was fine, if a little bit outdated, but there was only one (frequently absentee) student in the class besides me, and either the teacher or I would often skip class. We didn't make any trap beats, and I'd have to check, but I think I got a B for the semester. Somewhere along the line, my mother asked if I'd take piano lessons again, but after going for a few weeks, I quit. I'd just discovered DIY shows and had the opportunity to share the stuff I was making in cracked Ableton Live on my busted PC live with an audience of drunk high schoolers, which made my Connecticut-based piano teacher's disapproval of my sometimes accidentally-polytonal music feel completely irrelevant.
Coming back to piano as an "adult learner" has been an interesting, but largely rewarding experience. I've been working through a book of Bartók etudes for beginners—the preface says that Bartók wrote the collection of exercises so that his four-year-old son could learn the piano, which definitely makes me feel like I can probably play them. In taking these lessons, struggling with beginner concepts as an adult man with facial hair and health insurance, I've learned patience and discipline, and I've also begun to see music more deeply in new ways, not just as a fretboard on a guitar or a DAW screen, but as markings on staff paper and shapes on a keyboard.
I think everyone should probably practice something new for an hour or two a day, because it teaches you the virtues of temporary failure. You can knit or swim or play guitar or draw or write romance novels or do anything. Practicing isn't magical. You can't become an expert at anything overnight. But through the act of repetition and exploration, you get to watch yourself become better at something by putting in the effort.
I think all of this is on my mind right now because I've been extremely focused on writing music and my job recently, which sometimes makes it challenging to be a chill, respectful, well-rounded person. I have found piano lessons and practicing piano are great ways to get away from working all the time, but sometimes you really need to just totally get away from it all, which brings me to this month's list of shows and music that are kind of helping me get away from it all. I'm also recommending my friend Ian, because I want to hang out later.
🥁
I first discovered Rebecca Molina obsessively watching ML Buch live videos, trying to figure out what guitar tuning Suntub was in. Molina was first described to me as "ML Buch's drummer," which failed to adequately capture her position in the live project—she sings, plays samplers, percussion, and synthesizer, confidently moving around the stage and filling in parts across the record. It was not surprising to me, then, that she's a remarkable composer and solo artist in her own right. Her 2024 debut, When you wake up, is full of exploration and wonder, and has features from Buch and kindred Copenhagen experimentalist GB, but largely draws fuzzier, noisier territory than rest of the scene. There's a healthy admiration of Meredith Monk, chamber music, and Joni Mitchell-flavored avant-pop here, but songs like "Scorpio" contain whacked-out shoegaze studio magic, like a Kim Deal album produced by Kevin Shields, full-on elephant stampedes compressed and sent directly through a DS-1. A few weeks ago, she released an awesome new song called "Golden Brown Sugar," with bouncy woodblock grooves, swirling noise pop guitar, and Clarissa Connelly-esque woodland mystic vocal runs—I can't wait to see it live. My friend Anastasia Coope is opening the show at Elsewhere Zone 1. Her music is clearly informed by a similar love of chamber and pop music. Her use of hocketing, vocal stacking, samplers, and clear admiration of '50s/'60s pop might draw some Panda Bear comparisons on the record, but the live show feels like a completely different experience. Especially since she started playing with her boyfriend Moses, a masterful percussionist with near-perfect control of not only his rhythm and dynamics, but the tone of his kit. His playing subtly triggers an array of synthesizers behind him that fill the room with delicate electroacoustic tones. Anastasia and I are sitting down with Rebecca the day before the show at 1 p.m. to talk about music on Montez Press Radio, so make sure to tune in if you want to hear more.
🙂
If you're a person who sees a lot of concerts, and especially if some of those concerts happen to be at Nowadays, whether you know it or not, you've probably been in the same room as Ian Kim Judd a handful of times. His NTS show Fifth World consistently contains no skips. He invented cloud rock. He's an OG member of the Nina Protocol team. His label OST releases undefinable, glitch-pop, autotune-forward, EDM-slash-ambient music with guitars in it. He was Mac DeMarco's tour manager. He is a lore-dense mainstay on New York City alternative music guest lists, the kind of guy who attends the Autechre show just to compulsively swipe his music lover card. He kind of actually knows everybody. But much more importantly, Ian is universally beloved for being a great guy. He's the kind of guy who goes out of his way to tap you in for no reason, who stands next to you when you're alone at a show and buys you a beer and tells you extremely niche jokes and introduces you to his friends. A lot of younger people in the scene really look up to Ian, and I think it is because he's a constant reminder that actually good things happen to good people who put people on and work hard and are nice. Shout out Ian.
