I’m not sure how to write about it, other than anything you read here will be scrambled and obfuscated in accordance with HIPAA guidelines, and out of respect for the confidentiality of my cohort of fellow practitioners. Vøid Contemplation Tactics and Inter-Dimensional Music production will continue but with even more of an erratic production schedule than before, but you can always catch us coloring the Chihuahuan Desert airwaves in real-time on Marfa Public Radio each Sunday night at 11pm CT. I am grateful for your camaraderie, and patience, and for this most welcome distraction from my days talking and not talking about only don’t know.

Also I don’t have pictures to go with any of this yet so please enjoy these photos of our cats, Big Boi and The Detonator.

When COVID-19 hit, in addition to the weariness and fear that goes along with living through a global pandemic and watching the most vulnerable people in our society being sacrificed on the altar of capitalism, I welcomed the opportunity to drop out for awhile. I had recently walked away from an unpleasant development job writing and managing grants for a famously unpleasant Indianapolis arts organization, so I had already been slowing down in order to figure out how to turn my confusing resume full of jobs that no longer exist, jobs that I’m no longer qualified to do, jobs that made me want to die, and jobs that were never really jobs, into another job. More specifically, I wanted to turn my resume into health insurance.

There are two fresh episodes of Inter-Dimensional Music to complement this essay: Click above and listen to “2026.05.03 Shamanic Bones of Zen IV” as you read along, or scroll down for download and streaming links.

As an insulin-dependent Type-1 diabetic (T1D) with decent insurance provided by the modest public university where my spouse works in museum administration, the durable medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, alcohol swabs, glucagon pens, and office visits that I require to stay alive add up to something like making a couple additional runs to the grocery store every month. Without insurance, my T1D hobby becomes something more like renting a second apartment. There is no way to prevent T1D, an autoimmune disorder that is distinct from Type 2 diabetes due to the presence of treasonous autoantibodies that sabotage and betray the body that produced them by destroying cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.

Prior to the discovery, extraction and purification of insulin in the early 1920s, a T1D diagnosis was a death sentence. In 2026 it just means that T1Ds on average subtract a decade or so from our life expectancy. The more expensive the equipment I use, the more money I spend on treatment, the better control I have over my blood sugar, and the better my chances are for living as long as someone whose antibodies haven’t sabotaged one of their essential internal organs.

I knew that finding work as a magazine editor living in a Midwestern city after not working in publishing for 20 years, or getting hired to do nonprofit communications as a 50-year-old without a Facebook login, or paying for health insurance as an artist producing donation-only “immersive Zen-informed psychedelic death yoga” happenings at DIY venues and all-ages punk clubs, was unlikely. But I did not realize how catastrophic the pandemic would be, how slow things were going to get, or how far out I was going to drop.

Seven years later and I’m less than a week away from starting a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at an Indianapolis hospital, one of the city’s several level one trauma centers. It’s the first step toward becoming a Zen chaplain, and it was one of the only application interviews where my years as a low-level medic with a 911 ambulance service, and my tenure as a resident student doing volunteer communications and outreach for a crusty borderline apostate Midwestern Zen center, were counted as qualifications rather than charming anecdotes. And the more confused I became about chaplaincy—an extremely confusing field that attempts to provide accreditation for “spiritual care” offered in hospitals and hospices, universities and professional sports franchises, as well as all of the branches of the military by Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, Wiccans and Norse Pagans as well as atheists and “humanists” (?)—the more clear the path became. Zen center volunteers are unpaid, and medics are poorly paid, so finding a career opportunity that often includes a salary that eclipses minimum wage and that people describe metaphorically as “spiritual paramedic” was a revelation.

Compared to my intermittent careers in the art and publishing worlds, direct service work has always come as a relief. I developed a talent for selling the social value of creative practice in fundraising for arts nonprofits, but regardless of how successful I was at convincing funders that the presence of a European sculptor’s rave-inspired geological sculpture at the edge of town would benefit the youth in a rural community that lacked adequate medical services, it was much easier to convince myself that I was doing something to make the world a better place in the back of the ambulance offering medical services to a person who crashed their motorcycle at the edge of a town that lacked adequate medical services. It’s just that in 2015 2010 the ambulance job paid $11/hour with no health insurance, while raising and managing several hundred thousand dollars to fund the production of a rave-inspired moon-activated stone sculpture for an arts organization directed by a board of millionaires and maybe one or two billionaires, one of whom was famous for selling a Gerhard Richter painting for $20 million dollars, paid $45,000/year with health insurance. Neither one kept me out of credit card debt or cured my depression, but the nonprofit job meant I could buy actual insulin pens rather than surviving off the expired insulin vials that the EMS crew offered me rather health insurance.

The chaplaincy program begins a few days before my 51st birthday, and almost exactly 10 years after I moved from Marfa, Texas, to my childhood home of Central Indiana, without much of an idea of where I was headed, how long I’d stay, or what I would do once I got there. My last ditch effort at remaining in the Big Bend crumbled when the former park ranger I was dating showed me her spiral-bound resume—full of firearms training, wildland firefighting certifications, and accreditations in everything from fast water rescue, horseback riding, and botanical field research—that qualifies a person for a paying position with the federal park service. More to the point, “I enjoy hiking and camping and can update (some) websites,” wasn’t going to get anyone’s attention. Regardless, in 2026 “park ranger” is almost as mythical of a job as “magazine editor.”

It’s been a convoluted path to chaplaincy, in part because I didn’t know much about what chaplains do until recently. The trail is still overgrown because “what is chaplaincy?” is a big question for many chaplains, at least judging from the online forums and message boards I’ve been browsing. As with EMS and Zen, many people don’t think about chaplains until something very bad has happened, and nobody else is picking up the phone.

I started in this direction looking into death doula work as a possible extension of my Zen practice. But the more I learned about death doulas and the hospice industry in general, the more I saw parallels with the exploitative regions of the yoga world. If you watch enough HBO documentaries, “yoga teacher training” starts to seem more like an unregulated entrepreneurial scheme than a professional discipline. With both yoga teachers and death doulas, a certificate can represent years of rigorous and well-intentioned study with medically-informed instructors and spiritually insightful teachers, or it can be the result of using your credit card to access a series of MLM webinars. Just as with the fast-growing yoga industry, the emergence of a predatory for-profit death care sector1 has made it difficult to distinguish between righteous death doulas and hospice services and growing legions of ghoulish hustlers.

As much as I like the concept of becoming a spiritual paramedic, I am apprehensive about beginning a clinical internship that also sounds a lot like “spiritual boot camp.” After a week of orientation, I begin 10 weeks of full-time clinical work, first shadowing hospital chaplains, and then beginning to do the work myself under supervision. There are more study-intensive ways to earn CPE credits—credentials handed out by religious institutions or Masters of Divinity academic programs—but this clinical unit is recommended as a way to learn very quickly if you’re suited for the work. In preparation, earlier this week I picked up used copies of the Zen books about Buddha and Jesus being best friends that I had only skimmed previously, and signed up for training with Powered Air Purifying Respirators.

“You’ve got a beard,” said the nurse maxxing my arm full of all of the immunizations it can hold. “So an N95 won’t protect you as well when you’re going into isolation rooms.” Spiritual paramedic becomes less of a metaphor as the days go by.

I don’t know my cohort yet, but my impression is that it’s often people in seminary, or pastors, ministers, or other accredited religious leaders who are exploring the limited options for people hoping to do something more rigorous—or at least more likely to provide a pathway to health insurance—than the essential work done by hospice volunteers. My advisors keep reassuring me that my experiences on the ambulance as well as several decades of Zen practice are indications that this might be a good fit. An EMS license involves lots of hands-on-training and rigorous standardized testing, but the biggest qualification is “Will you show up, not look away from something that is very hard to look at, and keep your shit together long enough to help?” You may be upset about the unconscious person lying in a ditch on the side of the road with major head trauma, but that person doesn’t need your tears. They need you to offer an accurate response to the medic radioing for air evacuation and asking “do you see skull, or gray matter” so we can determine if they need to be flown to the sort of level one trauma center where I’m about to start working.

Likewise if you start playing at being a therapist or counselor to people seeking refuge at a Zen center, then you are not doing zazen, you are doing something highly unethical. When I lived with my guiding teacher, the easiest answer you could expect to big questions was “I don’t know.” In keeping with centuries of tradition, his responses would become more inscrutable as the dialogue continued, making the eventual transition to silent meditation a relief.

Q: What happens after we die?
A: I don’t know.
Q: But what do you think happens?
A: What did your face look like before your parents were born?

While my progress toward Zen chaplain has given me a slightly less confusing answer to “What is chaplain”, this concurrent close attention to my spiritual practices has raised the more confounding and eternally unanswerable question of “What is Zen”.

This is one of the most common questions that gets asked in Zen centers. Zen Master Seung Sahn—the founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen of which I am most familiar—has an answer well suited to dharma talks: “Only don’t know.” Dropping an unexpected “only don’t know” in dharma combat is as close as Zen gets to a guaranteed TKO. Such poetry may be less helpful in a clinical or academic setting, responding to a seminary student or terminal cancer patient.

I have a lot to consider as far as what sort of credential I’m seeking. The Kwan Um School would be an easy choice, but dharma teacher training involves a lot of memorizing sutras in phonetic Korean and practicing the timing of prostrations and incense lighting to start off meditation retreats. I value the preservation of rites and rituals, and see the veneration of lineages as a profoundly important part of the practice. But I don’t know if moving deeper into spiritual enclaves to acquire esoteric knowledge is going to be that helpful for interacting with mostly non-Buddhist people. This is Central Indiana, after all, so I’m not expecting to be sitting with too many ailing Roshis who will be expecting a flawless recitation of all 55 lines of the Great Dharani Sutra in phonetic Korean:

. . . and so forth. I am glad that somebody else is doing those things though!

I grew up in an extremely conservative church that my parents—now reformed, but who were among the church’s founders—have described to me as a Christian Nationalist church, an admission that is a key component of their rehabilitation into more or less mainline pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-war progressives with whom I can enjoy watching episodes of Golden Girls and Seinfeld. I’m extremely wary of authority that is bestowed according to metaphysical priorities or other spiritual abstractions. Such authorities made my life confusing and miserable as a kid, but more than that . . . I look at my kind, loving parents and remind myself that I am also susceptible to abusing that authority. I may recognize the value of rites and rituals—we’re bowing to each other’s Buddha-nature—but doing solo prostrations to Zen teachers feels bad to me. And I don’t want anyone doing prostrations to me. And yoga is way better than Buddhist burpees when it comes to preparing and recovering from sitting meditation.

Though I disagreed with some of my fellow medics on nearly everything beyond emergency medical interventions, it was easy to respect their authority because it was based on tangible skills. It was based on knowledge, not wisdom. Most of them didn’t get along with each other either, but they all said that if they ever ended up needing help, that they hoped their partner was first on scene. But think carefully before asking questions about the history of the Republic of Texas militia group, or what the gold fringe on the US flag displayed in courtrooms means as far as whether or not “travelers” need to hold a driver’s license.

Zenju Earthly Manuel’s 2022 book The Shamanic Bones of Zen has been a great help to me on this quest. As an ordained Zen priest and “medicine woman of the drum” she writes about the magic and mystery of Zen practice in the context of indigenous religious traditions, but without spilling over into the new age self-help mumbo-jumbo that has overtaken so many discussions of the overlap between psychedelic experience, indigenous spiritual practices, and Buddhist altered states of consciousness.

“Zazen is different from secular meditation,” she writes . . .

Which generally means using meditation as a calming technique or method to remain present in the moment. As with zazen, secular meditation often uses the breath as a focal point, but there generally is no transformation of how one perceives the world or their life. Usually, there is an intention to leave religious teachings out of secular meditation. There is no seeking God, as in some religious traditions, or discovering the nature of life, as in Zen meditation. Zazen is not meant to calm one’s nerves although that may be a result of the awareness zazen can bring over time. It is more than a religious activity as it might appear. It is more than a practice even though many call it that. Zazen is a prolonged ritual of seeing and listening. It is a shamanic process and a way of life.

Seeing and listening—remaining present to the experience of each moment—for prolonged periods of time is how I approached my work sitting with patients on the ambulance. It is also my intention with remaining present for all of the physical and emotional discomfort that arises in sitting meditation and yoga. It’s also the advice I give to friends as we have now mostly crossed into middle age, and have more and more opportunities to spend time with dying friends and family members: “Don’t look away from what’s happening, and don’t stop listening to your feelings.”

As for the questions I have yet to answer, like “do I still have the constitution to bear witness to intense medical trauma,” and “am I a spiritual impostor” or truly confounding inquiries such as “what is Zen” and “are Dickies short-sleeve work shirts considered business attire,” I look to Manuel for guidance: “Meditation is now sought by many for various reasons,” she writes. “However, Zen is for the rare person who is not only looking to attend to suffering, but also desires to immerse into the waters of our universal experience of birth and death.

“It is for those who ask the question, ‘What is this life?’ but do not really want an answer.”

More excerpts from The Shamanic Bones of Zen are also featured, as read by your host, on the two episodes of Inter-Dimensional Music available to stream or DL below.

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Inter-Dimensional Music 2026.04.05
Shamanic Bones of Zen I

As with zazen, secular meditation often uses the breath as a focal point, but there generally is no transformation of how one perceives the world or their life. Usually, there is an intention to leave religious teachings out of secular meditation. There is no seeking God, as in some religious traditions, or discovering the nature of life, as in Zen meditation. Zazen is not meant to calm one’s nerves although that may be a result of the awareness zazen can bring over time. It is more than a religious activity as it might appear. It is more than a practice even though many call it that. Zazen is a prolonged ritual of seeing and listening. It is a shamanic process and a way of life.

— Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
The Shamanic Bones of Zen

For this week’s practice, it’s an hour of expansive reimaginings of North African folk music, post-New Age tropicalia, burnt dub, metallic dub, and a high lonesome occult ambient blend of hazy flutes, distant bells, and windswept ritual percussion.

Our session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with the soundtrack to a med-spa bacta-tank plunge from aberrant techno producer John T. Gast and harpist Serafina Seer.

Serafina Steer & John T. Gast - Water Carrier (edit)
Zé Burnay - A tongue of hunger and thirst
Four Tet - You Were There With Me
Xyva Ixchel - ო თ ხ ი
April Clocks - Metal II (Dub)
DEAFKIDS & TEST - Dança Insana
Deterioration Yellow Swans - Burnt Dub
Nabil Vortex - Fouad (Cheikh Edit)
Mondo Lava - Beco Feio Platano Macho
Righteous Acid - Allman Jam > Move On Down
Marlon Asher - Fit and Strong
Serafina Steer & John T. Gast - Water Carrier (edit)

Inter-Dimensional Music 2026.05.03
Shamanic Bones of Zen IV

Zen is for those who thrive on the intangible, the ambiguous, the amorphous, and the infinite. We are stars forever suspended in nowhere.

— Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
The Shamanic Bones of Zen

For this week’s session, we’ll sit with an hour of earthy psychedelic techno, laid-back kosmische funk, dubwise UK cumbia, visionary Bolivian-American acid folktronics, a twofer of contemporary outernational hardcore, and a threefer of heady post-hardcore mysticism from the early 21st century.

Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with the sound of crystal chimes in the enchanted crystal forest at Ojai.

Crystal Chimes - In The Enchanted Crystal Forest in Ojai, CA
Polygonia - Splintered Soul Fragments
April Clocks - Sharp Eyes
Ninth House - Offerings Dub
Can - Paris 73 Zwei
The Poets of Rhythm - Moira
Rico - Distant Drums
Andy Stott - Science And Industry
AYUCABA - ¿Quién Dio La Orden?
POIKKEUS - Tulevaisuus
Los Thuthanaka - Caporal “Apnaqkaya Titi”
Elijah Minelli - Venn Diagram
Josh Johnson - 856
Tortoise - Axis Seamount
Celebration - Evergreen
Out Hud - Dad, There’s A Little Phrase Called Too Much Information
Pantha Du Prince feat. Panda Bear - Stick to My Side (Four Tet Version)
Crystal Chimes - In The Enchanted Crystal Forest in Ojai, CA

Since I first encountered Timber Rattle’s eerie backcountry devotionals during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Parks’ work has become one of the mainstays of Inter-Dimensional Music FM, my understandably unpopular yet remarkably long-running broadcast media art project combining heavy mellow music and non-self improvement aphorisms, that has aired each Sunday night at 11pm in the Chihuahuan Desert of Far West Texas and Northern Mexico since 2010. Since federal funding for public media was eliminated by the Republican administration, Marfa Public Radio is now 100% funded by its listeners. Today is the last day of their Spring Membership Drive, so if you’d like to join me in supporting the FM radio station that has kept these heavy mellow sounds on the airwaves for over 15 years now, click here:

SUPPORT THE FUTURE OF MARFA PUBLIC RADIO
and INTER-DIMENSIONAL MUSIC FM

Parks’ music as Timber Rattle, lightning white bison, and in collaboration with Anderson as Water is the Sun, is an ambient, forest goth variation on the pastoral, melancholic occult folk music that I’ve been chasing since first encountering the “Sunshine Superman-meets-Hamburger Lady”-sound of Current 93 way back in 1993. It still gives me the deep sense of satisfaction as when I first heard Fairport Convention crossed with Neil Young on the hand-lettered TDK SA90 Type II Compact Cassette my Uncle Rich made for me in high school, an auspicious simultaneous introduction to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere on Side A, and Unhalfbricking on Side B.

Like Kieran Hebden’s first albums as Four Tet, or his more recent collaborations with William Tyler, Timber Rattle and Water is the Sun offer something much stranger than sentimental pastiche. I don’t know that I would’ve been able to tell you that I wanted to hear what mournful British psychedelic folk music would sound like remixed into a chillout tent format until another first encounter, this time with the smears of bucolic post-techno jazz-folk on Four Tet’s Pause when I was as an editor at URB in the early ‘00s. The jazz influence is less pronounced with Parks’ music, but it’s there in an alchemical “Little Church” sort of way, the addition of hillbilly ragas turning Hermeto Pascoal, Teo Macero, and Miles’ recipe into something gamier and Appalachian, a Spice Witches Stew.

I don’t think we URB editors were responsible for coining the the term “folktronica,” but we were definitely early adopters. I can't find the place where he says this, but Florian Meyer aka Don't DJ2 described one of his projects as "wooden techno" which is less cringe name for a similar sort of sound. Here's some of his mesmerizing wooden techno inspired by Sun Ra:

A decade later, after I’d left Los Angeles for the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas, I came across a new variation on these themes with the music of Stag Hare and the artists of the “New Weird Utah” scene, a collaborative community producing strains of jingle-jangling arid lands ambiance under names like Silver Antlers, River Spirit Dragon, Wyld Wyzrdz, and Seven Feathers Rainwater. A Great Basin echo of these Great Smoky Mountains vibrations, and a component of ID Music on Marfa Public Radio since its launch. The ecosystem is preserved in terrarium on the Backcountry Chillout Volume I mixtape I made as part of a fundraiser for one of Arthur Magazine’s several resurrections.

I’ve never met the New Weird Utah folks—who are now dispersed beyond Utah, still making new weird music, e.g. Willow Skye-Biggs TAFKA Stag Hare and the Inner Islands label—but I created the album cover art for Seven Feathers Rainwater’s 15 Apple Musicians, and commissioned work from Stag Hare as part of her extraordinary Tapestry project: “Improvised long form zones creating a singular larger structure, totaling four hours in sound, ebbing and flowing in subtle shifting tones and moods.”

As with my very old Aquarium Drunkard contributions, this Vøid Contemplation Tactics project is an excuse to write about Zen under the cover of writing about music. I paid the rent as an editor, critic, and journalist for nearly a decade in Los Angeles from the late ‘90s through the late ‘00s, the last era when you could turn “having music opinions” into “having health insurance.” But I’ve always found writing about music to be kind of excruciating, and was grateful to shed the critic skin I wore at URB for the even more elusive job of “writing stories about taking drugs with compost wizards who take drugs to make compost to grow drugs with” at Arthur. But one of the upsides (?) to the catastrophic and heartbreaking dismantling of the music industry and the ensuing collapse of the cultural journalism industry that relied on record label advertising to survive is that it’s a lot easier to achieve direct experience of unusual and obscure music like Water is the Sun than in the days when you had to bet $20 or $30 that the Current 93 import CD you were buying was going to be closer to Thunder Perfect Mind than Dogs Blood Rising.

I envy the writers I worked with as an editor so many years ago who have ascended to the heights of what remains of the publishing industry, but I can escape those egotistical traps by reminding myself that first of all, I was pretty successful as a writer, even financially for a few years, and it is crazy to not be grateful for that good fortune. Likewise, I’m incredibly stoked to still be writing for all of you people reading this newsletter.

But that professional success didn’t make me any happier than I am now. It was the opportunities for adventure and connection that came from being involved in underground culture that brought me joy, the relationships with people that I still talk with 30 years later, and the people I still meet every few years because of the Arthur bumper sticker on the 2006 Subaru Outback that’s still rattling along after 20 years of bumping down desert tracks and forest service roads. Meanwhile I haven’t bothered to revisit most of these printed words in ages, despite carting my plastic tub archive of URB, Arthur, LA Weekly, RES, Spin, Budget Travel, High Times, and The Big Issue from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz to Marfa to Indianapolis and now to Muncie over the last couple decades. It was always a thrill when a new issue of Arthur arrived from the printer, but tumbling down booming Kelso Dunes by moonlight with a head full of fungi is a faster route to attaining “the freedom and poverty of Zen.” It’s taken 30 years of tumultuous career changes to understand that I don’t crave success, I crave community.

Whether you wanna call it folktronica, wooden techno, or occult acoustic ambient jazz, this new weird music that is deeply intertwined with wilderness experience has been profoundly meaningful to me because it has been incorporated into my lived experience in ways that I can’t adequately express, regardless of how carefully I fine tune the medicines, which in these dark days of middle age is more often a doctor-prescribed speedball of amphetamine salts and low-dose benzos.

I intend to continue Vøid Contemplation Tactics for free for the foreseeable future due to the opportunities and connections that it has created with you 650-ish readers and lurkers, 37 of whom are literal angels graciously subsidizing the ever-expanding ID Music bandcamp library with paid subscriptions. That being said, I have recently recovered an elusive sense of equanimity by turning to my Zen practice rather than my various unmonetizable creative practices as a possible means of subsidizing my Type 1 diabetes hobby: At the end of May I start a Clinical Pastoral Education internship at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis, the first step toward possibly hopefully perhaps becoming a Zen chaplain.

In addition to figuring out how many “business attire” outfits from the back of the closet still fit, one of my tasks is to determine how to pursue the requisite credential in a “spiritual/values-based orienting system” that complements the clinical experience of sitting with people in crisis. I’m neither a dharma teacher nor a Buddhist priest, and I only have 80 hours of yoga teacher training. But I don’t know if leaving my apostate earthbound teachers and going deeper into spiritual enclaves at this point is the right path.

In considering these questions, I’ve been reading Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s The Shamanic Bones of Zen, and featuring her language on recent episodes of ID Music. Manuel is an ordained Zen priest, but she has a perspective on practice that is as steeped in mystery, magic, and wilderness experience as this music I’m writing and not-writing about. As with any true Zen text, there are no answers within her pages, but as I have learned from a lifetime of losing myself in obscure sounds and getting lost on backcountry trails, a good ear and a compass are more important than field guides.

“Although I have had many teachers, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, I spend time out in the wilderness to access the wisdom of the bones,” she writes. “Zen is for those who ask the question, ‘What is this life?’ but do not really want an answer.”

Or as Zen Master Seung Sahn famously proclaimed: “Only don’t know.”

Water is the Sun is currently on tour in North America: Click here for tour dates.

The Indianapolis Zen Center will host a one-day meditation retreat with Dennis Duermeier JDPSN of the Kansas Zen Center on May 9, 2026. The program begins at 7:30am, and concludes at 3:30pm. Suggested donation is $25, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information on monthly retreats and weekly meditation practice at IZC visit indyzen.org.

Or feel free to drop me a line with questions: I’m no longer an IZC resident, but I’m planning to be there.

Ritual de lo Habitual: Timber Rattle and the Value of Not Knowing

(Originally published in Aquarium Drunkard in September 2021)

I walked away from my first visit to the Indianapolis Zen Center wondering if I’d been initiated into a cult. Despite practicing zazen for years, I was unfamiliar and slightly unnerved by the chanting ritual that started the group’s Wednesday night meditation practice. I was greeted at the door by three gray-haired and gray-robed white men, who offered a friendly but brief introduction that mostly consisted of pointing out the bathroom. Soon after, I was standing behind my cushion staring at a well-worn chanting book. One of the dharma teachers knocked out a methodical “tok-tok-tok” on the moktak, a hand-held percussion instrument. We began by repeating the line…

na-mu bul-ta bu-jung gwang-nim bop-he

…three times, interspersed with bows and prostrations. We continued on through variations on these tangled phonemes for 10 more minutes. My voice faded in and out of their three-part harmonies as I puzzled over how to pronounce the unrecognizable combinations of letters. I also hesitated because my fellow practitioners hadn’t explained that we were chanting about the bodhisattva of compassion—Kwan Seum Bosal aka Avalokitesvara, Kannon, or Guanyin—in phonetic Korean, and that I wasn’t pledging myself to a Midwestern Nxivm franchise.

