​“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own”—Frank Zappa

One of the ironies in my life is my long standing love affair with the industrial music genre and my interest in deindustrial themes. The origins of industrial music go back to the band Throbbing Gristle and the label they started in 1976: Industrial Records.  The intention behind their record label was to “to explore the psychological, visual, and aural territory suggested by the term ‘Industrial.’ ”  Industrial music began around the same time as punk rock, and there was a lot of crossover between these subcultures. One of the things I found so inspiring was the DIY ethos at work in these scenes. There were differences too, though. Genesis P-Orridge noted how “the punk rockers said, ‘Learn three chords and form a band.’ And we thought, ‘Why learn any chords?’ We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.”

The industrial music aesthetic and its engagement and critique of the effect of machinery and factories on our culture sucked me right in. Teenage angst played no small part either. Now I’m settling into my own middle age and I’ve already seen many of the original movers and shakers of industrial and punk music die from the effects of hard living. The others who have been luckier, or wiser, are now also starting to trickle away. Industrialism itself continues to take one nosedive after another on the path of decline. The time is ripe to consider deindustrial music for deindustrial people.

As the resources that prop up today’s popular musicians become scarce, so too will the possibility of listening to music with a swipe of a finger. In the later stages of the long descent recorded music may only be available to listen to when received from radio stations where the engineers and technicians keep equipment and storage media in working order, or at libraries that have dedicated time and energy to preserving a selection of formats. The stadium concert, with its vast energy intakes, will still be possible on smaller scales and in buildings designed on acoustic principles that make up for lack of loudspeakers and amplification, as has been the case in musical halls devoted to classical music and opera. Opera used to be much more popular than it is today, and a ticket could be had for a not-outrageous cost. Someone in San Francisco who wanted to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1875 could get in for a buck, or about $27 in the dollars of today; personally, I consider any concert less than forty bucks relatively cheap compared to the outrageous costs and fees of top-tier touring acts.[1] If the music business doesn’t continue to gouge its audience, cheaper concerts for national acts and large ensembles could come back.

Listening to local musicians in small venues will become the norm. Admission is often free in bars and cafes, though buying at least a drink is often expected. Music in the home will be played on pianos, fiddles, didgeridoos and other acoustic instruments. Folks will be invited over for front-porch sessions and barn dances. Music in all its diverse variety will still be sought to soothe our emotions and uplift the soul. It may not be quite as electric as it has been, though even that would still be possible on a smaller scale.  

Music is a broad topic and tastes are very individual, even when eclectic. Many different tangents could be followed towards different musical futures. As a form of cheap entertainment in a world with less energy, stuff, and stimulation, it seems that the religious dimensions and spiritual dimensions of music are worth looking into here. In the 20th century as scientific rationalism and a fundamentalist materialism spread in the West, many people left behind the religion they were raised in, and others were raised with no religion at all. In many cases the emotional power of popular music and the mass gatherings at concert halls and stadiums have become a surrogate, replacing the emotional release, rapture and instruction once given by churches, synagogues and temples.  Charismatic rock stars share many similarities with fired-up preachers, and there are now many different denominations to choose from in the form of genres, bands, and artists. As the long decline unfolds all of us will be faced with different tragedies, personal, local, and national. One of the most common ways people cope with trauma is through religion. However in a society where the old religious paths have overgrown into tangled thickets, the cathartic effects of music can be useful to help people heal. Some of the popular styles of music today may even become forms of religious music in our tomorrows.

​ I think it is safe to say there will be a fair number of goat songs in the future, just as there are now. That is, songs about tragedy. Tragedy has two Greek roots, tragos meaning “goat” and oide meaning “song.” These goat songs referred to the dramas about traumas put on by the ancient dramaturges. Dressed in the skins of goats to represent satyrs, these singers incanted their tales of universal woe.

Tragedies were originally performed at the annual festival for the god Dionysus in Athens, and the plays were largely chanted. Some of the ancient Greek and Roman writers state that a goat was given away as a prize to those who put on the best performance.  Later Christian writers speculated the goats may have been sacrificed; it seems the fear of goat-hoofed devil music has a provenance that extends back long before the Satanic panic of the 1980s. 

Aristotle believed that a poet or dramatist showed their skill through the careful arrangement of episodes to evoke emotions of fear, pity and amazement. He preferred for the tragic crisis to be brought about by passionate deeds that resulted in  unexpected destruction or downfall. He opined that the best subject of a tragedy was not a person who was wicked at heart, but that of fortunate person who gets thrown under the wheel of fate by making a mistake. Tragedy can have a noble effect on the human soul by bringing about catharsis, the cleansing of strong emotion through its purification and release, the cathartic effect first being experienced by the performers and then transmitted to the audience.

Release from the tragedies faced by people in deindustrial times might be offered by bards and musicians whose songs could offer catharsis for the feelings brought on by living in a time of massive cultural disarrangement and all the warring and violence that implies.  Before true-crime books were ever popular, and before rap music—which may well go on to form a new mode of epic poetry[1]—jumped on to the stage to bust out rhymes about violence and killing from all angles, the murder ballad was a mainstay of traditional song. Brought to America by English, Scottish, and Irish folk singers, this roots music was one of the threads woven into what became the genre of country as known today. The murder ballad remains a part of that form and offers today’s listeners a sense of release.

The oft-considered Father of Country Music was a man by the name of Jimmie Rodgers. Born in 1897 to a railroading father in the rough-and-tumble railroading town of Meridian, Mississippi, he became a railroader himself. Rodgers ran away from home on numerous occasions to join up with traveling shows, where he got a taste for music and the rambling way of life. In addition to the hillbilly and blues styles Rodgers heard growing up, he developed a taste for vaudeville and was inspired to try his own hand at show business. He worked as a brakeman on the railway to support his wife and children, singing and playing on the side, and his several songs about trains earned him the name the Singing Brakeman.

Rodgers eventually took his family to Asheville, North Carolina where he wore different musical hats, playing Tin Pan Alley tunes as well as hillbilly stuff. When talent scout Ralph Peer came to an area near the Virginia-Tennessee border looking for acts to audition for Victor records, Rodgers took the chance and rode that train all the way to stardom. Among the many famous and influential songs he recorded was the American murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny.” It tells the tale of a women who comes home to find her man in the arms of another gal: “She took a little forty-four / rootie toot toot three times / she shot through that hard wood door / shot her man / he was doing her wrong.” Rodgers’ version starts off with, and is interspersed with, his trademark yodel. In this version Frankie’s eventual fate is the electric chair. The Father of Country Music had done his part in continuing the tradition of the tragic murder ballad.  

