emergency break

Anyone who knows me knows that my whole psychological profile hinges on an interiority where alarm bells are constantly ringing, regardless of what’s going on out in the real world. And, of course, despite the boatload of pills I swallow every morning on that account, these days it’s growing increasingly difficult to hold at bay the deep insecurity, the sense of acute emergency that saturates our present, the feeling that we’re not acting in a manner commensurate with the scale of what we’re facing. So when friends keep telling me I’m becoming too much of a doomer, as they have been lately, I can’t really disagree: I do believe we’ve had barely a taste of the horrors that are headed our way in the near- to medium-term future, and I don’t think we’re at all prepared for what’s coming – but I’ll feel that way regardless of empirical circumstances, won’t I?

It can’t all be pathology. I know, of course, that despite my intellectual commitment to the optimistic will, there’s a measure of nihilism holding out in my heart, regularly putting its finger on my mental scales, but I can’t accept that this disqualifies all of this anxiety. Things are getting bad, friends, and everyone knows it. “Many of us feel this shift on a visceral level,” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write. “We sense that we have entered a new paradigm, a world of perpetual upheaval in which stability is the exception and uncertainty the baseline.”

But it’s worth asking, as Natasha Lennard does in the excellent On Un/Certainty, what other ends are being served by all this talk of crisis and uncertainty. She insists that we pay attention to “the weaponization of doubt,” and the kinds of certainty of thought and action that are given license by the near-constant evocation of an unknowably dark future, of rupture and carnage and apocalypse. “In this moment of purported boundless uncertainty, I’m seeing a lot of what looks like certainty in action,” she writes, pointing to the brutal resolve with which IOF soldiers assassinate Palestinian children, or with which ICE agents kidnap people off the streets of American cities.

What the book ultimately advances is “not an argument for or against uncertainty, or for or against certainty,” she writes. “Rather, it is a call for better certainties. And in order for that to make sense, we must draw our attention to specific activities of certainty and doubt that shape the terrains of our current struggles.” Lennard illustrates this effectively in her treatment of the supposed “crisis” of immigration, showing how the construction of the migrant as a source of insecurity and uncertainty serves to protect white supremacist property relations and shore up colonial bordering regimes (to use, as Lennard does, Harsha Walia’s supremely helpful formulation). Elsewhere she neatly takes apart the anti-trans moral panic, and its performative fear of the “uncertainty” ostensibly evoked by a world in which gender is not, in fact, something with a settled biological definition. 

In a broader sense, the construction of a generalizing sense of uncertainty and chaos motivates the desire for urgent resolution, and can provide cover for what might otherwise be considered egregious contraventions of political or ethical norms. Of course this brings to mind Klein’s “disaster capitalism” thesis, which she posited nearly twenty years ago in The Shock Doctrine to name the way that neoliberal “reforms” were being pushed through in the slipstream of large-scale disaster (whether naturally occurring or state-manufactured). Such moments of “crisis” were used to bypass or suspend norms of democratic procedure, moves necessary to pass deeply unpopular and anti-social policy packages in post-coup Chile, post-Katrina New Orleans, post-2003 invasion Iraq, and so on.

It’s difficult not to see the relevance of all of this to what’s been going on here in Canada the under the regime of Mister Elbows Up. Somewhat more understated than Klein’s examples of full-blown disaster, it’s more akin to what Lennard is trying to point out, in that Carney has very effectively positioned his calm demeanour as the antidote to the economic and geopolitical chaos wrought by Donald Trump’s louche belligerence. Whether or not we agree that “crisis” is the right way to describe what’s currently reshaping the global political-economic order, Carney is making the most of it, fanning the flames of the uncertainty as he rams through extraction projects, funnels public money towards private industry, and massively expands the arbitrary power of ministers to deport migrants and shut down labour action. Matthew Remski – who’s suddenly all over my Instagram feed with his sober, cogent takes on contemporary political culture (which I’m totally here for) – has convincingly called this the imposition of “polite fascism,” which Carney is rolling it out “in a way that is so sophisticated, he doesn’t have to bring out the boots.”