There’s an amplified sense of occult power when you know you’re close to acquiring secret knowledge, a feeling that’s increasingly elusive as the all-seeing algorithm develops new and faster ways to disseminate information. When I first heard Timber Rattle, a cryptic band with unspecified ties to the Blue Ridge Mountains, California’s Grass Valley, and Upstate New York, I wondered if I was listening to someone else’s arcane cult initiation.

I was deep into the “devotional” tag on Bandcamp, and growing weary of digging in the seemingly endless digital crates of kirtan. The sound of rapturous hippies doing Sanskrit sing-a-longs, strumming away on acoustic guitars, and jingling hand drums in a suburban yoga studio is often a far cry—both literally and figuratively—from the sound of Alice Coltrane in the Sai Anantam Ashram.

Timber Rattle uses a comparable sonic palette, but the ritual comes across way heavier. The intertwined voices chanting and moaning on their 2013 phantoms of place album were just as indecipherable to my ears as Swamini Turiyasangitananda’s devotional singing, or the phonetic recitations heard in Korean Zen temples.

“he’eile moloa’a” begins with 30 seconds of silence before a slow throbbing tone emerges. This presages the arrival of a methodically-picked guitar and at least one—but maybe two or three?—reverberating voices that rise in mournful harmony. Soon a keyboard—or is that a harmonium? or Pauline Oliveros on accordion?—begins to sigh, adding another breath to the chorus, everything respirating into a hypnotic blur. The effect is like an earthbound Sigur Rós, or Liz Fraser gone Pentecostal: vocals without obvious denotative meaning structured into sentences of pure connotation. The language appears to be Hawaiian: “moloa’a” translates as “matted roots,” and is the name of the Kauai beach where they filmed Gilligan’s Island. I failed to find a translation for “he’eile” on its own, and the two words together only point back to Timber Rattle. The rest of the album’s 40-minute runtime covers similar ground. It was just the sort of unmarked backcountry seep of organic ritual trance that I’d hoped to soak in, after passing by so many soft-focus day-spa jams.

Several trails led away from phantoms of place. Before long I was puzzling over at least eight Timber Rattle albums, tour tapes, and two collaborations with lightning white bison, an artist working the same esoteric soil. Digital and cassette versions were spread across two labels from the Czech Republic, and the Virginia-based Burial Dance. Bloomington, Indiana’s Bluesanct Records handled the vinyl. Scouring the web outside of Bandcamp didn’t reveal much more, other than a brief 2015 interview with Potlista, a Czech ‘zine. The band’s 2021 album, god walks the dark hills, isn’t even listed on their Discogs page. Timber Rattle does not go out of their way to explain what they’re doing, and yet they’ve been doing it for a decade or longer.

The rest of Timber Rattle’s catalog offers variations on these crunchy pastoral drones and arboreal dirges. The collaborative releases with lightning white buffalo, grazing the storm floor (2017) and chrysoprase (2019), are more likely to harsh the mellow with grumbling guitar grind and subtle dissonance. These efforts bring to mind Ben Chasny and Al Cisneros’ sacred riff geometries, or Pelt’s clangorous trip-reports. Thinking in terms of Indo-Appalachian fusion, Timber Rattle’s vocal-heavy performances are a slow-crawling dhrupad complement to the frenetic violin and piano-heavy ragas that shimmer across Pelt’s most recent Reticence Resistance album.

Timber Rattle’s 2018-19 albums—animal water, high desert hymns, and the veil beneath the mountain beneath the veil—foster a mellower devotional sound, filling raga-like structures with mountain gospel signifiers and field recordings. The effect is both bucolic and gloomy, like forest-bathing in the dankness of a deep holler, catching a whiff of musk from a hidden den, or inhaling the scent of creosote under the heavy skies of a desert monsoon. The weight is undeniable, making Timber Rattle the rare band that can shift between the slow-burning radiance of Brightblack Morning Light’s ritualistic country-soul, and the mesmerizing crush of “tribal” metal that Neurosis initiated with Pain of Mind‘s “Takeahnase.” There’s also an analog with the syncretism of Phurpa, the Russian collective performing proto-Buddhist shamanic rites in line with Sunn O)))’s amplifier worship catechism. Practicing at altitude often produces feelings of spiritual ecstasy, hypoxic reveries regardless of whether the thin air’s provenance is Appalachian or Himalayan.

How does music produce a devotional effect? And how is that differentiated from the overlapping descriptors “ritual,” and “tribal?” The latter term is often more problematic. Neurosis has refined a sound on their own, in solo efforts, and with the Tribes of Neurot side project to the point where “tribal metal” usually just means “sounds like Neurosis.” If one isn’t identifying the style of a specific tribe, the adjective derives its meaning from exotic stereotypes and racist caricatures. But devotional and ritual traditions from Nyabinghi riddims to 5Rhythms expand on the idea of ambient music as aural wallpaper. These sounds are incomplete without connection to some other activity, be it communing with spirits via ecstatic dance, passing a smoldering chalice, eating of the bread and drinking of the cup, or simply washing the Zen Center dishes. It shouldn’t fade into the background, but it also needs to complement your set and setting.

One can sometimes experience the devotional aspects of such music more clearly by giving up on efforts to understand the mystery. My taste in heavy music includes a lot of self-described “ritualistic death metal.” For my purposes the rituals in question are a lot more intense when left as abstractions of universal suffering, cosmic dread, or gastric distress, leaving any rote blasphemy or hyperbolic descriptions of cruelty lost in translation.

There’s a tendency toward overcompensation on the heavier end of the folk and ambient music spectrums where Timber Rattle might seem at home. Metal artists dabbling in acoustic guitars and repetitive synthesizers often distinguish their sounds as “dark folk” or “dark ambient,” which gives away too much. It also suggests that those musics were previously lacking in somber tones. If “Waitin’ Around to Die” isn’t filed under dark folk, then what does “dark” even mean?

Not that Timber Rattle makes it easy to go behind the music, or even sing along. The interviewer from Potlista asked some of these questions about the band’s use of language from the perspective of a non-native English speaker. The band member present, Adam Parks, clarified their intention:

I think [the lyrics] end up mostly being just a verbal exploration of the same things that the music is exploring. Land and bodies and life and death and magic and language and ritual and myth and space and cycles and animals and plants and food and poison, etc, etc… and our relationships to any and all of those things. I really like singing, especially with the harmonies, but the lyrics are intentionally kind of obscured, since the sound itself is more important to the music than being able to understand the words. I think the “meaning” can be real distracting.

There’s a reason why the dudes at the IZC didn’t offer me an in-depth explanation of Kwan Seum Bosal chanting. This particular Buddhist sect wasn’t a cult, but the Zen Center was an intentional community offering cheap rent. I ended up living there as a member of their religious commune for a couple years. One thing that I learned is that Zen isn’t about thinking your way into answers. It’s about experiencing the questions as they are, and sitting with the uncertainty that remains.

After a few more months of weekly practice, I suggested that we offer first time dharma room visitors enough context to know that we weren’t pledging allegiance to a guru or committing to any proprietary cult-branded body modifications. Linc, IZC’s 75-year-old guiding teacher, eventually agreed. He began to riff on variations of an idea expressed in Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake: Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn:

When chanting, or sitting, or bowing, even special practice cannot help you if you are attached to your thinking. Taoist chanting, Confucian chanting, Christian chanting, Buddhist chanting don’t matter. Chanting “Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Coca Cola…” can be just as good if you keep a clear mind. But if you don’t keep a clear mind, and are only following your thinking as you mouth the words, even the Buddha cannot help you.

Zen is about what you can attain by letting go of things, and what you can learn by accepting the things you can’t learn, practicing what Seung Sahn called “only don’t know.” He paired this with the maxim “only go straight,” which has never really worked as well for me. Seung Sahn was a Korean immigrant, and while his dharma is no less profound for its ESL-ness, there’s a cultural context to both Coca-Cola and “going straight” that obfuscates the teaching. By “go straight,” I’m guessing he means something more like “go forward,” a wayfinding directive that is free from connotations of heteronormativity or blind obedience. Likewise, keeping a clear mind while chanting the name of a hegemonic multinational corporation’s toxic flagship brand may require a lot more effort than doing so with Topo Chico, or better yet, a fully non-proprietary non-sequitur.

Leaving the debate over the effect of casting brand name hexes for another time, the point stands. Listening to Seung Sahn or Timber Rattle isn’t going to give you any answers. But they both offer the opportunity for accessing transcendent spiritual experiences without getting distracted by their meaning.

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Previously on Void Contemplation Tactics . . .

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Zazen is a slow walk in the wilderness. Step by step, bell after bell, chant after chant, breath after breath over many years—and without effort, one may reach a vast field of illumination.

— Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
The Shamanic Bones of Zen (2022)

Sunn O))) released their tenth studio album on April 3 of this year, but as of starting this writing I hadn’t listened to it yet, as I was fixated on digging through the “tapers’ & fans’ audience recordings, 2002-present” in the Sunn Live Archives on Bandcamp, where the drone metal titans have followed in the footsteps of the Grateful Dead by officially encouraging DIY ethnomusicological documentation of their live rituals. Each “RAW & LIVE!” recording is available for $5, but they’ll occasionally make the whole thing Name Your Own Price, which is where I got hooked at the beginning of March, acquiring nearly half of the official archive.

Listen to the 97-minute Field Recordings from the Sunn I episode of Inter-Dimensional Music as you read along, or scroll down for download links and the annotated setlist.

Whether you’ve been down since the Behemoth took flight in 2002, or you’re among the more recent converts won over by Life Metal, Sunn’s rainbow-hued Steve Albini-produced, NPR-approved American Beauty moment from 2019—this archive of audience recordings, along with a couple unmastered soundboards and at least one FM broadcast, is daunting. And given that the core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson acknowledge a tendency toward monochrome over the course of their almost 30 year career—see the albums White1, White2, and Black One—even fair weather fans may wonder what the point is of maintaining an archive of 170 performances and counting.

As with other mystery cults whose acolytes document and circulate their rituals in less than optimal audio formats, the uninitiated will wonder why, for example, I prefer any of the 25 live versions of the Grateful Dead’s “Row Jimmy” in my library over the pristine studio recording found on the band’s 1973 album Wake of the Flood, which isn’t even counted among the 334 hours and 22 minutes of Dead songs on my hard drive. There’s a technical answer that has something to do with the improvisational aspects of bands like the Dead—which leads to the taxonomical understanding that, like String Cheese Incident and Umphrey’s McGee, CAN and Miles Davis are jam bands at least in the lowercase sense of the designation. While, as one example, despite being regularly bootlegged and dropping surprise live jams such as the 17-minute long “A Forest” from Kilburn National Ballroom on May 3, 1992, The Cure is not.

The allure of audience-sourced recordings of Sunn’s megaliths is more elusive than the infinite variations of the Dead’s kinetic collages of folk, country, funk, jazz, rock, and drone. Most of Sunn’s songs, especially the ones that soothe my anxieties, are long grumbling waves of unadorned dual guitar drone that sound much better, technically speaking, in the studio. For example, the crush of sound on their new self-titled album on Sub Pop—which I have now listened to at this point in the writing of this newsletter, which has fragmented into a multi-part series so subscribe now if you want more?—is conveyed with 130 guitar tracks per song, which gives the music a dizzying sort of density that takes me back to 1993, the year I smoked weed for the first time which was not coincidentally also the year I listened to Siamese Dream 1,000 times.

Live, Sunn has achieved a similar outcome with the sheer volume of their performances, creating a cathartic auditory-massage effect which would be impossible for some guy standing in the crowd to capture with a microphone. But there is something to be said for the crowd noise, unintended aberrations, and intentional improvisations, even if they never reinvent themselves as completely as the Dead. The band’s documentation of each performance is minimal, only adding to the mystery. What, for example, might it mean when they describe their May 28, 2006 set at Nyabinghi Dance Hall in Youngstown, OH—featuring Oren Ambarchi, Mark Deutrom, and Boris’ Atsuo Mizuno—with the line, “No monitors were harmed, but feelings were.” And what tragedy befell the band in Amsterdam on January 26, 2010, as hinted at by the epitaph: “Attila’s black wings failed him this night.”

As the Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes in The Shamanic Bones of Zen, a book that has unexpectedly synched with my Sunn gazing: “Step by step, bell after bell, chant after chant,” . . . riff after riff . . . , “breath after breath over many years—and without effort, one may reach a vast field of illumination.” A Buddhist concept expressed as the Oblique Strategy “repetition is a form of change,” and realized in chanting the Heart Sutra at meditation practice three times a week, singing along to “Sugar Magnolia” at least once a month, or going to see Sunn whenever their tour brings them within range every couple of years.

Singing, chanting, zazen, or heavy mellow meditation are all more powerful in the company of others—the three jewels of Buddhism are the teacher (Buddha), the teachings (dharma), and the community (sangha). Solo practice has its limitations. But there’s still relief to be found on my own, as I listen to unsuspecting chompers trying to keep talking as the ritual begins, and another of the 80+ lossless low-fi low-frequency Sunn live tracks titled “01” rumbles out of the stereo, maximum volume moderated to home listening volume, my anxieties buried under a landslide of large boulders the size of small boulders.

Inter-Dimensional Music 2026.03.15
Field Recordings from the Sunn I

mixcloud / FLAC

For this first Inter-Dimensional Music: Field Recordings from the Sunn SuperSession, I took fragments from two shows that first caught my attention when I began my ongoing deep dive into the live archive, and mixed them throughout the sort of broad percussive spectrum regular listeners to our airwaves have come to expect. We start out with blackened sludge metal, in keeping with Sunn’s origins, but quickly detour to ‘80s West African dance music, deconstructed techno, a Kieran Hebden/Hope Sandoval collaboration, and Islamabad Discipline’s “kaleidoscopic exploration of his cultural heritage filtered through a collage of field recordings, guitar mantras, and experiments in traditional forms influenced through his studies with the late Ustad Mohammad Ajmal Khan.” In keeping with Sunn’s minimal written commentary on their live archive, this is a “more dharma rock, less dharma talk” edition of ID Music, free of any announcements or commentary from your host.

I returned to using a four-deck setup, and faded loops of a 2009 soundcheck from the Monoliths & Dimensions tour that features a lot of chanting in-and-out of a recording of the band in their Shoshin Duo configuration performing in Athens, Greece in 2025. This mix of the two performances lurks in the background of the entire set, resurfacing at full volume during in-between moments.

The 2009 recording catches the band in partial ensemble mode—core duo Greg Anderson on guitar and bass, Stephen O’Malley on guitar, with Attila Csihar offering his signature vocal performance that ranges from soaring arias to croaks of gastric distress, and Steve Moore on keyboards and trombone. According to the show notes, it was recorded by “retrodude83 utilizing the Olympus LS-10 Recorder, plus Church Audio STC-9000 with the Church Audio CA-11 mics.”

The 2025 show documents the minimalist setup of Anderson and O’Malley and their guitars, as recorded by “vavmos” who writes “here’s my recording from your recent performance in Athens, Greece, using Church Audio CAFs - Church Audio Ugly 2 - Sony PCM.”

The session is book-ended by excerpts from DrumCircles, an expanding collection of live psychedelic ritual trance music from YslashY and the Drummers of Zevenkamp. It’s not exactly 77 Boa Drum and I don’t know much about the artists beyond the statement of purpose on their label’s Bandcamp profile to “promote experimantal ways of getting into a mediative or trance state of being.” Conveniently, their ethos is also in keeping with the themes of communal rituals discussed above. “Donkse Oog prefers releases by artists who also perform live. everybody can be a studio/laptop artist, but not everybody is able to reproduce their sounds on stage.” Beyond that, the label’s hidden behind a Dutch FB reg-wall so I hope it’s nothing sketchy . . . but I’m a Nag-Champa huffing sucker when it comes to decent long-form drum circle jams like this.

Our multi-channel broadcast media installation includes the following selections:

artist — work

Y/Y and The Drummers - DrumCircle December 23, 2025 (edit)
SUNN O))) - 01 soundcheck (2009.10.22)
SUNN O))) - Crank (2025.10.19)
Lord Mantis1 - Vile Divinity
Actress - Voodoo Posse Chronic Illusion
Jay Duncan ft. Ben Vince - In Limbo
Alèkpéhanhou - Zozo Piaa!
Maral x El Kontessa - Butterfly Magic
Eyad - Qalq
Autechre - YJY UX
Chaka Chawasarira - Hurombo
Four Tet ft. Hope Sandoval - Into Dust (Still Falling)
islamabad discipline - aankh micholi
Mark Ernestus & Ndagga Rhythm Force - Ndiguel
SUNN O))) - 01 soundcheck (2009.10.22) (edit)
SUNN O))) - Pills (2025.10.19) (edit)
Y/Y and The Drummers - DrumCircle December 23, 2025 (edit)

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1

I think most Vøid Contemplation Tactics readers are here for almost everything except the metal, but that’s all the more reason to perform my due diligence as a conscientious selector who may be introducing people to offensive or even harmful material. I do my best to vet the music I play on the show, and for that reason this is the first time Lord Mantis has appeared on the ID Music airwaves, as I file them under the category of “problematic fav.”

Parsing metal ethics is a wild ride because a lot of these mfers are very loud in inscrutable ways about being very flawed, and their convoluted paths may lead to extremes in radical acceptance or bigoted oppression without many waypoints. In my limited experience as an amateur researcher of shitty metal politics I have found that heroin addiction and self-deprecation is often an optimistic indicator of ignorance and (sometimes very very very) bad judgement while clean-living snappy dressers with a conspicuous interest in theory are waaay more ominous.

Reading up on Lord Mantis’ history and connections with other artists has been an inversion of my experience vetting an artist like Dominick Fernow, where instead of scratching the surface of a confrontationally transgressive work and getting occult white supremacists and William Luther Pierce, I found a Columbia University ethnomusicologist and radical Black poet Tongo Eisen-Martin. Due to the inscrutability of a lot of metal in terms of actual lyrics, one is often forced to gather an impression of artistic intention—even if it’s just “I didn’t intend to be a shit head”—based on the company they keep. The difference between being a few degrees of separation from Clandestine Blaze or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

It also would’ve saved me some time if Vice had bothered to mention that Laina Dawes, the person interviewing Lord Mantis vocalist Charlie Fell in 2014 about transphobia and racism, is a respected academic and critic, as well as the author of the 2013 book What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal. A Black woman writing that “The music of Lord Mantis does not deserve clichéd descriptions, as it’s far too rich, too textured and too important for an easy dismissal” is more significant than another white dude defending his favorite shitty band.

More on all of this to come in a future newsletter.

Sometimes I hesitate over writing because I feel like I’m repeating myself. But as I learned by chanting the same sutra at every meditation practice when I lived at the Indianapolis Zen Center, this practice offers a refuge by presenting the same ideas over and over. The ideas may be relayed with different vocabulary, or in shifting dialects, but there is always the warning to regard any teacher presenting claims of newly discovered, wholly original insight with suspicion. Many things have changed in the 1600 years since Bodhidharma left for the east, but the suffering that connected people in the 400s is the same suffering that connects us in the 2020s: Impermanence doesn’t change. Avoiding suffering is just another form of suffering. Craving enlightenment is just another form of craving. It is easy to miss opportunities to relieve suffering in the world if you become distracted by the endlessly scrolling timeline of suffering in the world.

In a rare example of taking my own advice, I have returned to meditation practice at the Indy Zen Center several times over the last couple months. If you’re curious to experience the deep sense of connection that comes from sitting in the presence of other people, a feeling that continues to inspire this newsletter and the various projects documented herein, weekly meditation sessions take place on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30pm, in addition to monthly retreats and early morning practice. For more information visit indyzen.org.

Zen teaching, when stripped of the essential confounding poetry that gives its ephemeral simplicity momentum over the course of a lifetime, begins and ends with the proposition that it is better to not be a shit head than to be a shit head. The only place to be or not to be anything is the present moment. How many moments can we refrain from shit-headedness, even as unwholesome action continues to fill worlds upon worlds, and swallow up all things upon all things? Refraining from shit-headedness in the present moment is liberation.

You can lose yourself in the enchantment of mindfulness-maxxing just as easily as in the cynicism of striving for material success. Both extremes take us away from the wonders that persist along with the darkness. They are both sicknesses that infect us with the thinking that enlightenment is for later, and not for now.

Listen for more of these thoughts—paraphrased from dharma talks by Zen teachers Seung Sahn and Thich Nhat Hanh—in the two newsletter-exclusive Inter-Dimensional Music Supersessions available to stream or download below. In his long-awaited ID Music debut, Leon Russell joins these venerated sages to present the original face koan in his own peculiar dialect:

Each of these broadcasts was mixed live-to-FLAC from the yoga mat here at Cosmic Chambo Studio. Abridged versions aired in February on Marfa Public Radio, where you can encounter our transmission in the wilds of Far West Texas and Northern Chihuahua each Sunday night at 11pm CT.

Inter-Dimensional Music
2026.02.15: Bad Zen Sickness Supersession

mixcloud / download

For this week’s practice, we’ll sit with a polyrhythmic post-world music flow that is gradually subsumed by a swirling mass of visceral black, death, and sludge metals. My renewed enthusiasm for the dubby North African-influenced rhythms that have dominated many episodes of ID Music in recent years can be traced back to an encounter with Tunisian artist Azu Tiwaline’s collaboration with UK bass producer Al Wootton. Both artists are once again represented here, in the mix with the self-described tribal industrial power electronics of Tunisian artist Sayf.

We’ll also hear a wonderful example of my new favorite genre of music—”two adjacent stalls in a street market and one is blasting live Autechre AUD bootleg CDRs and the other is shuffling through 64kbps MP3s of top-ranking SWANA wedding party bands”—from Egyptian producer Eyad.

Then on to Shackleton’s psychedelic ritual trance music intertwined with the hypnotic rhythms of Live ‘80s Cure. Though rarely present in contemporary samples, heavy metals will always be part of ID Music’s DNA, so we’ll close out with the high kvlt weirdness of Yellow Eyes, funereal death metal, and a threefer of classic doom, contemporary industrial-adjacent doom, and a sludge metal cover of proto-heavy metal warmongering.

Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with downpressing naturewave ambiance from Deidarabochi.

Listen for correspondence from Zen Master Seung Sahn on the bad Zen sickness of wanting enlightenment throughout the broadcast, as read by your host.

“You say that in the beginning you were enthusiastic and now you are discouraged. Both extremes are no good. . . Zen mind is everyday mind. You must keep this mind during every action-eating, talking, playing tennis, watching television. Always keep don't-know mind. What is most important is how you keep your mind at this very moment. Just-now mind. If you have free time, it is good to sit. If you don't have free time, then just do action Zen.

But be very careful about wanting enlightenment. This is a bad Zen sickness. When you keep a clear mind, the whole universe is you, you are the universe. So you have already attained enlightenment. Wanting enlightenment is only thinking. It is something extra, like painting legs on the picture of a snake. Already the snake is complete as it is. Already the truth is right before your eyes.”

— Zen Master Seung Sahn
Dropping Ashes on the Buddha (1976)

artist — work
デイダラボッチ - 第1章: 終焉への道
Eyad - Mkhlb
Lukid - Underloop
Baptisma - pes#2
Sayf - untitled
Al Wootton - Hospital of The Five Wounds
Flore - Evidence (Azu Tiwaline remix)
Shackleton - When Memory Ceases
The Cure - All Cats are Grey (Germany, 1981)
Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance - Spring Will Return/Oliver’s Letter
Yellow Eyes - Brush the Frozen Horse
Haruspex Chants - Funereal Passages Through Cerebral Lesions
Black Sabbath - Supertzar
Fórn - Anamnesis
Crowbar - No Quarter
デイダラボッチ - 第1章: 終焉への道

Inter-Dimensional Music
2026.02.22 Heaven is Now Supersession

mixcloud / download

For this week’s practice, it’s 72-minutes of equanimity in armagideon with a bass-forward mix of percussion-heavy post-world riddim and voicing. Along the way we’ll hear a callback to the previous episode’s Led Zeppelin cover by way of Rihanna. For some reason we’re going nuts on this episode with what used to be called “mash-ups,” so listen for Damian Marley’s commentary on Jamaican tourism relayed over an iconic Dead Prez riddim. Plus lots of weirdo vintage dub, cryptical electronics, and an unexpected detour into a Dilla-influenced house music appreciation of vintage Detroit vibrations.

