The first is about genre:
Autechre pre-cognitively side-stepped this whole affair with the release of Confield in 2001, by retreating so far from, or advancing so far past, genre conventions that their deep influences and source material can now only be glimpsed as if from the inside of a multi-faceted gem, riven with fractures – all temporal, spatial information prismatically disrupted way past the threshold of rational categorisation.
… and the second is about IDM:
]]>The idea that the second IDM stops being formally groundbreaking and era-defining it loses its worth – no matter how enjoyable or exciting it is – is itself a philosophical idea that should be interrogated. Like, using one’s intellectual heft to help formalise the end of one stage in a cultural model but not to bother worrying about what comes next is, at best a job half done, and at worst a self-aggrandising act of vandalism, ceding too much space to the most conservative voices at work today generally (and allowing too much space for people who have strong opinions on trance remixes of Burial to take centre stage). It was the thrill of jouissance that first attracted me to this kind of music some three decades or so ago but that was simply the successful beach head of an overwhelming invasion. To suggest it was solely the newness in itself that gave this music worth is, to be frank, disappointing and narrow-shouldered.
]]>In believing the issues we face are systemic (true), and that there are no individual solutions to systemic issues (mostly true), we’ve jumped the gun to the point that it feels like any display of personal agency is viewed as pointless, or not-enough, or besides-the-point, or even downright impossible to actualize. We’ve (rightly) reacted to capitalism’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality by saying that only collective change will change the world, but then, perhaps, gone too far into believing that means nothing we do individually really matters. Which, I think, is actually a sign of the way the internet has infected our brains.
Nowhere is this better evidenced than in the continuing debate over loneliness. People are arguing ad nauseam, saying, “no it’s not phones, it’s the fact that the world is more expensive.” On YouTube and TikTok, the idea of third places is now common fodder for discourse—we are lonely because there’s nowhere to hang out. (As I’ve argued, these things are part and parcel: society has become more hostile to public life and phones and the internet are enablers of that hostility). But, I think our discourse around these issues is a sign of our hostility toward the idea of personal agency, and the idea that the world is changeable.
It’s as if we’re collectively reinforcing the idea that nothing matters, that no individual action can help remedy our lonely world, by trapping ourselves in an online ouroboros of argumentation, waiting to discover the perfect solution to loneliness before anyone actually does anything about it. It’s like that perennial, “someone should open a queer cafe” meme. At some point, you just need to go to a Barnes and Noble and hang out with some queer people or whatever.
]]>[…] I refer to objects as resting places for life because they stabilise human life. The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity. We can linger with objects. With information, however, we cannot.
If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence it’s impossible to linger on information. That’s how it differs from objects. Information puts the cognitive system itself into a state of anxiety. We encounter information with the suspicion that it could just as easily be something else. It is accompanied by basic distrust. It strengthens the contingency experience.
]]>In small pollination songs, in stifled dungeon music, in stirring strains flowing across desolate places, in smaller revolutions, in molecular experiments within arachnean networks, at the shorelines of “no return”, something else sings. Something crosses. You’ll never capture it, not fully. You can only touch traces of its awkward glory. You might find pieces of it as we notice that conferences aren’t doing as much as we want them to do, and that we need para-pedagogical, postactivist experiments in the carnivalesque perhaps just as much as we need instruction; you might notice traces of “it” as we feel the grief that dances across partisan lines; you might sense the tingling sensation of it as a politician admits that contemporary politics is stuck on itself, and can’t seem to rise to the occasion. You might smile then because you’d know what I know and feel what I feel – that when one comes to one’s death, when one arrives at the door of no return, when one touches the agnostos theos, the tribute to the unknown god, it is not a rising that is needed.
Over winter break, I decided to get certified in React, setup an S3 bucket, and build an interactive discography for myself.
With the turbulence and layoffs at Bandcamp, I no longer trust the platform to be the canonical source of information about my music.
I built it with these values in mind:
This project was heavily inspired by my experience building norns.community.
The source code for the React frontend is here and the @tyleretters/discography NPM package is here.
