a website that feels like walking down a dirt road deep in an evergreen forest, and it’s so quiet that your steps are the loudest thing you can hear. the brook contentedly murmurs somewhere deeper in the woods. you know you’ll find it soon.
the brook swells as you approach. it breathes in as you do, slowly. you may bide your time wading, feeling the water’s current excuse-me-pardon-me its way around your ankles as it races downstream. the brook breathes out as you do, slowly, like you’ve earned it.

This album has really been a jolt for me, and has had me rethinking my whole listening situation. God, where to start.

It’s such a soundy record. It reminds me of how little time and space I have carved out in my life right now for focused hi-fi listening. A lot of my listening time is a) while I’m working on stuff at my desk (high fidelity, but half attention), or b) while I’m on my way somewhere (full attention, but earbuds intermittently drowned out by the city unless I’m listening to pop or band music at near max volume). So like, I don’t really have a lot of time or space right now to just luxuriate in music like this. It’s fucked up.

There’s an anxiety and a neurotic urgency in knowing this and stumbling on a record that has all the signifiers of something I know I’d be really into. It’s spare, weird, ambiguous, dark, sensual, both a cold wind and the glow of a night out. I see reviewers mention Photek as a touch point—which, yes, but somehow torn and smeared, made strange.

Part of me keeps reaching for this record over the past weeks just because I haven’t really fallen for a whole album—not really—in a long minute. I’d really like to. My listening habits have been all breadth and no depth these past few years. Part of the deal with grownup life I guess. Fuck that!

There’s a lot of rhythm in this record, but you pretty much can’t nod your head to it. One reviewer says it sounds like he’s rewriting the laws of physics. That’s one way of putting it. To me our waking world of cyclical, pulse-based rhythms feels strongly implied rather than stated outright, and we’re left wandering through this dreamlike collection of, I almost wanna say “propositions,” or I don’t know, echoes of dance music. (The guest vocals from Voice Actor do a great deal to push it further in that direction. If you didn’t catch her four and a half hour release [?!] Sent from My Telephone in 2022 it’s never too late.)

I don’t really hang out in dance music, but I def lurk a bit and love to catch occasional outliers like this. This one’s really hitting for me right now. Out on Modern Love.

listen on youtube

A unique and delightful and really very wholesome recording of some old melodies and tunes for the kantele, a Finnish zither instrument. In 1916, a folk music researcher set out to record Teppana Jänis, a blind kantele player in his 60s who supported himself by playing at dances, schools, and by going door to door. Those sessions yielded 14 wax cylinders and 22 transcriptions.

By modern standards, wax cylinders are pretty unlistenable, sending the music they’re storing into a kind of dormancy. So another kantele player, Arja Kastinen, gathered the recordings and transcriptions, learned the tunes, and put together an album that weaves together the original recordings with her own from 2020.

What you hear in these tracks is the songs themselves flipping back and forth between a modern recording and one from a hundred years ago—same tempo, key, dynamics, etc. Sometimes the two recordings will even play on top of each other for a bit before one or the other takes the foreground again. It’s a really beautiful and profound effect. I can play this album over and over.

listen on bandcamp

Given the explosion of interest in recent years of composers writing for church organs, one throughline in most of the recordings I’ve heard is a kind of stern, sound designy, “new music” vibe. Do not get me wrong, I love it. And, I understand: This instrument carries some of the heftiest cultural weight than an instrument can. Messing around with it in a modern, secular context can require some drastic reframing, not just in the writing itself, but even in the recording techniques—our traditional perception of the sound of this instrument is the actual literal sound of whatever church it’s built into. To write music that is no longer toward God feels like a wrenching of the instrument from its spiritual and literal home. (Fine by me, but it is what is.)

So, it’s nice to hear something that feels like it’s taking a different direction with that reframing, that assumes it as a starting point, even. This album, out on Touch, feels like it sits well on the shelf next to Azusa Plane, Sigur Rós, Celer. It is deeply sweet music, the kind that I imagine being somewhat at odds with the new minimalists and sound artists. Never one to refuse dessert, I really dig this record.

listen on bandcamp

I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.

wikipedia

If you don’t know Nils from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh, you are in for a treat diving into that world. Sleepytime has been back for a minute now and the live situation has always been top tier. But meanwhile, Nils has been plugging away at a broadcasting project of his own, named after an Idiot Flesh album from the early 90s: The Nothing Show.

