Niklas's thoughts

When I started reading Patrick Radden Keefe's new book, London Falling, it says 'This is a true story.'

I think there's a story to be heard here; a true story, not the true story. The subtitle of the book is 'a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family's search for truth'.

Manic Street Preachers released This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. The title says a lot.

What is truth?

Merriam-Webster define truth partly as

the body of real things, events, and facts. also the real facts about something

As any old quantum physicist and philosopher could tell you, truth is subjective unless it is defined; when truth is defined, it can still be interpreted differently by different people. Hard to come to terms with at times.

Underworld have started releasing what I think are new versions of old songs. First this, 'Kittens', today there's 'Pearl's Girl' which isn't available to share. Underworld are one of my favourite electronic-music bands. When I saw them live in the mid-1990s, I had to choose between taking the last bus home or spend the night under the stars. I danced to their gig, left happy, found a t-shirt-selling Englishman who'd overdosed on cannabis, then spent the night in his and his mate's t-shirt-filled tent.

I've also spent the morning listening to Sepultura's wonderful album Chaos A.D.. I discovered the greatness of Sepultura in 2025 and I'm making up for lost time. Their debut album, Beneath the Remains, is a thrash-metal masterpiece.

Let's not forget Nathan Micay. His soundtrack for TV-series The Industry, season 4, sometimes bests what Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) did with his soundtrack for Marty Supreme and what Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did in their soundtrack for, mainly, The Social Network and also the one for Challengers.

#music #soundtrack #philosophy #Underworld #NathanMicay #DanielLopatin #TrentReznor #AtticusRoss #MusicTips

This is the best neoclassical-cum-electronic album I've heard since... Jon Hopkins' last album? Or the album that Floating Points did with Pharaoh Sanders?

From the Bandcamp page:

Hand of Thought is the first full-length release by Indian composer Sanaya Ardeshir under her own name – introducing a parallel practice that exists alongside her work as electronic producer Sandunes. The album examines matrilineality – the tracing of kinship through the female bloodline – and its manifestation as intuition and wisdom through the trans-generational currency of music and her primary instrument – the piano. The album title is inspired by Kosho Uchiyama's Opening the Hand Of Thought – a seminal work in the development of Buddhism throughout East Asia.

#music #MusicTips

I love The Go! Team since way back.

Musically, the band combines indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of funk and Bollywood soundtracks, double dutch chants, old school hip-hop music and distorted guitars. Their songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources.

I fucking love The Go! Team. I love Ian Parton, the person behind the band, although it's a collective effort, it's clear that he holds the reins.

'Buy Nothing Day' rocks. 02:35 in, there's lightning; how can a band like this sound like a marching school orchestra and carry a groove that otherwise only people like Sly Stone and Funkadelic could push out?

I just let this wave roll over myself. There's something that The Go! Team do that no other artist does. No other fucking artist. The joyous atmosphere by this Brighton, UK band kind of epitomises what came from the USA in the 1970s and then enhanced it. I can't put my finger on it and I leave it be so.

The vocals are by Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, who've at times been truly great. Just as with The Go! Team proved by making albums that at times topped their debut, Best Coast did the same thing.

Bonus songs:

#music #MusicTips

There was recently an interesting article published in the New York Times: Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?

It’s a grim business to linger on the numbers. In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir “Ardent Spirits.” By 2009, the year “Ardent Spirits” was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?

A few magazines, of course, still run inspired book criticism; essential trees are still standing though the vast underbrush is gone. And the online discourse has its moments. But here’s another number: Not long ago, someone estimated that there were seven full-time book critics left in America. With The Post’s Book World gone, that number has dropped to five.

As a lonely and shellshocked survivor of this decimation, I find it hard not to envy the critics in London, which still has at least seven daily or Sunday papers in which a serious author might hope for a review. The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.

AI will, naturally, never replace humanity; even if Skynet happens and every single homo sapiens is physically murdered by machines, there's no replacement for people like Toni Morrison, Lester Bangs, Anthony Lane. From the article:

But here’s a catch with A.I. It’s easy to tell when a reference, or a comparison, or a sentence, doesn’t belong to a writer. Erudition and style aren’t forgeable for long; they still must be earned. As for A.I.’s sleek, space-efficient text, we’ve already grown accustomed to what that sounds like — the flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood. Reading it, you feel you’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.

At times, I've used Pangram, the AI detector service, to see how much some people are using AI. A former mountebank manager of mine used to answer team chat messages by physically scurrying away and then regurgitating something that AI handed to him without really knowing what he did. It reminds me of this video.

Is there a difference between people who use AI and people who are addicted to drugs? People who do drugs either want to feel something they can't feel without drugs or they want to feel nothing; people who use AI want to outsource thought and also outsource their ability to feel.

When doing drugs, there's a toll on yourself and other people.

When doing AI, the climate catastrophe marches on and you still have to reverse-engineer a pile of slop to be able to use any of what's usable.

Speaking for myself, the use of AI is often far worse than doing destructive drugs. I'm not kidding.

#ArtificialIntelligence #drugs #books #BookReviews

The median age where I work is quite low. Terrific! On the other hand, there's rarely talk about music, books, art, culture, film, or getting your rocks off in any way, you know?

The most experimental stuff I've heard people mention at work is Radiohead and The Strokes. So no, not a lot of experimental stuff.

