eyes of the storm

Just naming the thing is half the battle, but to do that you've got to learn to see it from a distance. That's the strategy I try to use, anyway. You've got to be able to find the edges, to know it has an outside, so you can distinguish between the maelstrom itself and what it's ravaging. Because when you're in it, there's no compass, no signal from shore – and that's the crazy, for me at least: it's not so much the presence of the darkness and chaos as the absence of a stable vantage from which to narrate them coherently. You've got to understand the self as ontologically distinct from what's afflicting it, so you can steer the former toward safer waters.

But isn't making such a distinction always a bit of a bluff? We all know that no discrete thing is ever simply the thing itself: it's always assemblage, synthesis, conjuncture, undeniably there yet incessantly overflowing its container. It's mostly a matter of squinting until something comes into sufficient focus, and where could the crazy exist if not within that same cluster of fuzziness and lens flare?

In any case, the belief that something's in you but not of you can turn into its own terrifying prospect: a haunting, an invasion. So instead of expulsion, you try the acceptance and integration thing that all of our therapists are asking us to do these days, and the crazy becomes the misfit cousin who's still part of the fucking family or whatever. But even then, as you drill down into all the constituent "parts," you get closer to all the grainy specificities but further away from being able to see what holds them all together. Once again, the integrity of the whole can feel like it's disintegrating.

It's a unique kind of vertigo, the feeling that the thoughts in your brain entered without permission, or when you sometimes find yourself acting upon a will that seems other than your own. And I know it's obviously a false dichotomy, but when I ask myself what's a symptom and what's a character trait – when is it "mental illness" and when am I just being an asshole? – it's a question of agency: if we're going to hold ourselves to account for our shitty behaviour, we need to feel like we're holding the reins. I'm still enough of an anarchist to feel pretty viscerally attached to at least the concept of the self, even if it gets ever more illusory with each random misfire of synapses (it does!), and even if the truly autonomous individual is ultimately a liberal illusion (it is!). There's got to be a core, right? How else do we get to access that immense privilege of being responsible?

The Baffler just published "Crimes Against Language: The moral truth of Israel’s war against Gaza is not difficult to grasp," a stunning essay by Palestinian-New Yorker Sarah Aziza. It really beautifully interrogates the horror of watching this all unfold at a distance, and dissects the utter failure of the liberal language game to deliver on the political claims it still tries to make. It's incisive and angry and really just an essential read:

"What has been happening in language is nothing less than a story about what is becoming, or un-becoming, in our world. By exposing the utter incoherence of the liberal project, Gaza brings us horrific clarity. It reveals European and American narratives of righteousness that can bankroll at least six months of genocide. It is a political canary, signaling how vastly our elected officials are willing to betray their constituents and punish dissent. It is a reminder of how blithely the same elected officials will resort to racism and bigotry when a people is declared an enemy. In Gaza, too, we have a horrifying preview of new forms of state violence, a testing ground for killing technology that will soon appear in our skies. In this pinprick of land, we witness the grisly trajectory of our current configuration of power—or, in the words of Noura Erakat, 'the colonial nature of the rest of the world.' And so Palestine is also a portal torn in time. Through it, we glimpse a future that is ours to resist, or accept."

While we're at it and ICYMI, here's another essential read: Mohammed El-Kurd's "Are we indeed all Palestinians?" published about a month ago at Mondoweiss. As always, he's fierce and precise and lyrical, a deeply personal call to collective accountability. It's a pretty great gut check for folks striving to make the word solidarity really mean something:

"Once upon a time, I could easily estrange myself from the classes that I have long despised and envied (the elites, the bourgeoises, and those for whom Palestine is an aesthetic metaphor), but a new class has emerged in the narrow inferno of the Gaza Strip: the starved and the repeatedly, relentlessly, implacably dispossessed, and it is impossible to be more than an impotent spectator, impossible to belong to that class, not without bruises, not without sacrifice."

Okay so yeah, apparently the darkness has been really kicking my ass the last couple of months; I even had to pull out the big guns and spin Ocean Songs a few weeks ago (though really, that’s never a bad idea). It's always true that we're all struggling, but my god this one has really been a rough stretch for so many of us. Anyway, here's some songs. Get well soon?