Another one of the Singing Brakeman’s cuts had a much stranger fate. A tribe in East Africa known as the Kipsigi developed a small cult around Jimmie Rodgers. The Kipsigi were first introduced to gramophone records somewhere in the 1950s and one of the vinyl platters they had was by Rodgers. They pronounced his name as “Chemirocha” and they revered him for his guitar playing ability and thought his instrument was similar to their own stringed lyre, the chepkong.  The Kipsigi found his yodel to sound like a goat.  The girls in the tribe began to believe that Chemirocha was a deity in the form of a kind of centaur, half man and half antelope.

The example of what happened to the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers when they found their way to Africa is only one possibility of the kind of cult that may develop around certain musicians. If a musician is powerful enough they may attain the status of a demigod or saint in the spiritual traditions that get born out of the turmoil to come. Just as religions developed around the teachings of Orpheus and Pythagoras, new mystery cults may be born among fringe subcultures. 

There are many different possible paths a musical cult could take, as divergent as current spiritual paths and styles of music. Some that seem familiar to us now, may not exist as such in the various branches of our futures. Others that are obscure and may seem like the refuge of only a handful of fanatics may go on to become the seeds of movements that become mainstream.

David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture, suggests to “use edges and value the marginal.” Something that may only seem like the obsession of a few who are off to the edge of the crowd now, could become common in time. In Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture he writes of the “widening margin of the divergent possibilities” that exist within any system. Just as monocropping isn’t good for the land, the monotony of dominant styles can leave ripe and fertile areas unexplored. These unexplored areas on our cultural edges may be worth spending time in to see if there are useful elements, musical or otherwise, to extract and bring into the greater fold of the collective.  [2] 

For instance, the subculture around ambient, drone and minimalist music might become the seedbed for a new contemplative wordless music. Ambient is very often thought of as just something listened to for its relaxing qualities, or as something to have on in the background while concentrating on other tasks. Yet it has received levels of devotion most often thought of as the reserve of monastics and sadhus. An interesting case for this type of music involves a group of people I call the “disciples of the drone,” led by Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and his chief students La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. 

 Pandit Pran Nath was an Indian classical singer born in Lahore (present-day Pakistan) in 1918. He was privileged to hear many live performances from the masters of Indian traditional vocal music as a kid, and started singing at age six. At thirteen he made the decision to devote his life to music and left home, much to the distress of his mother.  He attached himself as a disciple to Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, the most distinguished master of the Kirana gharana (roughly, “Kirana school”), a style whose lineage is traced all the way back to St. Gopal Nayak in the 12th century.

In 1970 Young and Zazeela helped bring Pran Nath to New York City. They wanted a formal education in Indian classical music, and Pran Nath initiated them into his lineage, making them his first Western disciples. The couple lived with him in the traditional gurukula manner, where the disciples attend to various chores and duties while learning from the master. Young and Zazeela studied and performed with Nath for a total of twenty-six years. Nath went on to teach a number of musicians inside and outside of Young’s avant-garde circle. Many of these were devotees of minimalism. They began to incorporate drones and Indian ideas about tuning and scale into their emergent styles. They also began playing with long-sustained durations. Many of Pran Nath’s students went on to exert an influence on the development [5] of the ambient genre.

As old religious impulses are revived, and as new impulses are born in the deindustrial era, I can see a situation arising where esoteric music schools and lineages, such as the one represented by Pran Nath and his disciples, pass on their trade secrets of music theory and practice. The constellation of musicians around Pandit Pran Nath is admittedly a niche within an already small subculture. Yet ideas from the fringe can go on to have strange impacts on the larger society.

 In 2016 music producer Brian Sweeney began to organize events under the rubric of Ambient Church, promoting “group immersions into modern contemplative, otherworldly, and universal music through site-specific audio and visual performance.” All the events are held in churches because Sweeney’s aim was to bring a connection to the sacred through music, where the play of light, sound, and incense all lend themselves to the creation of a liminal space. No dogma is preached at the Ambient Church, as belief or its absence is left up to the individual. These creedless events do, though, fill a need for connection to divinity, however it may be conceived. Sweeney has said, “Music is spiritual, and if you come with an intention of finding transcendence, you’ll experience it...churches were built for transcendence.”

In deindustrial times such shrines and holy places as Ambient Churches could still exist sans electricity. There are plenty of ways to create long sustained drones with acoustic instruments and light shows can be created with lamps, candles and other means. One of the longest musical performances in the world is going on right now—if it can be sustained through the long descent. John Cage’s ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) has so far been running for over 21 years (including a 17-month pause) at the time of this writing, and is scheduled to last until 2640.  The work is being played on an organ in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, with note changes about every 6 to 18 months,[1] Given enough disciples to play this long-form contemplative music, a type of minimalist monasticism may emerge. One of the good things about long wordless music is that it gives a focus for contemplation without imposing a specific dogma or creed. If the Ambient Church movement takes hold it could provide community and solace for people in rough times without imposing a specific set of beliefs or doctrines on those who come in search of transcendence.

Other spiritual impulses seen within our recent music history are less obscure.  For the devoted deadhead the concert itself is a spiritual experience. The other deadheads at concerts shared a common community around the attainment of altered states of consciousness, induced by liberal amounts of marijuana and LSD. The songbook of the Grateful Dead was similar to the hymnbooks in a Christian congregation. The familiar songs, transformed and varied upon in long improvisations, formed part of the gel that brought the community together. Psychedelicized and outside of ordinary consciousness, the deadheads experienced mystical states as they danced and reveled. The feeling of togetherness provided a cohesion as they started to come down. It may not have have been religion in the traditional sense, but it was spiritual, and the deadheads had their own iconography of tie-dyed bears, roses, skeletons, and other imagery, often worn, that served to identify one member of the cult to another.

The shared bond was carried over into alternative living arrangements and an entire subculture built around following the band as a lifestyle. They formed a vast network of people who shared resources in the spirit of community. An underground economy emerged around the band as they toured, with vans selling grilled cheeses and hippie food to concertgoers, and people who taped the live concerts bartering and trading recordings with each other as kind of secondary currency. Some of this subculture has carried over to the spin-off groups made up of former Grateful Dead members, and jam bands inspired by the ethos of Garcia and company that go on tour and play the festival circuits.  All of this continues to be a presence in American alternative culture.

I can easily imagine the initiated acolytes of the current jam bands continuing to form their own traveling bands who perform at ever more homespun regional and national festivals. People would come to experience their music with all the fervency of a tent revival. In deindustrial times the alternative network would provide concert spaces, crash pads, equipment, food and other material for making the events happen. Locals would come for the music, mushrooms, beer, and festivity, and leave transformed. Perhaps devotees would still travel along with the bands, following in horse-drawn carts, perhaps working as part of the traveling show’s operation. Townie fans would wait with bated breath until the next flier runner to come to town ahead of the band, and help plaster up telegraph and radio poles with hand-printed psychedelic posters. There may yet come the day when a mother will be afraid that her child will not just run off to join a circus, but to join a freaky group of latter-day troubadours, playing their endless acoustic drones, afraid they won’t ever hop a train back home.

