MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • The Wrong Room

    This started as a Farcaster post. Halfway through writing it, I realized it didn’t really matter — not the ideas, but the channel. There’s something faintly ridiculous about posting a critique of abstraction layers onto yet another abstraction layer, as if the medium itself isn’t part of the problem. What exactly is the hoped-for outcome…

  • Hubs

    There is a peculiar form of reasoning that emerges when someone discovers they are standing at a chokepoint. It goes like this: “Networks need hubs” somehow always becomes “and therefore I’m destiny.” The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork had observed this phenomenon many times. It was especially common among the heads of the various Guilds, each of…

  • The Sincerity of the Artifice

    Danse Macabre (2023) represents something increasingly rare among heritage acts — a late-career work that doesn’t merely revisit past glories but advances the band’s artistic identity While casual listeners might dismiss it as a Halloween novelty project, it stands as Duran Duran’s most cohesive, personal, and artistically successful album since Astronaut (2004)—and in several crucial…

  • The Digi-Baroque

    Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ornate Collapse. The Baroque was Feudalism’s most glamorous costume party before its apparent death. Fast forward three centuries — and for whom do the bells toll? They toll for you. Forget the tired, minimalist dream of the digital future. That sleek, chrome-and-glass utopia is a…

  • The Alchemist’s Lever

    Right. So you want to grease the rails for a margin-lift. A classic maneuver. But you don’t just announce it. That’s brute-force. This is social archeology. You’re not raising prices; you’re re-engineering the consumer’s reality-tunnel. The goal is a psychic event in the customer’s limbic system. The click. The feeling that they’ve outsmarted the system,…

  • Microkosmos

    Microcosmos by Béla Bartók — it’s the equivalent of blogging for a musician. Not because it’s casual, but because it’s serial, reflective, and cumulative — an unfolding record of thought in real time. Each piece builds on the last, testing an idea, twisting it, moving on. You could think of it as the space where…

  • Mr Feedback

    Danny… the code boy… the syntax priest… fingers tapping a binary prayer wheel… a real precision saint… Präzisionsheiliger… Input… output… consequence… the holy trinity of the machine… But the machine had a sickness… a bad spark in the wire… Funken im Draht… a jolt from the junkyard data-fields… static crawling under his skin like Ungeziefer……

  • The Age Of Compensations

    An agnostic education in a catholic environment trains you to recognize a crucial distinction: the difference between the Real Presence and a symbolic gesture, between a sacrament and a simulation. It’s the discernment between bread that has been transubstantiated and bread that’s just… bread with exceptionally good marketing. This theological framework—with its vocabulary of immanence…

  • Auctor, Author, Auteur

    I went to see One Battle After Another, and it hit that this was a collision of auctorish chaos, authorish genius, and auteurial precision—a live-fire test of what happens when a literary virus meets a human operating system. The film is based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—one of his most authorish works, a sprawling, jittery tangle…

  • The Flow Wars

    “A system that treats every component as a piece to be owned will crawl. A system that treats every component as a flow, to be shared, will run.” There was a time we told ourselves a comforting story: that while American politics might be messy and its culture divisive, its business psyche was a bastion…

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