September 10 2025
Thank you to anyone who pays for this newsletter. The funds keep me going and any decent newsletter outside the fascist clouds of Substack is a strike against the tech pups. No need to stop your count at arrant Nazis or get yourself tangled in definitions of “alt right” and “right right.” Substack’s promotion of Chris Rufo was a boon to Trump and his war on whatever the advisors tell him is Woke. Rufo is a Zionist pom-pom shaker—
The Israelis command respect. They understand their enemies, ruthlessly prioritize their interests, demonstrate near-constant tactical brilliance, and are not afraid to buck elite opinion. It's a model of statecraft we would be wise to study and, in many ways, emulate.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 9, 2025
—who recently tried to get Doreen St. Felix fired over some good tweets from 2015. These guys are Substack’s bread and butter, because the company runs a 21st century playbook: use anything and everything to make the platform popular, drive users back to the platform recursively, and collect their data in the process. This is also Spotify’s approach and a principled stance has never been part of the pitch deck.
If you have any extra cash, it should be going to Gaza Funds and The Sameer Project. (Here is a post about how The Sameer Project gets aid into Gaza.) If you are not already following Writers Against the War on Gaza, please do. If you’re unsure of where to start, just sign up for the bulletin. WAWOG was at the People’s Conference on Palestine, which was a real solidarity boost. If you have time for only one speaker, I recommend Dr. Hatem Bazian.
Two podcasts stapling me to the Earth are East Is a Podcast and Adnan Husain, both of which deserve your support. Try this recent Tankie Group Therapy from the EIAP cohort, or this Struggle Session, for a sense of shared stakes. If your radical actions aren’t adding enough to the struggle, Nick Cruse suggests you learn a skill or uses the ones you have: “Man the grill!”
I wrote a remembrance of Joshua Clover for The Poetry Project Newsletter. There was a gathering for Clover in Oakland last weekend but I was not able to attend.
The rest of this newsletter is medicinal—music that has been keeping me going this year.
Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson work as both Beat Detectives (samples and loops, just the two of them) and Nuke Watch (live, with others). Much of their discography is here on their Bandcamp page, minus some projects on other labels. I wrote something here for the new Nuke Watch album Grave New World. (It’s on that page, towards the bottom.) These two have a real gift for rendering the squishy and animate, a living organic sound made with machines. There was a week or two when they were all I listened to.
Ammany Ahmad's mixes are always good, and “Going up the Mountain” is way up there. The combinations here are all kind of pickles and peanut butter, very little obvious matching. This remix of Art Fact’s “Rain in the South” came out of nowhere and got stuck in my head. I have been leaning on mixes because the good ones are so irreducibly human. No machine would think of this sequence. Also some shredding sax and Mutabaruka.
Dan and Wonja’s Do/While mix series is a standby. This latest episode is somehow crunchier and more unpredictable than their standard (high level) fare, a bit like Ammany’s. Something is in the air, most likely blood.
Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke mulched some live recordings to make Pareidolia. It sits right between all of their tonal, abstracted sound work and the music they sometimes attach to songs or movies. There are some unusually nice bass tones and aquatic bongs that feel more straight-ahead Spooky than their average elegance. I like a bit of cheap thrills.
I presented a documentary on Depeche Mode, now on BCC 4. Shout out to the producer, Richard Power, who was a dream to work with. I did not know the band had long-running family beef with England!
Ghostface went and put out Supreme Clientele 2? He did and I would be lying if I said it was anywhere near as tripped out and wired as the original. I would also be lying if I said I hadn’t listened to it ten times already.
But the album I have listened to every day since it came out? The new Deftones album, private music, which the teenager in me loves. Do I low-key think this is their best? Doesn’t even make sense but I have had that thought.
I’ve listened to Woven All of Dream and Error dozens of times since I first heard it in April of 2025—gleefully, of my own free will, as self-soothing. Plenty of music moves me and impresses me and ends up unplayed. This is different. Woven All of Dream and Error creates a tangibly human space and offers me a tactile blessings: sound that I do not get tired of being inside and around. In many ways, this music is a dialectical triumph because it is so sweet and mortal and yet suppresses many of its human traces. Tom O’Doherty’s guitar and bass parts hum and sustain and warp through various boxes, and Kata Kovács’s trumpet sails around inside digital echo, all of it lying between the train noises produced by machine learning. The tracks and wheels you hear are industrial vehicles that don’t exist but instead were generated by mulching the recordings of existing trains the artists never saw (open source recordings, YouTube, Internet Archive, etc). The technology of the locomotive was part of the 20th century’s military success story and AI—genocide’s new best friend—is central to the current military investment boom. Using the latter to recreate the former is a quiet way of melting the guns, so to speak.