To circle back to industrial music briefly, a third cult of music developed around Psychic TV, the group Genesis P-Orridge founded after the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY, was formed by P-Orridge in 1981 as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the notion of band fan clubs. It differed in that it was a fellowship and network of chaos magicians, artists, musicians, and ’zine and media makers centered around practicing  magic and creating art. TOPY members were those in the vanguard, popularizing the now ubiquitous tattoos, body piercing, and gender blending at a time when these activities were still frowned upon. Numerous writings, artworks, pieces of music, and acts of magic came out of the work of TOPY members.  The key texts were assembled by P-Orridge into Thee Psychick Bible. 

These are just three examples, derived from some of my own musical tastes and inclinations, out of the diverse and kaleidoscopic world of music. I’m sure readers of New Maps can find examples of other subgenres and styles that would have potential useful benefits to pass on to coming generations. Let us also not forget the practical benefits of playing music. Learning to read and play sheet music can sharpen the mind. Knowing how to play a song by heart gives the player a memory workout. The finger or vocal work involved in playing keeps the body nimble. Learning to play with others teaches us to listen to them and work towards harmony. With a modicum of skill and devoted time each of us can learn enough to entertain ourselves, friends, and family and keep spirits bright in troubled times. Those who go on to become master musicians will, at their best, be able to expand listeners’ consciousness and touch their very souls. 

NOTES:

​[1]McIntyre, Douglas. “The History of What Things Cost in America: 1776 to Today.” 24/7 Wall St., Sep. 16, 2010.

​[1] Though poetry and song are connected at the joint, the topic is too broad to tackle in this article. Perhaps I’ll take up in the future. In the meantime check out Wesley Stine's story "Luke Maxwell" in the Fall '21 issue of New Maps if you haven’t already. Also worth a read is John Michael Greer’s essay “Writing as a Microcosm 3: The Spontaneity Trap” that broaches the topic of rap as a future form of epic poetry. https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-3-the-spontaneity-trap/

[1]See the John Cage Organ Project for further details: https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt

RE/SOURCES:

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint. 2015.

Hammon, N.G.L., and Scullard, H.H., eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Hepburn, Victoria, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, 2002.

Keefe, Alexander.  “Lord of the Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground.” Bidoun, 2010. https://www.bidoun.org/articles/lord-of-the-drone

Langer, Ken.  “The Ambient Church: Seeking the Spiritual Through the Power of Music.” Klanger’s Page (website), n.d.  https://sites.google.com/site/klangerdude/home/ministry/papers/the-ambient-church-movement

Miller, M.H.  “The Man Who Brian Eno Called ‘the Daddy of Us All.’ ” New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2020.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/t-magazine/la-monte-young.html
Piaza, Tom. Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. New York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial, 2011.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2010.

Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

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This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:
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A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

Following the success of the original JAMCON in 1984, it is now time to the bring the convention of cultural signal jamming back to the future. A lot has changed in the cultural landscape over the  intervening 42 years. Ham radio, CB’s and illegal operation of said equipment to jam the same over a network of interlinked repeater systems doesn’t hold the same appeal to todays bored teenager or artistic adult looking for an enjoyable way to spend time making pranks over the airwaves. There are still plenty of signals to jam, but most of these are now controlled and operated at the data centers operated by the Borg hive mind. Artificial Idiotic slop must now be fought with Analog Intelligence.
 
For this reason the Situationist Intergalactical has put the call out for any Mentat who may wish to use their skills in the battle of the Borg. It has come to our attention that AI Slop is actually a form of soul sickness, known to some under the name of “garmonbozia.” It is a product of “pain and sorrow” emanating from certain subetheric entities who are inhabiting the internet and use it as a way to create conflict and anomie in human beings. These entities, who use silicon as a host, are currently coalescing into the form of huge data center cubes from which they will beam their phasers, currently set to stupefy.
 
It has been thought that one way to minimize the potential damage of Artificial Idiocy is to develop Analog Intelligence. For more on this, please see the Mentat Handbook, which should be seen only as a starting point, not as the sole authority on the matter. In the battle against the Borg, a multipronged approach is most helpful. As heirs to many different cultural and subcultural movements, we have taken it upon ourselves to reinvigorate once again the dada art movement. With its focus on irrationality, it seems to be immune to the cold logic emanating from the coded computers of the data centers. That’s why one of our charms against the digital monstrosity is the mantra “dada not data” or “dada centers not data centers.” Either works to rewire the brain in favor of sound poetry and analog cut-up techniques not  possible with the reductionist techbro version of recombinant art.

Jamcon ’26 also operates on homeopathic principles. The first is that “Like cures like.” This is the idea  that a disease, in this case Artficial Idiocy, can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. In other words AI slop can be fought using AI slop. For this some hacker skills are useful. If those with the knowhow start sending sending garbage each and every time a bot from meta, openai, anthropic, googleai make an appearance and feed them garbage, the system itself will go septic. Inputting dada into the data will help the process along because dada does not compute. This can be accomplished through shitposting strange experimental texts on all your unfavorite platforms, or with technical know how if you have the know how. 

The second homeopathic law to be applied is the “Law of minimum dose.” As a citizen of the American empire it is hard to not always reach for more, and that bigger is always better. Yet little and often is another way to have large lasting effects. Homeopathy notes that the lower the dose of the medicine, the greater its effectiveness is. Small scale dada inserts into the data sets might be enough to throw off the Borg and jam its circuitry. Many homeopathic products are so diluted that no molecules of the original substance remain. Even so, they somehow seem to cause shifts in entire systems. Operating from the sidelines in small doses can thus lead to dramatic changes across entire systems. It is not so much about reaching critical mass as it is about reaching an effective fringe.
 
 Still, for those of you who may be wondering about the whole thing, maybe never heard of JAMCON ‘84 , we have a little refresher for you on the original its continuing importance. It all started in 1984 when a group of culture jammers decided to start messing with incoming and outgoing signals over the airwaves. Once again we have Crosley Bendix and the Universal Media Netweb to thank for their efforts.

​JAMCON '84 was one of the early efforts of Bendix and the experimental media collective Negativland in association with the shows that they released under the auspices of the Universal Media Netweb, transmitted locally to the Bay Area over KPFA, part of the pacifica network of radio stations, on the Over the Edge show. The original radio album was edited together from a number of these transmissions, which themselves were edited together from other transmissions, scanning, and radio work by the delectable culprits involved.
 
