MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • Arsenal of Democracy

    When filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky began assembling his legendary, never-made adaptation of Dune in the mid-1970s, he ran into a problem with the future. The future, as Hollywood had begun to imagine it, looked suspiciously like the United States military.Much of that visual language came from the work of designer Ron Cobb. Cobb was an unlikely…

  • Nowtalgia

    Four days into the war with Iran, I was still getting confident answers. I had been checking in with the major models — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini — asking about shipping risk in the Strait of Hormuz. For days, across multiple conversations, the answers clustered around the same framework: patrols would continue, insurance premiums…

  • The Unpriced Shape

    I am looking at a text file generated on Tuesday. It is 650 tokens. The model that wrote it is, by every commercial metric, worse than the model that will replace it next month. Worse at staying on topic. Worse at following instructions. Worse at avoiding statements that might cause brand managers to perspire. The…

  • Belief Production

    Recent DOJ documents confirm: Jeffrey Epstein invested ~$3M in Coinbase’s 2014 Series C round, exited by 2018 with significant profits. No operational role, no alleged wrongdoing—just elite capital quietly entering the “decentralized revolution” through the most opaque channels possible. This isn’t a scandal. It’s a structural reveal. The crypto story: engineers building freedom tech, disrupting…

  • The Liquidation of Responsibility

    Just finished the Sean Combs documentary. It’s nauseating how a generation of politicians and influencers gave cover to this operator as a viable “empowerment” example for Black people. Democrats and respectable liberals loved it, flaunting playlists like credentials. He was offered as proof that the system worked—not because the harm wasn’t visible, but because it…

  • Software Eats Itself

    Late 2010s, somewhere in the protocol stack. A quiet panic went terminal. The smart money—the money that used to be smart—caught the scent. It wasn’t a bug. It was the feature, finally fully expressed: software, in its commodity state, wanted to be free. Not libre. Gratis. Worthless. But this was the hidden corrosion in the…

  • 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…