Anyone trying to work out what they think about decelerationism, better hold their horses, take a deep breath, and slow the fuck down. The nature of decelerationism is to put on the brakes. It’s whole point is to disentangle itself from the trend towards speeding the collapse, towards a facile transhumanism, towards the linear conception of the future represented by the failed imagination that gave us limitless progress. Things may seem to be speeding up, but it is only because of the energy dissipating from the unravelment of empires decline. In other words, entropy, that will in time also slow down.

Continued decelerationism will break and brake in waves on the times terminal beach. Each time we move to slow down and decelerate it will be a little less urgent, we will already be going slower, because the big skyscrapers will have already fallen by then, and the rubble will have stopped bouncing. Even so there will still be plenty to sift through and we can make mosaics out of the wreckage. On the ragged staircase of decline, a variety of possible futures are already presenting themselves, but none of them are distributed evenly. The futures aren’t one thing and they have never been distributed evenly. That doesn’t mean dealing with the winding down of things will be easy, or coherent. But if you take a deep breath, it can be dealt with in ways that won’t add to the chaos, but instead bring aesthetic harmony into various parcels of the disrupted field.     
The pressure of time can be eased by taking a decelerationist view. It is okay to take some time to think. Time to think can’t be taken away from those who are willing to think. It’s one of those things that can never be taken away, but it has to be chosen. The hurried pace of haste that results in further reactionary decision making to deal with the rapidity of change during the unravelment may require, at times, quick reflexes. Yet decompression from the systemic forces is a viable strategy for coping with these temporal processes, and allows instead for responsive decision making. So is renouncing the need to pay explicit attention to the play-by-play grind of one exceptional detail after another. The late David Lynch reminded us that we shouldn’t  “worry about the world going by.” Instead, we should do our work. Hurried slapdash and slipshod work may very well have to be redone. All it leads to is slop. 

 So we might as well slow down and think about the work that is needed, not be compressed into further busywork and band aids. These are the exact kind of things the too-late capitalist system excels at and that we would do our best to bypass anyhow.

Philosophically, deceleration gives us access to the transcendental. Without absolute horizons, when the big crunch gives rise to another big bang, we realize that expansion and collapse are just part of the oscillating waveform of history. Shown in human life it is the child who is born, matures, declines, and dies only to be reborn. In terms of civilizations, it is the family that becomes a tribe or clan, who in turn give rises to a larger nation, perhaps even an empire, that then in turn, begins the process of disintegration, leading back to clans, tribes, and family. Seeds from one empire get replanted in the birth of new nations. The problem with our contemporary dilemma is that so many are stuck on the through line of thinking that suggests the arc of history bends towards a single inevitable singularity. Like phallic rockets penetrating the depths of space, this remains a fever dream fantasy for those who want to believe in heaven without the religion. 

A viewpoint of multiple lives and multiple civilizations that arise and fall in their own vast cycles of spiraling time that involutes as much as evolutes, allows for periods of deceleration, of slowing down. These allow us to take a longer view in the outward world, and a deeper view within the depths of our own psyches.

The fond suspicion arises that the public conversation of deceleration and slowing down in all things, from slow food to slow productivity is still just beginning. Long views allow us to think slowly, to take in details that otherwise might pass us by. Small remains beautiful. Those small details get ignored in the hyper-compression of time. Doing anything good, can take a long time, so we might as well start now. Events will just happen anyway. They punctuate the long spectrum of time that is our shared lives. If things seem out of control, even traumatic, its because we have forgotten how to listen to the memories of the past. They had their traumas too. It’s okay to take a break from the news, from the noose that cuts off circulation to the head, and instead contemplate the things that have already happened. They have much to teach regarding how to cope with and even thrive as the problems delivered by the failed promise of the new meet the rubber of reality.

The blast waves of the H-Bomb continue to haunt our memory, just as the promise of cheap limitless energy continues to radiate our frenzied dreams. One can’t have one without the other, and these dead ends are better left abandoned. Nuclear power subsidizes nuclear weapons, and as Sun Ra intoned, nuclear war is a motherfucker. Better to place our hopes in the natural nuclear reactions of the sun, and learn to live with less and within limits then the dual explosions that destroy the land, its creatures, its people. Plutonium nightmares with a long shelf life really do require us to slow down and think it over, rather than speed up and do things faster. Let the new clear dawn fade.