During these broadcasts Crosley Bendix coined the term “culture jamming.” It was later taken up with gusto by the likes of Kalle Lasn and his work with Adbusters and others. Major precedents for culture jamming go back to the Letterists and Situationist International and their deployment of détournement. This is a broad term for practices that take the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. These two groups were of course indebted to the surrealists and dadaists of old. Their official rejections of various aspects of the Surrealist program reveal their own metaphysical anxieties. Their anxieties however, need not be our own. Other groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front, the Firesign Theater, or the pranks of Joey Skaggs and Abbie Hoffman, can be seen as part of the lineage.
 
To go back to Bendix, he put it this way in one of the JAMCON ’84 broadcasts, “As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”
 
Now we are not up against the signals of the legacy media so much, though they are there as constant background noise and irritation, as we are against the collision of multiple fragmented media siloes whose outputs are being amalgamated and fed into the Borg. The purposeful enshitification of Artificial Idiocy itself is one strategy against this computational architecture, hence the announcement of JAMCON ’26.
 
This convention is in no way organized. It is decentralized. But wherever you are in the web of existence, certain threads may be vibrated. Find the ones that you can vibrate, and jam on, because we don’t have enough dada.

Special thanks to John O'Neil for the JAMCON '26 idea.

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​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 
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​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

I listen to far more newly released music than I read newly released books. I do tend to read at least a few recently published books each year, but not nearly as much as I listen to newly released music. One of the joys of working at the library is having easy access to books from many eras, and to read where my interests go and flow. This has been essential to my own research and my pleasure. As with music, I don’t think there is a best book. (Or “one true book” for that matter.) I certainly have favorites, but as with music, my favorites many. As the great sage Robert Fripp noted, there is a resplendence in divergence.  Yet all are part of the whole joy that is the body of literature. Within that resplendent divergence are both fiction and nonfiction.

(Note: I link to Bookshop.org  or publisher in the title as a place to buy the books. As an online company, Bookshop isn't as damaging to brick and mortar bookstores or to authors as is that big company online that started off by selling books. I have also written full reviews of several of these, in which case I provide the link if you want to read my thoughts in more detail. )

One of Us by Dan Chaon

One of Us by Dan Chaon is one of the few brand new novels I read this year. As soon as I saw the cover of the book and the title I already knew I wanted to read it. When I read the inside dust jacket, I knew I really wanted to read it. When I learned that Chaon was an Ohio author, and would also be at the Buckeye Book Festival, where I also had a spot, I was even more excited. So I bought the book when I was up there, got to say hello to Chaon and he signed my copy.

It is an exquisite tale. I’d call it either a historical fantasy or an occult history, leaning towards the theosophical. It concerns two twins, a brother and a sister, who seem to share a gift of telepathy. When they become orphans they get taken in by their deranged uncle, who it turns out isn’t really even an uncle at all. He just wants what they have, that is, their spiritual gifts, to use as his own. Along with a diary that was their late fathers, and associate of the lunatic before he went fully off his rocker. Escaping his clutches they get taken into the colorful world of the circus and sideshow. I love a good carnie tale. This is one of the best I ever read, and the writing, the language, is what make it so.

This is a lyrical and literary telling, with freakishly intriguing characters you grow to love an care for.

Here is that dust jacket blurb. “It's 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor-twins so close they can literally read each other's minds-life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee. Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There's Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets. After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized…”

Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse

The past few years I have been trying to make an effort to always read or re-read at least one book by Herman Hesse. I’ve read quite a few. The Glass Bead Game ranks as one of my favorite novels, if I had to pick. This one I hadn’t got to yet, and I want to make sure I read all of his works as I can, because every one of them I read touches me deeply inside.

The book is set in Europe just before the time of the black plague and then during the plague. It centers on the friendship of a monk and a young man who has come into the monastery, possibly to give his life to the divine, but in the end, he gets seduced by the call of the world, and becomes a wondering homeless ladies man and then an artist.

After reading the story I got to thinking of how one of the gifts of Narcissus the monk was his ability to really and truly read a person’s inner nature. He knew Goldmund was haunted by the absence of his mother, and had an inner knowing of the path his friend would go down after he left the monastery -knowing he would live the monastery for a life "in the world." Later they are reunited after many adventures, vagaries and times of wonder on the part of Goldmund.

Goldmund alternated between losing himself in dispersion, but then all of that libidinous energy coming back around and he was able to do something useful with it in the creation of his sculptures after he had gazed upon a carved Madonna and felt the calling to the artists life. When he worked with the master artisan, he learned how to call forth all the images of the Divine Mother he had experience in all her glory and terror and was able to bring them into his own masterpiece, only to fall prey to dispersion again.

There is so much more to this story, though. As with all of Hesse’s work it hits you on multiple levels, starting with the metaphysical.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Sometimes the best reads are rereads. Dhalgren is certainly a case in point. When I first read this at the age of twenty it blew my mind. It blew my mind again when I re-read it for the first time in just over twenty-five years. I am surprised at myself for waiting this long to reread it, because when I read it the first time, Samuel R. Delany became my favorite author for many years and I quickly read most-all of his novels and a fair amount of his critical writings in the years that followed when I was just starting out as a shelver working at the library.

My taste for some of the transgressive aspects of this novel has mellowed. The other aspects -the poetry, the critical discussions, the beauty of the dialogue, the psychogeography of Bellona, all the things about race relations, the entire section when the Kid, the books main character, is going up to the highrise apartment building and moving furniture for the Richards family, and  the unending dialogue, I continue to love. Perhaps maybe I waited so long because it was like reading the book all over again and having that love for literature, reading, poetry and writing that the book does so well to imprint on the reader came through once again with full force. As did so many of its surreal, psychological, and science fictional elements. Yes, it is a total tour de force.

Did I mention the dialogue and the dialogue in the book? Delany has such a keen ear for language. This was written in the early seventies, and it really sounds like he is transcribing directly from some of the conversations he heard, which makes this book a masterful mix of literary realism, in the dialogue and the way people speak, and of postmodern science fiction, in all of the elements that make this a book of science fiction: the two suns, the visions the cities inhabitants have, the fact that Bellona itself is a fictional city, somewhere in North America. My mind places it in the Midwest, but hey, I am biased about the Midwest, in its favor. There are the elements that make this a postmodern work of fiction. I hope that isn’t a dirty word to you. There are many more colorful dirty words in the book. The dabbling in metafiction, the playing around with time and voice, and the holes in Kids memory, his sanity or unsanity, the way the work can be read as a Möbius Strip, the way it can be read as pertaining to the experience of multistable perception, all of this added to the rich experience of reexperiencing the book. 