I’ve been listening through the shows in order – a mixture of biography & oldhead tales, interviews with friends who do cool things & think cool thoughts, and readings from his favorite books (Foucault, Lispector, Burroughs, et. al.). As gifted an orator as he is a composer and singer, each episode is a joy, and I find myself reaching for my pen and notebook several times per episode, eager to garden the page myself. Definitely check out the Patreon.

This was a little minute ago now but seeing Charles Curtis play was a delight. Like probably many others, Curtis’ solo cello work hit my radar through his work with Éliane Radigue and the 2LP set that Saltern put out in 2020. (Come to think of it that album may be how I was put on to Terry Jennings as well, whose tunes I’ve been deeply enamored with for some years now.) Anyway the show was great. It was one of the last hot nights of the summer, and the audience was packed into what looked like a sculptor’s studio near Washington Square Park. The program was Feldman, Wolff, Lucier’s Glacier, and Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. The Lucier piece stood out for me (one twenty minute glissando, let’s fucking GO), and I see there’s a nice video of him playing this piece a decade ago, but obviously seeing it on a screen surrounded by a bunch of distracting shit is way different than sweating it out in silence with a sold out room full of people. A gift.

Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.

Could do without the “guys, give AI a chance” stuff, but it’s fun to learn of Project CETI‘s existence.

ny times / archive.ph

Aboard the first shipbound expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, writer Elizabeth Rush puts her ear to this massive body of ice to listen for the messages embedded in its shifts and shatterings. But can something so large, so vast, so ancient, ever really be witnessed up close?

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/glacial-longings/

Over the course of his prolific and varied design career, Jens Quistgaard created a series of peppermills for Dansk Designs. Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.

https://www.quistgaardpepper.com/

It happened here.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/what-would-you-do-617f

“Stream of a stream” is an ongoing gathering of streams. Each stream sound is captured with an underwater microphone and uploaded to the cloud. There, the sounds of the streams — the natural flow of water — metamorphose into a steady, continuous flow of data transmitted over the internet.

https://streamofstream.info/

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators. Published since 2025.

https://internetphonebook.net/

you don’t have to be a creator to have a website! some potential reasons you could have a website:

– to let people know where to find you
– to blog and write all your serious and silly thoughts
– to share your favourite things (movies, music, videos, pictures, links, wikipedia articles, animal facts)
– to store things you don’t want to forget (resolutions, goals, ideas)
– to display your resume (if you want to go profesh)
– just because you can!! who says two or three companies have to own your soul on this big and beautiful internet of ours!!

https://kayserifserif.place/posts/2025/what-should-i-use-to-make-a-website

Over the weekend, tons of people went to one of the No Kings rallies taking place across the country. And that means one thing: another round of tedious protest discourse.

You get this kind of thing every time there’s a big set of demonstrations, or even a small set. The protests are meaningless! They’re going to change everything! They’re too liberal and safe! They’re too anarchic and scary! It’s what T**** wants! It’s what he doesn’t want!

I hate this conversation. It is boring and repetitive and pointless. So I decided to write my definitive, one-time-only thoughts about what protesting is really about, and how you should respond to it.

https://www.discourseblog.com/p/what-protesting-is-really-about

I don’t know what kind of person I would be without records. Regardless, the era of recorded music started fairly recently. Many of us may have grown up around elders who could remember the way things were before. When I look at the moment we’re in now, and consider the possibility that we may be about to witness that kind of paradigm shift for ourselves, my feelings are complicated.

https://jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/this-is-what-youll-pay-for

Right now — perhaps this very second, even — we need to regain an ability to ask basic, reorienting questions: Where am I right now? What am I doing? Where are the others who can help me? Who are my neighbors? How can I be a neighbor to others? What’s going on in the world and how to I get out in the world to join in? Is what I’m reading harmful to me? If so, why do I feel a desire to harm myself?

https://www.late-review.com/p/the-eternal-present

Is America ghosting the rest of the anglosphere?