If I had to choose the most beautiful song from the thousands that have floated across the Chihuahuan Desert on the ID Music airwaves, it would be Chuquimamani-Condori’s “uru uru golden child e dj edit”, featured prominently alongside Leon Russell at the beginning of this wide-ranging set.

Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with lush techno from Prince of Denmark. Although the diligent practitioner who remains following the the sign-off will be rewarded with our program’s first post-credit sequence. I was up late making this mix and wasn’t ready to wrap it up just yet!

Language throughout the broadcast on the dangers of disregarding the wonders of the present moment, and sacrificing your life in the pursuit of enlightenment, from Thich Nhat Hanh, as read by your host.

“We have a habit of running after things, and this habit has been transmitted to us by our parents and ancestors. We don’t feel fulfilled in the here and now, and so we run after all kinds of things we think will make us happier. We sacrifice our life chasing after objects of craving or striving for success in our work or studies. We chase after our life’s dream and lose ourselves along the way. We even lose our freedom and happiness in our efforts to be mindful, to be healthy, to relieve suffering in the world, or to get enlightened. We disregard the wonders of the present moment, thinking that heaven and the ultimate are for later, not for now.

To practice meditation means to have the time to look deeply and see these things. If you feel restless in the here and now, or you feel ill at ease, you need to ask yourself: ‘what am I longing for? what am I waiting for? what am I searching for?’”

— Thich Nhat Hanh
The Art of Living (2023)

artist — work
Prince of Denmark - Squidcall
Chuquimamani-Condori - uru uru golden child e dj edit
Leon Russell - Stranger in a Strange Land
Nobody - White Folding Slowly (Into Blue Remix)
Rihanna - Umbrella Maker
Bob Marley - Jump Nyabinghi (Dennis Thompson mix)
Clams Casino - Wassup
DJ Shepdog - Bigger than Jamrock
Hype Williams - MITSUBISHI
Motor City Drum Ensemble - Raw Cuts #5
High Wolf - 707
Roots Radics - Soldierman Dub
Sabaturin - Berzh
Playgroup - Epic One Drop
Kieran Hebden + William Tyler - Spider Ballad
Prince of Denmark - Untitled

find more sounds from these artists in the
Inter-Dimensional Music library on Bandcamp

Vøid Contemplation Tactics welcomes all anonymous lurkers! If you’d like to make me feel better about the money, time, and energy that I put into producing a volunteer FM radio program and free newsletter, you can subscribe (for free) and give me a welcome hit of dopamine. Or you can subscribe for money and help me feel guilty about not sending newsletters more often!

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It’s also super encouraging when you share this with your nice friends. Regardless, thank you for being here.

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FLAC2 and mixcloud links are below, or click here to stream/DL as you read:

This extended mix is the conclusion of a series of programs that began last November, organized around selections from Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, a collection of writings from 12th Century Zen Masters. I focus on the writing of Ch'an Buddhist monk Yuanwu because that was the page that I opened to the first time I picked it up, while visiting my Zen teacher Linc in a nursing home. He’s in his 80s, and he’s a lot better after relocating to California and gaining access to proper physical therapy, but on this first visit—see the previous Zen Essence newsletter—I was devastated to see him having such a hard time. Sitting in a state of sadness and distress, and finding relief in 800-year-old teachings, is why I’ve stayed with Zen practice—however sloppy that practice may become from time to time—for 25 years now.

These very old writings are the bones of Zen practice, the basic forms around which so much else—both good and bad—has grown. It’s reassuring to see the intrinsic Zen concepts unclouded by the delusions of self-improvement that transform something infinite and inconceivable into a meditation app subscription, yoga T-shirt slogan, or productivity hack.

At the other end of the spectrum there’s the strictly ascetic approach to Buddhism that can seem like a rejection of the world rather than acceptance of life as it is. Linc has been my teacher because he walks a third path that is neither the streamlined prosperity Zen of management seminars, nor the fundamentalist method that can seem inaccessible if one does not have the option of retreating to a spiritual enclave. Linc’s dharma—both lived and spoken aloud at meditation practice—is closely aligned with the simple yet confounding language used by these 12th Century monks. As the jacket copy to Zen Essence reads, “In contrast to the popular image of Zen as an authoritarian, monastic tradition deeply rooted in Asian culture, these passages portray Zen as remarkably flexible, adaptive to contemporary and individual needs, and transcending cultural boundaries.”

The Indianapolis Zen Center where I lived with Linc for several years is home to a thriving, radically diverse sangha in part as a result of Linc’s adherence to rigorous practice while de-emphasizing the harsh dogma that might discourage return visits from first-time practitioners. While the IZC’s foundations are in the Kwan Um School of Zen, it’s a space that has adapted to the peculiar needs of Central Indiana’s fledgling Buddhist and Buddhist-adjacent communities. This final piece of language from Yuanwu—heard throughout this ID Music Supersession—is one way of understanding this variation of Zen practice:

Many intelligent people understand Zen subjectively, and are unable to let go of their subjectivity. They still their minds without experiencing their real nature, and think this is emptiness. They try to abandon existence to cling to emptiness. This is a serious malady.

I love when these cranky old monks proclaim such esoteric concerns to be serious maladies. It’s melodramatic language, but it’s also crucial to remember that the avoidance of suffering is just another form of suffering: Abandoning existence and clinging to emptiness is just another form of suffering. To experience the fullness of life is to sit with the darkness and the light, joy and sorrow, despair and jubilation. The fullness of life is just as much about watching your delighted Zen teacher drinking a Bud Light and eating a hot dog under kaleidoscopes of fireworks exploding over the White River at a July 4 block party as it is commiserating with him over the gnarly bathroom-centric details of his body’s deterioration on a gray afternoon in a gnarly, gray nursing home. Linc’s dharma is reflected in the fullness of his own life, and has become a crucial text in my own study of the science of freedom. Linc never asks me how my meditation practice is going, but he always asks me about my persistently unpopular yet surprisingly long-running FM radio broadcast.

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Inter-Dimensional Music January 2026
Zen Essence IV: Clinging to Emptiness Supersession

FLAC | mixcloud

As former participants in the still-on-pause Basking in Gravity yoga and meditation art project will know, the original intent of these live ID Music mixes is to provide a soundtrack for sitting still or rolling around on the floor in slowed-and-throwed yoga poses. Thus the long runway and landing strip provided in this session by Ruven Nunez, whose hour-long NYOP Ghostlight composition guides us slowly out of, and eventually back in to, the subjectivity we suffer from here in the provisional realm of names and forms.

From there it’s an hour of pastoral psych from the Hudson Valley . . .

. . . woozy Australian “solar-powered belt-driven drone” . . .

. . . bass-forward gamelan jammage . . .

. . . hybridized New Age zones incorporating throat singing and Aztec death whistles . . .

. . . plus Peter Gabriel, proto-industrial sludge dub, and vintage Sufi trance music of cryptical provenance.

Ruven Nunez - Ghostlight (excerpt)
Wilde Vier - Map of 33rd Dream
Ninth House - Reading Dub
Peter Gabriel - San Jacinto
Komodo Kolektif - Temple Ball
REDUCER - Nada Nuevo
Steve Roach / SoRIAH - Stars of Darkness
ZULI - سلام يا صاحبي
Muqaddium Mohsen Bin Arafa - (unknown)
James Holden - Seven Stars
Ninth House - Pendulum Dub II
D’Angelo - One Mo’ Gin (live)
Ruven Nunez - Ghostlight (excerpt)

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Seeing his physical deterioration on my first visit was a shock: He’s in his 80s, but I’ve always known Linc as a hale and hearty guy. His schedule had slowed down, but he was still working as a contractor earlier in the year. The confused, skinny man with a sloppily shaved face yelling at nurses from a hospital bed looked 20 pounds lighter, and though he recognized me, he was pretty out of it. It was hard to see someone who has taught me so much about patience, and remaining present with discomfort, struggling with the profound impatience and discomfort that accompanies physical decline, exacerbated by the United States’ sadistic healthcare system.

After the nurse left I said “This is the kind of suffering we’ve been practicing for, right?”

Conversation was hard to maintain, and he seemed exhausted, so we sat together quietly for awhile until he asked me to read to him from Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, a 1989 collection of writing by Chinese Zen Masters of the 10th-12th Centuries, as translated by Thomas Cleary. I opened the ragged paperback from his bedside table to the bookmarked page where the previous narrator had left off, a section of teachings from Zen Master Yuanwu. I’ve included a few of these readings on this series of Inter-Dimensional Music episodes, originally broadcast on Marfa Public Radio in November and December 2025, and available to download or stream down below. Or click here to stream the first episode as you read along:

Also! To be clear in case my sloppy switching between past and present tense makes it unclear, Linc is still here with us in the provisional realm of names and forms—albeit with a better view, having relocated from Indianapolis to the Bay Area—as of this writing in January 2026.

Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.

— Zen Master Yuanwu

Linc has been an important teacher for me because his approach to Zen practice isn’t dogmatic. I want to call his teaching style non-traditional, but it’s more like he’s deeply orthodox in adhering to Zen concepts of unorthodoxy. Interacting with Linc could be like living a koan, his humor, stubbornness, and intentionally frustrating actions often leading down inscrutable paths to unexpected wisdom. I like to say that the most profound thing I learned living at the Zen Center was how to not be a shit head when it’s my turn to do the dishes. But the deeper lesson came from learning how to not be a shit head when it was Linc’s turn, and he’s insisting on washing the dishes with a decrepit sponge in cold water without soap, and “drying” them with a damp and dirty kitchen towel.

I’d get confused about why Linc and I had so many conflicts over kitchen rules, things like what food needs to refrigerated, or how to properly wash your hands before cooking. I’d look to lines from foundational Zen texts such as Affirming Faith in Mind for guidance: “When preferences are cast aside, the Way stands clear and undisguised.” Was I too attached to my understanding of the difference between expiration dates, sell-by dates, and best-by dates?

John Melvin, another teacher, former housemate and lifelong dharma brother was helpful here, assuring me that preferences for such things as non-spoiled milk were okay to cling to, especially when we were serving meals to our guests. “‘The milk’s gone bad’ may sound like a value judgement, but it isn’t really an opinion.”

On subsequent visits to the nursing home over the next few weeks, I watched Linc’s condition improve. He still wasn’t walking, but it was clear that he knew who he was, who I was, where we were, and how he got there. I brought him the Taco Bell order he wanted, but was met with spirited disdain for delivering fried egg rolls when he requested fresh spring rolls. He was sometimes in deep conversation with other visitors when I walked in the door, and I was glad to give up my chair to newly arriving friends as our conversations wound down.

Linc was one of the first students who gathered around Seung Sahn—the Korean Zen Master who brought this lineage to the West—when he arrived in the US in the early ‘70s. He became a founding member of the Kwan Um School of Zen, and worked at Seung Sahn’s side as an organizer, carpenter and sometimes fixer. He also served for years as the abbot of the Providence Zen Center—one of the headquarters of Kwan Um’s rapidly expanding global network. He came up alongside well-known Buddhist celebrities like Roshi Joan Halifax, Jack Kornfield, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Catch him in the right mood and he’ll serve half-remembered and possibly apocryphal stories about their adventures in those heady days when traditional forms of Buddhism were becoming hybridized into a component of Western bohemianism. Who’s up for dropping acid and hanging out in a cemetery with some Korean monks?

Years ago I brought him a weed gummy from a shop in California, handing it over with a warning to “be careful, maybe take a quarter of this, go for a walk on a sunny afternoon.”

Linc eyed the button-shaped edible with wariness. “Peyote?” he asked.

“No, it’s just weed,” I assured him. “I’m not as cool as you think.” He smiled, shook his head, and handed it back to me. By the time we were living together, his preferred indulgence was to taste test the questionable fruit wine he brewed with a fellow neighborhood gardener, or maybe crack open a can of lukewarm suds—he insisted the small fridge in the “dharma-free zone” of the garage where he sequestered a slowly-dwindling six pack of light beer didn’t need to be plugged in since it was in the shade—to go along with the homemade fireworks he’d put on display for July 4, Buddha’s Birthday, or Linc’s Birthday.

When your original reason for studying Zen is not right, you wind up having labored without accomplishment. This is why ancients used to urge people to study Zen as if they were on the brink of death.

— Zen Master Yuanwu

Linc could also be painfully honest about the damage he took from his commitment to his teacher. Among other things, dealing with the scandal that followed the revelation in 1988 that Seung Sahn had been engaged in consensual yet highly unethical sexual relationships with several students led to a mental breakdown, after which he walked away from the school for awhile. He says these involvement with Kwan Um also played a role in the end of his marriage: His ex-wife Zen Master Soeng Hyang (aka Barbara Rhodes) was involved with Kwan Um from the beginning as well, and became the school’s figurehead after Seung Sahn’s death in 2004. They’re still on good terms as far as I can tell, and Linc gets emotional talking about her work as a hospice nurse. “She knows how to sit with people who are dying,” he tells me. “Not everybody’s willing to do that.”

These experiences informed his decision to not seek the title of Zen Master—or that’s the story as he tells it—so his official appellation is Ji Do Poep Sa Nim, or “dharma master” if gee d’oh poh-ep sah neem doesn’t roll off the tongue. The JDPSN designation gives him the authority to lead meditation retreats and guide students through koan practice, but he doesn’t claim the “soen sa nim” honorific, and given the lack of documentation of his vernacular stream-of-consciousness dharma talks, it seems unlikely that he’ll be remembered with an anthology of correspondence or his own Wikipedia page. And he’ll correct you if you refer to him as anything other than “Linc.”

It’s one thing for Zen Master Yuanwu to proclaim "If you have the idea of superiority and are proud of your ability, this is a disaster" from across the centuries. It’s another to skip the awards ceremony, exchange ceremonial robes for a paint-spattered thrift store T-shirt, and make fun of yourself for that time you sat alone in a remote cabin eating nothing but rice and beans on a solo 90-day meditation retreat. As Yuanwu asks, “How could anyone show off and claim to have attained Zen?”

While many members of Linc’s OG American Buddhist cohort have ascended to the heights of the mindfulness world with name-brand apps, impressive bibliographies, academic credentials, and influential positions in prestigious Buddhist organizations, Linc spent the the last decade as the abbot of a ramshackle residential Zen Center in a Midwestern Buddhist backwater. He is still best known locally as a reliable contractor, proud beekeeper, outlaw compost hoarder, and the sort of open-minded food upcycler sometimes known as a “dumpster diver.” As a result of his diverse community engagement, the Zen Center was the site of first contact with Buddhism for many of our guests. On the other hand, his unpredictable teaching style and contempt for dogma came across as heretical to conservative members, many of whom left the sangha, sometimes on less than friendly terms. One of whom allegedly tried to have him “excommunicated.”

When I got involved with IZC in 2016, I worked with Linc and the two remaining dharma teachers on diversifying our outreach efforts to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities that are often underserved by a profit-minded mindfulness industry catering to suburban yogis making “self-care investments” determined to “find your Zen.” As a native Hoosier and former Evangelical Christian I had a lot in common with many of the young seekers whose spiritual journey detoured into our dharma room, and I looked for ways to make our practice more accessible to first timers. Eventually fresh sangha members occupied the cushions of those traditionalists who couldn’t tolerate Linc’s free-wheeling dharma, but the zeal of fresh converts may not be as reliable as the steady hand of long-suffering acolytes when it comes to the institutional stability of a 501(c)3 religious nonprofit.

Whenever I talked with Linc about working on a book, recording his dharma talks, or documenting his legacy in the way that Kornfield, Roshi Joan, or Kabat-Zinn have, he would reference a line from the Heart Sutra that we chanted at each meditation practice: “If you’re trying to make money or get famous selling the idea of non-attainment, you may not understand the practice of non-attainment.”

This wariness of spiritual hierarchies was also part of Seung Sahn’s idiosyncratic teaching style. “Be very careful about wanting enlightenment,” the Kwan Um patriarch wrote in Dropping Ashes on The Buddha, a 1976 anthology of letters and dharma talks. “This is a bad Zen sickness. When you keep a clear mind, the whole universe is you, you are the universe. So you have already attained enlightenment. Wanting enlightenment is only thinking.”

As Linc tells the story, at the end of his life Seung Sahn only agreed to cooperate on a final anthology of teachings if it was given the title Wanting Enlightenment Is a BIG MISTAKE (Shambhala Publications, 2006). Taking his cue, Linc skips over the publishing negotiations altogether and will tell you that wanting enlightenment is a big mistake on your first visit. Then he’ll clap his keisaku and move on to whatever dumb jokes his buddies at Habitat for Humanity were telling at the job site, as we pass around a plate of the stale pecan sandies that he picked up from the reject table at the food bank where he volunteers.

Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egoism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization.

— Zen Master Yuanwu

Another thing that I learned as a Zen Center resident hosting longtime practitioners, novice seekers, and whoever else showed up at our door for one of six weekly meditation sessions, is that most people are already familiar with the idea that acquiring money, power, and fame does not guarantee happiness. But this is different from the practice of passing on actual opportunities to acquire money, power, or fame.

For all of his faults, Linc is someone who chose to live and teach in accordance with some of the most important, but least celebrated, Zen values. Non-striving, non-attainment, non-self help ethics that are at odds with the exhausting messages that metaphysical entrepreneurs and spiritual braggarts have used to turn ego-eroding practices into mindfulness maxxxing.

A weekend workshop at Roshi Joan’s Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe can cost upwards of $500, with an additional $300 for a bunk in a shared room. Weekend retreats at IZC are available for a $25 “good faith” donation, but nobody’s patrolling the zafus checking receipts or reservation numbers. Staying overnight on a couch might cost you $20, but pitching in with yard work will cover the bill if you’re broke. As Zen practitioners we vow to save all of the numberless sentient beings regardless of financial status—and somebody’s gotta pay for all that green tea and incense—but the overall sangha vibe is going to be different when the cushions are mostly occupied by people who’ve got a thousand bucks to drop on a weekend of sitting quietly, doing chores, and eating small plates of minimalist vegan fare.

It’s fitting that the abbot of a Bible Belt meditation center was a carpenter who rejected patriarchal privilege to embrace a life of relative poverty, surrounded by a dysfunctional, squabbling congregation of idealistic seekers. It should not be a surprise when such an abbot welcomes a mentally-distressed homeless friend to meditation practice as an honored guest. But contempt for ambition and the veneration of downpressed outcasts are traits perhaps more likely to be encountered in one of King Hu’s classic Zen wuxia than at contemporary Buddhist meditation centers.

Linc’s a good teacher because he’s flawed, and has lived a life that is more like a raunchy koan about toilets that you solve by burping at your teacher, than the life of an ephemeral bodhisattva as recounted in a flawlessly chanted sutra. He’s still got quite an ego, but that means he’s continuing to struggle with the rest of us sufferahs down here in the grubby provisional realm of names and forms, rather than playing the role of venerable guru, emanating rays of pure benevolence while levitating wisely above his cushion.

All of that being said, Linc’s treatment of the other dharma teachers could go from “mischievous sage” to “abusive mentor” pretty quickly. That behavior was the subject of many arguments that were more consequential than our squabbles over storing leftovers uncovered in the microwave overnight. During one of the last conversations I had with him at Christmas—shortly before he departed Indianapolis with his daughter, bound for a nursing home California—he told me that he decided years ago that he wasn’t going to argue with people anymore. But he made an exception for me. “You were worth arguing with,” he tells me, both of us tearing up in the empty nursing home cafeteria, holding on to memories of bickering in the kitchen over the use of thrice-recycled cooking oil, the placement of cat litter boxes, or the time he referred to one of the dharma teachers who had been struggling with a writing project as a “retired poet.” A sick burn is a sick burn, but elderly dharma masters are not always happy to have their students quoting the temple rules prohibiting sick burns.

The 1000-year-old Chan Buddhist writings—the Chinese tradition that preceded Zen’s migration to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—such as those found in Zen Essence are the sort of simple texts that Linc returns to after his sometimes confounding improvisational dharma talks based on random newspaper clippings that he finds in his pocket, or derived from one of the scribbled post-its folded into his dog-eared notebooks. As with the living koan practice of moderating kitchen hygiene in a slop-style spiritual commune, one-thousand-year-old Zen aphorisms are not easily appropriated for productivity hacks, management seminars, or other McMindfulness schemes.

During the time that I lived with him at IZC, Linc never encouraged me to become a dharma teacher or take the Buddhist precepts. He still asks if I’m doing Inter-Dimensional Music (yes!) the radio show that I produced in my Zen Center room for years, or the Basking in Gravity yoga sessions (no! but maybe again if I can find the right venue?) that started as bendy interludes during IZC retreats. He’d roast me mercilessly if I asked him to evaluate my progress toward enlightenment. The only thing he’s ever encouraged me to do is get in touch with a friend who supervises the Clinical Pastoral Education program at an Indianapolis hospital. Auspiciously, I ended up meeting this chaplain when she dropped by on my last visit with Linc before his departure for California.

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If your teacher is an asshole sometimes, it’s easier to separate the wisdom of the teachings from the failings of the teacher. This makes it easier to accept the fact that you’ve been an asshole sometimes too, and to do the work of being an asshole less often in the future. An enlightened shit head is still a shit head, and since we’re all already enlightened—we just need to wake up to our enlightenment—then we’re also all shit heads. The only way to recognize both of these states is by watching your mind. While also remembering Yuanwu’s observation that “As soon as you try to chase and grab Zen, you’ve already stumbled past it.” ​​

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.11.16
Zen Essence I: Practice

download / stream

Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.

For this week’s practice, we’ll immerse ourselves in an hour of death meditations, including blackened goth dubbing, an occult brew of atmospheric jazz, electro-chaabi street rave abstractions, and long-form psychedelic doom jamming.

Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with an excerpt from Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort, a synthesizer drone elegy for her son, inspired by the root text of the Bardo Thodol.

Language throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom.

artist — work
Éliane Radigue - Kyema
UNKLE - Time Has Come [Portishead Plays UNKLE mix]
Carrier - Slow Punctures
Miles Davis - Sanctuary
Iceburn - Dahlia Rides the Firebird
Jay Glass Dubs - Interlude I - New Teeth Dub
Aeson Zervas - 14
Shackleton - Death Is Not Final (T++ Remix)
Éliane Radigue - Kyema

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.12.07
Zen Essence II: Motivation

download / stream

When your original reason for studying Zen is not right, you wind up having labored without accomplishment. This is why ancients used to urge people to study Zen as if they were on the brink of death.

For this week’s practice, it’s an hour of free-form Hungarian space rock, East African free jazz cosmologies, post-punk iration, wooden techno, and other percussion-forward post-world musics.

Listen for non-self help aphorisms throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, and read by your host.

artist — work
Massive Attack V Mad Professor - Cool Monsoon (New Bass & Drum)
Don Cherry & Latif Khan - Air Mail
Psychedelic Source - Three Golds Reward II
Boredoms - (omega)
Bunny Wailer - Solomonic Dub
Lagoss & Abagwagwa - Cayeñero
Marc-Antoine Barbier - Tropique
Autechre - si00
The Clash - Straight to Hell (Extended Unedited Version)
Holy Tongue - Between the Vessel and the Light
Massive Attack V Mad Professor - Cool Monsoon (New Bass & Drum)

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.12.14
Zen Essence III: Liberation

download / mixcloud

Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egoism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization.

For this week’s “live-to-FLAC from the yoga mat” mix, we’ll sit with an hour of astronomical forecasts from New Mexican Stargazers, vintage interstellar livity, organic industrial percussion, a log xylophone in dub, soporific psychedelic folk music, and cosmic slop straight from the source.

Listen for 12th Century non-self help aphorisms throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, and read by your host.

artist — work
NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS - MOTEL ROOM THUNDER
Tradition - Planet Play/Laser Games
DEAFKIDS & TEST - Novos Métodos
dominique dela cola - open your eyes
Leslie Winer and Jay Glass Dubs - No Famous Actors
Eveylen Greene - | SMELL |
Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop
Nakibemebe Embaire Group & Naoyuki Uchida - Oteranga Waira
Mabrak - Drum Talk
Graham Nash - Another Sleep Song
Brightblack Morning Light - Star Blanket River Child

You can find more music from many of these artists in the Inter-Dimensional Music library on Bandcamp. Feel free to get in touch if you’re looking for specific song IDs. And you can catch Inter-Dimensional Music in the wild on Marfa Public Radio in Far West Texas each Sunday night at 11pm (CT).

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Vøid Contemplation Tactics welcomes anonymous lurkers, but if you’d like to make me feel better about the money, time, and energy that I put into producing a volunteer FM radio program and free newsletter, you can subscribe (for free) and give me a welcome hit of dopamine. Or you can subscribe for money and help me feel guilty about not sending newsletters more often!

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It’s also super encouraging when you share this with your nice friends. Regardless, thank you for being here.