I read the imagery of Bellona in a new way that I did not read in the first time I walked through this urban labyrinth. Having discovered the world of “psychogeography” in the intervening years, I wonder how much of the Situationists work Delany might have read? He was well versed in French critical theory (again, I hope you don’t think it is a dirty phrase, but if you do, I guess that’s your own business). That he might have incorporated some aspects of the dérive or drift into the novel is not without question. Another thing I didn’t know when I first read the book was how Delany himself had experiences of seeing some of America’s great cities with certain neighborhoods burned out and messed up. He put these visions into his work. Knowing that now, I think it is what adds to its sense of reality.

I hope I don’t wait so long to read it again and again, or go back to his imaginary world Neveryona for that matter.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher 

This book has been an inspiration. In part because of what I agree with Fisher about. But in a much larger part because of where I disagree with him. It fueled me creatively. His Capitalist Realism, which I read towards the end of December last year, was just as inspiring. Fisher set a high water mark for contemporary music criticism even if I don’t agree with all his conclusions, or some of his positions. In particular, I don’t find the sense of loss that he seemed with regards to the whole area of hauntology, and how most new music of the twentieth century was a rehash or even remix of what had come earlier, but that stems from me not feeling like constant progress is what deserve to have. I see history as much more cyclical. He is a writer to argue, as such, ultra-stimulating. 

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack.

I stumbled on this book while looking for speculative fiction novels from the 80s and 90s. It was amazing. A difficult read, but the language was incredibly beautiful, I wrote a full review of the book.

It is not a book for the faint of heart, but it might be good to read anyway for those who’d rather bury their heads in the sand, or medicate themselves into a false rosiness (just as the mother in this story does). Cozy this is not. Tragedy it is. The kind of happenings it raps on could well be heading to a future near you, even though some of the elements of this near future tale date it to the time it was written, 1991. Kids connecting over payphones and landlines are part of my own fond memories so I was happy to read about them talking on the house phone anyway. These tech anomalies don’t matter too much in the end, because they aren’t the focus of the tale. This is science fiction of the social variety.

[Read the rest of my sothismedias review ]

Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo. 

This was a book with a more recent publication. In it Galluzzo introduces the very important term “Critical Aquarianism.” The term “critical aquarians” alone is worth the price of entry. But there is so much more. I ended up writing a full review of this book as well.

What happened to the ecological utopian visions and visionaries that came out of the counterculture of the fifties, sixties, and seventies? Prior to the role reversal of hippies into yuppies, of the back to the land dreams transformed into jobs at a bank, a life in suburbia, and 2.5 kids, there had been an Aquarian counterculture. Those Aquarians carried a strain of thought critical of technology, unafraid of our biology, inspired by ecology, and considered alternate economies and the prospects for degrowth as a way to shift culture. This nascent tradition aimed to put the brakes on the endless expansion of the industrial system represented by all things Establishment, man. If endless growth can be thought of as a synonym for cancer, then the push for progress at all costs is metastasis. These Aquarians sought another way.

Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, looks at these neglected Aquarian visionaries in an effort to rattle the hypermodernist cages and the addled worldview promulgated by the transhumanist inmates of Silicon Valley.

[Read the rest of my sothismedias review]

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Mike Azerrad.
 
This book was phenomenal. One of the best music books I have ever read. I wrote a few articles based off it, hope to come out with a few more still (have some in the draft hopper actually), about how it can be used as a kind of handbook for analog and underground culture. I learned so much, and the way he structured the book was itself great. A super fascinating tale of so much music that I have loved -and other groups who I didn’t really get into (Replacements, Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr.) or didn’t hear a ton of (Butthole Surfers) … but this got me listening to all the music I missed, and going back with new ears and insights to all the music I loved. The story of the labels SST, Sub Pop, K Records, Dischord and others… it really spoke to me. How he wove it all together… it was fantastic.

[Our Band Could Be Your Life part 1] 

[Our Band Could be Your Life part 2]

Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics by S.K. Heninger 

This took me several months to read, generally a bit before bed each night. The first part on Pythagorean cosmology went faster, but the second part of the book on Renaissance poetics and how they manifested in English language during the Elizabethan age, mostly examined in the work of Sidney (Shepherds Calendar, The Fairy Queen) was absolutely fascinating. This will be a book I return to again and again, an excellent reference. I learned so much about Pythagorean thought, but also how their ideas of cosmos have continued to echo down the centuries. Recommended especially for all those interested in the music of the spheres, in “speculative music” and western esotericism in general.

America’s Greatest Noise: About RRRecords, Emil Beaulieau, and the True Sound of Love by Frans Da Waard

One of the themes now emerging from this list is how several of my favorite reads were about independent music and its spirit. Frans De Waard digs into this terrain in and even more fringeworthy way in this book about Emil Beaulileau, America’s Greatest Living Noise Artist, his record store and record label. This was another one that I wrote about, this time for Igloo…

If it is true that you imitate what you contemplate, then we should expect a new crop of labels, record stores and noise musicians putting forth their efforts after reading this audacious and inspiring book.  Reading about Ron Lessard’s life as a record store owner, a noise artist under the moniker Emil Beaulieau, as the force behind the RRRecords label, about ant-records and his custom built turntable with four-arms, the Minutoli, certainly filled me with the inspiration to make more noise, to do more in the DIY spirit, and get things out there into the world. The series of recycled music releases put out on recycled commercial cassettes are showcased here in Lessard’s own words. Alongside them are numerous tales of the American musical underground, with notable forays into Japan and Europe.

The focus is centered on the noise scene in the United States, as might be expected for a book about America’s greatest living noise artist. I love reading about most any kind of subculture, especially those that are home grown. The noise scene has a special place in my heart. I became involved in it myself through the former Art Damage radio show here in Cincinnati and the numerous shows put on by people involved with that program. It was a gateway drug into a world of broken consumer electronics, tape editing and manipulation, and feral children expressing themselves through sonic disruption in the lacerated zone of failed industry lurking between the bible belt and the rust belt...

​[Read the rest of my review on Igloo.]

Independent as F***: Underground Hip-Hop from 1995-2005 by Ben Pedroche

Having traversed the independent worlds of punk, indie rock, and noise, now it was time to get into the world of independent hip-hop which had equally important lessons to teach. This one came out in 2025 from my own publisher Velocity Press, and was thus one of the new books I read.