Even so, cybernetics will continue to have a lot to teach us. Each individual is a system containing smaller systems and embedded within larger systems. For decelerationism, the idea of the negative feeback loop continues to teach crucial lessons.

Deceleration doesn’t give one hoot about Karl Marx because it recognizes both communism and capitalism as both flawed. Both have led to techno-managerial elitism and the siphoning off of resources from the rest of the world and people by the 1%. Therefore we can just get on with our lives without having deal with Marx or his predecessor Hegel’s brain farts any further. They’ve stunk up the room for long enough as it is.

“Decelerate the progress” is an apt decelerationist motto. Progress hasn’t been everything it was hyperpresently hyped up to be.

Accelerationism, as such, was critically and theoretically formulated by Benjamin Noys. Let me repeat once again what he said about this idea of giving in to the fast flow of the future, and market forces, that has driven so much accelerationist thought:

 “… which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

This is like the idea of “changing the system from within” that so many people seem to wish to do, but have such a hard time doing, as the hippies who became yuppies might tell, if they remember at this point. This could be said to be part of the social aspect of recuperation. Recuperation is the process where the ideas of a counterculture get reabsorbed back into the dominant culture, spun back into the media spectacle in a way that can be considered as neutered or spayed, in other words, without any kind of life affirming fertility outside of feeding the corporate beast.

Accelerationism seems to accept all the flaws of capitalism, and relish in the idea of continuing to participate with all its consumerist perks, in order to “speed the collapse.”

Opting out on the other hand allows a person to tune in to other signals not being broadcast on approved portions of the social media spectrum. Or just tune into nature. Decelerationists are much more about the everyday terroir of ones own turf (i.e. bioregion) than territorialization, deterritorialization, or reterritorialization.

Another aspect of decelerationist thought that makes its adoption easier, is the ability for it to be put into practice by individuals. No one needs to rely on an institution to slow down, especially in their personal lives. The personal is political after all, is it not? Not adopting the latest platform or technology is a choice. The Amish have much to teach here, even if becoming Amish isn’t the goal. Learning to be a producer of things, rather than just a consumer, a user of things, is one way to not get used by the systems that have accelerated to a point beyond our liking.

With the accelerationists, it can be agreed that “there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is,” according to author Nick Land. This realization however does nothing to help those caught in the throes of “capitalist realism” or what Mark Fisher thought of as the “pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”

Breaking through that barrier does not require accelerating beyond the speed of sound, or light, or capitalism, but does require the ability to creatively opt-out, so that other economies and possibilities might once again be dreamed.

At the time of writing accelerationism is once again making the rounds among readers of a certain pomo crit lit tendency. The torch has been given to a new generation of thinkers who are seeking to resurrect it once again and see what use it might be put to, and this happening on both the left-channel, and the right-channel of the stereocentric bird brain of political ideation. They are spurred on by the promise, any day now, of space/time shattering quantum computers, virtual reality, AI, biohacking, cheap to free energy for all, and other bespectacled pipe dreams from the ongoing bromance with Silicon Valley. Decelerationism waits in the wings for those who think maybe things are speeding along just too much. A hand on the brakes isn’t a bad thing when you can’t see the scenery in the world that you live in.

As the false promises of cryptocurrency, quantum everything, better living through genetics and AI set in, as people grow bored of the metaverse and the ultimate Spectacle / Simulacra of virtual unreality set in, people will have to turn around and look to what came before, to tradition, to simpler technologies whose development we could have chosen, but didn’t. To walk away from this fetishization of techbrology and see what else we might do as a species is inevitable. 

As the process of winding down unfurls, any attempt to recover the lost sense of quality, craftsmanship and pride in the work of making things that last will find its own rewards. Quality is the greatest enemy to automatized AI machine creation. On the social level this means the renunciation of the cult of personal branding. The pleasures of private life are best enjoyed in private, not with the world watching through the filtered lens of social media. In the realm of culture this means a return from streaming television and the internet to the newspaper, radio, and the book. Most of all it means, moving from the feverish pace of ever accelerating change and fragmentation, to coherence and concentration, from wasteful extravagance, to simplicity and moderation.

