No one is less tolerable, even to themselves, than the person who meets with early success. 

Assured of their ineffable greatness, jealous of early victories, the greater the level of success the more someone becomes a prisoner of the castle they built with their own hands, unable to escape from the grim pictures staring down at them - as in a Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price - from the walls that only pretend to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the saved from the damned, the holy from the unholy.

 

 

There can be no doubt that the slow inevitable slide into the sea awaiting each of us is made a lot longer and steeper starting from the top of a mountain.

Up with REAL musicians and artists

Down with the endlessly rebrandable, leotard-encrusted, corporate boardroom-friendly AI-enhanced circus performers and their terrible taste in everything.

There is no god but... Nothing

Jim Al-Khalili explains:

Then it really is long overdue that we abandon entirely the leftover classical picture of the twin "arenas" of space and time in which material objects solemly and inexorably drift through imaginary ethers, and consider that "empty space" itself is the actual seed of what we refer to as both space AND time. They didn't exist beforehand. They literally spring out of the void in perennial fashion, as from a constant source. 

In other words, objects don't so much move "through" spacetime any more than they do through either space or time in isolation; rather things appear to us as immediate combinatorial possibilites that are more or less likely to remain, recombine, appear to move, or be annihilated based on an extraordinarily complex array of subtle mechanisms embedded deep inside of what was once thought to be... nothing but empty space!

Perhaps it was this implicit abandonment of the notion of a "body" subject to explicable external forces and undergirded by direct causal relationships that so unsettled Einstein about quantum dynamics, precipitating his infamous comments that God (understood by him to mean the God of philosophy, not of theology) "does not play dice".

https://ra.co/podcast/1016

Don't miss the Andrew Weatherall (posthumous) b2b set w/ DJ Harvey from the RA1000 extravaganza. Runs nearly 6 and a half hours and worth every minute! 

BTW, I can tell you that I'm much better at doing mental math than the authors of the blurb for this mix assume - even while stoned ;) I didn't have to clock the dates: 13 IS in fact bigger than 12, which would add together to make 25. Thanks for your opinion!

But, uh, anyway, about the mix. It reminds me of some rather more easygoing times when it was still kind of cool to be just some maladept loser freaking out to slowed-down disco beats on a battered hi-fi, later messing around making tracks with an old version of FruityLoops or Reason and generally not giving too much of a f*ck about anything in particular. That period seemed comparatively forward-looking and optimistic; excitement was bubbling around the new possibilites brought about by combining advanced DSP software with faster computer hardware to finally realize the "studio in a box" concept, combining multitrack recording and editing with virtual instruments and real-time effects processing and automation, until eventually interest began to shift toward modular systems and embedded software within dedicated devices. If you read old back issues of a magazine like Tape-Op, for example, this gradual change of emphasis is quite visible, contrasting the holdover from an earlier ethos to the often "boutique-y" advertisements for precise recreations of vintage gear that so many of today's producers lust after. There are some important reasons for this change, it could be added, but I think it's undeniable that something was lost when lots of people decided that the instrumentation was at least as important as, or in some cases even started to eclipse the importance of, the content of the finished work itself. The era referenced in this mix definitely had its flaws in the form of absurd amounts of signal oversaturation, 'blocky' arrangements, digital diarrhea and regular drug overconsumption, but in many ways the culture was very probably a lot more open-minded overall than it is now, when neatly tended guides and digests are always just a click away. And it wasn't all that long ago either.     

Note: I added the part about the mix a couple of hours later, upon which I discovered that the first two people to read this (according to the view count anyway) would have irretrievably missed it! Honestly I have absolutely no idea who they are. Of course I'm very sorry but I will refuse to pay for any potential psychological or other damage that may result from their having missed that part of the post, or from any other aspect of this blog, either positive or existing (somehow) by means of omission. Can't be too careful these days, right?

Out of line

We are habitually conditioned to treat of time as consisting of a long, singular "line", leading to such absurd questions as where must this line "begin" or "end" (how thick is it? is it really composed of infinitesimal points or 'slices'?). But these are only properties of lines, not of time. What does a line have to do with time? 

If time is really any "thing" at all, the one "thing" it most definitely is NOT is a line.

No force apart from traditional religion is capable of corrupting an otherwise rational person into sincerely believing that maiming, starving and denying medical care to thousands of innocent children is equivalent to doing "God's work."  

Liar in Chief

The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, to disobey your orders.