News
The Fringes
In the 1990’s I wrote a little piece that used spinning circles to explain culture. You can find it on this page. (and there are a few more here…)
In the fringe is where everything exciting happens, never in the center. Cultures are like spinning circles. In the center they don’t move very much, that’s where the traditionalists live, the conservatives. Towards the rim is where the action is, that’s where the artists hang out. Life is a little more out of balance there sometimes and the spinning can make you dizzy there. What is most exciting is that many of the culture circles overlap and if you can stay in a spot where several things overlap you can find new clouds of ideas. Ideas are not bound to any individual, there are bound to a time. Many people in that spot will come up with similar ideas. Sometimes this cloud of ideas forms a new circle and the center of it hardens and becomes a new tradition. The longer it can remain liquid the more alive it will remain. Life is change.
Today I am reading a new post from Ted Gioia and he arrives at a similar conclusion:
These things don’t happen in the center. They happen at the fringes. So the creative ferment takes place in a port city like Liverpool—just like opera came out of Venice, another port city. Jazz came out of New Orleans, another port city.
Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.
The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.
You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.
The Next New Thing in Music Will Not Come from New York, Los Angeles, or London
The fringes, the borders, are where innovation happens. History has shown this over and over.
We get rid of the fringe at our cultural peril.
one guitar two (Big Cave Versions)
Love of Overload
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
—Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
DMT 45
Last week I discovered Hüsnü Şenlendirici, an amazing Turkish clarinet player, when I listened to music by Dhafer Yousseff. You can read about Şenlendirici on this Wikipedia page. One of his grandfathers had a very cool first name…. ;-)
I love how he can make the tone of the clarinet rich and round or can make it sound almost like a violin, as he does in this piece.
Braiding
It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren’t two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.
–Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
I am reading Vita Contemplativa (thanks Steve!) and Braiding Sweetgrass, which was recommended to me by Robby, and these books are both medicine.
elephantear ext
I love elephantear from the album Rain Poems and created a longer version of the piece:
Lanois
Danial Lanois plays slide guitar:
sometimes the flow of melody feels like we can hear a person thinking and dreaming…
User-generated Tabloid
We became reliant on the dream of social media as The Great Conversation and a giant real-time discovery engine, and lauded it as such, when in fact social media’s fated final form was as a user-generated supermarket tabloid.
Popcorn
Popcorn and drums…
Found here.
Commentary Conversation
This is the conversation that took place in the comment section of Eno View, my post about an interview on YouTube that Brian Eno gave to Zane Lowe. Did anyone get that ENO VIEW sounds like INTERVIEW? Probably not, it’s just me… :-)
Steve commented and I replied and he replied to my reply. I think it’s an important subject that affects us all. I asked Steve for his permission to turn the comments into a post. He agreed. Have a look…
Steve on 02025-03-27 at 9:04
I really like Eno’s take on capitalism. I think about capitalism often. And I think it’s part of the problem … if not the entire problem his take that the design optimizes for very negative things, and I can’t help but agree … However, playing “devil’s advocate”for a bit …
I spent multiple decades in the semiconductor industry. The costs back in 1983 were high, but TODAY?
The cost of a modern fab is so astronomical that it’s hard to imagine any system other than capitalism pulling it off. We’re talking $20 billion+ per fab at the cutting edge, with individual machines (like ASML’s EUV lithography systems) costing upwards of $300 million each. The sheer financial scale means that any alternative system has to answer a brutal question: who takes the risk, and how do they get rewarded?
TSMC has nine (9!!!) fabs in Taiwan alone … their capital investment is on the order of $200 billion. Who else is going to do that?
And modern life as we know it would be impossible without semiconductors—and by extension, without the capitalist system that built them.
Take away advanced semiconductors, and we lose nearly everything:
- No modern computers or smartphones.
- No internet, because servers, networking gear, and fiber optics all rely on silicon.
- No advanced medical imaging (MRI, CT scans, ultrasound)
- No GPS, meaning no modern transportation or logistics.
- No advanced power grids, which rely on microcontrollers, sensors, and power semiconductors.
- No modern industry—factories, automation, robotics, and even agriculture are all deeply dependent on semiconductors.
