MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • Pipeline

    “You don’t like me. Hell, you think I’m despicable. You sit in your faculty lounges and tweet from your ivory towers about ‘consultants ruining education,’ about ‘corporate greed infecting the academy,’ and you pin that target squarely on my back. But let me tell you something: You want me here. You need me here. Because…

  • Hallmark Movies

    In the banal, saccharine world of Hallmark movies, we find, paradoxically, a profound confrontation with the abyss of Being itself. These films, with their predictable plots and saccharine sentimentality, seem to offer a kitsch escape from existential dread. But in their very banality lies the mechanism by which they reveal the Heideggerian truth of Dasein—that…

  • Soviet Sci-Fi, and the Dream of Hyper-Organicity

    This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions…

  • The Sack-Pie Treaty of Mordor

    I’ve been reading The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes, a fascinating—and frankly bewildering—account of how a couple of diplomats, armed with little more than pencils, whiskey, and a vague sense of geography, managed to redraw an entire region. It’s the kind of history that feels so absurdly implausible that it…

  • Undefined Behavior

    The equations hum like broken neon signs in a rain-soaked alley, flickering with promises of balance they can’t keep. You write the universe in numbers, chasing symmetry like a junkie chasing a fix, but the junk is laced with paradox. Set theory burns out like a circuit, feedback screaming: Does the set contain itself? Does…

  • Exile in the Wild Earnest

    Engineers. Always lurking at the edge of the frame, smoothing their tees, hands in pockets full of patents they didn’t quite invent. They didn’t write the symphony, but they’ll take credit for the piano. They didn’t build the cathedral, but they’ll swear they taught the stones how to sing. It’s their gift: rewriting the wiring…

  • My Father Ran A Prison

    The air hung heavy in the valley, as though weighed down by the burden of secrets left unsaid. Beyond the murmur of the waterfall, there was silence, save for the faint rustling of leaves, as though the earth itself conspired to remain quiet, afraid to disturb the ghosts that lingered in the minds of men.…

  • Syria

    I was reading The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes—a fascinating account of Mark Sykes and the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement—when the news broke that the Syrian government seemed to be teetering on the brink. It was almost surreal: the legacy of imperial lines drawn on maps a century ago now intersecting…

  • HyperRust

    The highways hum like electric rivers, flowing nowhere but into themselves. Neon crosses bleed light into the night, baptizing the lost in false salvation. Beneath the rust of the boxcar lies the ghost of gold—both gone and waiting. The jukebox preaches its gospel to a congregation of empty barstools. A dollar bill folds like a…

  • Aragorn, Paul and Luke

    Aragorn is the archetype of feudal nostalgia, the Good King myth resurrected to keep the dream of divine right alive. A cipher for the eternal yearning for a fatherly hand on the sword and a just heart on the throne. In Aragorn, feudalism is psychedelic—his lineage the mystic bloodline that encodes the sacred geometry of…

Got any album or book recommendations?

Get In Touch