The final result can be explored at: discography.tyleretters.com
The domain of “discographies” is rich. Individuals are can be part of many different projects/bands/orchestras/etc. Each project can release multiple albums, singles, and remixes. Each release has album art, notes, credits, and multiple tracks. Each track has a title, a duration, and an audio file. It is a domain I know intimately well.
My discography dates back to 2005 and I knew I’d be entering a lot of data by hand. I didn’t want to manage a database for a number of reasons. First, it adds cost, overhead, and a bigger attack surface. Second, I have less than 50 releases, so a text file of some sort seemed just fine from a scale standpoint.
I chose YML because it is nice to work with. I spent a day or two enriching the discography data I had already built for the discography page.
I then wrote a YML to JSON converter in Python. Publishing my discography as JSON means that multiple applications can consume it in an open format.
I then published the package to NPM. Now, anytime I want to work with my discography I can simply run:
npm init
npm install @tyleretters/discography
… and I’ll have everything I need! (I also love the idea of having this package available whenever I need an arbitrary data source to test something out.)
The package is publicly available on npm.
I created a new React app and installed my @tyleretters/discography
package. Since the package is written in TypeScript, I made sure to export the Release
and Track
interfaces. Ensuring my React components adhered to these interfaces made development fun because everything seemed to “just work.” Here’s what the interfaces look like as of writing:
export interface Release {
title: string
project: string
released: string
type: string
format: string
role: string
label: string
mp3: boolean
wav: boolean
tracks: Array<Track>
notes: string
credits: string
release_slug: string
project_slug: string
cover_url: string
id: string
}
export interface Track {
number: number
title: string
length: string
mp3_url?: string
wav_url?: string
id: string
}
From there it was really quick work setup a basic layout:
I configured GitHub Pages to serve my application so I could test it out on my phone. I always like setting up CI/CD as early as possible in a project so that I have plenty of time to work out the nuances as I go. There is nothing worse than scrambling to do your “first deployment” when you’re ready to be done with the project.
Alright, I have my data, a React app, a URL serving the app… but what about images and music?
I wanted all images and music to be hosted in a public S3 bucket. I named the bucket “Intertext” because that is my one-man, non-label. After configuring permissions I was able to create a simple workflow to easily sync assets with the s3cmd
utility:
cd ~/projects/intertext
s3cmd sync . s3://intertext --exclude ".DS_Store"
I spent another half-day harvesting images, updating the NPM package accordingly, and was able to readily consume the assets in my React app.
It quickly became clear this was going to be one of those “lifetime projects” I’ll curate for many years to come. In these cases, it is important for me to declare a MVP (minimum viable product) and give it the old v1.0.0
release number sooner than later.
As of today, I only have MP3’s from my latest release IN DARKNESS RADIANT available, but in the coming days and weeks I plan on adding:
I look forward to enhancing the application and backfilling more music from my catalog in the days to come.
Until then, check it out!
]]>I’m sitting up in bed, heartbeat racing from another nightmare. This one was a tangle of lost friends, failed drugstore bathroom lip-piercing operations, unread but undoubtedly horrible text messages, shame, and familial dissolution. I think back. Any triggering events today? Not really… except for dynamiting this leviathan psychic logjam. Ah. Yes. Such things always have unforeseen consequences downstream with me.
“Autocomplete is already fascism.”
— Anon
Unable to find the comforting quote I am looking for with my usual, privacy-oriented search engine, I resort to Google. I type the author’s name and am greeted with several suggestions. In my weakened and suggestive state I tap on the first autocompleted query.
A barrage of listicles ensnares me for five minutes before I wrestle free and regain my agency, back out, and refine my query with intent and a double-shot of anger. Several more failures before I begin writing this post. Now, it is time to share the quote but I don’t have it loaded onto my clipboard. I give it the Tyler Etters Akashic Hail Mary: clumsily recalling every word to the best of my memory. Dry and raw and damn the author’s name and damn the grammar. Only word proximity and the potpourri jouissance matter. Like a composite criminal sketch via eyewitness accounts, each weeks stale. I type, “in the 20th century we must regard everyone we meet as the walking wounded.” A hit! Ah. Yes. It was Robert Anton Wilson, not Hunter S. Thompson. No wonder my queries were failing:
“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”
— Robert Anton Wilson
Knowing this quote is about a half a century old makes it sting even more. Well, good thing I have a head full of Hunter S. Thompson now:
“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
Making the right music. That’s the new dream now. The old ones, the pre-2020 ones, the ones about my career and my family and my friends and my lifestyle and my aspirations and how the world could be and (even worse) how the world is — those dreams are all dead.
