Released as the second part of his most blistering triptych, ‘Evil N****r’ is Eastman’s idea of organic music taken to a confrontational extreme. It begins pensively with a jagged, undulating piano part, played on the Wild Up recording by Devonté’s right hand. Strings vamp in the distance, pensive and taut, but nothing really prepares for the sudden jolt which occurs one minute and twenty-three seconds in. A voice suddenly counts off ‘1, 2, 3, 4!’ and those violins and cellos hit like a tsunami. It’s a startling exercise in counterpoint – as vast as the height of a cliff – and those bombardments keep coming, each time the piano chords becoming less assertive until, after fifteen minutes or so, they’re just brittle fragments of melody twinkling away in a mass of strings. It’s one of the most jolting, astounding pieces of music I’ve ever heard and so it’s unnerving to think that, until 2004, it stopped existing at all. Even in the age of streaming, all music is somewhat fragile in this way.