​And if you are only now just putting on the brake, decelerationism won’t laugh, or say, it’s about time you slowed down. No one will even give you a ticket. It isn’t about policing the speed of degrowth after all, but settling into the natural rhythm, cadence and pace of its cycles.

Scarcity can be good for the human soul. Fully Automated Luxury Communism / Capitalism makes the muscles of body and mind atrophy. In absence of gravitas everything becomes trivia, fodder for game shows when so much that could be saved is in jeopardy. The grindstone sharpens individuals and society giving them a precise edge. Freedom requires this sharpness. Dullness prevails when no work of our own is required, when there is no block to thrust against.

Boredom with the way things are becomes an asset. Boredom was a gift to Generation X. Combined with feral free time it gave us an era of analog creativity: zines, scenes, bands, music you could hear, people you could touch, words printed on paper to be found like treasures. The absence of the ease of the internet search meant that finding the others was valuable. While there is nothing wrong with copying off the successful innovations of the past, Star Trek replicators will only lead us further down the path of replication crisis.

Growing bored again can be a form of salvation, because boredom will lead to daydreams and other forms of active imagination that require us to think of alternate ways of doing, being, relating.

So much criticism of new music criticism from the late Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) and Simon Reynolds (Retromania) has focused on how in love with the past it is, we must remember, not only that pop will eat itself, but that these previous eras todays regeneration of musicians feel called to, lived in a quieter media environment where there mind had more freedom to roam. Because of this freedom the imagination was sharp, because it had been whetted against the grindstone of boredom. Now we have what music historian Tim Mohr called “too much future” in his book Burning Down the Haus. While we aren’t living behind the Berlin wall with the stasi following our every move, we are living in a world of extensive digital surveillance, where the digistasi are collecting our data to readvertise at us in service to an algorithmic propriety that flattens the contours our imaginations might otherwise give in absence to this spectacle.

The “too much future” of the youth behind the berlin wall was in response to the way everything was preplanned for them. Meanwhile the punk rockers in Thatcher’s England had declared “no future” because it had all been eaten up and what was left was getting fed to the wolves of neoliberal economics. Todays youth and the Gen X parents who gave birth to them, have a different set of problems and predicaments. The force feeding of predicted tastes as channeled by cool merchants recuperating any vital signs of autonomy and putting them into an endlessly scrolling tube that drips content, not creations. Putting firm limits onto these feeds that create positive feedback loops of reinforced artificial idiocy is one way to curb escalating brain drain.

The imaginative dissonance of negative feedback is needed to put the brakes on these severed signifiers. The sign of the times are all there, but we would do well to tune into layer of symbols that exists beyond what W.B. Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.”

Passive imagination is the dead end in a space station become tomb, that fully automated luxury capitalism / communism leads to. This is the “Tomb of the Cybermen” prophesied by Doctor Who (Season 5, 1967). A living culture, while informed by cybernetics as systems, can be resurrected from this imaginative stasi stasis, by seeking out contact with the microrganisms of the living soil, and macroorganisms of winter starlight. Enjoyed down here on earth, the light from those stars does not have to be filtered through the protective lenses and glass on the space station tomb.

Other tomes are available if we would read them. We can check them out from the akashic ark-hives, from the library on the dream plane in the upper, from the library on the inner, where you don’t need to know morse code or computer code to make contact. When our nervous system gets touched by beings of intelligence from these other planes of there, and when we develop the disciplines needed to translate those flashes into works of active imagination, we will began to see the rise of new transcendental mentalities. The old faith of staunch materiality will be replaced as the seeds for new perceptive organs root and grow like upside down trees rooted in aether.

After the harvest of past culture made by the eminently copy-able nature of the internet has reached its past pull date, those souls born with a cellphone in their hand will enter a winter of deep hibernation. Deep listening, deep dreaming, deep sleep in the womb of earth, embraced and suckled at the teat of the bear mother as the light from midnight stars begin to trace out new songlines, faint tracks in space to be explored and walked down by others who receive the seed transmissions.

Listen, in the wake of internet noise music of talking heads analyzed conundrum.

Listen in the boredom, the radio chatter of banal algo-arithmetic of supervised society, turned down.

Listen, and the distant sound of Sirius. It can still be heard.

We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.