Moreover, lots of those people are dead. Again, both literally and metaphorically.
It is important to mourn when a relationship dies. The shift from bandmate to friend, the shift from friend to enemy, the shift from acquaintance to excommunicated, the shift from colleague to LinkedIn Connection, the shift from role model to embarrassment, the shift from inbox to buried: deaths all.
The best kinds of deaths are consensual and controlled. The worst kinds are surprising and violent. The ghosts of these ones can linger for years, sometimes for generations, before they’re exorcised. Their ravenous hauntings are capable of ruining even the sunniest of days.
Here, in 2023, we’re given more opportunities to experiences death than ever before. It is one of the reasons I’ve worked to kick my universally accepted social media addictions so hard. Like caffeine, we’ve all agreed it’s OK to be ingest this shit all day. Freebasing the apocalypse between meetings. Doomscrolling until you OD on terrorism, climate collapse, pornographic solicitations, wails from artificial intelligence, all jumbled together with posts from people you think (?) you actually know and care about. It’s all too much for me to handle. We’re all so many beautiful people and we’re all dying everyday. I’m too empathic, probably too neurotic, definitely too romantic for such a system to ever be healthy for me. (Fuck, I’m thankful I met my wife before the Age of Tinder.)
But death is a form of change and change is perhaps the only constant. I accept this. I do not fear death, nor do I fear letting my dreams die. No, the only thing I truly fear is that I will never change. That I will be trapped in some sort of entropic stasis-prison, where healing is just as impossible as decay. A zombie, chained to my own looping and unresolved traumas. A personal hell of grief and anxiety.
It is becoming increasingly clear I’ve been trapped in exactly this sort of prison for several years. And my old dreams, no matter how innocent and pure, are just as effective prison bars as any.
“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
Making the right music… I think about the discographies of artists like Celer, bvdub, and Leyland Kirby. I smile. They get it. Or at least, I project that they get it.
Listening to music, asynchronous or otherwise, is a communal act. And the practices between musicians themselves is similarly chartered. But in 2023, our folk traditions must be haruspexed from what digital entrails are left in our wakes, before they succumb to bit-rot.
If the Golden Age of music social media was heralded by the the MySpaces, Discogs, and last.fms, the Silver Age’s avatars were the SoundClouds, Bandcamps, Spotifys. It then follows are must be in Dark Age. Subcultures can still spread like ivy or lichen across the glossy cubes of Silicon Valley, despite the oppression of the algorithms. Their glass façades can be warm in the sun, even comfortable, if you can follow the changes.
“You won’t find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
Ending a Dream of Slumber is easy. Simply wake up.
Ending a Big Dream - like the American one - is much more fraught. It is difficult to see a result not named Achievement as anything but that shameful one named Failure. But if you realize your Big Dream was illusory all along, the kindest thing you can possibly do for yourself is let it go as with haste. And with gratitude.
]]>I started development of the game in 2022 knowing it was unfathomably large, that by the time it was complete most of the coral reefs could be dead, that it would be an endurance testing multi-media and multi-decade endeavor.
What I didn’t know is that so much of the problem-spaces inherent in game development would hold so little of my interest. It is for this reason alone I am throwing in the towel, raising the white flag, and letting it sink into the abyss of forgetting. To me, this is ultimately an act of energy-protecting selfishness and radical self-kindness.
Said plainly: I’m unwilling to invest the time into solving the problems needed to deliver the vision. (Much more on these problems below.)
I assure you if I were to become magically and unfathomably wealthy overnight, I would likely open a small studio and pay others a livable wage to solve these problems for me. But, as it stands today, I have come to terms with the fact I have aspirations to create what is essentially a “AAA” gaming experience with only my free time and the generously and sporadically donated time of others. I’ve been burning the midnight and weekend oil for almost two years and the finish line only grows further away. I looked to small indie studios and creators like Cardboard Computer, XRA, Hundred Rabbits, and ENDESGA as role models and proof I too could do it.
