I'm reading a coming biography about Elliott Smith, named Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith.

So far, I've only read the introduction. It bears the hallmarks of a great fucking book.

Twenty-three years after his death, Elliott still isn’t particularly well known, or well understood, but he is terribly loved. The task of understanding and preserving his legacy has become a collective project. There are YouTube accounts like I Remember Elliott; his old fan site Sweet Adeline, defiantly mired in Web 1.0; oral-history blogs like so flawed and drunk and perfect still; Smiling at Confusion, a site for posting guitar tabs, guidance on fingerings and chords. Fans share bootleg recordings and unreleased songs, reflections on his lyrics or entreaties for help understanding them, and they speculate darkly on his death. Below videos you’ll find hundreds of comments, people gushing over Elliott’s fingerpicking, arguing about whether he’s on something at this concert or just tired but clean, thanking him for accompanying them through depression or addiction, for making them feel less alone.

What is immediate, what is human, that is love.

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Recently, a friend asked me to run some of their works through AI to see what it would create. Instantly it generated some seemingly worthwhile stuff but in actuality, AI is autocorrect on steroids. My friend isn't very knowledgeable around AI but they produce stuff that's, frankly, some of the best I've ever read and heard in their 'fields'.

Three recent articles about AI:

• AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
• Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
• The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is one of my favourite modern philosophers. I highly recommend Ray Monk's beautiful Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

A recently-published article on large language models (LLMs) as they relate to Wittgenstein's views on language, semantics, and mathematics is very interesting indeed.

When Wittgenstein referred to the “beginning of the end of humanity,” he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms on the order of The Matrix or The Terminator or even Dr. Strangelove. He was referring to the end of humanity not primarily in terms of its biological survival, but in terms of what he called the “form of life” we inhabit. That form of life is threatened not so much by industrialization, nukes, robots, or AI agents as by a way of thinking that lowers human life to the plane of science and technology. Wittgenstein’s attempt to draw attention to that way of thinking—and dissuade us from it—is of the utmost importance in an era where the developing AI ideology threatens to further distort our understanding of how we use language and how we live.

A more in-depth excerpt from the wondrously and sharply written article:

The parts of the Investigations where Wittgenstein probes our concepts of thinking and understanding can help us escape the conceptual muddles that plague discussions and debates over AI and so-called “artificial general intelligence.”

“One of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment,” according to Wittgenstein, arises when a noun like “meaning” or “number” “makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.” We assume that our language works principally by way of reference, so that where there is a noun there must be a thing it points to. But referring to objects is just one of language’s many functions or games. Instead of looking for the things behind our words, Wittgenstein proposes studying the grammar of the language game: the role words play—and don’t play—in these activities.

When we reflect on words like “meaning,” “thinking,” “understanding,” and “reasoning,” Wittgenstein argues, a certain picture immediately enters our heads: an internal process existing in the brain or mind that enables or somehow gives life to outwardly meaningful expressions. But, Wittgenstein asks, “What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?” Is it a kind of picture, so that I see an image of a pen in my mind’s eye when I hear the word “pen”? Do I then compare my inner picture to my experience of the outer world in order to determine whether it would be appropriate to use the word “pen”? Does some correspondence between this internal process and my expression “pen” somehow constitute the meaning?

The idea of meaning as an internal process seems unproblematic at first, even unavoidable, but, as Wittgenstein shows, it’s not clear what role such a process would actually be playing. He asks his reader, for example, to “say: ‘Yes, this pen is blunt. Oh well, it’ll do.’ First, with thought; then without thought; then just think the thought without the words.” Having conducted these absurd self-examinations, Wittgenstein asks us to reflect, “What did the thought, as it existed before its expression, consist in?”

His point is that our intuitive idea of meaning as an inner correlate of our outward expressions breaks down when it is taken as something like a scientific theory for what’s really going on when we use language. This failure shouldn’t surprise us. Our language did not evolve for scientific or metaphysical purposes, but just to help us make do and get along in the real world.

The picture of thought as an internal process accompanying our use of language is just that: a picture. It is unproblematic insofar as it arises in everyday language, as when I clarify a misunderstanding by telling you, after you’ve mistakenly handed me a red pen on the desk, “No, I meant that blue pen on the bookshelf.” But that sentence is not a claim about the state of my brain a moment ago; it could not be confirmed or disconfirmed by some kind of retroactive brain scan. It’s merely a way to advance a practical project that has gone off the rails. If it’s anywhere, meaning is in that project, not in my brain.

Of course, we might imagine that some industrious cognitive scientist equipped with the latest in brain-imaging technology might actually try to establish a causal connection between a particular brain state and the correct usage of the word “pen.” But even in that case, would it be correct to say that with a coordinated set of brain images we’ve in some sense located the meaning of the word “pen”? In what sense would the internal state that shows up on the scan explain the use or understanding of the word? Would it be analogous to the way the properties of an internal combustion engine can help explain the forward motion of a car?