Hip-hop has only been a small part of my musical diet. But it’s always been there in the background, part of the soundtrack to my misspent youth skateboarding around the city. It played during the underage drinking sessions of malt liquor forties and while we passed blunts in the park or on a porch. In adulthood my listening to the genre faded quite a bit, because most of my listening was based on the records my friends had in their collections, while I was busy buying up ambient, industrial, and punk, going down into other rabbit holes of collecting. Yet I’ve always been fascinated by a variety of styles of music, and even more so, by the subcultures around them. Whether it was the Beatniks, hippies, punkers or the industrial scene I have  immersed myself in reading about, or later the danceable energy around the rave movement and moment, or the technological quests of the hacker community, if there was a subculture built around something, I’ve been interested in that subculture. In the last few years that’s manifested as reading more about graffiti and hip-hop. Independent as F*** by Ben Pedroche that came out earlier this year fits perfectly into all of this, and even covers the years when my youth was most misspent. 

One of my favorite musical histories of all is Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. What I love about that one is how much it can act as a blue print for how to set up alternative networks in the underground. That book focused on punk, but the principles behind how the bands created their own labels, how independent labels supported independent bands, and the DIY infrastructure of zines and venues that allowed for the spread of the culture remains of vital importance. Pedroche’s book fills a critical gap in the history of independent music and does so for the vibrant scene around indie rap. The stories he tells are a kind of essential information for any creator who wishes to work independently from corporate labels and publishers.

[Read the rest of my review over at Igloo]

Merge by Walter Mosley

Merge was a short novel by Walter Mosley that captured my imagination from start to finish. It was one of the best alien contact books I ever read to boot…and it was streetwise and relatable to those who’d grown up in urban settings.

“Raleigh Redman loved Nicci Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the lotto for twenty-four million dollars, quit his minimum wage job and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of twenty-four million dollars….and merges our world with those that live beyond.”

Formless Irregular by Babs Santini

This tome of an art book is going to get its own review. Every time I’ve sat down to look at it, I’ve gotten gobsmacked by the ostranenie. Having high quality reproductions of the cover art of so many Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93 and Legendary Pink Dots albums that I love dearly is just part of the sinister beauty of this book. More thoughts soon, but they are so formless, and the book so vast, it has been difficult gathering the ectoplasm together.

There were of course many other great reads that I read this year... these are just a few of my favorites. Thanks for tuning in and reading with me.
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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

It’s that time of year where putative critics pontificate about the “best” things that came out in the past twelve months. I never very much liked this aspect of being a music writer. That begs the question of why am I making a favorites of 2025 post? I do think it is helpful to review and remind myself, and perhaps my readers, of all the good material there is that is new in the world from artists working today. What I don’t like about it is when these lists say “top” or “best.” I just don’t think there is a best. I think there is stuff that I like, and stuff that I don’t care for as much, and stuff that you like, and stuff that you don’t care for as much. What I think is bitchin and cool as fuck, you may think sucks, and vice versa, and that is fine. Furthermore, I've never been a fan of thinking of the arts as a competition. I like to view the arts as a rich exchange full of possibility for cooperation.

As a music fan, and radio DJ my goal has always been to just share music that I love and am excited about. Here are some things I got excited about in 2025 and that are still exciting enough to warrant talking about again.

​There is always so much to listen to, read and explore, so I think the value of these kind of lists now is in helping people to go back and find some things they may have missed once the hype cycles are over. Old favorites return to the studio and show up with new offerings, and new-to-me artists grace us with their gifts and offerings.

Where I have reviewed an album for Igloo Magazine I have included a link if you care to dig in deeper to my thoughts on a particular work.

SCANNER & NURSE WITH WOUND: CONTRARY MOTION

Two great collaborators join together for the first time in a new collaboration. Call it an alchemical fusion in a marriage of true minds. Robin Rimbaud & Steven Stapleton have both collaborated with a ton of other artists and musicians. Now they meet together in musical mixing to create a homeopathic succussion. Here their combined powers reach a higher level of vibrational force through the energetic power of material dilution. Compare it to the Korsakovian method where the vessel in which the musical preparations are manufactured is first emptied, then refilled with a suitable electronic solvent, the volume and EQ of the of surrealist soundwaves adhering to the walls of the studio-vessel gets periodically scraped, stirred, and adjusted. After the contents have settled a new batch of material gets decanted from the material so conjoined.

Contrary Motion is an album for those who wish to embark on a journey of neurodivergence from the realm of traditional thought and soundwaves so as to access the remedies that will give them relief from the complexity of modern life. This is live audio that has been refracted through the studio by means of frequency hopping between Australia, Ireland and England.

[ Contrary Motion review. ]​

THE TEAR GARDEN: ASTRAL ELEVATOR

When The Tear Garden released their first single “A Return” late this summer, it was clear they were back in full force. The song’s ecstatic promise and lush synthesis between cEvin Key’s pulsing rhythms and Edward Ka-Spel’s visionary lyrics signaled the long-awaited return of their singular experimental magic.

What could be better than listening to two best friends, both masters at their art, playing together, laying down tracks, and having a blast?

[The Tear Garden: Astral Elevator review]

BIG BLOOD: ELECTRIC VOYEUR

The original album came out digital only at the tail end of 2024, in two versions, one with lyrics and one instrumental. It was a tour de force of experimental electronics and homebrewed instruments. All of the instruments, save one synth on one track, were built in the home of the band over a course of ten years while they worked on their other releases. In 2025 the album sees release by the Psychic Sounds label and includes an additional EP on the fourth side. I wrote the liner notes for it, which I am totally stoked about. Here are those notes...

Big Blood, the intrepid voyagers into the outer reaches of hallucinatory noise-rock and eclectic freakadelia opt for a new path along the circuit board of creativity. Electric Voyeur was made by applying strict limitations using home-made electronic instruments and voice alone. The result is an album that is as trippy as it is devotional in its exquisite craftsmanship.

The glorious scent of solder and silicon wafts all over this music. Crafted over the course of ten years at the workbench and in the studio by Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, they were guided along the way by a slew of books on how to make homemade instruments. Key among those was Nicolas Collins Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Lucky for us listeners, all of that effort is here condensed into four-sides of exquisite vinyl.

Kinsella’s mesmeric voice is showcased in all its crystalline beauty over beds of lo-fi reverb laden electro gurgles and percolating rhythms as she chases shooting stars across glittering percussive patterns. The lyrics are as poetic and mysterious as the efforts they put into creating these machines of ring modulation, rhythm and distortion. Beats made of crushed bits and the swirl of sweeping oscillators all make for a momentous and lyrical slapdown.

This work appeared first in two digital versions. For the vinyl release on Psychic Sounds an EP of additional unreleased material titled Moonlight Again, has been added. It is exciting to hear these extra songs, now brought out under the night sky and exposed to the lunar light.