- Even cars would revert to mechanical-only systems, and the global economy would be thrown back to the mid-20th century (or earlier).
A world without semiconductors isn’t just “slightly less convenient”—it’s a collapse of nearly every major system that keeps society running.
From a musician’s perspective, no synthesizers, no recording equipment: even tape based multitrack relied on discrete semiconductors.
Looking at history, capitalism wasn’t the only system that tried to industrialize, but it was the only one that succeeded in pushing semiconductor tech to where it is now. The Soviet Union, for example, had a state-controlled electronics industry, but it lagged behind Western semiconductor development by at least a decade—and that gap widened over time. Even today, China’s state-driven efforts haven’t been able to break free from reliance on capitalist supply chains.
The fundamental problem is that semiconductor development requires insane levels of risk-taking, competition, and specialization. Every node shrink, every new fabrication process, and every innovation in chip design comes from a brutal process of iterative failure, financial risk, and cutthroat competition. Governments can throw money at it, but they struggle to match the efficiency of private-sector-driven innovation.
I mean … mind you, I am no fan of what capitalism has become, but modern life would be impossible without it … maybe people wouldn’t mind going back to the 1940s though. We’d certainly have to revert back 85 years … and people would have to learn to read paper maps again. :^)
ottmar on 02025-03-28 at 9:06
It is completely understandable that an an engineer would love the development of chips in the last fifty years. It is indeed impressive and remarkable. But it has come at a cost. I would point out that all of that incredible progress you described has in fact pushed us closer to the edge. Species extinction, climate change, AI use of electricity, all these are related. And the real bottom line is that people aren’t happier. People die younger than they did thirty years ago. Social media, doom scrolling, looking for the next dopamine hit, the rise of fascism all over the planet, and more inequality that ever… I’ve seen comparisons that show inequality is worse than at the time of the French Revolution.
We are not very good at taking the long view, are we? We charge ahead and then hope to fix things later. We get so drunk on our power that we miss the exit ramp and suddenly we hurtle down the path so fast…
Steve on 02025-03-29 at 9:46
We are not very good at taking the long view, are we? We charge ahead and then hope to fix things later. We get so drunk on our power that we miss the exit ramp and suddenly we hurtle down the path so fast…
The root cause of this seems (to me) to be what Paul Humphreys calls “epistemic opacity” from his book “Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method.” – i.e., “processes, systems, or knowledge structures are not fully understandable or transparent to human cognition, either due to their complexity, inaccessibility, or the limitations of human reasoning.” ( I would add “greed” but Humphreys didn’t)
At least, that’s the nice version. The not-so-nice version is we don’t care about the future and future consequences … as an aggregate species. We’re just not interested. At least that’s how it seems from my seat out here on the plains in “flyover country.”
But also … Those of us that are in science and applied science (engineering) really don’t consider future consequences due to this epistemic opacity. I don’t really think all those scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were evil … I just think they didn’t really have an appreciation for what their work would propagate into the future. Same with computers: all that was being looked for was a way to switch telephone calls faster as the telephone network grew. And the same is true of the internet. When I got on it there were ~800 nodes on the whole thing … world wide. No one contemplated “social media” … all we wanted to do was exchange files electronically instead of mailing 9-track data tape to each other via UPS.
So … all the things you list:
… Species extinction, climate change, AI use of electricity, all these are related. And the real bottom line is that people aren’t happier. People die younger than they did thirty years ago. Social media, doom scrolling, looking for the next dopamine hit, the rise of fascism all over the planet, and more inequality that ever… I’ve seen comparisons that show inequality is worse than at the time of the French Revolution …
To be honest, I cannot disagree with anything you wrote.