I did not want to share my grief with Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube, Bandcamp, nor any other lurking facilitator. I did not want my listening experience to be interrupted by information about new flavors of Starbuck treats or details of the lucrative signing bonuses on offer to American Gestapo recruits. I did not want Spotify to flag this emotionally wrenching night on an annual user surveillance report. I did not want the temptation to start scrolling BlooSkeets on the device that was playing the music, looking for something funny or disturbing to distract me from my uncomfortably raw feelings. I just wanted to sit and feel sad about a friend who is nearing the end of their days while a group of fellow Zen practitioners scream over a hypnotic frenzy of guitars and polyrhythmic drumming about how “mountains are mountains / just as they are / not as I want them to be.”

The price of grieving without advertisements, of grieving privately to queer Zen black metal unperturbed by alarms or phone calls or credit card notifications, the price of fading into silence when the album finishes rather than auto-play hustling me on to the next thing is $10.50.

If you use Spotify1 to stream music, that’s fine. And who cares what I have to say about it anyway? Why pretend that denying a massive multinational corporation your $10 monthly subscription fee will have a substantial impact on their defense industry investment portfolios?

That being said, when there is an organized effort toward change, sometimes it has an effect. As a result of many people saying mean things about Spotify online and IRL for years, there actually appears to be a small but not insignificant organized effort by musicians and fans to leave the platforms that are actively undermining their ability to make a living. I don’t know if it’s working, but the Bandcamp bestselling albums feed has looked more like a King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard2 fan page since the confusingly popular Australian prog-jam-band-collective pulled their tunes from the streaming service.

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I also think it’s fine—good, actually!—for people to have easy access to an incredible amount of music. In the spirit of public libraries, I think it would be wonderful if our society decided to subsidize cultural production so that creation of—and access to—art doesn’t depend on advertising revenue or the patronage of generational wealth hoarders. That system isn’t working out very well for most of us! The privilege of experiencing a broad range of writing, visual art, film, and music should not be denied to people based on their income. As anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote in the beloved and oft-cited (by me) manifesto “To save the world, we’re going to have to stop working”:

It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures.

So this is not intended as a guilt trip for anyone who continues to make their daily grind a smidge more tolerable by spending $10/month for immediate access to one of the largest collections of music in the history of civilization. But for a naive idealist such as myself, there are reasons to avoid Spotify that have more to do with how I want to exist in the world, than with forcing the world to conform to my wishes. Listening to music without relying on the rent extraction-schemes of authoritarian broligarchs restores some of the sacred intimacy of connecting to other humans through shared aesthetic experience. Paraphrasing words of the 13th Century Zen Master Dōgen, “Even if unwholesome action fills worlds upon worlds, and swallows up all things, opting-out is emancipation.”

With all of that said, I am tired of having the same conversation with people who 1) feel bad about using Spotify, 2) have enough walking around money to spend on media in addition to their Spotify subscription, but 3) say that they do not know how to stop using Spotify. It’s another instance of people avoiding a difficult decision because they “don’t know what to do.” Often the reality is that we do know what to do, but we don’t want to do it. Instead of crowing about switching from Spotify to a streaming service that’s less open about its support of ICE, or one that pays artists one penny per stream rather than one quarter of one ha’penny, maybe post some Bandcamp receipts?

In the interest of full disclosure, we have a Spotify account, though I rarely use it. One exception was a night this last May when I drank too much tequila and stayed up too late getting too sentimental by listening to too much Terry Allen. It’s weird and creepy and genuinely unnerving that one of Spotify’s lurking facilitator droids flagged this as a night of unusual listening, notifying my partner—the account owner—seven months later on the just-released Spotify year-end surveillance report.

“The day you circled Lubbock in endless company,” it begins, somewhat ominously, especially if you’ve visited Lubbock. “Your late evening was a revolving door of Terry Allen’s ‘Lubbock (on everything),’ looping ‘Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey,’ ‘High Plains Jamboree,’ and ‘The Great Joe Bob (a Regional Tragedy)’ for extra mileage. 51 minutes, 14 plays, 1 artist—your most repeat-heavy day, with outlaw country on endless loop.” Which is annoying to begin with because listening to a couple songs for less than an hour is hardly “an endless loop,” but mostly because I did not realize that a corporation run by AI drone warfare enthusiasts that recruits its users for Republican kidnapping squads was taking detailed notes on a lonely Saturday night and my indulgence in 15-year-old memories of “slow dancing through the neons / like sorrow through a song.”

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Is it a poor excuse that this Spotify membership is part a very old but somehow still valid bundle with a streaming TV channel subscription? Probably! But I’m not making excuses, nor am I asking for yours. For what it’s worth, even though I’ve scaled back my media budget out of necessity, I’ve purchased almost 150 albums, EPs, and singles on Bandcamp over the last 12 months, thanks in part to the support of the 34 literal angels with paid subscriptions3 to Vøid Contemplation Tactics. Thank you! Next time I’ll spend $12 so I can listen to sad dirtbag Texas ballads without logging my listening data with ICE recruiters.

This “Exiting the Stream” series of Luddite virtue signals is a peculiar contribution to the Butlerian Jihad of Dune lore, documentation of my ineffective but personally satisfying blow against the engines of enshittification. Regardless of whether an individual decision to abstain from Spotify has an effect on Spotify, choosing to experience art in a way that aligns with my personal values is good for my nervous system. It feels good as a quiet refutation of the idea that the manufactured insecurity of the present age is inevitable, rather than the intended outcome of a wide-ranging set of strategies of tension implemented to make us afraid and uncomfortable while extracting as much rent as possible before we’re shipped off to Charles Kirk Koncentration Kamps.

There are already plenty of articles explaining how Tidal or Qobuz are less evil than Apple Music or Amazon which are probably more evil than Spotify given their expanded spheres of influence. Daniel Ek is a terrible person, but at least he didn’t bribe our 79-year-old white nationalist president with his very own special golden phone. This is a more annoying and inconvenient Luddite approach, with the reminder that Luddites are not anti-technology, but fight the use of technology for exploitation.

Cosmic Chambo’s Guide to the Moderately Inconvenient Process of Exiting The Stream Part I: Spotify

I. Excavate and Retain Physical Media

Archivists have been warning us for years that it’s dangerous to cede control over libraries to for-profit entities. In addition to leeching financial resources from artists, streaming services decide what art and music we have access to based on decisions over which we have no say. They can disappear catalog items for unknown reasons, for example see this list of 300+ movies unavailable to stream anywhere in the US. An increasingly unnerving prospect as a small group of authoritarian right wing billionaires consolidates control of the film and television industry. There’s no reason that in the future, work like Sinners, One Battle After Another, or Reservation Dogs will be shelved in favor of biopics starring insanely Q-pilled right wing freak Jim Caviezel’s as imprisoned Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro, or, as someone suggested online in a post I can’t find anymore, “an AI-generated film where Scooby Doo joins the IDF.”

To start with, plenty of Elder Millennials, Gen X people, and Boomers continued to buy enough music to support an entire cultural sector—from musicians and record labels to record stores and music magazines—well into the age of Napster, Soulseek, and The Pirate Bay. What’s more, a lot of us discarded those CD jewel cases and inserted the discs into large floppy black books, rendering the media ineligible for resale, yet much easier to transport. You definitely know someone who has several hundred CDs preserved in these hefty portfolios, physical media caches hoarded by cultural preppers like so many Jim Bakker Doomsday Slop Buckets.

I have a 25-year-old five disc CD changer that works fine even though I lost the remote over a decade ago. In theory, there are components that will eventually wear out, but in practice it works like new. There is no forced obsolescence: no operating system to be updated, nor logins to be forgotten. If you want to upgrade, a few companies still manufacture exorbitantly expensive audiophile CD players: The Crutchfield catalog ranks the $6,500.00 McIntosh MCT500 unit as among the best CD players of the year. Or you can find Technics SL-PD888 Compact Disc Changers like mine for $50 on Ebay.

If you don’t want to deal with a dedicated CD player, a low-end CD/DVD drive costs about the same as an antique CD player. I use a cheap LG Slim Portable DVD writer that I got from Best Buy for $35. That’s an example, not a recommendation: The first one I bought died after a couple years of moderate use, because that’s just how tech is these days, part of the brilliant strategy of manufacturing disposable products with carcinogenic materials that last forever. In comparison, the Technics SL-PD888 from 1998 has never given me any trouble, and is partially made of metal.

I don’t know if Apple Music still lets you import CDs, but there are several clunky but totally functional programs that will rip your CDs into multiple formats, from Ogg Vorbis to AIFFs. These apps are free and rarely updated, and they look as cheap and outdated as that might imply. But they work! I use one called XLD, which is a clever acronym for X Lossless Decoder. If that doesn’t do the trick, I turn to fre:ac, which stands for Free Audio Converter. Rest assured that these developers have not wasted a dime of the donations they occasionally solicit on interface design, user experience, or branding.

As for formats, audiophiles can debate the sound quality of WAV vs AIFF vs FLAC vs MP3, but after reading many articles and reddit posts, the majority opinion seems to be that if your soundsystem is booming, your hearing is undamaged, and your neighbors won’t call the cops, you can probably detect the difference between 320kbps MP3s and FLACs at high volumes. But the upgrade to WAVs or AIFFs is beyond the range of human perception.

II. Buy Music from Artists Even if You’re Only Ever Gonna Stream It

Unless you are purchasing vinyl, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, or novelty USB drives, you are not paying for the cost of manufacturing the medium upon which the music is conveyed. What remains is an ephemeral but essential component of the price of art: Compensating the artist for their time and their labor. It is a subtle but powerful shift in perception to consider any work of art as an accumulation of the creator’s time.

Musicians spend decades honing their skills and acquiring instruments and equipment, and put months or years of time and money into writing, rehearsing, and recording that music, so it feels good to give them $9 for the privilege of experiencing this documentation of so many hours of their finite lifetime. It’s like dropping change into a busker’s hat, except the busker is the nine-piece devotional drone-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor playing their album in full at your house and they’ll pause if you have to run to the bathroom or want to get something to eat from the kitchen. And they’re only asking us to give each player one dollar.

I’ve yelled a lot in previous newsletters about the good and the bad of Bandcamp. The TL;DR is that Bandcamp is an amoral company that will do whatever they want to maximize the profits—such as firing all of their unionized employees as well as over 80% of their BIPOC and LGBTQ+ employees in 2023, shortly after the original owners sold the platform to the multinational video game conglomerate Epic Games who promptly sold the company to a firm that licenses music for Taco Bell commercials—but AFAIK they still offer the best deal for artists.

When you buy something on Bandcamp, your money hits the artist’s PayPal in 24-48 hours—less Bandcamp’s fees—and congratulations you just helped your favorite musician pay for the tube of toothpaste they’re buying later this afternoon. You can even add a little note that says “hell yeah” and sometimes they’ll write back “thanks bud” and suddenly listening to music is human again. What’s more, you don’t have to cancel your Spotify account or actually download the files in order to do this.

III. Used CDs are Cheap and Plentiful

As for acquiring physical media: Vinyl sounds wonderful, record sleeves are beautiful to look at, and a few retain or even increase in value, but they are also complicated to manufacture, often very expensive, and always inconvenient to listen to, especially if you’re used to the seamless streaming music experience. Putting the bong down and raising yourself from the couch isn’t actually that much hassle, but as someone—maybe Julian Cope?—once said of Tangerine Dream’s immersive “dark ambient” album Zeit, “the only flaw is you have to get up to flip the record over.”

Used CDs on the other hand are easy and cheap to produce, and thus plentiful and usually inexpensive4. Show up at Half Price Books after an elderly hesher got shipped off to the nursing home, leaving their grandkids to hastily sweep out their storage space, and you’ll complete your Judas Priest and Iron Maiden collections with a grip of $5 portable FLAC archives.

you [apologetic tesla guy; careless cultural leech]:
dangit the blutooth won’t connect and the white supremacist stereo won’t play rap music after the last update

me [driver of 2006 subaru with only three functioning doors; wise arts patron]:
Miles, Axl, Sizzla, Prodigy, Eddie Hazel and the Cavaleras called shotgun; you’ll have to ride in back and also the driver-side back seat door doesn’t open

Most independent record shops are focused on vinyl, however there’s almost always a sad little CD table in the back. But you’re gonna get some attitude. The last time I bought a used CD was at the very cool Satellite Records in Kalamazoo, Michigan. My buddy picked up a bunch of local weirdo freak scene vinyl, while I scored a busted-up copy of G’ n’ F’n’ R’s extremely mid Live Era 87-93 on sale for $5. The middle-aged guy running the store scoffed at my choice, but I was happy to indulge him in a little nostalgia for the days of pretentious record store clerk tyranny, as a treat.

III. (Don’t) Acquire Music Without Paying for It, Which Is Shady

Unless we’re talking about checking CDs out from your local library—which is a thing!—this option may be a much sketchier way of acquiring music. But based on my highly subjective yet not insignificant experience with musicians over the last 30 years, a lot of them are begrudgingly okay with low-volume, non-commercial piracy at this advanced stage of the decline and fall of the music industry. A few artists I interviewed back at the dawn of Napster were already off-the-record OK with file-sharing on the grounds that they’d rather more people hear their work. Several decades later, as the ability to make money as an independent musician has been nearly destroyed by streaming, many now openly broadcast5 the bitter message “if you can’t afford to buy it now, please pirate my shit rather than using Spotify, and maybe come see us when we play in your town.”

Beyond torrents and Soulseek—two things that still confuse me—you may be surprised to learn that audioblogs still exist. For reasons that I do not understand, nor do I care to research, they’re often Spanish or Portuguese-language blogspots, ranging from conscientious reggae collectors digitizing out-of-print vinyl selections, and forever-stinky crust punk elders posting lossless rips of their no-fi cassettes, to goth bootleg collectors with a trove of ‘80s Cure SBDs, and classic rock hoarders sharing FLACs of The Allman Brothers’ 247 album (!) discography. There are also blogs with a lot of Cyrillic and—sorry to be slav-phobic—but I usually don’t click around on those.

If you can crack the mysterious Spanish code for words like “download” plus “discography” plus “blogspot” and tack on the name of the band you’re looking for, who knows where you’ll end up. The Mediafires are still burning if you know where to look for the smoke signals, but it’s VERY IMPORTANT to learn how to accurately determine which DL button is a DL button and not a nasty porno-game pop-up or malware download.

I AM NOT ADVISING ANYONE TO DO THIS.

Unauthorized downloading has always been mostly illegal, dubious ethically, and unsafe technologically. Don’t do it! But if you’re buying used CDs the artist isn’t gonna see any of that money anyway? We all make our own choices.

IV. How To Play Music on Your Computer Without Itunes

Swinsian is one of the most useful tools for dodging the rent extraction schemes of music streaming platforms without relying on the extremely unpleasant Apple Music Retail Interface. Swinsian has everything good about peak iTunes plus a lot more, and I shill for it whenever I can because it has made listening to music much more enjoyable for me. It took me a couple years of suffering the degradations of each new Apple Music update, and unsatisfying tests of so-called Itunes-killers that were scammy SaaS subscriptions, or prioritized streaming music over native files. I want Swinsian—which is maybe just one guy?—to be around for a long time.

The app has a one-time license fee that includes a couple rounds of updates including esoteric features that will surely delight fellow holders of unwieldy native digital music libraries. If “support for separator characters in the composers field” gets your juices flowing and you use a Mac, Swinsian may be relevant to your interests.

While Swinsian is compatible with Ipods and Apple telephones, I took a step further outside of the rotten Apple ecosystem and splurged on a single-function Sony Digital Walkman. Like Swinsian, it is optimized for playing music. It doesn’t sell anything, you can’t download anything other than music files from your computer, and it doesn’t play TV shows or movies. The model I purchased a few years ago has Bluetooth, but no wi-fi connectivity. Sadly, newer, more expensive models do connect to the internet and offer streaming options, but you can find used Sony NW-A55s on ebay for $100-200.

I don’t know if any of this makes a difference other than giving me the subtle sense of empowerment that comes from refusing to listen to music the way the tech industry tells me I have to listen to music. But in such dark times, reclaiming a sliver of autonomy is worth a little inconvenience. And as anyone who’s ever dealt with a stuttering Bluetooth connection in the middle of a party knows, the idea that the surveillance state was going to be super convenient is extremely outdated. Returning to the proto-Luddite language from Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, “Even if unwholesome action fills worlds upon worlds, and swallows up all things, opting-out is emancipation.”

This summer I was housesitting for New Mexico friends while they were on a long road trip, camping their way around the Pacific Northwest. Late one night we were coming down from a heavy “medicine journey” and listening to music on the only stereo in the house, an audio system that required wi-fi connection along with an app that required a login and then the only way to play music via the app was to log in to another streaming service that was compatible with the audio system’s app. Other than forcing the listener to use a streaming service subscription, there is no reason why these speakers—which sounded very nice—couldn’t have an aux-in. But they do not have an aux-in, so listening to music without an internet connection and several logins was not possible.

Sometime around midnight, the music stopped out of nowhere and we both jumped. My fellow traveler got up to mess with her phone—always a risky thing to do during medicine journeys!—and saw that we’d been kicked out of the app for some reason, and the password wasn’t working anymore. There was no way that we were going to call our vacationing friends at midnight for tech support, but suddenly we were afraid that maybe we’d been logged in to their Spotify account. Were our attempts to restart the music pinging a barrage of two-factor authentication texts to their backcountry campsite? Could they see that we had been listening to Miguel’s “Adorn” on repeat? Or worse, were we overriding their attempts to mellow out to Townes Van Zandt around the campfire with our obsessive slow jamming?

Rather than further harsh the mellow with password recovery attempts, we adjourned to the front porch, relieved that we could access IRL field recordings of the wind in the trees without wi-fi or login credentials.

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.11.09

mixcloud / download

For this week’s session, it’s an hour of post-industrial electronics, long-form heavyweight death sludge, blackened dubbing, and screwed and chopped new age tapes.

Language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, as read by your host:

To continue practice through severe difficulties we must have patience, persistence, and courage. Why? Because our usual mode of living—one of seeking happiness, battling to fulfill desires, struggling to avoid mental and physical pain—is always undermined by determined practice. We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life; not in avoiding pain, but in being pain when it is necessary to do so. Too large an order? Too hard? On the contrary, it is the easy way.

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with rolls and waves of rhythmic ambience from Sounding the Deep. Programming note: Be careful searching the web for “sounding the deep” as it is an uncomfortable-looking fetish thing in addition to an old-timey sailor thing.

artist — work
Sounding the Deep - Canopy Mist
Raime - The Last Foundry
Primitive Man - Natural Law (Cosmic Chambo FCC-edit)
Sinead O’Connor - Fire on Babylon
Portishead - Mysterons (Live at Roseland)
Dub Syndicate - JA Minor
Evan Caminiti - Babylonians
Pacific Walker - Induction Ceremony
Kamalesh Maitra - Raag Megh
Pantha du Prince - Welt Am Draht (Moritz Von Oswald Version)
Sounding the Deep - Thunderheads

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This week is the first time I’ve produced an entire Inter-Dimensional Music broadcast using Reaper – a totally decent digital audio workstation with no AI (I don’t think?) and a $60 license that includes multiple updates. And it only took me three times as long to do it. To celebrate, I’m sending you all an expanded version of the show that will air this Sunday evening at 11pm Central on Marfa Public Radio.

Maybe if I can keep my head together I’ll start posting new shows on a regular schedule? Maybe not every new broadcast needs a 5,000 word preamble? We’ll see!

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.11.02
Let’s Not Have Hope Supersession

mixcloud / FLAC

For this week’s practice, we begin with riddim, voicing, and electric guitar shredding from Count Ossie & The Rasta family, before fading into an excerpt from Miles Davis’ 1975 Agharta septet, creating a sound that Lester Bangs1 described with a Patti Smith lyric, calling it “a branch of cold flame.”

“I have finally learned to think of Miles’ most recent music, and what he has done to his art,” Bangs wrote in “Kind of Grim,” an Agharta essay published2 posthumously by NME in 1983, “as taking a jewel, a perfectly faceted diamond as big as the earth shining brighter than ten thousand suns, suppose you took that jewel and with implacable, superhuman, malevolent hands crushed it in on itself, compressed by a force beyond comprehension until it was half its original size, black all over, and a cold and unbreakable lump.”

He continues: “I think of that diamond as the emotional capacities of Miles’ music, as Miles’ heart; my theory re the musical personality of Miles Davis is that he has committed upon himself , his heart, just exactly what was done to that diamond, for reasons having to do with great, perhaps unbearable suffering.

“In Patti Smith’s words, his music now to me is ‘a branch of cold flame,’ and I think that, crushed as that heart is, the soul beyond it has not been and cannot ever be destroyed. Like Graham Greene’s ‘burnt out case’, perhaps that is all that is left. But in a curious way that almost glows uniquely brighter in its own dark coldness; and that, that which is all that is left, is merely the universe.”

From there, we move into Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer’s bass-forward retrofit of Arvo Pärt’s sacred choral music, sweaty secular dancehall, and several varieties of psychedelic ritual trance music, including hybrid and non-hybrid forms of devotional carnatic jazz. We’ll eventually find ourselves overwhelmed by “the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with devotional drones from Kali Malone, Stephen O’Malley, and Lucy Railton.

Familiar language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck, as read by your host. This piece is taken from the “No Hope” chapter of her 1989 collection Everyday Zen. My practice is not always a diverse one: I stick with what works for me, and “let’s not have hope” works for me.

Her teachings on the subject of hope can come across as pretty bleak – when I lived at the Zen Center, the guiding teacher suggested that language about the rewards of “giving up hope” on the Intro to Zen nights was not necessarily an easy entry point to our practice. But when things are as bad as they are right now, this clarity feels like an actual resting place, rather than the “vain hope for a resting place.” This chapter is framed with Joko remembering a friend who committed suicide: It’s explicitly not about giving up on life, but about finding ways to remain present with the pain of existence.

If we practice without hope, what will we get? Nothing, beyond the realization that this life – the experience of breath, body, and the environment – is the only thing that’s real. And this life is nirvana.

I’m reading an abbreviated version on the show. Full text here:

We spend a lot of time looking for something called the truth. And there is no such thing, except in each second, each activity of our life. But our vain hope for a resting place somewhere makes us ignorant and unappreciative of what is here right now. So in sesshin, in zazen, what does it mean to have no hope?

It means of course to really do zazen, to just sit. Nothing is wrong with dreams and fantasies. Just don’t hold on to them; see their unreality and turn away. Stay with the only thing that’s real: the experiencing of breath and the body and the environment.

Now none of us wants to abandon our hope. And to be honest, none of us is going to abandon it all at once. But we can have periods when for a few minutes or a few hours, there is just what is, just this flow. And we are more in touch with the only thing we’ll ever have, which is our life.

So if we practice like this, what reward will we get? If we really practice like this, it takes everything we have. What will we get out of it? The answer, of course, is nothing. So let’s not have hope. We won’t get anything. We’ll get our life, of course, but we’ve got that already. So let’s not be like my friend, failing to appreciate our life and our practice. This life is nirvana. Where did we think it was?

As always, ID Music is mixed “live to FLAC from the yoga mat,” and in this case that means there are a bunch of flubs because the power on my DJ controller kept dying. I left them in as a special “human touch” treat for all of you.

artist – work
Kali Malone - Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.1 (excerpt)
Count Ossie & The Rasta Family - Drums For Wise Men
Miles Davis - Theme From Jack Johnson (edit) (Agharta version)
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Rekondakion
Shackleton - Mountains and Waterfalls
James Holden - Worlds Collide Mountains Form
Gav & Jord - Appiness
Periya Mēlam - Misra Jati Triputa Tala Mallari
Saagara - Earth, Water, and the Holy Groove (The Shackleton Sessions)
Muslimgauze - Blue Mosque
Agriculture - The Reply
Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Samia
Kali Malone - Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.2 (excerpt)

Peace and blessings to all subscribers for helping me keep Vøid Contemplation Tactics paywall-free. Maximum gratitude to paid subs, but all posts are premium and blessed are the lurkers.

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Previously on Vøid Contemplation Tactics:

Inter-Dimensional Music is now “North America’s Gnarliest Mix of Heavy Mellow, Post-World Music, and Void Contemplation Tactics” because we’re playing more contemporary music from non-US/UK zones and presenting this as a metal-heavy show isn’t terribly accurate anymore. Lately it’s been a lot of sounds from SWANA and the Jamaican diaspora. Still some metal too, especially on the “Impure Flow” episodes, but hopefully more often with weirder percussion. None of this is particularly important during normal times, and it feels especially trifling given the dire state of the world in October 2025. But perhaps “post-world music” will continue to situate this project as an opportunity to take a break without completely looking away? At least now there’s fewer not-so-mellow heavy moments to interrupt those who tend to nod off during the New Age aquarium sounds portion of the program. The 90-minute ID Music SuperSession down below is a pretty good example, although there’s some Hawkwind-inspired hardcore from Singapore toward the end.

If you’re in a hurry to get to the ‘choons, scroll down for links to stream or DL “Inter-Dimensional Music SuperSession: When Your Body Disappears.” Or click below to listen while you continue reading.