And truth be told, I know I could.
But I’d prefer not to.
The game started on norns. I was riding high from the success and popularity of some of my other projects on the platform, so it was a natural choice. But norns isn’t a gaming platform, it’s a music platform. So I went dutifully to work, excavating and building the foundation for all the myriad of things a game needs to tick. But each brick seemed to spawn the need for two more bricks and I began to grow suspicious.
Soot is a perfect example. One of the first choices you make (consciously or not) with a 2D game is whether to render graphics on the fly or show pre-drawn images. I knew I was going to show images. Thus: Soot! A framework for manipulating pre-drawn images on norns. It was an absolutely necessary building block for the game to work, yes… but building and maintaining a sprite library isn’t something that actually excites me. Moreover, animating sprites doesn’t even really excite me! The sprites are just medium to convey the concepts and messages of the story, the thing that actually excites me.
Soot is just one example of dozens of similar several-layers-removed-from-the-actually-fun dilemmas development of the game presented to me. At some point I realized I was spending all my energy thrashing between frustrating problems. I kept promising myself I’d get to “the good stuff” if I could just figure out one more problem of the day. And when I would finally treat myself to working on the story itself, any feelings of absolute elation were quickly stifled with harsh realization as to how far away sharing “the good stuff” actually was.
Here are some of the other problems I didn’t want to solve, but knew I had to:
At some point CCI had become a deep-time MMORPG, would be primarily played in the browser, had interconnected norns components, was sorta like crypto-sudoku, and would also be a card game. Last year around this time I made a dependency map:
If I were to update this for today it would be ten times the size.
Worse, my other artistic practices suffered. It is no coincidence I have released less music during this era than any other in my career. Whenever I would work on non-CCI music, I felt a massive amount of guilt; like my time was being squandered and ought to be spent elsewhere.
All I really want to do with CCI is tell the story. And if this is true, why not just write a novel? Or a collection of short stories? Or a novella?
Good questions.
And maybe I will… but certainly not now.
Now, I need some time and space from the project. I have more code, images, reference documentation, architecture diagrams, journal entries, songs, sound effects, notes, plans, maps, and assets than I’ve ever created for a project. And most of these don’t really serve the story of CCI. They serve the game of CCI.
And if I’ve learned anything from this endeavor, it’s this: I am not a game developer.
The world of CCI continues to captivate me. We built this collaboratively and in a manner not dissimilar from the very best TTRPG experiences. To everyone that has contributed stories, images, music, and art: thank you. It is my sincerest hope the act of creation and sharing brought inherent joy. Know that you are always welcome in this world, for it is yours just as much as it is mine.
To everyone who has a story, song, bit of code, or character in flight: I am sorry. There will be no opportunity to share what you’ve done. No flaming arrow shot into a burial ship or massive send off with confetti and bunting. No scrapbook of memorabilia and ephemera. No compilation album or documentary or retrospective or anthology. These things all crossed my mind but none of it feels right.
No, it is my wish for CCI: The Game to fade away with as little fanfare as possible.
Perhaps I will return to the world of CCI one day, but now I need to write this post, share it with you all, hit the power switches, let the pumps fail, and watch it all sink into the sea.
I feel the weight lifting already.
]]>Seven years later, it mutated into tyler etters & the northern information movement with the release of the geometrie of our lost cause. This marked chapter one of a nine album project called the trilogy of trilogies.
2020’s The Arecibo Lamentations saw the designation return to simply Northern Information.
Later that year, as the pandemic raged, the Applied Sciences & Phantasms Working Division was established and the GitHub organization was instantiated.
2021 brought about an industrious shift to Northern Information, LLC as I explored various capitalistic ventures with the entity. Now, in 2023, I am in the final steps of dissolving the LLC and I couldn’t be more relieved.
Northern Information has always been my icebreaker - my vessel with which to cut through the harsh seas of time. It has served as a beacon, a publishing house, a website, a broadcast station, a band, a company…
While its callsign and tactics may have changed over the years, its objective has remained ever constant: the future.
