MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • 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…

  • Feudal Optimization

    We often imagine the fall of Rome and the onset of the “Dark Ages” as a catastrophic failure of intelligence—a great forgetting, a descent into blissful ignorance where the poor dears simply couldn’t figure out how to keep the water flowing and the laws coherent. I talk about this a little in this post. Dark…

  • Mother Goose

    I’ve been living in California since 2007. I used to come here before, and I always had this feeling that it’s like people come here because of an album. Some people came for Crosby, Stills & Nash. Some people came for Hotel California. Some people came for Linda Ronstadt, some for The Grateful Dead. I’m…

  • Dark Ages

    The “good old days” fallacy assumes that the past is always better. That’s not what I mean. For every Sgt. Pepper squeezed out of a four-track, there were mountains of forgettable slop pressed on the same machines. The real point is that history isn’t a steady line of progress. A medieval town might not have…

  • Four Track Fascism

    Using the word “fascism,” even ironically, is a high-risk, low-reward strategy. It is not a trivialization of historical evil but a precise metaphor for absolute, inflexible authority. The word “fascism” is used here with intentional, tongue-in-cheek irony. The four-track machine was the opposite of actual fascism—it was a constraint that enabled rather than oppressed; it…

  • Ulysses

    So Ulysses finally comes rowing back into Ithaca. Long trip, longer than advertised, and the shoreline isn’t olive trees anymore — its server racks humming, whispering, belching out cloud exhaust. The suitors have multiplied in his absence, and none of them are men. They’re LLMs. Not one or two scribblers competing for Penelope’s attention, but…

  • Phase Transition

    Welcome to 2025, where the music industry has achieved something genuinely unprecedented in the annals of human cultural production: it has successfully replaced its primary product with its own publicity apparatus. This is not hyperbole. This is not metaphor. This is the actual material condition of our present moment, and it’s magnificent in its sheer…

  • Larping Platonism

    This points straight at the deep tension between artistic realism and mathematical idealism. Artists already live in a world where form doesn’t ensure function, where structure can betray you, where the beautifully designed fails. Why is this news to mathematicians? Math pretends it lives in a frictionless world. In art, surprise and disappointment are built…

  • Active Terrain

    When I first watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I didn’t have a lightbulb moment. I had something stranger—a sense of orientation. Herzog’s voice drifted through the darkness, talking about Paleolithic painters using the cave’s natural forms as part of their art. How they didn’t flatten the wall into canvas—they collaborated with it. Followed its curves.…