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Tag: sound

fig: 4may26

Published May 4, 2026 by Warren Ellis

This is going to be a fig.

  • I am very much sick of people sticking -maxxing on the end of words, just like I’m sick of -punk as a suffix, but the looksmaxxer pentastack is worthy of note, the “enhancement” cocktail consisting of Adderall, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine… and an industrial solvent called BDO.
  • Cellular rejuvenation for life extension may actually have some possibilities
  • 4000 year old magical texts from Syria preserved on clay tablets! There’s an anti-witchcraft ritual in there, and get this:
  • “The purpose extended beyond personal protection. These rites aimed to stabilize political authority, ward off misfortune, and neutralize perceived supernatural dangers that could undermine a king’s rule. This reflects a broader Mesopotamian worldview in which cosmic order and political stability were inseparable. A threat from witches or malevolent forces was not merely spiritual—it was a potential crisis of governance.”
  • “A new study explores the role of sound in medieval English imagery. Employing a combined approach that integrates neurobiology and the framework of the “sound milieu,” the researcher argues that early medieval images were never “silent.” Instead, they could evoke imagined acoustic environments, allowing immersive, multisensory interaction with the scene.”

Accessions:

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD was gifted me to the author, for which I am very grateful because it looks very much My Shit. BLANK SPACE had conflicting reviews, but when it showed up on Kindle for 99p, I figured I may as well find out for myself.

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey (UK) (US+)

BLANK SPACE, W David Marx (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: Crash week. By Friday night I want to have moved at least eighty pages of material out of the office.
STATUS: Major reset. I’ve booked two gigs to go and see on the 16th and currently wondering where I can fit some small amounts of travel in. Inbox at 100, but a ton of those are delivery notifications
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)

But despite the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 they, like most of the approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees scattered across the region, still believed they would one day regain their villages, land, businesses and property. The nakba, meaning simply ‘catastrophe’, as it became known, prompted feverish debate among the refugees and throughout the Middle East.


LISTENING: SONGDREAMING, Saadet Turkoz & Nils Wogram (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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telemetry 2jan26

Published January 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Every Day Carry” is a lifestyle native to the 21st century. This hobby was directly named after “the everyday.” “Every Day Carry” concerns tools, toys and/or utensils which somebody, somehow, feels obliged to lug around on their own person. All the time. Every Day.

“Weird Everyday Carry” is a niche even more intriguing to me, because it combines my abiding interests in the oxymoronic, the everyday, and the weird. How weird is everyday weird? What are the limits to weirdness? How long has this weirdness been going on?

Sources are now telling Deadline that Netflix reportedly only wants to keep movies in theaters for 17 days after it buys Warner Bros, a move that would “steamroll the theatrical business.” Major circuits like AMC continue to insist the line must be held at roughly 45 days.

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others. After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review. Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are “total bunk.”
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Being Eaten By Noise

Published November 26, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Torino in Italy who has spent the past couple of years engaged in an intense study of what he refers to as “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification, and movement” (as per the album’s inner sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of that study, which began with Flag Day Recordings’ Disincarnazione in 2023. From the very beginning, it is a seriously intense listen. The word “immersive” gets bandied about a lot in music writing these days, but Mess (Akt IV) is a positively engulfing experience. Which is to say that putting it on feels rather a lot like being eaten.

The music on this tape represents part of a concert given by Hugh Davies and David Toop at Riverside Studios, London, on 15th July 1978. The music was improvised without prior discussion. Hugh Davies plays mainly amplified found and home-made instruments; David Toop plays (on this occasion) mostly acoustic found and home-made instruments as well as more conventional flutes, fiddles, etc. The fact that this duo has not worked together often combined with the differences in approach and types of sound-producing technology highlights a quality of so-called free improvisation. The structure of the music derives from an immediate listening interaction rather than from externals such as composition, choice of instruments, cosmic schemes, preferred mode of dress and so forth.

SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES
At the very beginning of Survival Research Laboratories in 1978, the group’s founder Mark Pauline predicted that people would eventually start building their own technology in order to seize control of the very violence that characterizes the age we live in. Survival Research Laboratories was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 50 mechanized presentations in the United States, Europe and Japan, each performance consisting of a unique set of ritualized interactions between robots and other machines. Humans are present only as operators and audience members.

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AI Voice Hallucination / Electronic Voice Phenomenon

Published July 26, 2024 by Warren Ellis

What grabbed me here was the accidental voice reconstruction.

The project group used machine learning voice changing software, off the shelf, made for streamers.

The scratches and taps on the metal were transformed by the proto-AI into fragments of voice: burbles and syllables that sound something like a person speaking, but not quite. You strain to hear.

(I didn’t ask but I got the impression that the group didn’t originally intend for this to be part of their project, even though it was part of their demo by the time I spoke with them. That’s what you get from working directly with material.)

And this is something new:

Where does the voice come from?

Novelty in the signal.

This is essentially Electronic Voice Phenomenon.

Within ghost hunting and parapsychology, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted as spirit voices. Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, who popularized the idea in the 1970s, described EVP as typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.[1]

Enthusiasts consider EVP to be a form of paranormal phenomenon often found in recordings with static or other background noise. Scientists regard EVP as a form of auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in one’s own language) and a pseudoscience promulgated by popular culture.[2][3] Prosaic explanations for EVP include apophenia (perceiving patterns in random information), equipment artifacts, and hoaxes

Those babbling voices from the sheet metal are not noise in the signal. They’re the point. Sources of creation are rare and here’s a new one!

What would happen if we listened to the voices?

Old radio in new graveyards.

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