People keep telling me that every generation is sure it’s living through end times and yet humanity has carried on, that every empire falls, every darkness eventually meets its dawn and so on, but it’s the empty sense of optimism that these statements so often seem to carry that frightens me: the superstitious belief that history has a predictable rhythm, that the universe indeed has something like a moral arc. It’s precisely as a student of history that I know things can always get worse, and expressions of certainty that it won’t make my blood run cold. But by the same token, though dark times these are indeed, let’s pull back from this certainty that the future belongs to the zombie hordes and the army of robots, lest we make it so ourselves, yes? We’ve got to be cognizant of the ways the darkness can cover the advance of those who would make it even darker, whether it’s Klein and Taylor’s “end times fascists” or Remski’s more congenial ones. 

The real question, as always, is what is to be done; and the answer, as always, is to fight like hell for the living. Because there’s always something to be done, in spite of the most deeply pessimistic intellect. As Lennard writes, “Whether it is appropriate or useful to speak of a new era of mass, convergent crisis is somewhat of an academic question, unless the answer informs how we go forward – unless the novelty of the era’s crisis formations requires new kinds of action and analysis in response.” What if the structural state of emergency that’s feeling so acute these days stopped inspiring such paralyzing fear – or worse, cynicism – and instead motivated us to keep on moving? What if gloomy fuckers like me started to see the doom and anxiety as a starting point, rather than a foreclosure?

For the mix this time we're mostly back in ambient/contemporary classical territory, to help ease your transition into these more affective seasons. It starts off with the turbulent flicker of "Pressure Dream," opener to Beirut-based sound sculptor Jad Atoui's It Will Take Forever (which came out on Ruptured in July), before morphing into "Everything" from Arca, walking a similarly anxious line between noise and melodic drone and strobing like a malfunctioning hologram. That's from her latest, XXXXX (also released in July). Then it's Mexico City's Concepcion Huerta, with "El fuego y la luz están aquí," from May 2025's excellent El Sol de los Muertos. Huerta's cavernous, elemental drones seem to issue from somewhere deep in the earth, fittingly for an album meant to evoke and pay tribute to land-based anti-imperialist struggles from Mexico to Argentina.

After that it's "Canto Duo," a sombre pipe organ suite from LA-based composer Sarah Davachi's latest triple LP, The Will of Tongues, which released in August. The song features a bit more melodic movement than the glacially-paced work for which the master minimalist is probably best known, but still demonstrates her uncanny ability to make sound seemingly stand outside of time. That's followed up by a haunting cascade of layered strings and synth drones from Tehran's Ava Rasti, the title track from her forthcoming No One Knows How Wild the Wind Blows, and then it's Felisha Ledesma & Snakeskin with an excerpt from their collaborative cassette Palm of Hand, which came out in August, spectral voices and twinkling guitar plucks all ashimmer.

Next it's "Your Destiny Distresses Me," the latest single release from North Carolina trio Setting. It's at once a bit folky and a bit spacey, a luminous zither line floating above colourful smudges of synth while remaining tethered to the earth by a muscular snare-hit metronome. Then it's Melbourne's Peter Knight & TL;DR with an excerpt of "Impression II," from their forthcoming LP, Phosphenes, processed trumpet wails echoing off the bedrock of steady and insistent post-punk. Finally, it's Windsor-based Bilal Nasser, with "Who We Used To Be," which features on Every Martyr is a Universe, due out on Constellation in November. For the album, the Windsor-based Palestinian-Canadian guitarist rallies a nine-person ensemble to realize his vision of ambient orchestral folk, nodding towards the likes of Rachel's, Do Make Say Think, and Balmorhea while honouring the student encampment movement against the genocide in Gaza, and I can't recommend it enough. He'll be launching the album with unmissable shows in Toronto on Oct 15 and Montreal on Oct 25.

• Mixcloud: emergency break (sept 2026)

Okay that's it for now. Many thanks to everyone for reading and for listening, especially to Don for editorial support, and much additional gratitude to those of you who've signed up to become paid subscribers. You can join their ranks right here, if you haven't already.

xo, graham