A lot of musicians who get filed under post-rock/punk/metal/hardcore are irritated about that: Maybe the “post” signals an artist is introducing non-traditional elements to the root genre. Like the dub, jazz, and avant-garde hybridization that makes Gastr del Sol, Lungfish, Talk Talk, or Soulfly stand out from their indie, alternative, punk, and nu-metal1 cohorts. But maybe the metal band just wants to make droney, instrumental metal with folky interludes, not something that comes “after” metal. Russian Circles, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Neurosis are just good and imaginative metal bands that probably have a lot of fans who aren’t into Hatred Surge or Cerebral Rot. Who wants some music nerd to tell people that your band is more evolved than your buddies’ bands?

“World music” is annoying mostly for its use in the global north as a blanket term for everything from Riverdance and Deep Forest to Maalem Mahmoud Gania and Kishori Amonkar. Sorry to be a “the dictionary definition of”-type of guy, but as the first line of the “world music” Wikipedia entry reads, “‘World music’ is an English phrase for styles of music from non-English speaking countries.” All music is dance music, all music is world music, and the only moment is now.

Since people already get annoyed about world music, maybe post-world music is less annoying since it’s a critical affectation? Regardless, it’s a way of acknowledging that we’re playing more music from artists like Azu Tiwaline, Nihiloxica, DEAFKIDS, Duma, and Gnäw, people who are making hybrid forms that draw from a broad range of non-US/UK zones.

It’s music that is weirder, darker, or more experimental than the mushy global fusion directed at the regulars pounding raicilla Mai Tais at the Buddha Bar, or housing gochujang chimichangas at their local Rainforest Cafe. The “post” isn’t referring to the music part of “world music” anyway. I’m going for a doomer vibe: It’s music from after the end of the world. Inter-Dimensional Music and this Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter are tools for non-self improvement and finding equanimity in armagideon, guides for taking refuge in the mutual sufferation of our blackened new age.

I’m especially aware of the language I use to describe things online at the moment because a friend reminded me a couple weeks ago that I am “referred to and discussed” in the Wikipedia entry for “minimal techno.” Oh no.2

I wrote a lot about techno and other kinds of dance music when I was an editor at URB magazine in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. That’s URB as in urban, not weed, but of course we wrote about drugs too. The official tagline was “future music culture,” but FUT doesn’t have the same mouthfeel, and the music we wrote about wasn’t necessarily futuristic or emanating exclusively from built-up areas. My citation on the minimal techno Wikipedia page still came as a surprise because most of that writing does not exist online. While I have a full run of URB in physical storage, small independent print magazines about hip-hop, raves, and club music are probably just as difficult to find in your library’s microfiche archive as they are to dig out of our very hot and cluttered bat habitat/attic. And the citation isn’t from URB anyway? Wikipedia editors dig deep into unexpected places, and in the ‘00s even freelance writers as bad at pitching as I was could make a couple hundred bucks every once in awhile writing alt-weekly event previews.

The aforementioned “discussion” is a Wikipedia editor typing about how I typed something in 2003 about the influence of La Monte Young and Terry Riley on minimal techno in . . . “Party Arty” . . . a wholly inconsequential and otherwise forgotten article printed in an iteration of the Miami New Times that has been scrubbed from online outside of the Wayback Machine.

This is not something I’ve highlighted in my sparse selected bibliography. Most of which dates back to the era of print-only journalism: articles, interviews, reviews, and essays published by magazines that don’t exist on-or-offline anymore. Most of the things I wrote for RES, Spin, LA Weekly, The Big Issue, High Times, Miami New Times, and Budget Travel remain safely air-gapped, i.e. stored in a place that is not connected to online, beyond the prying eyes of Wikipedia editors or info-mulching large language models. There are also many many people who have written more eloquently, authoritatively, and in-depth about minimal techno so I’m not sure why my Miami New Times fluff from 20 years ago is the preferred citation for the definitive encyclopedia of the 21st Century.

I thought my “Party Arty” lede claiming that white avant-garde artists “invented disco” was obviously a cheap provocation? Regardless, at some point someone editing the minimal techno page went on to accuse me of ignoring the Black roots of techno, which was very disappointing because in this short and silly article from 2003 I wanted to make the point that techno and disco have more to do with dub and Detroit than ‘60s avant-garde dorks, an acknowledgement that bumping and grinding to Steve Reich would require more than “a basement, a red light and a feelin’.” This part of the Wikipedia page has been edited since I last visited a few years ago. Which is great because while I sometimes have bad feelings about being a has-been writer whose career disappeared, it would be an absolute nightmare to be remembered as a pretentious racist in the encyclopedia.

This was also ironical since as the editor of URB I wrote dozens of hyperbolic editorials accusing other people – pretty much anyone who used the words “electronica” or “I(ntelligent) D(ance) M(usic)” – of erasing the Black and queer roots of techno and house music. I was young and angry and insecure about being a straight white Midwestern ex-pat editing a Los Angeles-based magazine about hip-hop, raves, and dance music culture. A former hardcore punk poseur and recovering Evangelical Christian, converted by the gospel of club music after spending a year running around southern England with a merry band of crusty woodland squatters and druidic lesbian bikers.

I was thinking about those UK pals from 1996, the year I spent at the University of Kent at Canterbury, while listening to Ullulators’ “Simply Conscious Dub” and “Eternal Now,” a reissued 12-inch from “the UK’s free festival3 dub pioneers” on the Toronto-based Spiritual World label. Ullulators make drippy digi-dub as fragrant and vibrant as the still-damp tie-dye stain on the single’s label. It has a wide-eyed drift specific to pre-millennial chillout tents and right-to-roam soundsystems broadcasting from behind moonlit hedgerows. The sort of “ethnic fusion” that is the privilege – for better and for worse – of curious British subjects coming up in the imperial core.

The goin’-to-goa-dub revivalists at Spiritual World don’t make any Fluxus connections, but they’re quick to declare Ullulators place in an avant-garde lineage, suggesting their wonderfully dopey fusion “evokes the kosmische tradition and aligns with the spatial sensibilities of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4.” Which helps me feel a little better about the whole “Terry Riley invented disco” thing.

Spiritual World is good at hyperbole, especially when it comes to outernational proto-rave music of the ‘80s: I first encountered the label through N1_Sound’s Mantras EP, a reimagining of the two mantras on Cabaret Voltaire’s deceptively titled 1980 album Three Mantras. N1_Sound’s versions are described as “a dance floor stepper that embraces white noise,” “funked-out waka guitar-pop,” and finally “conga rhythms smear[ed] with distant electro-plucks and lush erratic synth pads to create an off-world alien soundscape for our extraterrestrial brothers & sisters to enjoy as a token of our appreciation while they are stationed among us.”

The original is something a bit more clattery, in the vein of old-school 23 Skidoo-style “tribal” industrial. Spiritual World says that “Cabaret Voltaire’s Three Mantras might be the least known, most influential record of all time.” Yowza!

Spiritual World’s reissue makes the Ullulators look quite sophisticated, so you might not have any idea how beautifully corny these guys are if you don’t visit their Bandcamp page. Their deep catalog features many more shreddy guitar solos than you’ll find on an Astralasia or Rabbit in the Moon collection, along with a mish-mash of chanting and singing that is casually non-specific as to the ethnic and/or cetacean groups from which it may or may not have been appropriated. A well-intentioned vernacular attempt at post-colonial world music perhaps, but a ways to go before decolonizing world music.

I like a lot of this stuff, and if you’re intrigued by the idea of Mad Professor4 taking on the Windham Hill catalog, you might enjoy it as well. Make it past the title, and “Duck Nipples” from Monads of Mangonia could be The Ocean Blue remixed by Adrian Sherwood. However it’s fairly obvious why Spiritual World went with the gentle dubbing of Beyond The Gates of Ull’s “Simply Conscious” for the reissue treatment, over, say, “Sloshy Sausages,” which begins with 30 seconds of digitally-distressed gargling before improbably shifting into something closer to a Soundgarden demo tape.

As for their look, The Ullulators are outfitted exactly like we hoped they would be. A crew that would’ve been right at home passing a comically elongated UK-style origami spliff around the grotty living room in Kent with those friends that I haven’t heard from in 30 years. Right down to the bugged-out eyes, mohawk-mullets, and fingers up their noses.

I only have a couple disposable camera rolls from the year I spent in Canterbury. And my pals were involved in a lot of black market commerce anyway, so I don’t have much documentation from this foundational chapter of my youth. As I recall from an adventure that took place years later where I had to help an obnoxious magazine photographer escape the outlaw weed farm where we were working after she went off her meds and started threatening dangerously paranoid armed people, taking snapshots of people doing crimes is not always the best way to make new friends. As my friend Dave – who did chronicle some of those adventures, albeit with the details obfuscated – puts it, “Soft criminals are especially tense about getting put in cages by men with guns.”

I was introduced to these Hash Queens of County Kent after asking one of my housemates where to score weed. My inquiry prompted an unannounced afternoon pop-in from a woman with a shaved head, draped in purple robes. Before she would tell me where she lived so that I could come and buy chunks of compressed cannabis resin, she wanted me to know that she knew where I lived, in case she ever suspected me of sharing her address with uninvited parties. I was extremely intimidated and very excited.

Because I was good at being quiet, open to being endlessly ridiculed, and knew how to operate the kettle, I was usually allowed to linger on the couch after securing my resinous plant medicine. Sinking into the musty cushions in my Jarvis Cocker cosplay, kitted out in a thrift store mod leather jacket, black turtle neck, and oversize glasses, watching the crew tease and torment the common people as they came to get sorted for hash and grass. In addition to the usual tea on offer, in the winter months I learned the proper ratio for mugs of “hot Ribena,” boiling water mixed with syrupy blackcurrant juice concentrate.

I had a hard time finding my place in college, trying to decide between anarchist punks and fratty Phish-heads, the common ground being an enthusiasm for cannabis and hiking. I hoped my time in the UK was going to be an escape to a Britpop drum & bass fantasyland, not understanding that Canterbury is a world away from Camden and Bristol. The reality was closer to a wholesome Trainspotting epilogue where the gang finally kicks junk and retires to the countryside, or a reboot of Performance from the The Young Ones writers. The unexpected hospitality of lesbian bikers and goofy dreadlocked forest-dwelling Dutch tinkers covered in comedy tattoos – my favorite was a green skeletonized hand with the text “Legalize Cannibals” inked underneath – set me on a path that I’m still walking today, a middle-ground between freak constituencies, happy to stand with crossed arms on the perimeter of Dead Congregation circle pits or Dead & Co. drum circles. One of the advantages of outlaw drug culture is that if you want regular access to the contraband, you gotta learn how to keep your head when you’re off your head in a weird stranger’s living room, regardless of what’s playing on the stereo.

My year in Canterbury ended with the traumatic and untimely death of one of our group, which is one of the reasons I lost touch after returning to the United States and moving to Los Angeles. Her decision to leave us gave my long strange overseas study trip a heartbreaking end point. I’m mindful of indulging in these reminiscences too often. It’s a testament to the weight of memory that finding my only thirty-year-old photo of my dead friend in the arms of her wife still produces a few quiet tears. Followed by a memory flash of a gap-toothed Mongolian biker club chaplain, the Motörhead-roadie-looking brute who mentored us through the brain-scrambling medicine circle of her chemically-indulgent wake. Memories that recede, but remain potent even as micro-doses. Selective reminiscence, impressionistic recollections of grief and the joy that preceded it, a kind of post-mourning.

A bunch of those crusties had already opted-out from a grid that was much easier to drop off of in the ‘90s. I don’t have Facebook, so people that I’m not actively in touch with disappear from my radar pretty quickly, regardless. A few years ago a dear old friend – my girlfriend at the time I lived in Canterbury, and the only person still in my life who can confirm that it wasn’t all a dream – found one of the robed druid hash queen’s social media profiles. Who knows how far removed someone’s actual life is from their online presence, but this bohemian diva was now working a boring-sounding job at a bank or an insurance company in a larger city far from Canterbury. Her hair was longer, and styled conservatively. She looked tired, in the way that most of us look tired after making it through a couple decades of trying to live differently, the weariness that arises from making attempts to feed ourselves and pay the rent by doing work that is in line with our personal values. I wonder if she would’ve looked tired in a different way if she’d been wearing home-styled pagan robes instead of a business suit, or if her wife hadn’t decided to end her life so suddenly, so long ago.

I don’t know if she’d want to hear from me, and I’m not sure if I want to hear from her, but I hope she’s happier than she was when I last saw her. Sometimes it’s good to forget, and to be forgotten. It helps to remember that one day it all disappears.

In related news about forgetting and disappearing, the complete run of Arthur, the singular boho-subculture broadsheet where I did most of my writing in the ‘00s, is now available online as PDF files. Freeloaders like us can find individual issues at arthurmag.com. If you’re more methodical about rooting around in digital archives of musty newsprint broadsheets, Arthur’s editor-turned-preservationist Jay Babcock writes in his Landline newsletter: “Academics, students and other scholars who are interested in using Arthur in their research can find the complete run of the magazine at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale.”

I’m proud enough of the dozens of self-righteous ham-fisted editorials I wrote for URB to have hauled my boxed-up archive across Southern California to Far West Texas and finally up several flights of stairs to the attic here in East Central Indiana. But in the three decades since I worked there, I’ve only opened those boxes a couple times, usually when I’m procrastinating during a move. Sure, the moving truck’s gotta be packed by tomorrow morning, but I wonder what I had to say in my review of Dj WAlly’s The Stoned Ranger Rydes Again from 1999? TBH it holds up pretty well!

I am more stoked that my contributions to Arthur are being preserved by a group of music journalism hoarders on a medium more durable and easily distributed than newsprint. There are a couple things in the new PDF archive that have otherwise disappeared from online, including “Dr. Moustache and The Egyptian Gentleman,” a two-part travelogue about the month I spent with my brother in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. I don’t talk with my brother often, and considering he’s a respected historian at Columbia University with several prestigious books to his name, I don’t know how he’d feel about being reminded of his perpetually unemployed older brother’s account of what happened when my Imodium wore off during our visit to that Hezbollah museum in the Beqaa Valley. But unless I decide to repost it here, you’ll have to search the index and download a PDF to find out.

My Arthur debut from March 2004 – “A Slow, Strange, and Grueling Thing: Venturing behind Northern California’s Redwood Curtain for the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race” – is still one of the best things I’ve written. I was not alone in this assessment, as it was included in that year’s Best American Non-Required Reading anthology, albeit as a line-item in the post-script of also-rans.

I was more honored that some OG Humboldt County freak folks tracked me down years later to ask if they could excerpt language from the 20,000-word travelogue for a play they were writing about Kinetic Sculpture Race founder Hobart Brown after he died. It means more to me that a few aging hippies and backwoods dropouts found something meaningful in a story that I wrote about their dead friend in a free underground newspaper. It means more that someone read those lines aloud in a community theater in Ferndale one night, than it does to be included in a momentarily prestigious but now-forgotten anthology available from any used bookstore for a buck or two, or cited as a techno expert in the encyclopedia. Likewise, I’m relieved that the URB editorial where I suggest that Deleuze & Guattari invented techno has disappeared, or at least remains forever air-gapped.

Reminiscing over a few greatest hits feels justified now that I’ve hit the half century mark. But as I harbor fantasies that a repost of one of these dusty 20-year-old long-form articles about hip-hop artists, compost wizards, or making small talk with Syrian border guards will win Vøid Contemplation Tactics a few more subscribers, it’s good to remember the importance of forgetting. For me, there is more value in being remembered in an unexpected note from a person who didn’t forget a story I wrote a lifetime ago, than there is in an impressive number of people clicking the subscribe links in this newsletter.

Eventually even those singular memories will go, every day another day closer to the day when my entire body of work, and my actual body, disappears. As the ever-cryptic Zen Master Seung Sahn says in his trademark broken English in this excerpt from a video of unknown provenance:

Inter-Dimensional Music
Someday Your Body Will Disappear: October 2025 SuperSession

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For this extended newsletter-only supersession, it’s a hypnotic post-world music flow of dubwise devotionals for Mauritanian pilgrimages, uplifting ashram ambiance, melo-rhythmic trance music offering guidance for difficult times, drippy deconstructed lover’s rock, bleak psychedelic hardcore from Singapore, and the sounds of “humid synth sequences chewing on bone-rattling acoustic percussion and dissociated traces of humanity.”

In keeping with the theme of dissociation, we’ll hear language throughout the broadcast on preparing for the day when your body will disappear from Zen Master Seung Sahn.

Our session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with an excerpt of field recordings and tape loops from William Basinski’s studio in 1982.

These episodes aired in edited form on Marfa Public Radio in August 2025, where you can catch Inter-Dimensional Music on the Chihuahuan Desert airwaves each Sunday evening at 11p CT. As always, Inter-Dimensional Music is mixed live-to-FLAC on the yoga mat here at Cosmic Chambo Studio. You can also find many of these selections in the library at bandcamp.com/interdimensionalmusic.

artist – work

William Basinski - 92982.2
The Horrors - I Can See Through You (Blanck Mass Remix)
Hype Williams - businessline
NKISI - Pona Nini

Nilotika Cultural Ensemble - Praise Jah
LLWCH - The Gold Translucent (Part 1)
Æolus - Ecstasy
Surya Botafasina - Ashram Sun Sai Anantam with Nate Mercereau
Akira Umeda & Metal Preyers - Olhos De Faca o
SEEKERSINTERNATIONAL - MeetMeAfter
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force - Nimzat
Light-Space Modulator - Her Name
Leslie Keffer - Fallow
Star House - Black Tape (side two) (edit)

Sial - Kita Dilahirkan Untuk Melawan
Star House - Black Tape (side one) (edit)
William Basinski - 92982.2

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Peace and blessings to our subscribers, but all Vøid Contemplation Tactics posts are premium and blessed are the lurkers.

If you’d like to make me feel better about the time and energy that I put into producing these projects, you can subscribe for free and give me a welcome hit of dopamine. Or you can subscribe for money and help me feel guilty about not sending newsletters more often!

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It’s also super encouraging when you share this with your nice friends. Regardless, thank you for being here.

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Previously in Vøid Contemplation Tactics . . .

“The reason we get confused,” she says, “is because we’re trying to figure it out. The main thing we’re always battling is we don’t think this could be it. We think it has to be somewhere else. There’s just this. That’s all life is, just this absolute moment.”

Perhaps it’s a good time to revisit such helpful, confusing, and undeniable Buddhist wisdom? Not only are we as a species accelerating into dystopia via the most cruel and stupid routes possible, but Vøid Contemplation Tactics just hit 600 subscribers – thank you, and welcome to everyone! Even the lurkers and we love the free subscribers but also you people with paid subs are literal angels.

Maybe this erratic bi-semi-monthly publishing schedule is working out just fine. As usual, you’ll find links to streams and downloads of the latest long-form “mixed live-to-FLAC from the yoga mat” supersession of heavy mellow, post-world music, and void contemplation tactics if you keep on scrolling.

Heads up to the newly arrived heads: “Figuring it out” is also why this newsletter has such an irregular schedule. I sit down to type something real quick about each week’s Inter-Dimensional Music FM broadcast and then I catch a glimpse of a missing piece of my “Grand Unification Theory of Why We Can’t Have Healthcare” masterpiece lurking just out of view. Then I stop drinking water and several hours disappear as I try to write something using a spidery “mind map” outline that connects an aside from a New Scientist article about how “the nasal cavity also provides direct access to the central nervous system via the olfactory epithelium,” which means that it “is the only part of the brain in direct contact with the environment” (!!!), to something I learned on a rude comedy podcast about the similarities between Gladio – the NATO-sponsored post-WWII right wing terrorist stay-behind network in Italy – and the United States’ domestic eugenics programs and international mass murder campaigns, and then somehow make the leap into talking about how I’ve stopped playing metal on the radio show because the only metal I listen to these days is Soulfy and Suicidal Tendencies, who are both very very good, actually. And in conclusion maybe people forget how cool they are because of racism?

Although to be fair Suicidal Tendencies is sort of like what if Red Hot Chili Peppers decided do more of Megadeth’s So Far, So Good… So What! wordplay and Soulfly is basically Nü Age metal – i.e. less like Blood Incantation’s ambience, more like Sepultura with rain sticks and rapping – which is maybe not what a lot of you are looking for due more to unenlightened aesthetic prejudices?

Sometimes these longer pieces work out – see this greatest hits countdown of top-ranking essays about basketball, NFTs, my experiences as a black market medic, or go straight to my wife’s remembrance of Steve Albini which is the most popular and also the best thing we’ve published – but mostly it fills my drafts folder with thousands of words filed under unhelpful titles like “Love is like oxygen???” or “Longevity is a big suffering.” Never mind trying to figure out why that “Home Savers” image is sitting there halfway through the mess. It’s one of the only good photos I’ve taken on my afternoon walks in awhile, which is also why there haven’t been any fresh “Muncie Photo Digests” in the last year. Here are two examples from the archive:

And of course I am also distracted by whether or not to ditch Substack for Ghost as Substack continues to turn into another social network, which is bad enough before being reminded that Substack is fine with hosting nazi newsletters. What if I don't want to build a brand what if I want to make things that lack broad appeal and share them with a small group of people with a complementary enthusiasm for such things while not going further into debt or supporting nazis. Which platform has that feature.

The point is that I get distracted trying to figure things out even though I’ve included Joko’s dharma talk about not trying to figure things out in maybe 20 or 30 episodes of Inter-Dimensional Music and IRL yoga sessions over the last 15 years. If I can defeat Joko in dharma combat and figure out the golden ratio between meditation, exercise, upper head meds and the downer head meds – all prescribed by actual doctors, no more gas station drugs until RFK’s strategies of tension become strategies against “take as needed for panic attacks” anti-anxiety drugs – I might bring one or two of these ADHD-highjacked airliner essays in for a landing.

For example, maybe the one about the bittersweet refuge that I find in that one melancholy space video game where everything looks like Moebius, or one about the importance of forgetting and a British druid biker friend of mine who died 30 years ago, and then there’s the actual “Grand Unification Theory of Why We Can’t Have Healthcare” essay which has a subtitle about how the Allies did defeat the Germans but the nazis didn’t exactly lose World War II and that’s why everything is terrible but also it’s not your fault . . . unless Substack’s algo has referred some of the very openly nazi users that enjoy their platform my way?

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Rest easy, squeamish nerds: there’s no Suicidal Tendencies in the mix this time out, but I’ll wrap things up here with their sick crossover thrash riff on Joko from the moderately successful 1990 single “You Can’t Bring Me Down”:

Just cause you don't understand what's going on don't mean it don't make no sense.

Stop Making Sense Supersession: Summer 2025

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It’s been a busy summer with some fun travel, including the trip to Northern New Mexico I wrote about in the previous Vøid Contemplation Tactics, plus an unexpectedly beautiful weekend staying in a barn with wonderful friends and walking around Northeast Indiana wetlands.

While I was in Taos I had a ball doing live radio with my friend Spiros on KNCE’s Roots & Wires, which is the inspiration for this Outer-Dimensional Music supersession featuring 2.5 hours of blackened livity, goth dubbing, and post-world music. Mixed live from the yoga mat in my friends’ meditation room in Northern New Mexico, and aired in two parts on Marfa Public Radio in July of 2025. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows, noisy bass-forward iration and downwardly dogged soundsystem escapism. Big love and gratitude to all of the aforementioned people! And to you, dear listener and reader, for coming along for the ride.

Listen for a collage of language excerpted from Joko Beck dharma talks throughout the broadcast: “The reason we get confused is because we’re trying to figure it out . . .”

artist – work

Bob Marley – Running Away (Dennis Thompson Version)
Strategy - Daydream Space Graffiti
The Rootsman - Sayidi Dub
PÖ - The Harvest
NKISI - NziNzaNzo
Black Bones - B.E.E.F.
The Clash - Magnificent Dance
Prins Thomas - Nattonsket
Pole - Überfahrt
Porter Ricks - Port of Tangency
Holy Tongue - Rivers Cannot Wash It Away
Natural Information Society - Moontide Chorus
Burial - NYC
Andy Stott - Missing
Jimmy Cliff & Joe Higgs - I’m Gonna Live, I’m Gonna Love (Live in Ann Arbor, 1975)
Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton - Ancient Model
Damien Marley x Dead Prez - Bigger Than Jamrock (DJ Shepdog Mix)
Felinto - Sol Na Cabecça
Horace Andy - See A Man’s Face
The Sabres of Paradise - Planet D
Andy Stott - Faith in Strangers
Equinknoxx Music - Congo Get Slap (Mark Ernestus Remix)
Danny Red - Don Gorgon
Feel Free Hi Fi - Digital Tomb
The Rootsman - Arid Land
Muslimgauze - Narcotic
Othar Turner & The Afrossippi All-Stars - Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Lagoss & Abagwagwa - Dog Star Man
Lui Lepki - Tribute to Bob Marley

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Previously in Vøid Contemplation Tactics . . .