]]>In April 2020, Cayley turned his attention to the recently declared pandemic and the measures being taken against it. His purpose was not to offer policy prescriptions but to draw into view ‘the practised certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable’. How was it that, almost overnight, the concept of ‘lockdown’ - previously a measure used by prison authorities against rioting inmates - had come to seem obvious, not just accepted but demanded, on the scale of whole countries? He was struck by the ease with which we grant authority to ‘models’ of how this new disease would spread that could only be based, at best, on educated guesswork. What were the longer trends in our understanding of ourselves and our societies that laid the foundations for such a response and where would this take us next?
Elsewhere in the book:
The work of science can and should inform the decisions we make, but to put science in the position of leading, while the rest of us fall in behind and follow, is to go beyond what can be asked of it.
This long one:
For all the history of mortality statistics, there has never been a moment outside of wartime - and scarcely within wartime, for that matter - when the numbering of the dead has impinged so relentlessly on public consciousness. The box with the big red numbers and accompanying charts became a fixture of the newspaper homepage. The national totals were painted on the placards of protesters at the gates of government buildings, demanding stricter measures. Meanwhile, across the widening gulf of pandemic politics, the same statistics were a focus of scepticism. Questions about co-morbidities and the difference between ‘dying with’ and ‘dying from’ Covid led down rabbit holes of claim and counterclaim.
Let’s assume, if only as a thought experiment, that all the numbers were accurate. Because I want to say that the sceptics would still have a point, somewhat like the intuition I suggested underlies the Deep Adaptation paper. However accurate the numbers are, they do not adequately represent the reality they offer to describe. In the power given to the numbers, this new prominence of a particular way of representing reality, there is something troubling. Because why should it stop here? If the ultimate criterion by which the life of a society is to be structured is the prevention of deaths, then by this logic, we ought to have a dashboard that includes all the other ways that people die. Such a dashboard would be prominently displayed, it would form the basis of governance and the frame of our civic duty, the reference point according to which we should all feel entitled to engage in the moral policing of our own and each other’s behaviour. We should never return to the carelessness of pre-Covid existence, in which we did not base our actions on a constant awareness of ourselves and others as potential vectors of transmission.
If this does not sound like the world you want to inhabit, if you feel that there might at least be some balance required here, then whatever your position on masks or vaccine mandates, I suggest that you should oppose the condemnation and exclusion from the space of reasonable discussion that has been the fate of anyone who tried to articulate their misgivings about the way our governments responded to the virus.
If your sense is that it will stop here, then, without venturing down all the rabbit holes of alternative explanations, I would ask you to join me in wondering what the last three years have been about - since, by the logic of preventing deaths, there is no reason not to go on dealing with every human encounter as, first and foremost, an opportunity for the spread of disease.
Finally:
]]>The trouble is that this one-sided approach to truth can’t help fueling the other way people have found of resolving the cognitive dissonance. For a significant minority has swung in the opposite direction, treating the whole pandemic as an orchestrated lie. It is hard to get a clear sense of the breadth and depth of adherence to conspiracy theories about Covid, since any attempt to engage critically with the dominant narrative is likely to get you denounced as a wingnut. But faced with a response which seems disproportionate to the disease, and surrounded by friends and family who are convinced that Covid is far deadlier than the evidence suggests, many of our fellow citizens went looking for the hidden agenda, the interests served by lockdowns and vaccine passports.
At the risk of adopting the most unpopular position imaginable after three years of Covid culture wars, I find myself sympathising with all sides: with those who understandably believe themselves to be in far greater danger from the virus than the evidence suggests; with those who saw such exaggerated fear as necessary and desirable; with those who reasonably ask why we should suddenly trust the drug companies, with their history of skewing medical research in the interests of profit, and who mistrust the agendas of Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates.
]]>The idea suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history will begin to orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are thought of as rustic, bizarre or “old-timey”; that is, towards the “ghost” of the past. In this, it is has some similarity with the cyberpunk literary movement. Derrida holds that because of this intellectual realignment, the end of history will be unsatisfactory and untenable.