The exact etymology of the word glitch is not known, though it may derive from the Yiddish “glitsh” which means a “slippery place”. In the mid-twentieth century the word first started showing up in technical texts and related to sudden surges of voltage within an electrical circuit causing it to overload. Today a glitch is any kind of malfunction in hardware or error in software.

​In the 1990’s glitch music became a kind of subgenre of electronic music found at the meeting points of the avant-garde, noise, and more popular forms. This type of music, and the methods surrounding it, including circuit-bending, can provide a window, cracked as it is, for looking out at adjacent electronic worlds, including the internet.
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Bending Circuits

Circuit-bending is the art of recycling, reusing and repurposing old consumer electronics, sound making toys, drum machines and synthesizers. The item to be bent needs to be low voltage, because the art involves opening these castaways up, and tinkering on the exposed circuit board while turned on, making connections that weren’t originally part of the design to see what new sounds might be created. If a person bends higher voltage electronics they run the serious risk of electrocution. In addition to de-soldering, and re-soldering pathways that weren’t originally connected, new elements can also be added. These often include sensors, controllers, potentiometers, switches and the like slipped into existing circuit paths. 

Sometimes a metallic surface is added to a spot on the bent instrument that allows a human’s natural electricity to create voltage changes within the instrument, making an electrical loop with the player. They become part of the circuit. 

Circuit-bent instruments emphasize the aleatory, and can be seen as an extension of the fascination with randomness that started gaining prominence in Western music in the 20th century under the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and others who followed in their footsteps. With regrards to Cage, circuit-bending can be seen as an extension of a “prepared” instruments. Like Cage’s prepared pianos, circuit-bent instruments alter devices in ways that make it sound different than before the intervention, although something of their original voice remains present.

The process of circuit-bending was discovered and developed by Cincinnatian Q. Reed Ghazala. Ghazala cultivated a whole suite of instrument types from the detritus of junk he found in thrift shops and other places, and has also written and taught others how to make their own alien instruments. His work, legacy and example are well worth exploring for anyone who wants to lift up the hood on the development and evolution of the practice. 

Bending existing circuits offers the electronic musician and tinkerer a chance to play with chance, creating artful errors that allow the unknown to slip in what was previously predetermined.

  Digital natives need chance like a body needs water. Algorithms have taken the fun out of what was once unplanned and unstructured; internet surfing has been made accident proof, as if it were run by insurance agents and safety specialists. Spots of possible slippage are mopped up in favor of putting forth pre-chewed opinions and junk food clickbait. A similar environment prevails for electronic musicians. The hardware and software being made more often than not makes it difficult to fail. Sound libraries, instrument and effect presets, samplers pre-loaded with perfect pulsing patterns, make it hard to even play in the wrong pitch. 

These fully loaded tools make it a possible to become a producer of music in a matter of minutes. 
Preconfigured musical gear may make it easier to get grooving right off the bat, but the gift of instant gratification steals the sense of accomplishment and intimacy that comes from knowing every inch and crevice of an instrument. And while on first meeting, a run in with a run of the mill modular set up might cause sparks to fly, the slow burn of excitable electrons grows even further from long association. The nuance and subtlety available to those who explore in depth comes across in the very sounds. Circuit-bending is one way to go into those depths, down to the wire. 

Prefab music is low risk music. Something might be made from it that could be used as a backdrop to a car commercial or fit into a DJ set at a dance club, as filler, but without investigating the underlying assumptions of a piece of gear, or software, the things that come out of it will tend to not have the rewards associated with riskier behavior.  Disfigured musical gear gives the gift of decomposition and recomposition to electronic composers. With their materials mangled and mutilated, the gear becomes a mutt, with all the natural advantages over thoroughbred, store bought, off-the-shelf kit.  The system may be less predictable, but that is the point. 

​There are stories that tell of how Richard D. James of Aphex Twin modifies nearly all of his gear, with special regard given to changing the tunings. He gives his gear a personal workover. This accounts for his music’s longevity over the decades since the first songs and albums came out to the public. Kim Cascone has written (after Roland Barthes “The Grain of the Voice”) of a sense of hearing the “grain” inside certain musical works. In his view this grain is in part unconscious material bubbling up as expressed through the imagination, and the grain is what makes music that can touch a listener in their core, beyond mere intellect. Circuit-bending dosen’t necessarily create grain on its own; any technique can sound cold and uninspired when it is used as just another part of checklist for cultural production. What circuit bending can do, is make room for the glitch, slippage, an error where something other than the pre-programmed is liable to mainfest.

