MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • 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…

  • 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…