This one starts with Portland-based ambient producer Daryl Groetsch – best know for his work as Pulse Emitter – with an excerpt from the long-form, churning cloud of synth that is "Above the Shore" (which just came out). Next it's eminent, prolific, and Spotify-averse Munich beatmaker Bryan Müller, whose work as Skee Mask ranges from glitchy, jungle-adjacent techno to sprawling electronic ambient; "untitled 2014," released in 2022, is included here as a masterful iteration of the latter. This gives way to “Double Life,” a hazy passage from Tehran-based pianist and ambient composer Ava Rasti’s score for a film of the same name; followed by "Save This Manual For The Future" from experimental synth-weaver (and new Montrealer) Bana Haffar's gorgeous LP intimaa', which came out via Touch last year.

Then it’s on to a selection from Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone’s new and widely-acclaimed All Life Long double LP. The album continues Malone’s work plumbing the technical and emotional depths of pipe organ drone, while allowing for a bit more melodic lyricism in transposing half of her compositions into arrangements for chorus and brass ensembles. A lot of what she does is over my head in terms of the math involved, as is often the case, but it’s still immediately immersive and just hugely affecting nonetheless. Next up is "Solar Flare," from New York pianist Kelly Moran's just-released LP Moves In The Field. Her last full-length, 2018's outstanding Ultraviolet, was a series of semi-structured excursions for prepared piano (that's to say, when you attach various little random objects to the strings inside the instrument). This time she's left the strings alone, but she's performing alongside what's essentially a player piano, and it does indeed sound like a series of intricate and strangely organic duets, "only slightly uncanny" as far as The Guardian are concerned.

The second bit kicks off with an excerpt from shoegazy noise hero Jefre Cantu Ledesma's "Severed Belonging," a gentle hour-long piece meant to accompany the second issue of PRESENCE, an art magazine wrangled by one Liz Harris (Grouper, of course). Then, it's more from KMRU, the Nairobi-via-Berlin ambient producer who over the last year or so has been among my most frequent listens (much gratitude to Anna T for the rec). A couple of months ago I shared something from 2022's Limen, his intense and honestly somewhat terrifying collaborative album with Aho Ssan; here it's a clip from his phasing looped guitar epic "falling dreams," which came out in 2021. If you're still hungry afterwards, there's the just-released 17-minute drone masterpiece "Stupor", or Disconnect, a forthcoming collab with legendary producer The Bug, and the list goes on. Back to the mix: next up is "Things Fall Apart," from Endless Path of Memory, last months' debut full-length from London/Paris experimentalist Adam Dove's work as NEXCYIA. It's a fairly dark and ominous electronics-based ambient affair, compared favourably by A Closer Listen to the work of a Tim Hecker, for example, and it certainly does evoke those angsty early 2000s vibes while still feeling vitally contemporary.

Sticking with said vibes, I've been spending some more time lately with New York-based guitar-via-laptop viruoso Rafael Anton Irisarri's really wonderful 2019 LP Solastalgia. "Visible Through the Shroud" follows a smoky, aching three-chord motif as it blooms through a humid field of static and noise, towards an emotional summit that burns almost too brightly to stare at directly. Close on its heels comes "Close Forever Watching," a highlight from Norwegian duo Deaf Center's 2011 opus Owl Splinters: an epic and harrowing journey, and truly one of my favourite records, in which elegant piano études sidle up to some absolutely towering cello-driven dronescapes, all of it grainy, impressionistic, organic, and unsettlingly powerful: a must-listen if you're into the "dark ambient" thing. This piece in particular takes the listener right up to the edge of the abyss, and you'll notice that you've been holding your breath a little as the piece pulls you back to safety – it's thrilling. Finally, we careen back into the sunlight with a glorious excerpt from prolific, seriously well-credentialed drone master and Olympian Kevin Doria's latest offering as HUMMING AMPS. I'm not sure where the "song" divisions are in this half-hour piece entitled "Sideways/Ultraviolet/Pulsing," but the passage I've pulled out is a sweeping and triumphant blast of life-affirming noise, to my mind positing a really devastating counteroffensive against that perverse gravity pulling us towards hopelessness and inaction, know what I mean?

Okay that's it. La lucha sigue, compañer@s.

• MP3: 24/05 - eyes of the storm.zip

• Mixcloud: eyes of the storm

NB: Same as last time, I've included a single hour-long MP3 of the whole mix in the zip file linked above (along with the individual MP3s, though I've left them all at their original lengths).

xo, graham