This example shows how strange it is to use an examination of brain states instead of actual behavior as a criterion for ascribing understanding. If we’re looking for understanding and meaning, Wittgenstein thinks, we will find them in the various things we do with language and not in some internal process that accompanies our use of language.

This is just one of the strategies Wittgenstein uses to try to dissuade his readers from a mechanical, pseudoscientific understanding of language as it is embedded in human practices. The Investigations doesn’t attempt to refute this false understanding by formal, analytic argumentation the way a scientist or science-imitating philosopher might. Wittgenstein instead tries to show its limitations. His makeshift strategies—describing language games, imagining dialogues, conducting thought experiments, and drawing analogies—show how the scientific worldview has strayed from narrowly defined areas where it actually has purchase and started to distort our understanding of domains where it doesn’t belong.

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It all reminds me of Noam Chomsky's discussion with Michel Gondry in the documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?. The documentary is packed with discussion on matters like universal grammar, but I remember Chomsky talking about how a small child can see a tall man who's happy; the child immediately knows that man is happy, and can draw parallels that allow the child to equally immediately know that not every man who is tall is happy, nor that every man is happy. The two-year-old Watumull/Roberts/Chomsky article The False Promise of ChatGPT says much about this.

It's not hard to know where happiness is found. To experience happiness is another thing, and AI won't help us there.

#ArtificialIntelligence #music #ElliottSmith #NoamChomsky #LudwigWittgenstein

David Stubbs tells the following words which are culled from his brilliant book Future Days. This passage mostly tells us about an action courtesy of Nikel Pallat, the manager for music group Ton Steine Scherben.

There were others, however, including Nikel Pallat, manager of hard-leftist polemical rockers Ton Steine Scherben, who regarded Kaiser as a typical have-it-both-ways liberal bullshitter. This schism came to a head in a televised debate involving the pair on a WDR talkshow in 1971, whose discussion went under the heading ‘Pop & Co – Die “andere” Musik zwischen Protest und Markt’ (‘Pop & Co. – The “Other” Music between Protest and Marketplace’), which can be viewed on YouTube. Its period quaintness lies not just in the length of the hair of the participants, the studio smoking or the orangeness of Kaiser’s jumper, which merely to look at is to overdose on Vitamin C. It’s in the admirably earnest accommodation of those discussing the feasibility and possibility of the overthrow of capitalism through rock music. As Kaiser seeks to dampen this far-left yearning, the debate begins to heat up. Translated, the action runs as follows.

‘Societal change will come in an evolutionary process,’ says Kaiser. ‘That isn’t something that’ll happen tomorrow, but a development that will take probably a hundred years.’ He points out that immediate change was the illusion of the people who marched in the 1960s, important though these protests were. Pallat angrily dismisses this Fabian talk of slow, evolutionary progress, suggesting that it amounts to support for continued oppression.

‘You are working for the oppressor, not against the oppressor. Do you realise that?’ Kaiser defends himself, saying that one has to understand how the media work. ‘Who are you working for?’ retorts Pallat, sharply.

‘You cannot dispute that you are working for the capitalist.’ ‘Who do you represent here?’ comes back Kaiser, with equal sharpness. ‘Don’t you think the TV isn’t also a capitalist organ?’ (Here the moderator intervenes to point out that Kaiser isn’t speaking on behalf of TV.)

It’s all too much for Pallat. ‘Here we have TV making this shit-liberal programme we’re having an opportunity to go on about anti-materialism – socialism … we shouldn’t speak about evolution but revolution, yeah? And objectively nothing is changing about oppression. TV is a tool of oppression by general society. And that’s why it is completely obvious that if something should still happen, then one has to stand against the oppressor and not be neutral … and that’s why I am going to destroy this table now.’

Whereupon, true to his word, he produces from his inside jacket pocket an axe and, snarling and swearing, commences to bash the table as the rest of the panellists edge away in consternation. It is not so much the table towards which he bears a grudge but its symbolic role as polite vortex of sedentary, liberal consensus. Once he has completed his attempted assault on the offending piece of furniture, which proves remarkably resistant to his ferocious efforts, he says, ‘So, let’s continue our discussion.’ No one else, however, is inclined to do so.

Taking full advantage of the freedom temporarily afforded him by his axe to do as he pleases, he gathers up the microphones abandoned on what’s left of the table and stuffs them into his pockets, announcing that he is commandeering them for the oppressed. ‘I need the microphones for the young people who are sitting in jail.’

