MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Month: March 2025

  • GASPAR DE LA NUIT

    There are accounts—fragmentary, contradictory—of a man by that name. A minor poet in the salons of Paris, a soldier lost in the Napoleonic wars, a condemned prisoner who vanished from his cell before the executioner arrived. In each case, the same detail: he was last seen at dusk. A manuscript surfaced once, bearing his name…

  • The Authoritarian’s Handy Guide to Governance

    The Spanish media framed Erdogan’s move against the Istanbul mayor as a shift from competitive authoritarianism to hegemonic authoritarianism—a distinction so precise it belongs in a political science textbook, or maybe a corporate branding manual. The Authoritarian’s Handy Guide to Governance (Now with Corporate Sponsors™ and Countries Included!) Ever feel like democracy comes in different…

  • Bad Men

    “Bad men do bad things in the name of authority” James Ellroy BAM! Marilyn’s DEAD. The town’s REELING. Camelot’s a CON, and the dream machine’s bleeding out in the gutter. You want TRUTH? You want FILTH? You want the hard, fast, and lowdown LOWDOWN? Step inside, sweetheart. This is The Enchanters. Freddy Otash—ex-cop, badge-burnt, scandal-slinger,…

  • Studio Ghibli Chat GPT

    The thing with the Studio Ghibli ChatGPT images is a dead giveaway that someone can’t afford the real thing. The guys aren’t doing it because they’re cutting-edge. They’re doing it because they’re broke. Forget innovation; they’re dumpster-diving for Creative Commons scraps while the suits monetize their nostalgia.   Social media forces everyone to look like…

  • Discipline

    DISCIPLINE In 1981, as the world grappled with the hangover of the freewheeling 1970s—stagflation, punk’s rubble, and the cold dawn of Reaganomics—King Crimson, rock’s most mercurial act, reemerged with an album titled Discipline. Its track, “Indiscipline,” was a jarring manifesto: a recursive guitar riff, arrhythmic drums, and lyrics about obsession, control, and the terror of…

  • Cyberpunk

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about cyberpunk’s jagged grip on the collective id, its knack for haunting the edges of our digital decay like a rogue algorithm stuck on loop.  Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive belief systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their…

  • Atomkraft

    Nuclear power looks cheap—right up until you factor in the part where you have to mothball the reactor for a hundred years, entomb the waste in some geologically stable crypt, and pray your great-grandkids don’t get irradiated by a budget cut. The sticker price on a kilowatt-hour is a joke, a little accounting fiction that…

  • Aphrodisiac Jacket

    1 The heat signatures moved across the screen in slow, rhythmic pulses, as if the algorithm itself was breathing. Gaza, 3:42 AM. A suspected militant, nothing more than a glowing red figure in the machine’s gaze, exited a cinderblock home, stretching his arms in the night air. A drone hovered above, invisible to him, watching.…

  • Abundance

    Abundance is just trickle-down economics in Patagonia fleece and Allbirds—cozy, sustainable vibes while selling Reaganomics with a Substack subscription, still catering to the top but with a personal essay explaining why the same old supply-side stuff is actually good for everyone. This late I’m the game pitching a deck of faux YIMBY-ism for tax cuts—full…

  • Fear of the Shakes

    Look, pal, let’s get something straight, okay? I don’t have time for your bullshit. I need five grams of coke, ketamine, MDMA, meth, Adderall, ecstasy, oxy—whatever the hell the market’s cooking up these days. A little PCP, a dash of heroin, if that’s what’s trending. Don’t tell me it’s not necessary. It is. I don’t…