From The Guardian:

At the end of their set at the second weekend of the California music festival, the band performed their 2016 song Oblivius in front of giant LED screens that showed a montage of world leaders whose death or ousting the CIA has either been a proven or suspected party in, as lead singer Julian Casablancas sang the lyrics: “What side you standing on?”

The montage showed Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, who was executed in 1961 by a Congolese firing squad with the backing of Belgian military. Lumumba was killed amid a separate CIA conspiracy to assassinate him due to the threat he posed to western control over Congo’s mineral resources, though it was Belgium that admitted “moral responsibility” and apologised for his murder in 2002.

The montage also showed Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered plot in 1954; and Bolivian president Juan José Torres, who was ousted in 1971 and then kidnapped and killed five years later.

Also shown was Chilean president Salvador Allende, who killed himself during the 1973 CIA-backed coup that toppled his socialist government and brought in the brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Though some still believe the US also played a role in Allende’s death, a scientific autopsy in 2011 confirmed there was “absolutely no doubt” he died by his own hand.

Other leaders shown in the montage included Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose removal from power in 1953 was exposed as a CIA-orchestrated coup in declassified US documents in 2013; and Martin Luther King Jr, who was assasinated in 1968 after years of surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA. However, US government involvement in his killing has never been proven and a department of justice investigation in 2000 found no evidence of a conspiracy.

Also shown were Panamanian military leader Omar Torrijos and Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós Aguilera, both of whom died in separate plane crashes in 1981 that were officially attributed to pilot error.

The Strokes’ montage closed on footage stating that more than 30 universities in Iran have been destroyed by US-Israeli airstrikes since they began earlier this year, followed by footage of the demolition of al-Israa University in Gaza, the last standing university in the Strip before Israeli forces destroyed it in 2024.

Casablancas told the audience he was “tempted to come out tonight with a laptop and show you guys some of those Iran Lego videos”, referring to the viral AI-generated clips made and distributed by pro-Iranian groups to ridicule Donald Trump’s administration.

“More facts than your local news. But they were taken down,” Casablancas said, blaming “fucking YouTube or government or whatever” before adding: “Land of the free, am I right?”

The Strokes go a long way at times. Their latest single sounds like drab shit though and it's unfortunately produced by Rick Rubin, but at least The Strokes have done some great stuff in the past – not to mention 'Oblivius' at Coachella. I dig how Casablancas's voice sounded when dragged through autotune.

And yes, there is loveliness about a band that has more chutzpah than most Swedish political parties.

#TheStrokes #protest #music #MusicTips #dissidence

In one breath:

Elliott Smith met a French girl and spent a couple of weeks with her and then they 'broke up' even though she had a boyfriend at the time and he misunderstood what she'd said so it ended without having ended.

This is an unreleased song. Place Pigalle was the working title for the album Figure 8.

Place Pigalle is a public square in Paris, France.

The girl and the boy met in New York City and went around town.

For more details on the story and the song, I urge you to get a hold of Jamie Fisher's coming book about Elliott Smith, Nobody Broke Your Heart. The book will be released on 25 August 2026.

#ElliottSmith #JamieFisher #music #MusicTips #passion

Have you heard M. Gessen's podcast The Idiot? I've read three of their books:

• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
• Surviving Autocracy
• The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

The books are mostly about Russia, fascism, humanity, and a story about the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombing. They're all humanistic stories, ones that tell people in more than two dimensions.

Now, the podcast is a little different because Gessen has made it about their 'least-liked cousin'.

The podcast is North American white-person-formatted: it goes on for too long and is kind of on valium at times. The exchanges between Gessen and their cousin are marvellous, not to mention FBI transcripts.

I won't give away information about the plot but the cousin is a very manipulative, scheming, lying, and treacherous individual, to say the least.

Is the podcast worth it? Yes, it is. Even though it goes on for too long at times, it's insightful and frustrating. I wish I could reach through the ether and slap the cousin, but then again, they just sound like a drab psychopath.

Gessen's way of reporting what happened is the interesting stuff to me. They're always good at cutting through faff and getting to the person behind it all: motives, thoughts, ways of thinking. The gist of the podcast enthralls, especially letters and conversations, but Gessen's style also shines through.

I long for another of their books.

#podcast #author #humanism

Lenny Henry gets it in the latest episode of The Assembly.

#humour #funny

Boards of Canada are about to release their new album, Inferno, the first album in 13 years. It's out on 29 May. Bleep have registered 'overwhelming demand' and I see why.

Boards of Canada is a mysterious band, like some other artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Here's my favourite song of theirs, 'Dayvan Cowboy'.

#music

These are photographs that I shot this morning in Stockholm, Sweden.

The text is in Swedish. It means 'Two years of genocide, more than 20,000 murdered children in Gaza'.

Each sheet of paper is a list of children that have been murdered by the Israeli government in Gaza in the past two years.

This is Hind Rajab. From Wikipedia:

Hind Rajab was a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Gaza war, which also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.

I aim to see the film The Voice of Hind Rajab very soon.

The Palestinian flag: red, white, green, black.

A close-up of one of the sheets of paper.

Another sheet of paper.

#Palestine #Gaza #murder #genocide #massacre #IDF #art #HindRajab #FreePalestine #israel