Worship the Glitch

In 1994 post-industrial giants Coil made a series of recordings that included the use of the moniker of ElPh. These releases reveled in malfunction, and started their life unplanned. While working on material that would eventually become the Black Light District release, A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room, they were plagued by difficulties with their equipment. Tape machines messed up, digital media was mangled, mechanical issues crept into the workflow. Lucky for us, the recording machines were on when many of these errors happened. 

John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson were both at home with things metaphysical, and to them it felt like some kind of extradimensional entity was manifesting through the glitches. The band called these unintended transmissions from their equipment “ElpH” a being they conceptualized as part equipment, part something reaching out from another realm. Often snatches of random composition came from the gear and other accidents occurred. As they rolled with the obstacles being thrown at them, they realized it was better to accept these errors and mistakes. So they shelved the Black Light District project for the time being to focus on the new energies that were slipping through their defective gear.  It is interesting to note that the word gremlin is sometimes used as a synonym for malfunction.

Drew McDowall, who had played with the band before, but was now a vested member, furthered the notion, “It really felt like we were channeling something. Or at least that’s the idea we allowed ourselves to play with.”

​Balance said of these experiences, “For a week it really felt like something opened up above and poured into us. We were constantly inspired and then, just as abruptly, it finished transmission. We felt it go.”

One album and one EP came out of these sessions. The album was Worship the Glitch by ELpH vs. Coil, and the Born Again Pagans EP was billed as Coil vs. ElpH. Even across a discography as varied as Coil’s there is something very different about these two releases, compared to their other works. They tend towards the sparse and minimalist, the failures given their due and showcased as portals to something beyond.  

 After these Coil records came out in the mid-90’s a new electronic genre started to erupt on the scene. As progenitors of new styles, this wasn’t unusual for Coil. Others had followed their pioneering steps before. They certainly weren’t the only ones in that time frame who had used the errors of technology to shape a new aesthetic, but their album helped give it a name, and a style or subgenre called glitch began to emerge. Glitch had its home on the outskirts of more popular electronica, with underpinning strategies borrowed from the techniques and obsessions of 20th century art music masters.

Glitch exploed for a time. What had once been heard in the most outré and underground of cultural settings was now being mixed on dance floors, in chill rooms and played as a background for late night trips all across a conceptual black light district. 

​One signature technique of glitch music from the time was using scratched or beat up CDs to make them purposefully skip or stutter. Circuit-bending was another. Accessible computer software for making music was also reaching more artists at the time and digital artifacts from heavily altered sound files came to be incorporated into the style. A standard practice was to sample these artifacts in short cuts, which became the basis for building up beats, rhythms and textures. This latter template became the defacto sound of “glitch” as a genre. The Clicks and Cuts compilation released on the Mille Plateaux label in 2000 remains a high point watermark of the genre, with contributions from many of the leading artists involved during its hey-day.  

Yet after it had evolved it became easily copy-able, just as many other musical styles that preceded it had been, and just as easy to be co-opted by market forces and musicians who wanted to try to cash on this next big thing.

Kim Cascone pointed this out in his inspired essay The Aesthetics of Failure that glitch as just the latest way of investigating the creative misuse of technology. Yet as the internet grew, the process by which those techniques spread happened much faster than in previous decades. In sharing technique of glitch, some of the imaginative grain within the music was lost as it became just another commodity. With the widespread availability of digital music software, “the medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message.”

​Failure had reached a point of failure. 

Logic Circuits and Automatism

If our own thinking can be glitched than perhaps it is still possible to create systems that embrace the slippage. If we don’t want the “tool to become the message” than a third element beyond the digital must be added into the mix. 

The technopoly runs on data. Is there a way to make it more Dada? The artists of the Dada movement rejected many things, but logic and reason were chief among them. Where was the logic in the atrocities of World War I?  The founders of the movement had lived through the war and in reaction against it, sought to elevate nonsense and the irrational above cruel, cold logic.