Big Blood’s is uncategorizable music and refreshing. Even so, I can’t help but thinking of the silicon lifeforms forged in the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron when they created the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. Or of producer Joe Meek’s many field trips into avant-pop strangeness. The effort is reminiscent of material forged in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but remains contemporary. It’s a rapture for fans of the process-oriented electronica of Matmos or the ritualistic glitch ambience of Nocturnal Emissions. Big Blood devotees will delight in this overture to the human voice, transistors, and transcendent electric vibrations.
This is music for deep listening in the deep time of Deep Maine.

[Review of the original Big Blood release of Electric Voyeur]

ALESSANDRO “ASSO” STEFANA

Instrumental guitar music is one of my favorite things to listen to on the regular for rest and relaxation, right next to ambient. In particular, I am quite fond of the American primitive style, and anything with technical and gentle fingerpicking. Stefano delivers on that, but he also does some sampling and collage style work on this album, taking the voice of Roscoe Holcomb from various Smithsonian Folkways recordings and doing new music for the voice to accompany.
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My favorite of these is “Born and Raised in Covington.” Covington, Kentucky is right across the river from where I live, and the sounds of Kentucky are never too far from my mind. There the rivers of earth are made out of coal. Holcomb was a coal miner from the town of Daisy, further south in Perry, County. By contrast, Covington is a big city, in the shadow on Cincinnati on the other side of O-hi-o. The song tells a story of a man brought up by honest parents, and how he became a rambling boy in his twenties, and shot a man with his revolver when he saw his first true love walking with this other one instead of him. Then was sent to jail in Frankfurt, Kentucky’s capital, much to the tears and shame of his parents. Holcomb sings this one like no other, and the new musical arrangement given to it by Stefana is a reincarnation true to form and thoroughly metamodern.

[Alessandro "Asso" Stefana: Self-Titled review]

GWENIFER RAYMOND: LAST NIGHT I HEARD THE DOG STAR BARK

​With song titles like “Jack Parsons Blues” and “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds” you know you want to step inside and listen to this magisterial reckoning with American primitive guitar. You know you want to hear how she wrestles this fingerpicked beast into new worlds. Delve into the eternal mysteries of Sirius. Go on a voyage to hang out with the banjo players of Aleph One all the way to the Cattywomp and fields beyond… perfect album start to finish. So glad I saw the strange lights and followed Gwenifer up into the mountains.

IKUE MORI: OF GHOSTS & GOBLINS

Ikue Mori’s Of Ghosts and Goblins transforms the ghostly folklore of Lafcadio Hearn into a mesmerizing electronic séance—an album where myth, memory, and machine intertwine. Using her OP-1 as a spirit catcher, Mori conjures a world of shimmering sprites, fractured rhythms, and spectral beauty that feels both ancient and futuristic. An absolutely beautiful gemstone of magical music.

[Ikue Mori: Of Ghosts & Goblins review]

idialedyournumber : MOURNING GLOW

Coupled with intense rhythmic hooks and jaunty infectious melancholy lyrics, these short sweet pieces make me feel joyful and full of hope, even as the lyrics are moody and depressing.

Sometimes you just need a little Midwest Emo in your musical diet. The Midwest Emo genre comes from all those Midwest bands that pioneered the style in the 90s and oughts, perhaps best personified by the Illinois group American Football. idialedyournumber however is Pier Emo. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to being from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I never listened to a ton of Emo until recently, but sometimes you need to. It’s kind of like roughage. It cleanses the system. Or at least it cleanses my system. What it does to your system, I can’t be sure. Maybe listening to Emo is like giving yourself a system update. A necessary defragmentation for the mental-emotional hard drive.

[idialedyournumber: Mourning Glow review]

SUNNY WAR: ARMAGEDDON IN A SUMMER DRESS

​This album gutted me in the best possible way. Folk-punk is a genre I really like when it is done well, but it can go off the hobo freight train hopping rails a little too easy into sloganeering and trusty-punk railings against the corporate state. This album rails, but it is so authentic and vulnerable, and the musicianship so spot on, it elevates the promise of folk-punk once again to the highest form of what that genre can be. This doesn’t mean their need not be a message carried by the medium. Antiwar numbers like “Walking Contradiction” with Steve Ignorant tell it like it is, while the folksy “No One Calls Me Baby Anymore” take the tradition back to the roots while extending it to the future. “Ghosts” conjures up visions of blues and ancestors in the land, the spirit world, and how the person who perceives might be a little bit crazy, always on the fringe. This is fringe music that makes me feel folded in and at home in the borderlands.

JULIEN BAKER AND TORRES: SEND A PRAYER MY WAY

I feel a kinship with some of the music of Julien Baker. What I like about her music is how she wrestles with her Christian upbringing and faith. That’s something I can relate to, having been brought up in a fundamentalist church myself, and with the mental and emotional scars to show (though there were some good things that came out of the ordeal). I hadn’t been familiar with Torres before, but I very much liked this collaborative effort. Especially the song “Tuesday” about a mother ripping her daughter apart because of a teenage lesbian awakening and love affair. I heard the song around the time Dr. [sic] James Dobson died. Dobson was a big proponent of gay conversion therapy and the like and his Focus on the Family really focused on a lot of the wrong things, in my own opinion. Anyway, the convergence of hearing that news, and hearing this song really hit home for me, and the experience of people in my own family and many friends, the hurt and damage done to them just because of the judgment placed on them by Christians who want to get all up in their business about what they are doing with their bodies in private. Beyond all that, the music and the songwriting is excellent, as on the other songs like “Dirt” and “Send a Prayer My Way.”

“...Spend your whole life getting clean / just to wind up in the dirt...” 

HAINBACH & SIMON SPIESS: WE COLLIDE, WE SHATTER, WE GROW

​This album is like pure catnip for me on a conceptual level. The musicians played remotely over the internet into a resonating tank in Colorado, recalling both the telematic music of Maryanne Amacher and the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros. This kind of stuff is like candy for my brain. On the resonating emotional and visceral level, this is great experimental music, adventurous, bold. Hainbach’s energy and work ethic is matched by his commitment to creative exploration. Here a chance meeting with saxophonist Simon Spiess at a Berlin basketball court allowed for a new collaboration that was a sure slam dunk.

PHIL WESTERN: AFTERFLASH: A REMIXED TRIBUTE

Phil Western once said in an interview, “The quest is to create a timeless piece of music that never sounds old, or dated, or cliché.” If that was his mission statement as an electronic musician, he succeeded with aplomb. These remixes and re-workings by his friends, loved ones, people he touched continue to set the bar high for what can be done when pressing technology into service of the imagination. Yet it is not just for his creativity that so many people connected to Western and his work. From what I’ve read and heard he was beloved by everyone who knew him. It has certainly been true that all the music I’ve heard from Western’s heart, mind and imagination has touched me. He remains a source of inspiration and these versions are no exception.

