MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • 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…

  • 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…