https://jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-canzukian-schism

A million easy pieces.

https://askmolly.substack.com/p/crumble

https://fliparealcoin.com/

“The self is not a stream,” Critchley writes. “It is less a seamless flow than a series of jumps and starts that flicker into intense alertness before sliding back into inactivity or boredom. It is a discontinuous series of episodes, an amalgam of blips, pauses, stalls and restarts.”

https://lindseyadler.substack.com/p/we-tell-ourselves-stories-in-order

ScanOps is based on Google Books accidents in which software distortions, the scanning site, and the hands of the ScanOps employees who digitize the books for Google are visible. Through reframing these images of obscured text as photographs with an accidental depth, the technologies and processes used are emphasized.

https://andrewnormanwilson.com/ScanOps.html

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death

https://www.tree.fm/

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they’re in. Here’s a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

https://www.titledrops.net/

my dear friend was kind enough to offer me a place to stay during, what was supposed to be, a 10-day-long visit to Rotterdam to see my pals. a laundry room at the place they were renting. the war started 3 weeks before my flight to the netherlands. in march, after 2 weeks on the road and a different reason to leave, i got to my destination, and the short-term-stay little laundry room turned into a place i called home for a year and a half. to be specific – 527 days.

https://odetoalaundryroom.site/

I know I’m late to the Ethel Cain party but goddamn. I’m reminded of the first time I heard Harsh 70s Reality – not in style or content so much as in form: treading in the deep end for most of an hour-plus, with an occasional song thrown in there to keep things grounded. Unlike Dead C’s deep-fried free rock zoners though, Perverts is gently, sensually horrifying. Sex and Death, front and center.

listen on spewify

So fun. I burned through these books so fast.

https://s-n-d.si/

Tech whoppers the world over are obsessed with eternal life. But, argues Professor John Tregoning of Imperial College, scientific research increasingly suggests that the music we love can have a huge boost to our immune system and health

https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/hope-sings-eternal-can-listening-to-music-help-you-cheat-death/

I’ve lived here off and on all my life and I don’t think LA will ever be the same again. I know it won’t be, though we will pretend as soon as possible. The moment we can, and we’ll sell film the rights to that. Keep our pretenses in your hearts.

https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/this-city-will-not-stop-burning

This wiki serves as a guide to the endless blank canvas that is Your World of Text.

https://yourworldoftext.wiki/YWOT_Wiki

My approach to this creating on this website is either a form of radical self-empowerment or the symptoms of depression. I think it’s the former, but honestly don’t know. I definitely was depressed from my previous internet habits, and this site is either a product of that or reaction against it. The best thing I can do is check in each time I’m online and ask if I’m happy, if my approach is still something that feels good, and if so I’ll keep doing it. I find this process good for battling sadness in general, and great for designing websites.

https://coolguy.website/introduction/

There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.

https://bgreen.lol/accepting-the-spotify-problem

https://emergencemagazine.org/film/aralkum/

https://non-user-events.computer-feeling.xyz/

https://departuremono.com/

https://www.mandy-barker.com/casette

https://www.davidcastleton.net/byron-polidori-vampire-villa-diodati-vampyre/

https://ncase.me/remember/

https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene

By all rights, Singularity theory should have faded back into obscurity for another decade or so. But nearly simultaneously with the dual crashing-and-burning of metaverse and crypto came the rise of techno-futurists’ last great hope: generative AI.

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/

Nestup is an experimental markup language for musical rhythms. It’s specifically designed to break away from a fixed musical grid.

https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.

https://linuximpact.com/bandcamp-support-is-faltering-download-your-music-now/

I’m not saying that software is terrible, though. On the contrary, people do amazing things. I was just glad not to be fighting NULL.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/689943-_why-the-lucky-stiffs-printer-spool

A little more than 969 years ago—on July 4, 1054, to be more precise—the light from one of the universe’s most energetic and violent events reached Earth: a supernova, or exploding star.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-jwsts-spectacular-new-view-of-the-crab-nebula/

Maybe the passing of the web can at least be the prompt we need to stop pretending that our relationship with technology is anything but window dressing.

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/