[Phil Western: Afterflash review]

​SAAPATO: DECOMPOSITION: FOX ON A HIGHWAY

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out in this is an extended meditation on death. It’s a musical ode to the detritivores who come in and assist in the process of breaking down the constituent elements back to their component forms and returning them to the earth, or in this case into the pavement. Saapato took his his inspiration from a dead red fox he saw while driving to work, and the changes he observed in its carcass over the course of his commute day after day. Who knows when the muse will strike, but if a creator is open, a project can be given life by observing so-called “dead matter.”

[Saapato: Decomposition: Dead Fox on A Highway review]

EVERYDAY DUST: SHROUDED III, MOSSED IN TRANSLATION, RESURRECTION OF THE FOGHORNS

Everyday Dust has become one of my favorite experimental musicians working in the realm of electronics and musique concrete. Their compositions are esoteric and inspiring, mysterious and leave me in a state of wondrous, unsettled rapture. They are no slouch either when it comes to putting material out.
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Through white noise, thorough in its separation and diffraction of constituent tones, before reprocessing them and sending them back out into an abyss of stars as if these horns are calling to some alien entity or god far beyond the reaches of our usual means of communication.

[Resurrection of the Foghorns review]

​Everyday Dust returns with Shrouded III, a fever dream of decayed synths, eerie textures, and hallucinatory soundscapes that blur the line between madness and revelation. Paired with the wild remix project Mossed in Translation, these releases plunge deeper into the project’s haunted world—unsettling, immersive, and impossible to ignore.

[Shrouded III / Mossed in Translation review]

CHURCH OF HED: UNDER BLUE RIDGE SKIES

[This is the third volume in the Rivers of Asphalt series from Church of Hed, all aural travelogues along classic American roads. The first album, Rivers of Asphalt, takes Route 66 as its inspiration, while The Father Road is a journey across the Lincoln Highway. The Blue Ridge Parkway connects two National Parks, the Great Smoky Mountains, on the North Carolina side, over 469 miles to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

I love roads. Trails. Paths through the wilderness. Animal traces. Here in America many of our roads and highways started off as animal traces, then became Native American trails, and then made into roads as we know them today. I hope something of their original character remains, and it intrigues me to think of these roads being walked on and driven on by animals and humans in different times and places. All of us leaving our trace.

​This album is the sonic journal of one such trace, and it sallies forth over the gurgling streams and brooks of fuzzy prog and kraut adjacent synth workouts. It’s muscular music, building, swelling, climbing up the altitudes, but not without stretches of drone to see the cloud covered vistas and valleys below, before tripping back out into the surreal sensations of oscillating sequencers.

[Church of Hed : Under Blue Ridge Skies review]

ARROWOUNDS: LONELINESS OF THE HOLLOW EARTH EXPLORER V. 1 & 2

Arrowounds delivers the music, magic and mystery, solidifying the esoteric energies emanated from the underworld into the medium of this album. It’s a perfect soundtrack for getting lost in the labyrinthine depths waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of everyday Ohio and Kentucky. This is ritual shoegaze music for the seeker of the mysteries...

Ohio. The heart of it all. Place of mystery, place of magic. Former capital of North America when the Moundbuilders and Adena civilizations built their ancient earthworks that still inspire people with awe today. Home of the Loveland Frogman, of Bessie the Lake Erie monster, of a bigfoot type known as the Grassman (and you don’t necessarily need to be smoking any to see him). It is also the home to Hangar 18 at the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base where the remains of the alien and alien tech from the Roswell UFO crash were transported and kept so the military could reverse engineer the gear they salvaged from the flying saucer. Numerous other UFO sightings have been reported in Ohio’s Miami Valley. These may or may not have anything to do with the Air Force base and their secret operations. Not far from Ohio, and connecting it via a bridge that has now collapsed and been rebuilt, are the haunts of the Mothman and the Men in Black who were seen prowling around Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia in the aftermath of the sightings.

But that’s not all. The cryptids, UFO sightings and traces of former civilizations, just scratch the surface of the mysteries of Ohio. Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon cross the river into Kentucky and find the opening to the cave that leads the seeker downwards on a pathworking into the areas rich esoteric underground. Much of it literally is under the ground, in the Hollow Earth. Just ask the I-Am-The-Man from John Uri Lloyd’s proto-science fiction novel of alchemical illumination and underworld exploration, Etidorhpa, one of the inspirations for the album at hand. The book was illustrated by one J. Augustus Knapp, an artist from Cincinnati who went on to be the illustrator of Manly P. Hall’s splendorous elucidation of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Knapp later designed a tarot deck with Hall. This music also recalls the Hollow Earth theory of Ohioan, John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his disciples.

Later still in the 1960’s and 1970’s the magical revival kicked off by Eliphas Levi back in the 19th century that was taken up by such initiates as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, W.B. Yeats, and many others was in full sway. A loose cabal of pagans, polytheists and practitioners of Crowley’s Thelemic magick formed in Cincinnati, and centered around the (oc)cult band Bitter Blood Street Theater, later evolving into the bardic Owen Knight’s Blacklight Braille project. From Bitter Blood the emanations of their occult practices were reified down from the astral light and into the local music scene. Now here is some more music from the Athens, Ohio based Arrowounds. It might best be called “ritual shoegaze sludge,” and I mean that in the best possible way.

[The Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer vol. 1 review]

bvdub: 13

The emotional resonances of this album would seem to be marred by writing a review that cannot, by its very nature, encompass the fluxing changes of musical flow and depth captured on 13. Just listen to it and be swept into a world that’s always changing, fates of people and nations rising and falling. This is something we should be unconcerned about, and instead offer our trust, care and love back to the world.

I am reminded of this passage recently read in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel The Dispossessed just when the main character Shevek is about to go on a journey to another world. “You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

​This album is an extended meditation on the 13th chapter of the Tao Te Ching. 

[bvdub : 13 review]

SALLY ANNE MORGAN: SECOND CIRCLE THE HORIZON

​Those in the know, know what a song like “Oak Knower” means to some of us. This trail through the forest and mountains is conjured into the circle by fiddle, banjo, electric and acoustic guitar, piano, and various percussion. Hurdy Gurdy courtesy of Geologist makes an appearance as well. Exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail spill outside the circle into the world beyond.

Thanks for tuning in to listen and read about just some of my favorites from 2025. There was so much more I listened to, music past and present. There is always more to hear and find. I hope this guide helped in your own hunt for finding the frequencies that resonate.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed.” -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose