MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…