So Long, 2025

Well, here's to another year swallowed by the landslide of history. Time for a quick accounting.

The Komoy Noise Research Unit began early 2024. Back then I was lucky enough to have regular chunks of what I guess Mark Fisher would have called 'prospective time'. Time every human deserves to have but precious few do. Time for thinking, for figuring things out, for making noise without portfolio. For messing about basically. And this little website/blog/newsletter was intended to be a platform for whatever happened during those periods, whether that ended up being more Polinski releases, making weird experimental audio-visual systems, writing about music or perhaps pretending to understand Frederic Jameson books.

My two original aims for The KNRU were:

1. For it to help push me into what I find the most difficult step of all, which is daring to declare thoughts or noises finished enough to risk putting them out into the world for other people to see and hear.
2. For it to be the main pillar in a strategy to get myself off all other social media as much as possible, whilst staking out a tiny corner of the internet where I can still, in a very small way, contribute something hopefully of use to 'the discourse', whatever that nebulous idea might be.

Then in the latter half of 2024 most of that prospective time got swallowed up by a huge music project, which continues to this very day. It's all good for me, and in the long term I reckon good for future weird noise experiments too, but it necessarily changed my ambitions for this place, and so in 2025 things were a little quieter here.

Nevertheless, coming to the end of the year I am pleased to discover that I did manage to put out a bunch of things over the last twelve months. So after The KNRU AGM I just had with myself, here's a short summary of things of what my 2025 looked liked in the context of writing about, thinking about, or just making weird noise.

SOME THINGS ACTUAL

► 01 // AI Music as Walmart as Utopia:

I think my writing took a bit hit this year. At least in terms of writing done with the intention of trying to share it. But I felt pretty satisfied with this piece from the start of the year, which pulls together some bits and pieces about 'the utopian impulse', how AI Music Tech Bros fundamentally misunderstand what 'music' actually is, and what it might mean to be a 'Luddite musician'. Although, spoilers, there is no answer to that last part. Further research is needed.

► 02 // Remixing The Cure (!!):

Somewhat KNRU-adjacent, but back in May 65daysofstatic got to do a remix of The Cure. What a treat. As the years go by it gets increasingly difficult to believe that we once went all around Europe and the United States playing in ginormous arenas opening up for The Cure. But we did! Playing wrong notes and glitchy drum'n'bass on stage at Madison Square Garden, imagine that. And now, a decade and a half later, we got to do a new remix for them. No stress. (Ok, there was a little stress). Turned out alright though. If only the version that ends with a blizzard of beats and noise had made the final cut...

► 03 // NMS Redux:

Also with 65days - we put out a brand new record! Or at least 50% of one. It's a new No Man's Sky soundtrack - Journeys - which is half us and half Paul Weir, the Hello Games audio director who has been adding music to the game since we stopped working on it. It all came together really nicely I think.

► 04 // Polinski Live Shows & Talking about Wreckage Systems:

In the spring I did a talk about Wreckage Systems at a conference called Composing (With) Systems that I was pretty happy with. Wreckage Systems is such a niche project, so it was fortuitous that not only should a conference turn up that felt custom-made to discuss it, said conference was also in Sheffield, home of 65LABS and the place where our kernels of molten sonic debris were forged into systemic noise in the first place.

I did the talk again at Soundtrack Köln a few months later (and I shared a few more slides of it in THIS post), but I was primarily there to play a rare live Polinski show for which I finally built a new live setup that did not use Ableton Live. This was an arbitrary and frankly unnecessary decision that I doubt I would make for anything with higher stakes, but it had been a goal of mine for quite a while so finally pulling it off was a small point of pride for me. The whole thing was built in Max, using an appropriated prototype of a Max-based version of Wreckage Systems I had been tinkering with for some time. (This is one of those long-term, vague but ongoing projects The KNRU is meant to document, but I only got as far as writing THIS post. But still: better to make weird noise systems without talking about them than to talk about weird noise systems without making them, right?)

Also, the Köln show went down well. It's a pity I can't bring myself to try to figure out a way to do more Polinski shows, because in amongst the terror of them there are increasing moments of fun.

Then in the autumn I played one more live show at Alpaca Festival, which was a slightly updated version of my Köln show. Again, good fun, very cool festival. From my vantage point as a strong admirer and irregular participant in 'the live-coding scene', it feels like Sheffield continues to be a beating heart of ideas, musics and events around it and Alpaca was a great demonstration of that. More, please.

garden_heart, by polinski

from the album Compassion through algorithms volume III

algoravem4th31st

Finally, a couple of months later I performed a short 15 minutes set as part of the 24hr Live Code Stream for Palestine (archived HERE though the video compression is very unfriendly) and then later contributed a brand new song called garden_heart to the associated fund-raising album. As explained HERE, this latter live set was different to the others, made up of new material entirely written and performed on a tiny little handheld device that looks like a cyberpunk gameboy. (It did use the ASCII visual system from my main live set though - yet another project I must have promised to write about several times at this point - maybe next year?)

That's it. So long, 2025.

My main ambition for 2026 will be to cling on.

See you there.