This is Alex.

If you think you hear Frank Sinatra crooning in our halls, chances are good that it’s Alex and his portable speaker. Music is life, and Alex seems to have a track for everything. “Most moments of my day to day [I] have an album playing,” he tells me, whether he’s making noodles, grocery-shopping, or on a walk. “Scenery is the bonus.”

This summer, Alex fell into something called krautrock, which is German experimental fare, by way of Radiohead’s most inaccessible album, Amnesiac (2001). “You have to sit and prepare yourself for it.” Alex says he “wanted more of the weird stuff”, and to prove it, he played me “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”. Despite not taking any English this year (he finished last year and, unlike most of his HON cohort, opted not to sign up for the Corpus Christi offering), Alex has retained an interpretive lens. There’s a metaphor at the end of falling through a trapdoor, he insists; and I can’t help but think -- somewhere in the middle of the 11-minute “Peking-O” -- that Alex is spinning through portals of his own.

You might think the obsession only runs one genre deep. Alex (“I go out of my way to be uncomfortable”) also told me about attending a Chinese rap concert (where Melo from the "Higher Brothers" actually grabbed his phone and took it onstage mid-performance), and recognizing musical influences in the religious cults he’s learning about in Philosophy of Religion 12. Alex has a notebook where he’s keeping track of every album he’s listened to; he just might fill it one day.

Right now: “I am in a funk phase,” he says. “A lot of it is we’re flying in a spaceship.” 🎧