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Vøid Contemplation Tactics is free to anonymous lurkers, but if you’d like to make me feel better about the time and energy that I put into producing this newsletter, you can subscribe for free and give me a welcome hit of dopamine. Or you can subscribe for money and help me feel guilty about not sending newsletters more often!

You can also drop a one-time donation in the tip jar.

It’s also super encouraging when you share this with your nice friends. Regardless, thank you for being here.

Share

The Inter-Dimensional Music Mobile Soundsystem has relocated to the Taos, New Mexico field office for a few weeks of adobe flossin’, green chile tossin’, hot springs dippin’, and high altitude trippin’. While our blackened New Age and post-world music vibrations have continued uninterrupted on the Far West Texas airwaves of Marfa Public Radio each Sunday at 11pm CT, all of this moving around has slowed the processing of new shows for the public archive: find a very special newsletter-exclusive ID Music Supersession below.

But first, I would like to extend an invitation to all Vøid Contemplation Tactics readers to join me and one of our New Mexico hosts, Spiros Antonopoulos, on the actual airwaves or wi-fires of KNCE 93.5FM Taos on Thursday morning – July 10 – at 4am MT for this month’s full moon edition of his long-running Joyful Noises broadcast. Spiros’ show is two hours of pan-spiritual devotional psychedelia, chanting, divination, and prognostication that is maybe the only DJ session that does what I’m trying to do with ID Music better than the way that I do it. It’s less a matter of actual “DJ” DJ skills, and more about his choices as a selector, and how his heady narration of sincere spiritual practices is hybridized with the arcane lines of sacred audio transmission that extend from Pandit Pran Nath → Alice Coltrane → Pauline Oliveros → Sunn O))) with occasional contributions from OM, Exuma, Kali Malone, Boards of Canada, and Catherine Christer Hennix, depending on how the tarot pulls are affected by the current astrological forecast. Taos’ most elevated morning zoo transmits live in the eighth prahar, a selector rising just before the dawn as a sign of dedication to this most sacred pillar of hip-hop.

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Outside of the considerable overlap of our audio libraries, I continue to take inspiration from Spiros’ laid-back, non-dogmatic approach to presenting long-standing and deeply-held spiritual, religious, and philosophical concepts as a way to increase understanding of an existence that is beyond full comprehension, rather than as rote evangelism. Regardless of my isolated individual and arms-length understanding of jyotisha, tarot, or the Guru Purnima goings-on at our local Neem Karoli Baba Ashram and Hanuman Temple, I am curious to learn more about the systems that my comrades rely on to make their way through the world. Even more so when that knowledge is shared over a percolating bend of warm chai, gnostic krautrock, ambient melancholia, blackened bhajans, pastoral drone, New Age illbience, and other ritualistic offerings to color the dawn.

Then on Sunday July 13 Spiros and I will be DJing live together on KNCE for this week’s Roots & Wires session, a two-hour broadcast of high desert livity that begins with tributes to Bob, and moves through locals-only nyabinghi from the land of look behind, through outernational dubbing, and into the ever-expanding cosmos of non-denominational riddims and voicings that bear the blessed marks of the JA diaspora. It’s a post-punky reggae party that runs from 7-9pm MT this Sunday evening. I am deeply stoked to make an appearance on this show that has been on the Taos airwaves for over a decade, and all the more excited for an opportunity to dig deep into the most irie corners of my FLAC crates in the good company of a fellow devoted lifelong slop-style practitioner.

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You can also find more of Spiros’ deep commentary on “embodied divination through yoga & tarot,” along with Joyful Noises setlists, and information on IRL manifestations in his SPACECRAFT newsletter . . .

SPACECRAFT (yoga)

Joyful Noises in Rohiṇī: New Moon radio, ritual objects, and embodied divination through yoga & tarot

Greetings, folks, friends, kin—fellow drifters; seekers of something true, somewhere, anywhere… maybe here, at the edge of this strange place…

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment

Now on to the Inter-Dimensional Music . . .

ID Music 2025.06.08
Equanimity in Armagideon: Pacers Supersession

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It's the return of Equanimity in Armagideon, a (sort of) semi-annual and/or bi-monthly series focused on blackened iration, downpression in dub, and percussion-focused post-world music. An edited version of this session aired on Marfa Public Radio, but this is the first public broadcast of the full two-hour set that I listen to while watching basketball with the sound turned off.

Language throughout the broadcast on the importance of resting and seeking equanimity on the eve of destruction paraphrased from various sources and read by your host. Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with the live sounds of Humming Amps, a project from Growing’s Kevin Doria “born from a love of hands on vibrating strings amplified through rusty, seizing speakers in empty, tired rooms and kept alive by a stubborn desire to please the unpleasable.” As always, you can find more sounds from many of these artists in the Inter-Dimensional Music Bandcamp Library.

If you missed our earlier forary into sports commentary, you can find more of my thoughts about basketball in the two part essay “There’s Always This Moment”:

artist – work

Humming Amps - Exhaust (live) (edit)
wndow - Bright Yellow Light
Dub Syndicate - Mafia
Holden & Zimpel - You Are Gods
DJ Python - Descanse
Emeka Ogboh - Everydaywehustlin
Time Cow - Million Leg Millipede
Bunny Wailer - Arab Oil Weapon (Disco Mix)
King Khan - Blacksnake Rising
Secret Drum Band - Antifa Fuschia
Badsista - Nile River Dancing
Jacob Miller - Tenement Yard
M//R - Drum Dub 1 (Remix)
D.K. - Assault from Java
Pontiac Streator - Triz Cohors pt. 3
Freddie Gibbs - G.I. Pride
Arafat Brigande feat. King Lopo - Whereabouts
HHY & The Kampala Unit - Lithium Blast
Steel Pulse - Roller Skates (Dub Version)
Shackleton - Shortwave (Pole Remix)
wndow - Chant Liberation
The Revolutionaries - Kunta Kinte Version One
Humming Amps - Exhaust (live) (edit)

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Vøid Contemplation Tactics is free to anonymous lurkers, but if you’d like to make me feel better about the time and energy that I put into producing this newsletter, you can subscribe for free and give me a welcome hit of dopamine. Or you can subscribe for money and help me feel guilty about not sending newsletters more often!

You can also drop a one-time donation in the tip jar.

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It’s also super encouraging when you share this with your nice friends. Regardless, thank you for being here.

The Indianpolis Zen Center, Red Key Tavern, and All in The Wrists barber shop didn’t make me a Pacers fan, but these communities gave me reasons to feel good about returning to Indiana in 2016, after 20 years in Southern California and Far West Texas. I was never proud of being from Indiana because I was from Zionsville, a deeply racist and conservative Indianapolis suburb, where I went from the first day of kindergarten to high school graduation with a cohort that was almost entirely white, and 0% Black. A couple of lifelong friends are from Zionsville, and my childhood was pretty idyllic, but pride in being from Zionsville was White Pride by default. And despite driving to Indianapolis for punk rock shows in high school, followed by three years of undergrad at Indiana University in Bloomington, my home town remained the default image of Indiana. The racism in Zionsville was thoroughly modern and “polite,” and it looks like I everything I hate about the right wing and their spineless liberal enablers.

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“In the normal course of human events,” sociologist James W. Loewen writes in his history of sundown towns like Zionsville, “most and perhaps all towns would not be all white. Racial exclusion was required.” He goes on to quote from Tim Wise’s White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son: “If people of color aren’t around, there’s a reason.”

I have few recollections of Zionsville’s high school basketball team. Football and basketball players all looked alike to me. There were no braids, dreads, or fades, just buzz cut jocks, sworn enemies who had been inflicting humiliating violence on nerds like me since my first days at school. As far as the NBA went, I didn’t care about anyone other than the Lakers because I thought Kareem Abdul Jabbar was one of the coolest humans I’d ever laid eyes on: I was more curious about his protective goggles, dashikis, and boycott of the Olympics than his playing style. Meanwhile Larry Bird was a dead ringer for the shit head kid with a lip full of dip who hit me in the back of the head every morning on the bus ride to school.

Growing up, I shot many lonely baskets with Peaceful Brown – my only neighbor, a now RIP pal (the nickname came from his surname, not his skin color) who once told me without malice that I should try football instead of basketball “because you’re fat” – on our gravel driveway out in the cornfields. Along with our house’s lack of a basement or a second-story, and our rural route address far beyond the cable company’s range of service, the gravel drive was something that I perceived as a mark of “poverty,” mostly because it was hard to dribble on crushed stone, and impossible to skate over. My friends in subdivision McMansions watched MTV in basement home theaters, and practiced ollies and crossover dribbling on freshly paved cul-de-sacs.

Other than that, my only significant experience playing basketball in high school happened at the end of gym class. Partly out of a need to defend myself against shitty bullies, and partly because they were cool and knew about music, I was a nerd seeking refuge with the school’s punk rock skater clique. We either outright refused to participate in the official physical fitness syllabus, or opted-out with performatively lackluster efforts. Upon returning from the locker room in our street clothes, we’d tear up the courts until the bell rang, working up a sweat and annoying the gym teachers by playing an extremely chaotic and aggressive form of basketball.

We threw the rock at each other like a dodgeball, tackled the ball handler and pinned them to the floor, and ignored rules and fouls and keeping score. It was basketball-as-mosh pit, a proto-Jackass junior varsity melee, sporting violence by teenagers in Vision Street Wear and Slayer T-shirts who knew more about circle pits and stage diving than pick-and-rolling. It felt like physical liberation to me as a person who wasn’t good at sports and hated my body. I was getting attention for rowdy masculine prowess, wearing bruises and skinned knees with pride. I ended up missing out on the freshman year roller-skating party after getting hit in the head by a flying basketball, spending the afternoon with an osteopath manipulating the rib I’d popped out of place instead.

In a school where almost everyone was white, I had long counted myself among the downpressed because I was not cool and we were not wealthy. The punks and the skaters got plenty of abuse too, but they weren’t meek in their response. Many years later, living in Los Angeles and writing about rap music, I would refamiliarize myself with basketball as one of the extra credit pillars of hip-hop. But in Zionsville we had to play a different game. Basketball was still the provenance of white jock overseers.

The stain on this memory is not unlike the stain “One In A Million” leaves on the already somewhat problematic discography of fellow Hoosier Axl Rose and his popular band Guns N’ Roses. Some of my skater kindred referred to our pickup games of berserker ball with an adjective form of the hard R n-bomb that Axl deploys in the opening verse of the last song on their underwhelming 1988 sophomore album G N' R Lies.

I already knew that using slurs was wrong. I was a member of a Christian Nationalist church, not a White Nationalist church: There was only one Black family of four in our congregation, but that was more Black people than in my high school. I was relieved when someone suggested “street ball” as a slightly less explicitly racist name for our rambunctious activity.

At this point in my youth I’d heard the N-word more often from white people than Black people. But not how you might think. I’m talking about songs by the Dead Kennedys, Jane’s Addiction, Seven Seconds, Patti Smith, X, and JG “Foetus” Thirlwell. The N-word with the soft A was bleeped out of rap videos on low-rent broadcast television MTV knock-off The Box, as well as the occasional hip-hop single on local R&B station WTLC, but not on my dubbed cassette copy of Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.

I understood that these white musicians’ use of the slur was not equivalent to the racist jokes I might hear at school. But it wouldn’t be until I was earning an increasingly worthless degree in comparative literature at Indiana University that I would learn terms like “complicitous critique.” I just knew the vibe was wrong. If my parents were home, I’d scramble to turn the volume down for that one verse on “Holiday in Cambodia” just as fast as I would for the “Last Caress” lyrics about murdering babies and sexually assaulting your mom. As further example of the naïveté that can arise from a racially and culturally monochromatic childhood in a staunchly right wing community, before giving a proper listen to N.W.A. I assumed that Efil4zaggin meant Ren, Dre, and Eazy were “pro-life” anti-choice activists, which was a positive for me at the time given my church affiliation. I thought maybe N.W.A. was like rap’s U2 or something.

The skater buds who casually dropped the slur as a descriptor for the type of basketball we played probably would’ve used a defense similar to Axl’s dumb bullshit:

“I don’t like being told what I can and what I can’t say. The word n****r doesn’t necessarily mean black. Doesn’t John Lennon have a song ‘Woman Is the N****r of the World’? There’s a rap group, N.W.A., N*****s With Attitude. I mean, they’re proud of that word. More power to them.”

Crying about not being able to say the N-word usually involves the complainant saying the N-word, because anyone can say the N-word. As is often the case in these exchanges, Axl is complaining about the consequences of saying the N-word. It’s easier to avoid those consequences when there aren’t any Black people around. While this quote doesn’t do Axl any favors, at least he doesn’t immediately go to the “but my friend Slash is Black” defense. In other interviews at the time, Axl’s Black friend doesn’t sound too stoked about this anyway.

It’s easier to consider Jello Biafra or Patti Smith as satirists than it is to perceive Axl’s lyrics as the voice of a character, ugly social critique rather than uncut racism. Perhaps because Axl’s artistically-licensed racism seemed more authentic the more he struggled and failed to defend himself, or maybe due to the significant number of the band’s intentionally and actively racist fans. But while X singer and fellow N-word sayer Exene Cervenka gradually morphed into an Info Wars-pilled Sandy Hook denier partial to Confederate flag pins, by 1992 Axl was already proto-woke, telling Interview Magazine,

“l don’t perform [‘One in a Million’] because l think it’s too dangerous and l don’t trust people with the song. I don’t trust the audience with the song. I don’t want to do ‘One in a Million’ on stage and know that there’s a lot of people out there in the crowd who are prejudiced and it’s gonna help fuel their fire. l don’t like the damage that that song does.”

In the time since, the list of white artists using artistic license to drop an N-bomb has grown to include John Mayer in a very uncomfortably horned-up Playboy interview, and the extremely rude sludge metal band Eyehategod. Surprisingly late to the party, Green Day dropped a satirical hard-R N-bomb on 2004’s American Idiot. The same year the gratingly twee cringe-folk duo CocoRosie deployed the slur twice in the chorus to “Jesus Loves Me,” a song delivered in a vocal style that could easily be heard as Billie Holiday blackface. As we discussed earlier regarding white people attempting to use the correct pronunciation of Rastafarian terminology, you’re probably fine as long as you don’t do the voice.

Other than Mayer’s apologies on Twitter, as far as I know it’s only Guns N’ Fuckin’ Roses and Eyehategod that took action after listening to their critics. In a rare instance of band cohesiveness, Axl & Company unanimously chose to pull “On In A Million” from reissues, and while Eyehategod is still too chummy with racist dipshit jock-jammer Phil Anselmo for my taste, their setlist now includes a song rebooted as “White Neighbor.” Neither Axl nor I like being told what to do, but unfortunately Axl stuck to those famous guns when his Black friends surely cautioned him against cornrows, just as mine steered me clear of dreadlocks.

This isn’t a defense of casual racism in Central Indiana. These are examples of why I’m not proud of where I’m from. But that doesn’t change the way I grew up. When I was in elementary school, I thought we were poor and I was fat because my dad wasn’t a doctor or lawyer and I wore husky Rustler jeans from Kmart. By high school I was paying for my own Levi’s from JC Penney, but I still thought I was fat and I didn’t want people to know I was from Zionsville because they’d think I was a spoiled, racist rich kid as well. I didn’t spend much time with Black people until college, but I went deep enough into hip-hop and reggae and Bad Brains by my sophomore year of high school that I sometimes wore a red, gold, and green Africa medallion dangling over my Joy Division shirt, blissfully unaware of yet another paradoxical juxtaposition of ideologies. Oddly enough, years later this very same culture clash would serve as the organizing principle behind Jäh Division, my favorite side project of the noisy psych rock band Oneida.

While I embraced the harsh hxc ethical code of straight edge as safe passage out of Christianity – an easy pivot from youth group to youth crew – I was quietly wary of the hardline rules laid down by Minor Threat. I wasn’t so sure about the band’s “Guilty of Being White” song either, but latter day Dischord mainstays Fugazi and Lungfish both offered passage into the world of dub and jazz, Ian MacKaye’s evolving contributions to the culture counterbalancing poor decisions made in those salad days.

Likewise, going to reggae shows in high school helped keep the boring puritanical aspects of youth crew politics in check. Whirling awkwardly in sweaty circle pits at the Broad Ripple Community Center offered more opportunities for physical catharsis and made it easier to endure the harsh clatter of Indianapolis hardcore bands, but I was too square to join in the easy-skanking on Sunday afternoons at Broad Ripple Park. Instead nodding my head out of time in the back of the crowd with a friend in matching Doc Martens, him with a dyed-blond devil lock and me in a Sisters of Mercy T-shirt and baggy shorts. I also noticed that the hand-rolled cigarettes at punky reggae parties smelled nicer than the ones at parties that were just punky.

As with many places in the North, there’s a history of racism in Muncie – the East Central Indiana city where I live now – that is too easily glossed over with a liberal veneer. You’ll still see a handful of Confederate flags flying in certain neighborhoods. One morning I walked past a black truck with a 14-881 decal parked at the Delaware County Emergency Management Center. And the former headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan is just down the street from our apartment – though not long ago it was renovated by a local performance artist into a queer-forward dance studio with full-spectrum Pride and BLM flags flapping out front. Muncie had a couple sundown neighborhoods at the beginning of the 20th Century, but by the 2000 census the city of almost 70,000 people was 13% African-American, with a median household income of $26,613. As of 2020, Zionsville was still 91.4% White, 1.4% African American, with a median household income of $137k.

There’s still racism in Indiana, but it’s more insidious than the unhoused bicycle mechanic I met with the stars ‘n’ bars tattooed on his arm. The current Indiana governor – Republican Mike Braun – came to national attention for suggesting that the legality of interracial marriage should be left to the states, and then got elected in a landslide. Then in April 2025, Braun’s lieutenant governor, Republican Micah Beckwith, posted a video on twitter defending the Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement from the 1787 Constitutional Convention that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person, giving the slavery-based economies of the south more political power and lower taxes. The last “good” Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, pressured Indiana colleges to cancel a book tour by the author of Sundown Towns because he thought it would scare businesses away from the state.

But my experience in Zionsville sounds alien to my wife Rachel. She grew up in Muncie with lots of Black friends and classmates. In addition to punk rock and hip-hop shows, she also went to more basketball games as the statistician for her high school team. This is in part because Zionsville and suburbs like it are still operating with the camouflaged form of middle-class neoliberal racism that aggressively resists the label of racism. Unemployed Sons of the Confederacy with unfortunate peckerwood tattoos are easier to spot and a lot less powerful than the smiling pant-suited Republican mayor of the posh Indianapolis suburb Carmel, a woman whose electoral victory was marked by the eye-catching AP headline “Candidate who wouldn’t denounce Moms for Liberty chapter after Hitler quote wins Indiana mayor race.”

Learning to appreciate basketball, and watching the Pacers journey to their first NBA Finals series since 2000, has given me a reason to be happy for Indiana, but that’s not the same thing as being proud. Despite the best efforts of right wing government officials to undo any legislation making life easier for everyday people, and despite an electoral map gerrymandered by those same Republicans into a white supremacist jigsaw puzzle, I can see an Indiana that is something more, something better than ‘80s Zionsville, or the ‘25 state government. But I left the Midwest after college. Other than helping the Indianapolis Zen Center become more inclusive – I learned a lot about what “inclusion” feels like at my appointments at All In The Wrists, and could better understand what it might feel like for a person who is not a mildly depressed white man with a close-cropped haircut to visit a dharma room full of mildly depressed white men with close-cropped haircuts – I didn’t contribute much to the things that I like about Indiana.

So in the run-up to the playoffs, I was confused and eventually kinda angry over how often people shitted on the Pacers. As the team slowly battled their way up the Eastern Conference rankings, I began to detect the subtle shade when their many victories were attributed to injured opponents or negligent referees. Prior to nearly sweeping the top-ranked Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs, and once again defeating the highly favored Knicks, Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton was ranked by his NBA comrades as the most overrated player in the league. As more and more commentators have started to admit, at some point you gotta stop referring to every win by one of the most dynamic, top-ranking teams in basketball as an “upset.”

Pacers hate is so pervasive that it even leaked into my usual housecleaning soundtrack of left wing comedy podcasts. “I have disliked the Indiana Pacers for longer than any other pro sports franchise,” David J. Roth declared in an aside at the end of a recent Chapo Trap House episode. “I’m rooting for a Knicks-Timberwolves finals.”

I am a clueless neophyte, while Roth is a professional sports writer and political critic whose writing about the day-to-day lived experience under American fascism is some of my favorite contemporary commentary. The Pacers and Knicks are longtime rivals, though Haliburton squaring off with Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson at pro wrestling matches suggests this is not much of a blood feud. So Roth is rooting against two underdogs from wildly enthusiastic secondary market teams – the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Pacers are the youngest, most collaborative, fastest, goofiest, and downright weirdest teams in the NBA. They’re both good in large part because the team owners have kept these men together for years, rather than subjecting the players that they “own” to cynical trades. And the Pacers are not just dude’s least favorite basketball franchise, but his most disliked team in all of professional sports? It’s probably easier to say things like this if there aren’t any people from Indiana around.

And now suddenly I am in way over my head, not just talking about basketball, but talking shit about sports writers that I like, rather than talking about not talking about basketball.

Watching Pacers games in Indiana is not easy, because the NBA is just as mired in a tangle of profit-maximizing capitalist schemes as every other social and cultural institution. Outside of a few months in 2001, I’ve never paid for a cable subscription. Growing up, we lived too far from town to be eligible for cable, which my conservative parents wouldn’t have signed up for anyway. When the FCC made the switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting, I lived in Marfa, Texas, hundreds of miles beyond the broadcast range of network affiliates in El Paso or Midland/Odessa.

When I moved from the Indy Zen Center to a Muncie apartment and stopped visiting the Red Key, the digital antenna I used for the first time only caught one channel, the local PBS affiliate. I had no idea how to watch basketball for free that didn’t involve black market streaming websites that required a half hour of dodging and weaving between gnarly sex game pop-ups and malware downloads disguised as “play” buttons in order to access a glitchy Brazilian stream guaranteed to stutter and cut out at every dunk or three-point attempt.

An NBA League Pass subscription solved some of these problems. I ignored that option for too long, mostly because I thought it would be as prohibitively expensive and confusing as the NFL streaming service. But basketball is different from football in many ways. There are a lot more games in basketball. While the NFL was voluntarily licking boots and scrubbing the milquetoast “End Racism” text from end zones after Trump’s election in 2024, NBA games were bookended by graphics celebrating HBCU month, without even bothering to expand the acronym. It’s also nice to watch tremendous feats of athletic prowess without all the slow-motion traumatic brain injury footage.

As with art, music, and bougie Zen seminars, the price of accessing a sports experience tells you a lot about who the experience is for. Unlike the NFL, in-person Pacers games – especially regular season matchups here in Indiana – are for whole families, who can have a night out in the nosebleeds without committing to a Capital One indentured servitude program. The same was true with League Pass: We signed up for an introductory subscription with a “dot edu” email address education discount and gained access to hundreds of games for $9 a month.

In an era where streaming services are becoming less functional and more riddled with ads and algorithmically-driven auto-start selections, League Pass was a revelation. If you don’t watch the games live – and as a non-denominational fan I didn’t care about spoilers and rarely encountered sports commentary on my timeline2 anyway – the ads are replaced by “in-arena entertainment,” which includes Drip Cams set to a loop of OT Genasis’ raunchy “I Look Good” earworm, bonkers jump-rope stunts, an acrobatic woman in a reflective leotard target shooting a compound bow with her feet, and “the skateboarding fiddler.” One OKC game featured a free-throw contest where the prize was a year’s supply of sliced white sandwich bread. With League Pass’ slow-motion effect you can slow down everything and make the national anthem singer sound drunk and off-key, in addition to choose-your-own-replays of obvious things like dunks or foot archery.

It’s the basketball equivalent of “matrix”-style Grateful Dead bootlegs, delicate patchworks of audience recordings and soundboard tapes, where the band comes through clearly in harmony with the crowd, a reminder that these happenings don’t take place in a vacuum, but are living, breathing ecosystems. Myles Turner’s thoughts about in-person yoga are relevant playing basketball, attending games, or watching on TV: “It’s so much better not doing it on your own.”

While NBA games appeared and disappeared on TNT and HBO and ABC and ESPN as the result of confusing licensing deals, at worst they ended up on League Pass three hours after the buzzer: not a big deal if you, like me, were just looking to “watch basketball,” often with the sound down and headphones playing podcasts or ambient jams. But a problem came to my attention when Rachel – a dedicated Pacers fan – got involved: Pacers games are blacked out locally on League Pass, regardless of whether they’ve sold out at the arena. And they don’t show up on League Pass until 72 hours later, a blatantly punitive delay which means she’s already seen spoilers and I’ve found another game to watch.

