Glacier vs. Glacier

Hello. Here is another somewhat overdue dispatch from The Komoy Noise Research Unit.

There's been a handful of new subscribers since I last posted here, so: hi there. This is me. I'm one of the people from 65daysofstatic, who still absolutely exist even though we have kind of disappeared from the internet. This is just a little space, based out of Studio Komoy, where I keep my solo work and various side projects, very few of which I actually have time for.

Nevertheless! Finding ways to squeeze in some writing is not so difficult. The problem is that I start numerous different dispatches between each one I send, only to end up with a bunch of lofty, unfinished scribbles and muddled thoughts that were fun to write but never quite catch the thing they were trying to grasp. Perhaps that is precisely what I should be sharing here anyway?

I dunno, maybe, maybe not. This brings to mind the new Saul Williams book I just picked up. I read the first couple of chapters before sitting down to write this, and it is immediately compelling, though I had assumed it would be a book of mostly poetry or prose, whereas at least for the moment, it is actually more of a memoir wrapped up in history lessons.

Amethyst Rock Star, Williams’ first album, was invaluable to me in my early 20s. I spent an enormous amount of time poring over the lyrics and ideas crammed into it. Pointed, political, philosophical, existential, metaphysical. It was not ambiguous exactly, but it still left space for me to sit in, for me to ponder life, meaning and the universe as seen through Williams’ lens. It gave me guidance and a helping hand to build worlds of my own. (“These words and worlds are metaphors of me…”) Unlike Williams, the worlds I was starting to build were made from sounds not words, far less articulate, but certainly they aspired to the same political ideas/ideals, railing against capitalism, empire and the many injustices both things wrought.

But wait, I'm doing it again! Instead of just writing a simple update on things, I am starting to follow the glimmer of a thought that I can't properly articulate yet.

This now-to-be-abandoned point was probably going to be something along the lines of: this book has got me thinking about the balance between demystifying the process of artistic work by showing your workings out in all their unglamorous messiness, versus deliberate myth making and obfuscation.

But enough of all that. Here are some noise things.

RECENT MUSICS I LIKE

Let's start here.

The new Klara Lewis album sounds to me a bit like a demonic possession of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. High praise indeed and if you like gritty reversed tape sounds then drop everything and pick it up immediately. If you like not-reverse tape sounds then pick it up and play it backwards.

Matt Pusti (better known as Makeup and Vanity Set) has done the score to a new movie called Onslaught and it is FULL of goth industrial horror synth bangers. Imagine some kind of gleaming colossus of chrome and metal, all angles and exposed circuitry, stomping on a Casio keyboard. If the good ship Nostromo from Alien were an analog sequencer it would sound like this. It is what would happen if sawtooth oscillators were made of concrete. Echoes of the score to Stealth Bomber, that mythical lost John Carpenter film. I wonder if Onslaught will live up to its soundtrack.

Another recent Bandcamp purchase is Bonded Pairs by Dane Law & Chants. I cannot remember where I heard about this and I don't know who or what Dane Law & Chants is/are. To be honest I don't remember buying it either. It's been that kind of month. It is very nice though. It reminds me of Ex-Easter Island Head a little bit. I like hearing acoustic instruments and not being able to recognise what they are. Once upon a time my brain would have jumped to thinking about this in terms of spectromorphology and the ways in which physical human gestures are tangled up in our understanding of sounds of acoustic instruments, and what that therefore means in relation to electronic music that (unlike this album) does not use samples but rather wanders off into fully synthesised realms. These days, thankfully, I have managed to retreat to a more holistic, affect-based, relaxed appreciation of music like this. Or have I? (No.)

Don't get me wrong. There is absolutely something deeply problematic on a structural level when in 2026, with rising fascism and the planet on fire, in LISA's SaWaDiKa the message that one of the most famous hyper pop stars in the world is concerned with communicating is that she owns a really expensive watch and a Ferrari. But when it comes to the upper echelons of the musical industrial complex I’ll take this kind of brazen directness and the breathtaking choreography and artistry that come with it any day over the liberal hand-wringing and 'can't we all just be nice to each other?' vibes of, to randomly pick a different massive pop star, Ed Sheeran.

I'm not sure anybody needs my hot take on the Ed Sheeran debacle, but for the record: nice one, Macklemore. Nice one, all the other artists who dropped out of that tour in solidarity. The genocide is not over. FREE PALESTINE. Sheeran's response was cowardly, though I wouldn't really have expected anything more from him in the first place, and the real problem is not Sheeran himself. His privilege, crap centrist politics and LISA's bling-core bragging are all symptoms of something much bigger, beyond the scope of at least this particular dispatch.

And yet this song by LISA remains annoyingly great. I would love BLACKPINK to make a whole record that goes as hard as the last 18 seconds of SaWaDiKa. Also, when I saw this music video my first thought was 'giallobrutalism!', and for a fleeting moment I briefly felt like I had my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. This is because of an essay I saw recently that coined this term giallobrutalism, 'or why everything looks like that'. Which, you know, is interesting in its own right although I don't agree with all of it, and I enjoy how efficiently the word itself nails a particular aesthetic. Mostly though I thought it was interesting in the context of being me, a relatively ancient human, finding it heartwarming to see the youngsters joining the dots that people like Mark Fisher and Fredric Jameson did about nostalgia and capitalist realism/postmodernity via their own pop cultural talismans.

Oh I've been listening to this guy called Chopin a fair bit too. He shows some promise.

WRECKAGE ETERNAL UPDATE (GHOST FUTURES)

Spurred on by anti-AI spite, the rebuilding of Wreckage Systems continues apace. A glacial pace, sure, but that feels somehow inevitable these days.

Ambitions remain undiminished, ideals and daydreams ride high, but somehow the tumbling hours don't seem to hold as much time as they used to. As Lenin once said, "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen, and there are 65 days where barely anything happens."

At the core of this rebuild a particular friction is emerging. A dialectical push and pull between two comradely antagonists, two sites of power.

This kind of struggle seems to happen at whatever level I approach making music. Whether it's sculpting a kick drum or guitar tone, trying to get feedback to resonate correctly, or trying to organise a collection of sounds through time to give it the shape of a song, it's the same thing. Little sites of conflict. Small disjunctions, detours, hooks, complexities that have to be held in relation to each other. And it turns out that all the same obstacles remain when scaling up to build generative music systems and rules that are able to conduct these systems.

Perhaps that's what all music ultimately is: emerging, cascading frictions; assemblages of tiny ruptures in the air.

I'm not sure how much sense any of that makes and I'm not going to get into it any deeper now as this is getting long, but be thankful I at least stripped out all the stuff that tries to explain the pivot to a new framework based on making Wreckage Systems haunted.

What I mean to say is: the work (stubbornly) continues.

IT'S OVER

Look, this dispatch is going off the rails. There's a lot of things going on and most of those things are the wrong shape to fit into irregular, noise-focused blog posts. Which is odd, since almost all of them involve making lots of noise.

Welcome to autumn, friends!