Rhys Langston – When the Orchestra Is Dreaming feat. Mike Ladd

Rhys Langston’s “When the Orchestra Is Dreaming” is not so much a track as it is a cryptic jazz sermon delivered from the margins of a notebook full of browser tabs and broken systems. As the third single from the upcoming Pale Black Negative LP, it loops in Mike Ladd for an avant-garde duet that slips between lyrical freestyle, sociopolitical side-eye, and sonic code-switching.

It’s rhythm with intent, distortion with purpose. Nothing here is neat, and that’s the point. From “soft drink sociologists” to “perverted assonance,” he doesn’t so much rap as unravel.

Mike Ladd jumps in midstream, slipping behind the curtain of the orchestra pit with lines that echo institutional failure and the weight of history in fragmented couplets. He turns pauses into punctuation, rest into resistance. There’s a cadence of confrontation throughout the piece—spoken, broken, reframed.

This isn’t meant to go down easily. It’s not background music. It’s a challenge: fill in the blanks if you dare. Or don’t—Langston’s already done it.