The resilience of the table is a metaphor of sorts for the resilience of a certain leftist strain of German tolerance and liberality at that time, whose broadmindedness and reasonableness was capable of withstanding even axe attack. The very fact that Pallat had an axe about his person in the studio suggests to the cynical an element of premeditation to his outburst. Nonetheless, as insurrectionary television goes, it rather puts the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy in the shade.

Alongside Can and Faust, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld also listed Ton Steine Scherben as one of the seventies German groups he most admired. On the strength of this performance, it’s not hard to see why. It shows also the depth of feeling and revolutionary commitment that had seized the hearts and minds of the more radical young Germans, as well as Kaiser’s ability to put people’s backs up.

#music #destruction #Germany #video #politics #BlixaBargeld #EinsturzendeNeubauten

Stop. Listen.

Tirakat is a very funky album. From the album description:

Tirakat brings together Jakarta-based trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane in a collaboration shaped by long-standing cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world. Ali’s blend of 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms meets Charif’s long-running exploration of cross-regional sound, rooted in a shared musical vocabulary rather than genre.

Bar the hardcore rock and hip-hop, this is how Beastie Boys could have sounded if they'd grown up in Jakarta and Lebanon instead of the USA.

This is inventive, extremely groovy, and romantic. Strings mingling with fuzzed guitars and beats that would make any hip-hop producer salivate? Just check out the track 'Pejokan Funk'. You want a hazy, arpeggio-riddled harpsichord dream track set to the oboe and sitar? Try 'SILK END'.

Don't sleep on this. Buy or stream it via this page.

#music #funk #groovy #soul #HabibiFunk

I've looked for a band to make me stop wishing Alvvays would release a new album like Blue Rev. That won't happen but having said that, Brink, the new album by Girl Scout, is very good.

There are many guitar-based melodies and the singer is nearly as good as the lead singer in Alvvays. Differ'nt strokes, y'all.

I'm such a sucker for good guitar-based music.

#music

Just as Miley Cyrus could potentially be seen as 'bad' for covering a Cocteau Twins song, that is, to me, not even interesting to consider.

First, it's obvious that Miley loves the track. Second, I love her talk before and during the song; reverence is overrated. Third, the result is a gateway into the universe that is Cocteau Twins, and that, friends, is never bad.

This morning I read a well-conceived and -written book excerpt about the villain as concept. The book is Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley. The book excerpt is found in this LitHub post.

The excerpt starts by focusing on Heidi Montag, The Villain of fantastic TV series The Hills.

A villain is just Heidi Montag wanting to make money for being famous. She just wants to follow her own path. Her “flaws” are on the outside, and she’ll enumerate the ways in which she’s tried to fix them, not squirrel them away so they can do damage in the dark. Villains may not be perfect, but at least you know who they are.

Reality TV, despite all the moral hand-wringing and critical disdain surrounding it, has never really been so different from other kinds of American media. It fits neatly into the broader cultural landscape of torn social ties, disconnection and alienation, and the hunger for a life that feels more real and the belief that video somehow offers a cure.

The genre may actually be most similar to the televisual medium that sits on the opposite end of the respectability spectrum, vaunted as so critical to maintaining the American republic: the news.

Another excerpt:

Heidi is a storyteller. She conceives her lines and delivers them in the moment, reacting to the scripts of the people around her, such as the newscaster interviewing her.

Many have followed in Heidi’s steps—Christine Quinn, Donald Trump, the Kardashians—and they’ve been so successful because America had been heading in Heidi’s direction since its founding. She is the self- made soul, speaking the story of herself into existence, redefining the wilderness as she sees it, finding love and a home in the process.

This is the strange trajectory that hybrid homes get pushed along by the digital forces running through them. Video’s paranoia about the story of reality now runs through the places we live.

The Real World, Selling Sunset, the Kardashians shows, and The Bachelor show how homes are freighted with feelings, but they don’t explain why homes are just so foundational to the American psyche. Our homes, our selves. It might be a universal association, but Americans and their twisted economic system take it a step further. When it comes to your home, you have to own it, as any Real Housewife will tell you. It’s on their show that we start to see how deep the paranoia about reality runs.

The book seems to be extraordinarily well written. I will buy it.

#books #reality #TV #music

I do not like easy jazz. I don't know what is happening. Maybe I'm getting softer in my older fucking age or it's just that I'm appreciating a recording where you can hear playing not in the modern-classical jazz sense—i.e. fucking boring twiddling à la dreadfully-virtuosic-performer style—but instead how the piano hammers move inside a piano.

The EP Galileo by Luke Howard is a lovely EP where old-schooly piano playing meets a neo-classical sensibility.

I feel weirded out by myself: I actually like the 1940s-ish type of playing, how it twines with steady and quieter background chord thrums, while the Howard's right hand louder plays melodies and curlicues.