As a 23 year old newly minted BSEE/CS student, I was gonna do all kinds of “cool stuff” … The (technical) world was “my oyster” and all that … design new devices with exotic new materials … super quiet amplification devices with infinite bandwidth … blah, blah, blah … That was 42 years ago. But … four+ decades is a long time, and things definitely went sideways: the big HARD pivot took place at two significant points in fairly recent history- 1995: The National Science Foundation decommissioned NSFNET, and private companies (like AT&T, MCI, and Sprint) took over the backbone of the internet, allowing full commercialization. This facilitated what took place a decade later: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. And here we are. It is not coincidence that most of what you indicate above has taken place between 1995 and today. (Well … except for climate change … that one has a much longer event horizon going back to late 1800s)
I think it will get much worse before the trajectory changes direction in the slightest. Which gets back to what Eno says in the interview: if you optimise a system for a specific thing (such as “engagement” or “profit” instead of “happiness” or “human improvement” ) don’t be surprised if you get extreme negative externalities.
ottmar writing today 02025-03-29
This is the gold right here:
If you optimize a system for a specific thing (such as “engagement” or “profit” instead of “happiness” or “human improvement” ) don’t be surprised if you get extreme negative externalities.
We optimized the system for profit and for profit only, without regard for health or happiness, ours and nature’s.
Steve writes about epistemic opacity and that humans don’t seem to care about future consequences. I think originally that was a feature, not a bug. It enabled humans to deal with being conscious, of knowing that we will die, that the next earthquake may be fatal, that the volcano might erupt, that the next tsunami might wipe us out… Life is dangerous. It was good to be able to put those thoughts out of mind and move ahead anyway. Now we have to grow up. We are the biggest predator on this planet. We created machines that can pulverize this planet. There are nearly 8 billion humans. We can’t just plow ahead any longer, we need to make plans, think ahead, consider the future. Not just our future but the biosphere’s future, too.
Let me try a different angle. When there was only one car in a town, there was no need to create traffic laws. The traffic light was invented when many cars were on the road and accidents killed too many people. The more cars on roads, the more laws we need. You want total freedom… we will need to get back to a population of about half a billion for that to happen. More people means more laws, more rules. Just like traffic laws were created to deal with cars, we should have created rules for social media. Instead we let their creators become billionaires by optimizing their businesses for unhappiness… I mean for engagement and profit, of course. We let that horse run too far.
I have often thought that humanity is in its teenage phase. There are a lot of hormones and we don’t quite know how to act, what to do. What is right? How do we begin to take responsibility for our actions? How to we get rid of that plastic in our brain and in the ocean. We grow up. We put on our boots and gloves and we get to work.
Eno View
Playlist
I played with the BNDCMPR playlist maker for Bandcamp. Here are a few pieces I threw together. It starts with the sound of frogs! Look at that great cover image… it took me a little while to recognize the frog!!
Listening to Music
Open source streaming service?
Tone is an open source, artist & listener owned music listening service.
We’re building it out right now, help us decide what an equitable music marketplace looks like.
Tone – Home
Sounds good, will keep my eye on that.
I also discovered two playlist making sites I will experiment with:
Go to https://bndcmpr.co/
The other one is called Buy Music Club
Go to https://www.buymusic.club/
Found all of the above sites in Warren Ellis’s newsletter.
Diet + Eno
Ringing in the ears? Your diet could help turn it down
This study aimed to provide clinical evidence to inform the development of dietary prevention approaches for tinnitus. What they found was that fruit, fiber, dairy, and caffeine consumption all had the ability to lessen the risk of developing tinnitus. Specifically, higher fruit intake was linked to a 35% reduction in tinnitus risk; intake of dairy products with a 17% reduction in risk; caffeine with a 10% reduction; and dietary fiber with a 9% reduction.
Eno Livestream Weekend – Full Pass – Anamorph
Weekend pass to watch as many of the six “Eno” livestreams as you’d like between March 27-30. Each livestream is a unique version of “Eno”, the groundbreaking documentary about musician and artist Brian Eno that’s never the same twice. THESE ARE LIVE EVENTS. You must be watching on the date and time specified for each livestream. There is no delayed viewing. These versions of the film will never be shown again.
DMT 44
I discovered this album, which was released in 2015, while I was touring last month, and listened to it several times. The leader is Andy Sheppard – LINK to Wikipedia Entry. Born in 1957, he picked up the saxophone at the age of 19 and started gigging only three weeks later, which sounds crazy. Sheppard has a wonderful tone and I love his playing.