Woven all of Dream and Error is a soundclash between the human and the machines that capitalism has nurtured under the banner of “convenience,” while using them most often for death (can’t get to the camps without rails) and surveillance (your phone is already using AI to log the fact that you’re reading this). As the duo told me, “the underlying tech can be applied to make cute pictures and also to murder families in Gaza.” Kovács and O’Doherty presented the original version of Woven at the Hošek Contemporary gallery, combining their audio with stills and movies of the railway lines around Berlin and Brandenburg they took over a five year period. For some of the walks, Kovács and O’Doherty carried speakers amplifying the machine learning train sounds they developed with their colleague Kris Slyka. They then filmed that new walking performance. In person, the films and stills and sounds made for a sort of summoning that blends into memorial. As audio, though, Woven is what the duo call “a dub album in method.” They described their plan to “assemble a body of sounds, and shape them through subtraction, through iterative removal and recasting, through echo and layering.” They also described the “hallucinated trains” as “a new sort of dub versioning” that establishes a body of audio material, layer and subtract and ping-pong your original stems and then let the AI model learn from that modified seed. (Holly Herndon has called this process “spawning.”)
When the show was originally put on in September of 2024, the duo invited Dimitra Andritsou from Forensic Architecture to be a guest speaker for an event at the gallery. “We talked about the general cultural silencing in Germany and the wider lunatic turn in German public life,” they explained. “We talked about German weapon exports to Israel, which is Dimitra’s area of expertise, and how this connects to AI warfare technology like Lavender and similar IDF tools that have been developed in collaboration with German research institutions. We then talked about how the material we put in the exhibition—railways as remnants of war planning, past and future architectures of conflicts, and so on—connected, in turn, to all of that.”
“The world is woven all of dream and error” is the first line of Sonnet XXVI by Fernando Pessoa. Each track on the album is subtitled by one of the fourteen lines of the sonnet. The duo mentions that Pessoa’s invention of literary heteronyms like Alvaro Campos and Alberto Caeiro was also relevant, in his project of “inventing voices through which to speak, a kind of extended all-encompassing multiplicity of pseudonyms.” AI became, for Kovács and O’Doherty, a “machine for creating infinite masks and infinite stories,” as Pessoa’s trunk full of scraps had been for him. This does not mean, however, that their use of AI is about creating some sort of vague, reassuring dreamscape (even if this album is legitimately pleasurable). “We had the intention with the album of foregrounding the technology and explicitly linking one process to its technological antecedent: AI/ML networks and, respectively, train networks,” the duo said. “This artistic decision is rooted in a materialist way of looking at the world, in the Marxist sense of materialism.”
Kovács and O’Doherty live and work in Germany, the facts of which influence the nature of the work, as it was generated, and how they discussed it during the original exhibition. This is a different but ineluctable aspect of materialism—place and how it shapes the political economy of the art produced there. That also affects how the AI model they built with Slyka works. “Dreamsloth,” as they call it, processes sounds in an idiosyncratic way. “One thing about the hallucinated train noises is that they would sometimes get stuck doing a train-going-into-tunnel-style shoooommm noise,” O’Doherty told me. “There’s no logical consistency to the sounds, they’re just the result of computational guesswork—there would never be a corresponding whooooosh of a train coming out of a tunnel. The program ended up just repeating the first part, like a contemporary variation of a locked run-out groove or skipping CD.” The duo also pointed out that the program mostly spit out “quite midrange-y sounds” and they had to “do some persuading of Dreamsloth to give us any bass.”
But they did, and it’s a truly magical thing they’ve made. The train audio is something like an ocean, or a buffering wave, not at all like the pink noise bricks you get in much ambient music. There’s a lot of clean space between the sounds—it’s not a murky or a lazy arrangement of events. Kovács’s trumpet lines are long, confident presences, like canopies being stretched over the sand. The bass and guitar parts could easily be organs or vibraphones, extended and amplified. They form small chords that waver and grow and disappear. The train chatter doesn’t always sound like a train, though when it does, it seems a bit like our chords and tones are static and the train simply passes through what we are doing together. O’Doherty said the rails and track sounds “remind me of the feeling of being on the train to school in the mornings when I was a teenager, when I would be listening to music and trying to will the sounds of the rails to line up with the beat of whatever I was listening to.” Woven All of Dream and Error has a way of lining me up, again and again.