💻
This website is essentially just a thoughtfully designed online calendar “documenting NYC’s experimental (slash avant-whatev, DIY, weirdo)” music & artists developed by Jessica Hallock and a team of volunteers. It feels like a relic of the early internet, but it’s constantly updated and breezy to use. It’s open source — it lacks AI assistants, data mining, infinite scroll, or really any type of hierarchy to what gets added to the site. There’s no paywall or way to make an account. You just go on the site and there’s a feed of hyperlinks, surrounded by emojis: swirl means free show, a is all ages, lightbulb means strobes, $$ means more than $30 for a ticket. Beneath each show, there’s a collection of quick tools to add the venue on your google maps or add the event to your Google calendar or iCal. The bulk of shows are added for about a following month, and the amount of options on a night can be overwhelming - it’s a testament to the determined weirdos of this city that there’s 15 spaces hosting freaky music nights on a Thursday in the dead of winter. I also love just clicking around the about page, which is full of blog posts, noise-sphere lore, and links to music and random articles A few exciting shows that the nyc noise reminded me of: Joanne Robertson, Maria Someville, Colle @ Pioneer Works Bill Nace & Ikue Mori, Luisa Muhr & Kenneth Jiménez, Loren Connors & Bob Bellerue @ LSD Duo (Lee Ranaldo & Brian Chase) @ the stone TRIO (Yuka Honda, Ikue Mori, Brian Chase) @ the stone Chemical, Debris Bardot, Karol Konstancia, Peace Thru Strength @ hart bar
👢
Uncertainty, attunement, and disaffection, and the feelings before feelings are the atmosphere that Fine Glindvad inhabits on Rocky Top Ballads. Lovers cross mountaintops seeking truth and devotion, but find only flashes of each other in the rain—we're adrift in a sea of memory. Baroque chamber strings phase around distant Wurlitzer lines and roaring amp cabs, but the sound of the record still feels otherworldly, holographic, and intangible. This seems like an album that owes as much to Oren Ambarchi and Kali Malone as to the Cocteau Twins or Mazzy Star. It recalls Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica: constructing abstract soundscapes from the familiar forms of popular music much like how he used vintage adverts a decade ago—mining the past for emotional and harmonic information. Discovering Fine's "Coasting" via Kieran Press-Reynolds' prescient 2024 best-songs-of-the-year list on Substack was an immediate sign to check her out, and while I want to say that it clicked with me instantly, it wasn't until recently that I was able to more completely grasp the weight of the record. I honestly believe that this is one of the greatest records of the past 10 years. I don't know if I'll ever be able to grasp the shape and weight of it, but each time I return to it, I find new shades.
🤠
A recurring theme in this column is "the music I was listening to in 2024 and 2025." The music I am listening to in 2026 will likely become increasingly pervasive in the column as the year goes on. Operelly was the first artist I found in January of 2025 and I was immediately curious. She had a string of three demos on streaming: "Cozy," "Encyclopedia," and "My Bells Rings"—the last of which deeply charmed me with Olivia's strange but adept melodic sensibility, the skittering persistent drum rolls, intricate sound-collage landscape which finally introduces a completely unexpected sample of Oneohtrix Point Never's "Zebra" in the back half of the song. I sincerely admired the audacity, sort of like PinkPantheress raised on Panda Bear and Pinback, rather than UGK and DnB standards. Over the summer, when she came to New York, we organized a secret acoustic show at Montez with her, Memory Card, and Melody English, which was an extremely wholesome night. A few months later, I met Cate, who performs as Rockie Rode, an ambitious alt-country project—Dean Blunt meets Dolly Parton, more F.G.S. than The Crying Nudes, ultimately wholly its own thing. It's playful, but not without an unsettling darkness, conjuring images from David Lynch's Wild at Heart, especially that film's fantastic usage of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game," which the album's cover might be an explicit reference to. Tickets just went on sale, but I can't imagine they'll be around for long.