From the Wikipedia entry for this album – LINK:
The AllMusic review by Thom Jurek notes “Surrounded by Sea invites the listener into an intimate, mysterious sound world. Sheppard’s band plays with discipline and restraint. Through extremely close listening, the players explore the mystery of melody — both plainly stated and implied — and its various thematic trails in inspired if laid-back dialogue”.
I think that’s a good description.
Wednesday in Seattle
From Joe Boyd’s book:
In the wake of the Moors’ expulsion, playing an oud could land you in big trouble with the Inquisition, so around the courts most musicians turned to the vihuela, a small guitar-shaped instrument with six pairs of strings tuned like a lute. And the vihuela turned into the guitar.
The relationship is even clearer in Portuguese where the guitar is called Violão, which sounds a lot closer to Vihuela.
The following paragraph is a rough translation from a German book I am reading. (((thanks to Steve for letting me know about this gem of a book!))) The book is called Vita Contemplativa and is by the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. It’s been translated into many languages but I wanted to read the original. The second half of the quote really hits home. In a way social media attempts to force us to express ourselves continuously, filling every silence. Many people seem to use it in this manner.
Only silence enables us to say something unheard of. The compulsion to communicate, on the other hand, leads to the reproduction of the same, to conformism: “The difficulty today is no longer that we cannot express our opinions freely, but rather to create spaces of solitude and silence in which we can find something to say. Repressive forces no longer prevent us from expressing our opinions. On the contrary, they even force us to do so. What a liberation it is to not have to say anything for once and to be able to remain silent, because only then do we have the opportunity to create something that is increasingly rare: something that is actually worth saying.”
I added the emphasis. And later:
The compulsion to act, indeed the acceleration of life, proves to be an efficient means of control. If revolution does not seem possible today, then perhaps it is because we have no time to think. Without time, without taking a deep breath, the same thing continues. The free spirit dies out.
The compulsion we feel to constantly react to social media posts and news, but also to all messages and calls, doesn’t let us take a breath and form a coherent thought. Ours becomes a reactive life, always running after something, but never quite reaching it. Always behind. This becomes a means of control. Keep the rats running in their wheels. They will exhaust themselves and won’t be able to breathe or think. The phone has become the wheel.
Behaving like a mule, standing still, not taking orders, not being reactive at all, is the finest response to the present day rush. A mental sit-in. We can create a focus setting on the phone, press engage, and do nothing. I have my phone set up to give me a summary of notifications at 0900 and 1800. Hold my messages. Perhaps that’s even too much and I should switch to once a day, because I do notice the difference it makes.
Now add meditation to the recipe and see where that leads. Meditation is a truly radical act, the act of saying stop, wait, hold that thought. I am just sitting here minding no business at all.
And here is a photo of coffee from Seattle:
Smoke
Soundcheck at the Sofia in Sacramento. Photo by our engineer Stephen.
Bug in the letter
Robin Sloan on transparent tracking pixels, the invisible images that can show the sender precisely when an email was opened.
In the marketing context, I think this kind of data collection is okay — barely — but only in the aggregate, i.e. to judge the overall performance of a newsletter.
In the personal context, it’s shockingly presumptuous. An email isn’t a letter, but even so: imagine unsealing a letter, and a winking electronic transponder slips out. You would have questions for your correspondent!
and here is my favorite part:
Anyway, I wish Gmail offered an option less passive than simply declining to display the tracking pixel — maybe some way to send a fart sound streaming back into the sender’s inbox…
Gulf
Beauty of Distraction
In English, we pay attention. In French, we make it. In German, we gift it. In Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, we lend it, as though attention is something that can be used and then duly returned. In Finnish, attention is gathered or added, like a spice that seasons perception. It’s a broad linguistic trend that begs a couple of questions: Are we using this resource efficiently? Are we paying attention to what we should be?
On the Beauty of Distraction | House of Beautiful Business
I like this part:
When performing our lives trumps the actual living of them, attention becomes a commodity. The market vies for our time and focus, knowing there’s a direct correlation between what we pay attention to and what we, quite literally, pay for. This commodification feeds into a larger societal pressure to constantly do more, achieve more, and be more. We live in an era of relentless ambition, where success is often measured by how much we produce and how little we rest. The hustle culture further fragments our attention, as we’re constantly pushed to divide our focus among numerous goals and tasks.
