Struggle Artist is a 2018 album from Justin C. Meyers, the Minneapolis-based composer, artist, and head of the Sympathy Ltd. label. It portrays Meyers' expectations and disappointments arising from making art in his free time. Created initially during lunch breaks and in hospital waiting rooms, and finished after being laid off from his job, it catalogues the despondency of the precarious life. If his previous album, 2016's Negative Space (1981–2014) was about the fallible body, Struggle Artist is its violent collision with late capitalism. Meyers' formal language employs the barest of ingredients: scintillating digital synthesis, evacuated field recordings, impossibly crisp transients and an elegiac harmonic sensibility. On Struggle Artist, he sets up scenarios that anticipate some musical event or flourish, only to renege on them with stark about-faces or resolutions into dissonance. These rhetorical figures reproduce the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity and motivation while working a day job and dealing with chronic illness. Tracks like Self Portrait evoke the trauma of reconfiguring and rewriting one's own identity to (unsuccessfully) appease indifferent funding sources like grants and fellowships, which Meyers wryly calls "Granular Opportunities." Stability is not conceded until the stunning eponymous final sequence, that ambiguously signals either the willed discontinuation or reaffirmation of Meyers' musical career. The impression is not entirely bleak. M