If you want to watch Pacers games in Indiana – and as basketball gossip online quickly reveals, few people want to watch Pacers games outside of Indiana – you have to sign up for a cable package of some kind, but that’s not enough. Figuring out How to Watch Every NBA Basketball Game on a Streaming Service was already so complicated in 2023 that Wired gave up on explaining it in the SEO-optimized explainer “How to Watch Every NBA Basketball Game on a Streaming Service”:

Nationally televised games are played on four networks: ABC, ESPN (for which ESPN2 acts as a secondary station), TNT (for which TBS acts as a secondary station), and NBA TV. But unlike with NFL games, not all NBA games air on national networks. Many games air only on regional sports channels, such as Bally Sports and AT&T's SportsNet. All of them strike coverage agreements that vary from team to team, region to region, and game to game so widely that it's impossible to cover them all in this guide.

Many Pacers games are only available in Indiana by adding the Fanduel Network to an already pricey cable subscription, turning your living room into a seedy OTB. Which means it’s now $100 or more each month to access games that were previously available for free to anyone with a TV antenna. It sucks if you can’t watch Utah Jazz games in Maine, but it’s cruel when this profiteering means you can’t watch Indiana Pacers games in Indiana.

And then there’s the whole repellent gambling thing. It’s not just that there are advertisements for the online gambling services that ruin peoples’ lives during every commercial break, but the gambling companies literally own the network that broadcasts the games. It’s gross to see powerful sports legends and beloved commentators like Shaq – whose net worth is estimated to be around $500 million dollars – fueling gambling addiction with picks and parlays while chastising the Pacers for clowning around on camera at halftime. Though he has plenty of experience making money off the exploitation of hapless proles: at the beginning of June 2025 Shaq agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle a class action lawsuit related to his work alongside Larry David and Tom Brady as a spokesman for the fraudsters at cryptocurrency exchange FTX. To put all of this in perspective, in an oft-cited 2017 study, the National Council on Problem Gambling presents research showing that in addition to high instances of bankruptcy and divorce, gambling addicts have a higher suicide rate than heroin addicts or alcoholics.

Critical commentary on the harm caused by pervasive gambling advertisements throughout the entire professional sports ecosystem may or may not be affected by the blatantly unethical partnerships that the same gambling companies have with TV channels like ESPN and The Athletic, the New York Times sports gambling advertorial insert. An April 2025 story in The Athletic about the negative impact sports betting has on basketball players – they get a lot more death threats now! - begins with the parenthetical disclosure that The Athletic has a “partnership” with one of the largest sports betting companies. “Sports gambling is an important, complex topic,” the sports betting company partner goes on to say, taking a stand on an intrinsically misanthropic and unquestionably harmful industry that is just as spineless as the NYT editorial board’s support for literally every new American war.

Like alcohol and heroin, gambling is not inherently evil. The issue is that vampiric sports betting corporations are more exploitative than ever before, using the mechanics of social media addiction and invasive surveillance tech to help people lose as much money as possible by playing on their phones. “These companies have more data on gamblers than any gambling operation in recorded human history,” says Jonathan D. Cohen, the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, in an interview with Semafor. He continues,

It seems like they’re using it to identify problem gamblers and make money from them; or identify losers and make money from them, rather than cut off people who have obvious gambling problems and stop them from gambling. This is anecdotal, they claim that it’s all trade secrets, and they won’t give up any of their data. But again, like a tech company rather than a sportsbook, it is their primary resource. Whenever you sign into the app, and you see a customized parlay, that’s like, ‘wow, that looks perfect for me’ — no shit, it is perfect for you. They built it for you.

But perhaps this is a bit too much “inside basketball” for a newsletter ostensibly about slop-style Buddhism and Inter-Dimensional Music, my understandably unpopular but surprisingly long-running FM radio “heavy mellow meditation” art project. It’s just a bummer to see all of these powerful people and journalistic entities taking money that they don’t need from corporations whose profit model depends on driving fans to literally kill themselves, a phenomenon that is simultaneously making the game more unpleasant for the current generation of players. So it goes.

I feel as if I have mislead you, dear readers, by prefacing a two-part 10,000 word essay about basketball by telling you that I don’t want to talk about basketball. Although old heads may recall that the most widely-known item from my selected bibliography is “Uncle Skullfucker’s Band,” a similarly long and nostalgic essay about how much I love the Grateful Dead and how I don’t like talking about the Grateful Dead. I appreciate the patience of those of you who have made it this far, and I assure you we are close to the end. But before I wrap things up with a touch of Zen, I am tempted to break another of my promises, and talk about statistics, deep benches, balanced play, and what may or may not be a minor revolution in the way teams win basketball games. . .

. . . But it turns out that I am no more well equipped to convince you that basketball is interesting and the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder are good teams using sports data than I am able to make a case that the Grateful Dead are a good band based on a musicological analysis of my favorite “Scarlet -> Fire” jams.

In addition to charming videos where Pacers discuss their love of baking cookies3 and doing yoga, there are numbers that show how much more often the Pacers and OKC pass the ball, or how much time their bench players – the guys who aren’t the “starting five” – spend on the court, or how they don’t rely on one or two superstars to score all the points. For example, the official NBA account tells us that “The Pacers are the only team in NBA history to have 8+ players average 10+ points per game through the first 5 games of a Finals series!” Sounds like a big deal, but also just look how happy these guys are!

Reading written descriptions of memes is about as enjoyable as reading descriptions of basketball stats posts from online, so here are a few that I’ve pulled from text threads that my wife is on with our homies who are Pacers fans where I usually don’t know what to contribute.

Stats are one thing, but the numbers are embodied in the weary, worn-out faces of titans like Nikola Jokić, Josh Hart, and Donovan Mitchell as they start a fourth quarter after playing almost every minute of the game. Going up against four or five grinning second-string Pacers fresh off the bench: Exhausted heroes with their team’s destiny on their shoulders, risking injury against opponents whose names are only recognizable to the diehard fans who didn’t think twice about adding the Fanduel network to their cable subscriptions back in October.

I know the Dead are a good band because I can hear them smiling at each other through their blunders in a collaborative 30-minute improvisation, knowing that they might stumble through the whole acid-fried mess to faceplant at the end, or they might achieve something transcendent long after the clumsy interlude between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain” has faded away.

Likewise, I know the Pacers and OKC are good teams because I can actually see them smiling at each other through their blunders in a collaborative 48-minute session, knowing that they might be eliminated from the series in a blowout, or they might emerge victorious after taking their first lead4 of the game with 0.3 seconds left on the clock.

Even if you don’t care about basketball, it’s still worth watching a highlight reel of Pacers comebacks. The Haliban5 – aka Tyrese Haliburton – makes bonkers clutch-time buzzer-beaters with statistically incomprehensible regularity. But in a testament to the broad distribution of skills across the team, he didn’t take MVP in the Eastern Conference Finals: The award went to power forward Pascal Siakam, whose visage graces bootleg T-shirts sold on the sidewalk outside Gainbridge Fieldhouse emblazoned with the title “Cameroonian King,” and who may be recognizable from many racially . . . complicated . . . “I am the captain now” memes. Or perhaps you’ve seen the viral footage where he appears to be calling on occult powers during the Pacers pre-game prayer circle:

If The Haliban is too soon, Haliburton’s other nickname – The Moment – points to what I like most about the Pacers. Like the Dead’s uncanny ability to slide into gorgeously mind-blowing jams after a shaky, unremarkable first set, Haliburton’s statistically-improbable clutch performances happen because the Pacers don’t get hung up on past mistakes. Haliburton attributes his uncanny ability to slide into gorgeously mind-blowing half-court buckets to playing basketball to play basketball, shooting the ball to shoot the ball. He plays basketball like how I want to watch basketball. Ignoring the commentary, ignoring the score, ignoring past mistakes: In the moment.

Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat?

- Hanif Abdurraqib
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Suzuki was once asked how it feels to have attained satori, the Zen experience of “awakening.” He answered, “just like ordinary, every day experience, except about two inches off the ground!”

– Alan Watts
The Way of Zen

Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry about Michael Jordan’s ability to soar from the free throw line to the cup has an easy Zen corollary. In an oft-quoted talk, religious scholar Alan Watts recounts an interview where the revered Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi describes the experience of enlightenment as low-key levitation, a metaphor that is too easy to take literally.

While Abdurraqib’s words are almost unbearably beautiful, I’ve never really liked the description of enlightenment that Watts is talking about. It’s a petty gripe, but after living at a Zen center and dealing with guests who are seeking special Zen powers – including a few dopes who swore that they could literally levitate – the analogy of floating through daily life feels misleading, a false promise. The thing about enlightenment is that we’re all already enlightened, we just don’t realize it. “Experiencing life with two extra inches” sounds less like waking up to the reality of the present moment and more like waking up at a shady surgical center specializing in leg-lengthening procedures for incels.

Of the many inspirational Buddhist quotes with dubious attribution that litter online, it’s one often credited to the disgraced Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa that best suits the Pacers:

The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.

While I have developed a chip on my shoulder regarding the Pacers that is not uncommon to my Indiana kindred, there is something valid about recognizing the Pacers as perpetual underdogs. The most visible Pacers alum is Reggie Miller, one of a handful of NBA legends – including such luminaries as Patrick Ewing, Allen Iverson, and Charles Barkley – who never won a championship. As part of the Pacers rivalry with the Knicks, Miller had his own rivalry with Knicks fan Spike Lee that resulted in the iconic “choke” gesture that Haliburton mimicked when the Pacers defeated the Knicks yet again in 2025, an image that is popular as a template for T-shirts and tattoos across the Hoosier state.

Miller’s name is also slang for low-quality cannabis, and he is immortalized in Three Six Mafia’s anthem “Stay Fly,” with a verse that also references the aforementioned “choke” gesture. An anonymous annotator at the lyrics website Genius explains it like this:

In summary, 8Ball is detailing how someone who smokes reggie on the regular and then smokes some bomb bud will choke and cough like crazy ‘cause it hits harder.

Miller is now a NBA commentator, and during the 2024 playoff contest between the Pacers and the Knicks the New York crowd launched into a chant of “Fuck You Reggie,” still “not mad but actually laughing” about it 30 years later. Surely no less so now that their championship dreams have been foiled by the Pacers two years in a row. Sure, Miller looks like an age-appropriate dorky dad, but Spike Lee now makes promotional films for the NYPD, and sits courtside at Knicks games looking very “How Do You Do, My Fellow Bing-Bongers?” in a blue and orange ghillie suit.

Watching basketball can be a soothing, meditative experience because I often don’t know what’s happening beyond the visual experience of seeing humans flying and falling through the air. It’s gratifying that the two teams I most enjoyed watching over the last couple of years are now playing each other in the finals. The vibe could only be more positive if The Roots were providing a live soundtrack for the series.

It’s satisfying to understand that the reason I liked watching the Pacers and OKC is one of the reasons they’ve been so successful: their games are compared to track meets, they move the ball around a lot, and they seem to really love playing together. One commentator described OKC as the most fun team for post-game interviews: A star player gets on the mic, but then all of the other players - including their wildly enthusiastic bench – gathers around and the interviewee redirects from his achievements to detailed appreciation of his teammates contributions. Not to get too sappy about it, but both teams are young, good-looking, extremely talented, and they seem to really like each other. Turns out that chemistry translates to good basketball.

I don’t read or listen to much commentary, but I got a lot from an essay that Myles Turner published at the beginning of May, a few weeks before the Pacers victorious playoffs performance, and a few weeks before my 50th birthday. It would be an i n s a n e understatement to say that Turner and I are at very different places in our respective careers. We both left Texas for Indianapolis around the same time, though he landed here as the Pacers 11th round pick in the NBA draft, while I took up residence in a dear old friend’s basement without much of an idea about what I was going to do with my life. Fittingly, this was the same time our paths briefly intersected on yoga mats in the corner of Invoke Studio.

The most useful concept I’ve taken from my slop-style Zen practice is that everything is connected, and nothing lasts, so everyone suffers. Quoting Zen teacher Lewis Richmond, “The fact that we all suffer means we are all in the same boat, and that’s what allows us to feel compassion.”

In “It Took Me 10 Years to Write This,” Turner describes a surprise party thrown for him by friends and family, and the bad feelings that kept creeping in to harsh the good vibes.

The party itself was so fun. But I just kept having this feeling during it — this awful feeling, where I wasn’t exactly sure at first what it was. And as the night went on, it got worse and worse. I tried to shake it and couldn’t. Until finally, I turned to my girlfriend and said it out loud.

“This is amazing. Except … what the f*** are we celebrating?”

You’re not supposed to talk like this, but here’s the truth: I’ve never been an All-Star. I’ve never made All-NBA. I haven’t won a ring yet. Bro, I haven’t even won the division yet. And we got 40-some people dressed up in cowboy hats, celebrating what I’ve accomplished, throwing me a party with balloons??? I almost felt a little embarrassed.

I’ve had my own version of this conversation with my girlfriend – now wife – many times over the last 10 years. My radio show is now on fewer stations than when I started. I don’t sell any of the art that I make. I haven’t written a book. Bro, I haven’t even been able to keep my free yoga classes going.

Turner continues, “Getting out of the darkness wasn’t easy … but the first step I had to take was incredibly simple: I stopped trying to do it alone. I turned to my people […] Sometimes that’s all it takes, belief from your people. So just start there I’m telling you. Anything but isolation.”

Turner’s essay goes waaay deep into the details of his decade as an Indiana Pacer. While I’m still not sure what I’m doing as I start my fifth decade, Turner and the Pacers are one game away from winning a championship and being recognized as the best basketball team on the planet. But in spite of all those successes, he’s been asking the same questions I am, the same questions many of us ask at anniversaries that end in a zero. He answers this question for himself at the beginning of the piece, and he answers the question for me as well.

“Now that I’m deep in it, I think I understand a lot better what it was we were celebrating … and what it is I have to be proud of. And I wanted to write this, because a big part of what I’ve realized — and what means so much to me about my journey — is that it isn’t just 10 years in the league. It’s 10 years in one city. It’s 10 years with y’all.”

Unlike Turner – and unlike my Pacers fanatic spouse – I’ll be just as happy if OKC wins Game 7 on Sunday night. But I’m celebrating 10 years in Indiana and 50 years in this provisional realm of names and forms for the same reason that Turner was celebrating: Because 10 years is 10 years. Because 50 years is 50 years. It hasn’t often been easy, and it has often been dark. But it’s always been anything but isolation.

Everything is connected.

Nothing Lasts.

You are not alone.

The 2025 NBA Finals have been much more stressful than I imagined. I write this the morning after the Pacers tied the series at 3-3, forcing the first game seven since 2016. As soon as I care about who wins or loses, I get distracted from the aerial ballet, like a gambler assessing the odds in the hope of striking it rich or at least not going bankrupt and committing suicide, I begin trying to ascertain whether a team is flying or falling. When maybe it’s both.

While I’d be delighted to see the Pacers take the championship, I’ve spent more time watching OKC, if only because of the punitive delay imposed on local fans. If forced to choose, I’ll go with the Pacers though. If only because Rachel is sincerely emotionally invested in the series, so there is a lot more hooting and hollering while we watch games projected on the wall of our Muncie apartment.

This gives new meaning to the phrase “there’s always next year,” from which Abdurraqib takes the title of his book, There’s Always This Year. And which in turn I am borrowing for this essay appreciating the overlap between Pacer nicknames and Zen concepts: “There’s Always The Moment.” As the 2025 season comes to a close, this means looking forward to the first games of a new season in October. Resuming the meditative practice of watching the games to watch the games, staying free of preferences for good and bad. To celebrate basketball because it is basketball, and it is something joyful to witness in a world that seems to have turned its back on compassion and kindness and all of the things I value most in life.

It’s a way of enjoying basketball that is best explained, once again, by Myles Turner. In a post-game interview the person holding the mic asks him one of the usual meaningless, koan-like variations on “what was the biggest challenge in this game.”

His response is an unassailable truth that has the clarity of satori, an answer like an empty ball ringing above the rim. It’s also the reason that I enjoy watching basketball games: “Everyone out there is an NBA player.”

The Indiana Pacers meet the Oklahoma City Thunder for Game Seven of the 2025 NBA Finals on Sunday, June 22 at 8:00 pm ET.

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Here is some statistical analysis of game four that I understand, via r/NBAEastMemeWar

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sorry not sorry; image via r/NBAEastMemeWar

Years ago, shortly after accepting a position at the University of Kentucky, my history professor brother confided in me that his resurgent interest in basketball – and to a lesser degree, bourbon – came out of a necessity to have something to talk about at parties. His academic specialization of “twentieth century international history with a focus on U.S. foreign relations and the Middle East” could conceivably lead to more complicated conversations than “how about those Wildcats” and is only slightly more sensitive than his defense of Wild Turkey 101 – which is about 102 more Turkeys than I care to consume – as the top-ranking American whiskey.

He’s at Columbia now, and we don’t talk very often, but I can imagine that the whiskey guy debates over the aristocratic transcendence of Pappy Van Winkle versus the earthbound tasting notes of Wild Turkey are less fraught in Manhattan. Given the current political climate when it comes to objecting to US support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns targeting Palestinian refugee camps and hospitals, I can also imagine he has thoughts prepared on the Knicks recent playoff performance. Although his third book – Scorched Earth, a 656-page “global history of World War II” – was published in early May, so that should give him plenty of material for light conversation.

A “sports talk” option could be similarly useful to someone such as myself. Small talk stresses me out much more than intimate conversation: A group chat about what we’re watching on TV this week is waaay more uncomfortable than talking about dying parents, or what cocktail of head meds my fellow middle-aged “creatives” are using to moderate the surges of depression and anxiety that make us think we’re failures. But talking about basketball is like talking about Buddhism: my slop-style beginner’s mind means I get lost quickly when the conversation requires familiarity with the Pāli Canon or “zone defense.”

Outside of the existential insecurities that affect everyone living in an impermanent realm – regardless of their financial situation – the older I get, the less I have in common with my Generation X cohort. I don’t have kids, and don’t own property. I have two nice cats and watch TV but I get bored quickly talking about cats or TV. I read a lot of sci-fi and horror paperbacks – the real nerd shit more often than not – but you probably don’t. I listen to obscure and sometimes unpleasant music made by people half my age that is often unavailable on the streaming platforms that are the sole source of audio entertainment for 95% of the people I know.

It’s good for a laugh to respond to the Gen X Guy prompt “I’ve been revisiting The Replacements discography, what have you been listening to lately” by talking about Texas metal band Pyramids and their new album’s surprisingly successful blend of black metal, shoegaze, and reggaeton. “Ha ha ha” but soon they’re heading back to the buffet for more spinach dip and I’m looking for the bathroom and feeling weird about all of the unmonetizable, conversationally useless knowledge I’ve acquired over the last 50 years. As a fellow middle-aged music weirdo friend from online once posted, “Whenever people ask me to DJ at a normal party I reflect on how much time and money I’ve spent collecting some of the most unlistenable music ever recorded.” Sadly, it seems unlikely I’ll be finding a publisher anytime soon for Scorched Vibes, my 656-page inter-dimensional history of DJ Screw’s influence on contemporary vaporwave.

I don’t really know if I have a job, so the question “what do you do” from one of my wife’s colleagues – Rachel works at Ball State’s art museum – at a reception is followed by an awkward pause as rising shame vapors begin to cloud my vision. “Depends on the time of day ha ha” is a go-to if I don’t want to explain that I’m an artist whose projects are mostly paused, and my medium is “yoga and slow-motion water videos.” Or that I write a free newsletter about Inter-Dimensional Music, my ambient/metal/meditation/reggae FM radio show that airs late on Sunday nights in Far West Texas on Marfa Public Radio, but is actually usually Luddite ranting and hopelessly naive anarchist interpretations of Zen.

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At the very least, the “homemaker” title that the bank awarded me when we set up our joint checking account a few years ago is a reminder of my highly specialized Zen training in cleaning unintentionally low-flowing meditation center toilets, sweeping cat litter from the dharma room floor, and policing commune kitchen hygiene. But it will always feel like I’m stealing valor from my mom, and people don’t take me seriously anyway, given the gender inversion and the fact that we don’t have kids.

Perhaps as a result of the financial repercussions of “I haven’t been able to say what my job is for 10 years,” my politics have also become more uncomfortable to talk about with many other fifty-somethings. Rather than the stereotypical but hardly inevitable middle-age slide toward conservatism that often accompanies the attainment of a professional salary or a transfer of life-changing generational wealth – that exceeds the safety net of middle-class1 generational wealth that gives me a modicum of stability – I’ve gone from “I’m an anarchist and not a communist because I like listening to Crass more than I like reading Gramsci” to “Crass still slaps, but also Mao had some interesting ideas about landlords ha ha.” Nevertheless, before making an entrance to many social gatherings, I will often ask my wife to avoid mentioning that I watch a lot of basketball.

In my never-ending search for an answer to “what do you do for a living,” I’ve been researching Zen chaplaincy training. I was looking at a program offered at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico and getting excited until I figured out that the mostly-online two-year course came with a $13,200 price tag. This seems like a lot to pay for a series of interactive webinars that results in a certificate qualifying the bearer for a job that probably doesn’t pay much! Especially if you’re working outside of premier venues on the hospice circuit. In comparison, two years of in-person tuition at the community college here in Muncie comes in at around $10,000, and results in a more lucrative certificate in dental hygiene or automotive technology. At 50, my vocational aspirations are looking more like a “Zen or the art of motorcycle maintenance” type of situation.

The chaplaincy training tuition corresponds with some of Upaya’s other public programs, including $500 registration fees for two-day Dōgen seminars and calligraphy workshops. This is fine – even if you’ve paid off the temple mortgage, providing the sangha with all that fermented bean curd and mint tea isn’t free. That being said, their residency program is considerably more affordable: $900 for the first month, $100 after that, and free after six months. The price of living at a Zen Center is often better measured in the limitations – and frustrations – that make it such a profound learning experience, which makes the Dōgen workshop seem like a bargain. You might not be paying rent at the dharma center, but living there isn’t free!

As with art, music, or sporting events, the price of admission is an indicator of who the experience is for. This is less about Upaya – a place that has a reputation for socially-engaged Buddhism, and is led by the highly regarded Roshi Joan Halifax – and more about how living at the exponentially less refined Indianapolis Zen Center – a borderline apostate2 religious community in the Kwan Um School – led to my own resurgent interest in basketball.

Editor’s note: Both residency programs are good examples of the significant differences between the camouflaged gentrification of “artist community” housing, co-ops, and actual practicing communes. A topic that we expounded on at length in this previous installment of the Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter:

“To live in a [Zen Center] community is not easy,” Zen Master Wu Bong, a teacher in the Kwan Um School says in “The Practice of Together Action and Buddhist Wisdom,” a 2008 dharma talk. “There is a structure and a set of rules that must be followed,” he continues. “There is less privacy than one would have living outside such a community.” Showing up for meditation practice at 6:30am can be a problem even if it just means walking downstairs. But the challenge that drove me to drink came from the kitchen. As Wu Bong gently puts it, “There is sometimes food one does not like, and often a lack of food that one likes.”

We all took turns at preparing meals at IZC throughout the week, but the advantages of “beginner’s mind” in the dharma room are not the same as “beginner’s mind” in the pantry. I was not totally exempt from dinnertime SNAFUs: While I prided myself on spiralized primavera veggie pasta and vegan curries served over roasted cauliflower rice, I also shamefully sprang for takeaway mezze platters, fighting back tears of frustration when my poorly-made falafel balls dissolved in a boiling pot of canola oil.

On nights when the resident cook was too depressed or ignorant of basic culinary skills to come up something more than, say, a can of chunky vegetable soup served over macaroni boiled into wheat paste, I would ride my bicycle a couple miles up the street to the Red Key Tavern. I ended up there at first because it was the closest place to the Zen Center where I could sit and stare off into the distance, when sitting and staring off into the distance at the Zen Center became too hectic. It was an unconsecrated dharma room that offered profane sacraments of meat and booze along with quiet contemplation. The bartenders knew my order but not my name, so I felt welcome without the pressure to socialize. They did know enough to appreciate that I was hiding at the bar like some kind of dirtbag dharma dad, seeking refuge from my spiritual family’s disappointing dinner offerings.

It wasn’t long before I figured out that this unassuming dive was one of Indianapolis’ most beloved and long-standing bars, once frequented by Kurt Vonnegut, and was counted by Esquire in 2011 as one of the best bars in the US. Perhaps because the place hadn’t changed much as a result of these accolades, it was usually quiet on weeknights. I’d sit at the end of the bar next to the jukebox stocked with World War II-era 45s and closest to the silent TV that was often tuned to basketball: With 30 or so teams playing a regular season of 82 matchups, there are somewhere around 1240 games happening between October and April of any given year. I didn’t have loyalties to specific teams, but I saw enough local games to recognize that the 6’11” guy with short dreads that I sometimes sat next to in the furthest corner of yoga class was Myles Turner, who was playing his second year of NBA basketball with the Indiana Pacers. Turner and I never spoke to each other, but we were both downward-dogging on the floor of Invoke Studio for at least one of the same reasons: As Turner says in an interview about his years of dedicated yoga practice, “It’s so much better not doing it on your own.”

