Gabriel Ellis is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford University who specializes in the aesthetics of contemporary popular music. His dissertation, “Anaesthetics: Popular Music and the Flight from Feeling,” explores how experiences of nonfeeling are evoked in musical genres from shoegaze and dreampop to trap music and cloud rap. It argues that by embracing themes of numbness, coldness, and dissociation, artists in these genres are responding to the emotional demands of care and creative labor in the neoliberal era. At the same time, these artists are developing sophisticated aesthetic strategies for translating sensory deprivation into the sensuous medium of sound. Gabriel responds to this phenomenon by developing a theory of “anaesthetics”: the aesthetics of anaesthesia.