Fuck me, this is nice. I can't remember a single song name nor a single melody but I just like this shit. To me, this is a pleasant take on romantic piano playing in jazz. This is everything that the Downton Abbey scriptwriter should have wanted to do and failed to do. This is made with feeling and does not at all feel like it's written by AI, thank Bog. Get in.

#piano #music #jazz

The Dwaele brothers, a.k.a. Soukwax, a.k.a. 2 Many DJs, have now released a 50-minute video from their February 2026 gig in Studio One in Abbey Road—yes, the room where Shirley Bassey recorded 'Goldfinger' in the world-famous recording studio—that shows why they're great DJs.

I really like the mix between feeling you're caught in a liminal space between being in the same room as the DJs and being in the surrounding areas, watching buspeople, empty room, and corridors, for example, here:

#music #soulwax #dj #dance

Stream the album via this page.

My Bloody Valentine's song 'only tomorrow' is great example of what the band could and can create.

Kevin Shields has a billion guitar pedals and ways to make effects; still, this song is basically something that a young person with a few computer-based effects could make. Shield's great knack at creating music is what separates him from the chaff.

It takes a fucking aeon of trial-and-error to come up with this fucking sound, let me tell you, in case it's not already obvious to you. To mix a simple guitar that's not particularly fuzzed with another guitar that sounds like a Big Muff pedal has been blasted through overdrive... And pairing those two elements with what seems to me to be pink and white noise, and then adding Bilinda Butcher's processed vocals...

The arrangement and full-on playing could easily have become ham-fisted but here we are: this is fucking grace.

From the first verses to the bridge at 01:20, to then twelve bars of overlays: softly toned-down guitar feedback and then back to the verse?

mbv live in 2025.

Fuck me. This is some really thought-through music that still sounds like it's made by renegades and young punks. This is some proof that the next MBV album will fucking rock the world, if it ever comes. Only Kevin Shields would know, I guess.

03:29: the start of a solo-guitar tremolo melody starts. I can't believe how more guitars are added just a bit after the four-minute mark, and the song grows even more. Is that a Leslie speaker? I don't know. I've heard this song and it's taken me to other galaxies so many times that I can now afford to chill out and just go somewhere else in my mind with this. Repetition, minimalism, and a simple wall of guitar-based music – the drums can't be ignored, because unlike most of the guitars, they and the simple one guitar that follows the verse are the only instruments that seem to contain a bit of treble.

It's all mixed very extraordinarily. If you know anything about Kevin Shields's ways around music, you know he cares about everything in how music is presented.

At the end of the day, the song is a fucking tune. Regardless of how well-produced, engineered, mixed, and presented a track is, if it ain't a tune, people won't like it. This is a track that one could play on one acoustic guitar and people would get off on it.

#MyBloodyValentine #music #MusicTips #shoegaze #feedback #composition #sound #tone #guitar

A short while back, MTV—a.k.a. MTV Music—stopped broadcasting. Their website went fairly dead as well. The music video phenomenon didn't start with MTV but without MTV, it would have gone nowhere.

Now, a developer has taken it upon themselves to try and save the feeling that MTV was. Enter MTV Rewind.

What's saved:

• 120 Minutes (6,063 videos): The holy grail of alternative rock and shoegaze.
• Headbangers Ball (1,604 videos): A shrine to thrash and heavy metal.
• Yo! MTV Raps (348 videos): The golden age of hip-hop, preserved.
• MTV Unplugged (343 videos): Stripped-back intimacy from before auto-tune ruled the charts.
• Club MTV (232 videos): For the techno and house heads.

There are also decade-specific buckets—ranging from the experimental MTV 70s (268 videos) to the massive MTV 2020s (8,050 videos)—proving that the music video format isn’t dead, it just lost its home.

Here's an embedded example of MTV Rewind:

For more information about the project, see this Midnight Rebels post.

#music #video

Robyn's 'Sexistential' vs Factory Floor's 'Fall Back'

'Sexistential' feels a bit dated as Robyn's done this stuff before; it's not bad, it's just that I feel spoiled with how more of an pop innovator Robyn used to be. This isn't bad stuff! It's just that other artists, for example Fever Ray, make sexual music that's more exciting and uproariously fun than this. 'Sexistential' feels like Chicago house, the stuff that Robyn tapped with Honey.

I can't help but think of music like Factory Floor's song 'Fall Back' as I hear this new single. Even though their sound owes a lot to that of New Order, they managed to release something with a distorted and contorted vocal, a very simple bass-line, and drums that sounded as though they've been programmed by myself (not an accolade in any way), and yet everything coalesced and sounded good; better than that, it was really fucking good.

I hope Robyn's coming album contains a lot more interesting and mainly experimental stuff. She's a pop master, I get that, but we need more. MORE!

#music