Plato 2025

With “ok”, his new album and ACT debut, French trumpeter ‘daoud’ offers a quiet manifesto - a record shaped by contrast and contradiction, by collapse and the stubborn act of beginning again. Built around the idea of accepting what cannot be changed. He explains: “The whole record is built around the concept of reluctant acceptance of things that you can’t control. All right, fuck it, fine, I guess.” The album explores failure, loss, repetition, and the soft absurdity of pretending everything’s fine. Across 14 tracks, daoud weaves tragedy and humor, chaos and tenderness, melody and noise into a rich and emotionally charged soundscape.

With “ok”, his new album and ACT debut, French trumpeter ‘daoud’ offers a quiet manifesto - a record shaped by contrast and contradiction, by collapse and the stubborn act of beginning again. Built around the idea of accepting what cannot be changed. He explains: “The whole record is built around the concept of reluctant acceptance of things that you can’t control. All right, fuck it, fine, I guess.” The album explores failure, loss, repetition, and the soft absurdity of pretending everything’s fine. Across 14 tracks, daoud weaves tragedy and humor, chaos and tenderness, melody and noise into a rich and emotionally charged soundscape.

In May 1747 Johann Sebastian Bach traveled to Potsdam to visit Frederick II of Prussia, whose son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as the Court’s first cembalo and his pupil Christoph Nichelmann as the second. This visit is well-documented, with a famous encounter between Frederick, a musically trained monarch, and Bach. Frederick invited Bach to test Gottfried Silbermann’s new fortepianos and demonstrate his organ-playing skills on various church organs. During this meeting, Frederick presented Bach with a musical challenge: he provided a theme in C minor and asked Bach to improvise a three-voice fugue based on it. Remarkably, Johann Sebastian did this on the spot, without any prior preparation. What follows is also fairly well known, but from this point onwards the interpretation of events becomes crucial.

"Hummingbird Highway," the title track of Dar Williams' 13th album, was inspired by a romantically-named road that runs along the Maya Mountains of Belize—and a partly imagined story about a child whose parent brings gifts back from work trips as an attempt to make up for lost time. "Sometimes you go away in a car. Sometimes you go away with your door closed," Williams has said. "I've been the child and the parent." She sings with rich detail about what the kid sees: "You're laying out the treasures you brought for me/ Cinnamon bark from a cinnamon tree/ And a stone that you saw/ Clear at the bottom of the sea." This is joyous Americana, its fleet rhythm like the flap of a hummingbird's wings, but with an emotional tug as the young narrator also recognizes their parent's guilt for needing to be in two places at the same time. "You say it's the older you feel, it's the older I get," she sings. "Your highest of highs and your deepest regret."

"Hummingbird Highway," the title track of Dar Williams' 13th album, was inspired by a romantically-named road that runs along the Maya Mountains of Belize—and a partly imagined story about a child whose parent brings gifts back from work trips as an attempt to make up for lost time. "Sometimes you go away in a car. Sometimes you go away with your door closed," Williams has said. "I've been the child and the parent." She sings with rich detail about what the kid sees: "You're laying out the treasures you brought for me/ Cinnamon bark from a cinnamon tree/ And a stone that you saw/ Clear at the bottom of the sea." This is joyous Americana, its fleet rhythm like the flap of a hummingbird's wings, but with an emotional tug as the young narrator also recognizes their parent's guilt for needing to be in two places at the same time. "You say it's the older you feel, it's the older I get," she sings. "Your highest of highs and your deepest regret."

The Socrates Project