In our own time reason and logic have failed to deliver the utopia of technology as promised and promoted by Big Techs advertisers and PR specialists. It can seem that humanities dystopian nightmares are what are actually manifesting. Perhaps part of technologies failure is due to the fact that the digital world is built on binaries. 

Logic circuits or gates are the brick and mortar of digital systems. They are electronic circuits that have one or more than one input, but only one output. Logic gates are the switches that turn ON or OFF depending on what the user does. A logic gates turn ON when a certain condition is true, and OFF when the condition is false. A logic gate is able to check whether or not the information they get follows a certain rule, and the output is thus determined. . 

There are several types of logic gates, but the three most common are the NOT gate, the AND gate, and the OR gate. The NOT gate is the simplest. It’s sole function is to take an input that is either ON or OFF and give it back as the opposite, what the original signal is NOT. 

The AND circuit requires two inputs. It can only turn on when both inputs are ON. If only one input is on it turns OFF, and when both inputs are off, it turns OFF. 

The OR circuit also requires two inputs. It needs one input to be on for it be ON, and is also still ON when both inputs are ON, and it is only OFF when both inputs are OFF.

While variations from these basic circuits have been used to build complex systems, they still have at their core, the binary which undergirds the entire techonosphere. It is rather difficult for the unknown to break through when only two outcomes are possible.  A third position between ON and OFF is never arrived at. This would require ternary logic, and as far as I know, a ternary computer has yet to be built.

In lieu of a ternary computer, a third element needs to be added to digital systems: that is the human component. This is also where I think modes of artistic creation in the spirit of Dada can help. By moving away from pure logic and reason, by letting a bit of nonsense or irrationality slip through, the human tendency to also think in binaries can be glitched. 

​So much of the creative process is automated when working with digital tools, but it has little in common with the methods of automatism that came out of the Surrealist milieu. The various methods of automatism developed by the Surrealists put a person in touch with the unknown, whether it be the unconscious or from beyond the fragile borders of this world. Bringing these techniques back into play could give back a sense of humanity to the sounds of dead electric emitted from programmed machines. 

Automatism came in part from the method of automatic writing or spirit writing, when mediums and others of their psychic ilk were said to be in touch with disembodied spirits. The writing came through them from the other side. For the Surrealists tapping into these forces became a source of creativity. The results were often startling as they bypassed logic and reason.

To the point of this essay, in artistic creation, logic is rarely the principle that needs to be abided. Automation needs to be bypassed in favor of automatism. In electronic music strategies and interventions need to be used to work around and supplant the built-in binary biases of the tools, otherwise the music being made on them ends up just sounding like a commercial for the tool.

Circuit-bending is one way to bring a sense of automatism back into the studio. Musical dice games, musikalisches würfelspiel, are another. These go back to the eighteenth century, and exist in a variety of forms.  Today there exists a set of Musicians Dice, that look like they were stolen off a D&D table. They are handsome 12-sided dice that have the chromatic scale engraved on them in silver. They allow composers to easily work at writing 12-tone music and as a basis for improvising in jam sessions. While a computer is capable of generating random numbers in various sets, using something outside of the digital workstation for composition creates a new zone for creative insights to occur.

Guitarist Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance developed what he calls the Hexadic system, using common playing cards. Chasny developed and used his system to break a creative funk he had felt he was in. The cards are related to the notes on a guitar and through playing games with the cards, players can arrive at new tonal territories they might not have come up with on their own. Chasny has put out three albums worth of Hexadic material, and other musicians are also using the system. 

 The painter Max Ernst used the technique of decalcomania, where a texture or pattern is transferred from one surface to another. Ink, paint or other medium is applied to the final surface, and while still wet, other materials such as glass, leaves, patches of cloth, aluminum foil or pottery are pressed or rubbed against it. Musical decalcomania can be achieved by incorporating found sounds into the texture of a piece. These could be samples, field recordings, or the use of unconventional acoustic material. 
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Whatever the source may be, if we are to glitch the circuit, we need to open ourselves up to the slippage that comes in from the unknown. Otherwise people might as well just let AIs design the music for them. And while generative music systems can be built that produce startling beauty, such as Wotja and Brian Eno’s Bloom, they leave too little for unintended influences from outside the confines of the system. For that a human really does have to put themselves into line with the flow of the circuit path. To create something new, we need to become conduits, connect and plug into to an outside source.