If there is a discomfort that registers, perhaps it is in the realization that, once again, there is a code that they cannot decipher, no matter their desire to. No matter how many times they have fallen into dreams of our language, our enemies wake up with the same tongues, reaching but falling short. What else to do, then, but to imagine every gesture toward flyness as an affront to their own monochromatic living?

- Hanif Abdurraqib
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

There is much to be said about the form and function of professional basketball players – from Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetic descriptions of Michael Jordan’s early appearances in slam dunk contests, to the corny technicality of ESPN’s animated AI-slop post-game analysis of every shot taken by Oklahoma City point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in the 2025 playoff series. But as a wide-eyed late-coming middle-aged basketball dilettante, my thoughts on the mental strategies and physical mechanics of the game are naive at best, clumsy and incorrect at worst. Trying to keep up with real basketball heads can be as embarrassing as my analysis of Rastafarian poetry in freshman English at a 99% white high school in Zionsville, Indiana circa 1989.

This was the pre-internet era where ascertaining the lyrics meant rewinding-playing-rewinding-playing-rewinding Legend in my cheap GE-brand “walkman” until I decided that Peter Tosh’s verse on “Get Up, Stand Up” was “We're sick and tired of your easy kissing game” rather than “your ism and schism game,” a mishearing informed by the harsh moral teachings on premarital sex from the Christian Nationalist church that my parents dragged us to each Sunday morning. I was mostly ignorant of Iyaric’s fluid linguistics, completely missing the dread talk critique of those same right wing spiritual and political ideologies (isms = easy) as vectors for discord that reinforce false binaries (schisms = kissing). Referring to the Detroit ‘76ers in 2025 is less charming. As I mentioned earlier, casual conversation about basketball is full of pitfalls, and very stressful. Talking about Rastafarian semiotics and using the correct pronunciation is comparatively easy as long as we crazy baldheads follow the rule from I Think You Should Leave’s “Hat in Court” sketch: Don’t do the voice.

I am only slightly more knowledgable in talking about the hair styling that is a big part of what I enjoy about watching basketball. Ironically, I was educated on the semiotics of such flyness because I am a white baldhead. Prior to my return to Indianapolis in 2016, I lived in remote Far West Texas, a literal as well as metaphorical desert in terms of ecology, medical care, nutritious food, and quality barbering. I relied on the assembly-line clipper operators in barbershops near Fort Bliss, pit stops when running to or from the El Paso airport. One of these Wahl techs was the first to gently break it to me that I’d reached the point in life where I needed to start trimming my eyebrows and ears more often than the increasingly sparse hair turning from brown to gray atop the Sunburned Dome of the Chambo.

My hair game changed forever after returning to the Midwest, when I saw a mural on the wall of Carols and Everybody’s Barber Shop while walking around my new Indianapolis neighborhood. The shop’s door was locked, but I heard voices and knocked politely. I was seeking a quick trim before a family portrait for Mother’s Day. As long as there was someone inside who could get the hard-to-reach spots on the back of my large, thick skull, I’d be good.

A young Black kid opened the door, and was pretty obviously not expecting someone who looked like an out-of-shape extra from Green Room. It was clear from a glimpse inside that this was not just an establishment run by a Black barber, but a double capital-B Black Barbershop, full of comfortably-lived-in clutter, chess boards, posters with meticulously rendered technical diagrams of Black hairstyles hanging on the walls, and a mini-fridge that might’ve been stocked by Allen Iverson3. We both paused, but it occurred to me that the weirder and ruder thing to do would be to say “sorry, my mistake” and scoot down the block. “Do you sell haircuts here?” I asked, which was weird but hopefully not rude.

The kid looked me up and down again. “Marvin! There’s a . . . guy here,” he said, and closed the door again. A week later at the family portrait session my mom proclaimed the freshly faded sides of my skull and the precision lines in my beard to be the best haircut I’d ever received.

Though they offered braids and perms by appointment, Marvin was the only barber working at Carols and Everybody’s, and I only came back at his invitation. He was a very large man with an impeccable brutalist head of hair and massive beard, all the more impressive for its topiarian symmetry. He wore plain black T-shirts, black LA Dodgers snapbacks, and had a detailed tattoo of a pair of clippers on his forearm. We were the same age, though we grew up in very different circumstances: He was proud of being from the north side of Indianapolis, and I was ashamed to admit I was from Zionsville, a white flight suburb and “sundown town” north of the city. Technically I grew up in the country in between Zionsville and . . . Whitestown . . . but that detail didn’t do me any favors.

“To this day, African Americans who know about sundown towns concoct various rules to predict and avoid them,” sociologist James Loewen writes in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, his history of the “organized jurisdiction[s] that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in [them], and were thus ‘all-white’ on purpose.” The name comes from signs posted at the edge of town advising Black people to be on their way before nightfall in much more violent language. Circumventing towns with colors in their name is one of the general guidelines for Indiana, even if the color is black or brown.

While Loewen makes the case that “more than half” of all towns in Indiana, Oregon, Ohio, the Cumberlands, and the Ozarks were – and in some cases, still are – sundown towns, I grew up in an interstitial rural zone in between a working class sundown town and the more insidious upper middle class manifestation in Zionsville. “Residents of all-white suburbs also usually avoided the term, though not the policy,” he writes.

Marvin and I ended up talking about hip-hop because he was kind enough to seek out generational common ground: Neither of us grew up with cable so instead of BET or MTV, we relied on the janky pay-to-play video channel The Box to discover now forgotten rap songs like Cool C’s “I Gotta Habit.” We both tuned into WTLC, Indy’s local R&B station, late at night hoping to catch the rare appearance of De La Soul or Special Ed in the mix with Michel’le and Babyface. It didn’t hurt that he halfway remembered URB, the Los Angeles-based hip-hop and dance music magazine where I worked in the late ‘90s. I talked about Above The Law and Freestyle Fellowship and he quoted Mac Dre and Z-Ro. But mostly I got invited back because I knew when to be quiet. I was thrilled when Marvin tagged me into barbershop rap chats saying “Daniel’s old school, like me.” But I knew I had nothing to add when the conversation turned to basketball.

Marvin eventually moved on from Carol and Everybody’s after the owner declined to sell it to him, an emotional decision that we talked about at length. “Black men of a certain age carry large keychains with great pride,” he explained. “Owning property is not something they will ever take for granted.” I followed him to his new shop, All in The Wrists. Along with the Red Key, the barbershop was a community space where I could escape from the stress of Zen Center life. Marvin hired a couple other barbers, and while occasional goofy stories of life at a Buddhist commune were welcome, it was also a place where I could sit and stare quietly at the floor or the posters on the wall.

I understood that access to All in the Wrists was a privilege every time I walked in the door and the room would fall silent, all eyes on me. “Daniel!” Marvin would bellow, raising his hand in greeting. “Find yourself a seat.” And conversation would resume. I asked Rachel about this once, worried that I was thoughtlessly trespassing in a Black space, doing the white man thing of presuming I can barge in and be welcomed wherever I please.

“You can’t get an appointment unless you call Marv on his personal cell phone, right?” she asked me. “Do you think the guy with the clippers tattooed on his arm that everybody refers to as ‘OG’ would be reluctant to make you feel less than welcome in his shop?”

The Black barbershop experience is the most luxurious grooming experience I’ve ever experienced. The only distant contender being a salon in Los Angeles where they served me weed brownies – in the good old days before Prop 215 – because I was pals with the owner. Marvin took a few snips with his rarely used scissors up on top, but it was mostly graceful movement of various clippers skimming over my head, steady and confident, my pale scalp protected by each carefully selected guard. Then a hot towel, beard oil, and whatever Black hair products that OG deemed culturally appropriate for a repentant white devil such as I.

It was in this setting that I listened to Marvin and the other barbers’ war stories of weekend hair battles: public barber expos and raucous competitions where they tested their skills in creating ornate designs on stage with complex props, DJs, and cheering audiences. “Can you do the Prince symbol in the back of my head?” I asked when there was a long enough pause.

“No.”

“What about Batman?”

“Daniel.”

And that was as all it took for me to settle back into listening mode.

These exchanges triggered fond memories of the similarly generous Black friends who – in my youthful days of long hair, after I’d explored Rastafarian music beyond what greatest hit collections Columbia House had to offer – explained patiently but firmly that tangling my hair into scuzzy dreads was a bad idea, regardless of how much I admired fermented crust punk locks. “Nausea and Sepultura are not the same thing as Bad Brains or Mutabaruka,” they’d remind me. I might’ve protested at first, but the same gentle yet curt “Daniel” would always finish the debate.

“This idea that what is atop the head or not atop the head or what is temporarily masking the head is all a language, a code,” Abdurraqib writes in the beautiful basketball memoir There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. “That at the highest point of the body, there is still a point that can be made to ascend higher, by some invention of whatever God has given us to design with, or whatever wasn’t given, or what was given once and taken away.”

It was only by the grace of what was given once but taken away – my flaxen hippie cosplayer mane, unfortunate man buns, french braids woven by cheerleader crushes in high school, and Willie Nelson-style headneck locks – that I was gifted an abridged outsider’s knowledge of what Abdurraqib refers to as “the language of Black hair.” Since I was losing my hair, there wasn’t much left to appropriate: I wouldn’t have made it past the door with a patchouli-fertilized nest of matted wook dreads.

This opened up a new way to see basketball, and to understand how much of a difference it makes to watch a sport where the heads are unfettered by helmets. It’s an opportunity to appreciate the language expressed by Oklahoma’s Jalen “J Dub” Williams’ flip from floppy afro and goofy grin at photo shoots to tightly lined braids and cold-eyed gaze on the court. To feel admiration but not envy for Oklahoma’s other Jaylin “J Will” Williams’ perfectly twisted dreads. Or to nod wisely at the synchronicity between Myles Turner’s dreads flopping on the side of his head, tucked under the white NBA headband; and the “business in the front, party in the back” style of braids tucked in a similar style under fellow Pacer Andrew Nembhard’s headband. I can also hazard a guess as to which white players understand the importance of a barber who can put a line in before a game, or keep a creeping neck beard in check. I always rolled solo to appointments with Marvin, but I can more easily imagine showing up with Pacer TJ McConnell than Cavalier Max4 Strus.

Like with so many things in basketball, it’s Rachel who has helped me better understand the semiotics of basketball hairstyling, a conversation that begins with fond recollections of her favorite player’s inspirational braids thirty years ago. “While men like Dennis Rodman broke barriers with beauty in sports, a then 26 year old Iverson became the first in NBA history to have a braid appointment mid-game,” India Espy-Jones writes in Essence. “A reminder of just how important hair is in the Black community — and how beauty often teams up with our success.”

This is also an excuse to draw your attention to the secret archive of vintage games – the full games – available on NBA League Pass. There are dozens of pages dedicated to stars like Iverson along with individual team pages including highlighted contests ranging back to the ‘70s, but as far as I can tell they’re not cataloged anywhere on the site. I only discovered this by messing around with the direct link, successfully surprising Rachel at the end of a rough day by dialing up The Answer’s 1996 NBA debut. . .

Continue reading in “There’s Always This Moment II” featuring Guns N’ Roses, sundown suburbs, and an unexpected pivot from Allen Iverson to Alan Watts.

The Indiana Pacers meet the Oklahoma City Thunder for Game Five of the 2025 NBA Finals Monday, June 16 at 8:30 pm ET.

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To be fair Strus’ hairstyle is very close to my own look in high school.

The idea that “doing more is better” is hardly unique to the era of AI slop and digital-only productions, but the urge to apologize for not doing enough, or to flex over doing too much, has been wearing me down. The latter is something that seems more common to musicians, and it feels rude to complain about the artist who opens their bio by talking about the 20 albums1 they’ve released over the last year. I appreciate it when artists offer deep discounts on their full digital discographies on Bandcamp, but I’m happier shelling out for the most recent desert sand feels warm at night collaboration, rather than paying $1 for the full 25 album discography, a multi-GB acquisition that will flood my digital music library with literally hundreds of hours of long-form rainbow-smeared slushwave. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Contrasted with the newsletter writer who opens with an apology for not sticking to the arbitrary production schedule that they’ve set for themselves. It’s reassuring that a slower Vøid Contemplation Tactics publishing schedule has resulted in a boom in free subscriptions: More dharma rock and less dharma talk. Though the analytics also suggest that recommendations from the good people at Sermons, Strength Reversed, Range and Basin, and The Burning Shore are helping out. Thanks, friends!

It’s a gross ideology perpetuated by useless billionaires like Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who got yelled at in 2020 when he responded to criticism that Spotify wasn’t paying artists enough by blaming artists for not working harder and producing more product. While many vampire CEOs may be naughty little piggies indulging in bully-cuckolding fantasies2, antisocial nerds getting off when the cool kids tell them to get fucked in front of thousands of twitter followers, this idea is a long-standing component of cultural production.

Whether it’s a parasite like Ek telling musicians to churn out more slop so he can invest millions in AI murder machines; ghoulish tech bros telling their employees to sleep at the office while they get back to inventing new slurs in group chats; Republicans using AI to fast-track images of weeping immigrants in a “Studio Ghibli but fascist” style; Trump cabinet members suggesting that it’s patriotic to work yourself to death with three factory jobs; or breeding-kink fetishists offering Nazi-inspired medals for big natural broods, the message is clear: Do more3. And know that “more” will always be more. More will never be enough, at least not under the current cancerous hegemonic financial system.

It’s a point glossed over in a recent New York Times article about Generation X people who once supported themselves with their creative practices – e.g former magazine editors like me – melting down into existential crises because their once lucrative career was eliminated and the skills they developed became hobbies at best, annoying affectations at worst. It’s not as devastating as the elimination of sustainable incomes provided by unionized blue collar jobs, but at least those folks learned how to fix cars or repair stuff around the house. A solid understanding of AP vs. Chicago Manual style doesn’t have much application out in the garage or down on the farm.

The inevitability of this problem is lost in the NYT piece, but is foregrounded by Ek and other parasites getting rich as cultural landlords charging us to rent art from their brokerage firms, rather than buying it from the artist. Or at least it’s inevitable when art production can only be sustained by commodification, and healthcare is only affordable if your boss is feeling generous. The history of patronage stretches back to medieval Europe and the feudal eras of any number of other regions. It’s been long-established as a system that, paraphrasing David Graeber in Debt, his history of the concept of . . . debt, was never about elevating the artist to the same level as the patron.

This is amplified now as the tools that allowed artists to eke out a living by crowd-funding their next self-published PDF or passing the micro-transaction hat at the end of the livestream are taken over by the landlord class, hoarding more wealth siphoned off from the artist and fan through convenience charges, predatory SAAS fees, or Spotify’s decision to eliminate the already meager royalty payments for songs with fewer than 1,000 streams. This project is just a side-quest in the right wing’s decades-long project of manufacturing insecurity by dismantling social welfare programs and overthrowing any government anywhere on the planet that attempts to extricate itself from capitalist hegemony. Even if we’re speaking metaphorically, is it surprising that a scorched earth policy where there can be no good examples of alternatives to the current economic system trickles down from the substantial work the US does staging coups in Latin American countries implementing worker-friendly economic reforms, to undermining independent artists’ ability to make money?

As a bitter and confused (but mostly just sad) person who is ready to blame myself for not being able to pay the monthly T1D insulin-subscription bill4 solely by typing on the computer – rather than taking the creative industry’s inevitable capitulation to market forces into account – I think about these things too much. But it’s been on my mind lately after talking with friends about the terrible state of the world and usually ending up at the question of “but what should we do.” The non-answer I end up with most often is “maybe there’s not much to do.” Beyond being good neighbors, spending time with people we love, and trying not to make things worse. It’s great to go to protests, but I’ve been going to protests for three decades and even supposedly independent liberal entities like the New York Times continue to support every new conflict that comes along, from the invasion of Iraq to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. When people ask questions like “what would you have done in 1930s Germany” they’re probably gesturing toward things like the Warsaw Uprising, rather than buying toilet paper in bulk, or leaving messages with the interns at your National Socialist representative’s office, asking them to please do fewer National Socialist things. But may as well give your congresspersons a call anyway, if only to waste their time.

On a personal level, that’s where I look to the practical Zen and anarcho-optimist writing that we’ve been listening to on Inter-Dimensional Music the last few episodes: Life is the way it is [boo!!!] . . . but it doesn’t have to be this way [yay?]

On a macro-historical level, there’s a different but complementary reason that I end up back at “there’s not much to do.” It’s something that we’ll get deeper into in future newsletter issues and FM episodes – assuming Marfa Public Radio survives the ongoing Republican attack on their funding sources. It’s the cold comfort that I get from scoring household chores with “parapolitical” podcasts like Ghost Stories For The End of The World.

If there’s something that we could do, some secret action or proclamation that would set the world right, there’s an implication that we – me, you, and most (?) of the people reading Vøid Contemplation Tactics who I assume lack any substantial individual political power such as casting a vote in the US Congress – could’ve done something to stop it. In other words, it’s our own fault for not voting harder. Like how the Earth’s climate is collapsing because we forgot to take the reusable bags to the grocery that one time, and not because of decades of uncompromising corporate resistance to environmental regulation. As Zen teacher Joko Beck, the unofficial patron saint of non-self improvement, says in Everyday Zen:

. . . we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there's some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.

Unlike Zen, it’s not easy to come up with a pithy explanation of parapolitics, especially because it often intersects and overlaps with more outlandish conspiracy theories: Saying “it’s not conspiracy theory” is the easiest way to convince people that you’re pushing conspiracy theories. Or as the leftist parapolitical “independent researchers” say of their right wing equivalent “do your own research”-researchers of the QAnon movement: you’re so close! Parapolitical people also usually don’t want to talk about UFOs, and the adjective “spooky” is neither an antiquated slur nor a reference to the supernatural.

The best I can come up with is that parapolitics is a materialist approach to the history of political and economic power. As opposed to the idealistic suspension of disbelief required to have faith in more spectacular conspiracy theories, or to have faith in the essential goodness of the US government. It’s looking at the shared goals of organized crime, intelligence, and powerful financial, business, and political entities. There are no good guys, and the bad guys are hardly five-dimensional chess geniuses or galaxy-brained protocol-following puppet masters. It’s acknowledging that these groups want many of the same things, and there’s no reason to assume that a CIA director or CEO is more ethical or trustworthy than a drug cartel leader or mujahideen commander. The host of Ghost Stories sums it up with language from The Wire’s Lester Freamon: ”You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.”

I’m trying to write something about how this approach to understanding the chaotic bad news that floods the present moment via rude leftist comedy podcasts paradoxically makes me more optimistic, or at least prevents misanthropic black-pilled-ness. It has something to do with the relief that comes from abandoning NPR’s dulcet tones of centrist acceptance for the host that exclaims “fuck these people” after coverage of the ongoing US/Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign, or exclaims “fuck these people” while discussing the Q-pilled moron who expects a Republican administration lousy with rapists and allied with celebrity sex traffickers to finally reveal the full scope of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sexual blackmail operations.

But due to a lack of editorial input here at Cosmic Chambo Studio, that issue keeps bleeding over into another grand unification theory essay. So in the meantime, these three most recent ID Music episodes feature language from activist and writer Astra Taylor’s Age of Insecurity. Her interview with Tech Won’t Save Us is somewhat easier to digest than Ghost Stories for The End of The World’s excellent 15-hour-long podcast series about the intersections of CIA pro-apartheid operations and the international arms trade with the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.

Taylor provides a helpful distinction between the “existential insecurity” inherent to human life and the “manufactured insecurity” that is giving rise to so much suffering in the present moment. Manufactured insecurity has been essential to creating a supplicant workforce since the aristocracy’s encroachment on public land in 12th Century England, through the industrial revolution, and up to the ways that employer-based healthcare undermines our willingness to participate in political protest. But it all comes down to the reality that “capitalism thrives on bad feelings.” Here’s the paraphrased excerpt from Age of Insecurity read by your host on the Inter-Dimensional Music episodes archived below:

Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less. Consumer society capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design. No matter how much we have, we are ensnared in systems that are structured to trigger insecurity, propelling us to endlessly strive for an ideal that we will always fall short of. This is why no advertising or marketing department will ever tell us that we're actually okay, and that it is the world, not us, that needs changing.

This manufactured insecurity is quite unlike the existential insecurity that is inherent to human life. Where the latter is an ineradicable feature of our being, the former is a mechanism that facilitates exploitation and profit and is anything but inevitable. Capitalism is a kind of insecurity producing machine. Insecurity is not an unfortunate side effect, but a core attribute of the system.

This isn’t to say that the situation is hopeless, or that there isn’t worthwhile work that needs doing. The message is “this is not your fault.” Stopping the Republicans is the job of the Democrats, but the Democrats are very bad5 at doing their job. So if you’re getting by on getting by and also not being a shit head to the people around you: give yourself a break from figuring out what goods to stockpile before the tariffs hit, make friends with your neighbors instead.

This is also a suggestion from a former compulsive doom-scroller that burning ourselves out trying to understand how to fix things by staring constantly into the flashlights that give us an endless stream of breaking bad news is not the healthiest way forward, that “more information” doesn’t help us do more good work. That’s another thing that I enjoy about getting my news – and social media garbage gossip – in digest form via podcast: Even though I might be alone pushing a vacuum cleaner around the apartment, I’m consuming the information simultaneously with analysis and dumb jokes: the podcast as proverbial “friendship simulator.” It’s a reminder that it’s important to not look away, but it’s just as important to not look constantly. It helps when the takeaway is “fuck all of these people.” But the real relief comes from hearing someone explain that everything hasn’t gone to shit because you and I didn’t do enough. We are actually okay. It’s the world, not us, that needs changing.

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Now on to the Inter-Dimensional Music . . .

ID Music 2025.03.30: Astra Taylor I

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For this week's practice, it's an hour of Zen-informed environmental meditations, solemn vaporwave groovers, slow-motion ambient jazz, and a heady blend of gamelan, synths, percussion and dub. Language throughout the broadcast excerpted and paraphrased from Astra Taylor's Age of Insecurity, as read by your host.

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with vintage Japanese New Age meditations from Kenichiro Isoda.

artist - work

Kenichiro Isoda - 水車小屋について (with Stream & Birds)
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - The Milky Sea
days of blue skies - Tfakkira
Kevin Richard Martin / Dis Fig - Silent
Early B - Imitator
Gamma Knife - The Seven Heavenly Elements
Kenichiro Isoda - 水車小屋について (with Stream & Birds)

ID Music 2025.04.06: Astra Taylor II

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For this week's practice, we'll sit with mournful deconstructed corridos about "the geographic and cultural entropy caused by people and their pursuit of money, power and joy," the long-form recreation of a ceremonial Rasta gathering featuring chanting, Bible readings, and tenor saxophone; and meditative synth compositions for total relaxation and contemplation.

Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with The Chi Factory's “bucolic conception of ambient ecological music.” Language throughout the broadcast from Astra Taylor's The Age of Insecurity, as paraphrased and read by your host.

artist - work
J. Derwort - Bamboo Music (Part 1) (edit)
nudo - soñando jales
Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Grounation
Former Selves - ceremony / patience / many moons
J. Derwort - Bamboo Music (Part 2) (edit)

ID Music 2025.04.20: Astra Taylor III

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For this week's practice, it's an hour of ambient reggaeton-blackgaze joy, bleak non-self improvement ASMR, and "a sonic-spatial matrix" that "transmutes trans-local experience" using the sounds of Nairobi and Berlin as instruments.

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with, vintage cloud-based private press New Age music from Brent Snyder. Language throughout the broadcast from Astra Taylor's The Age of Insecurity.

Brent Snyder - Excursion (edit)
Luis & Lis Dalton - timmy chalamet
PYRAMIDS - Fools Gold (Mi Vida Ha Ido Pa Atras)
Andy Stott - Science and Industry
DJ Python - ADMSDP (feat LA Warman)
KMRU - CPR-12*
Pole - Rondell Zwei
Brent Snyder - Excursion (edit)

As I get older and the world is overwhelmed by the manufactured insecurity that only compounds the existential insecurity1 that is inherent to human life, I’m spending even more time staring in impotent frustration at a screen full of thousands of words of disorganized sentences and a journal full of scribbled mind-maps and thought bubbles. When did this mess stop coalescing into something that makes sense, rather than dissolving into an endless theory-of-everything essay? Is this actually useful, or is it just bitter and confusing navel-gazing? When did I lose the ability to make a living as a writer? Did I forget to take my afternoon amphetamines? Is it because I haven’t been keeping up with morning meditation? Or is this just who I am? And if so, should I try and fix it?

Why not log off and go watch basketball with the cats? Ever since we ditched the TV for a projector, late-night screenings are less disruptive to circadian riddim and snoozing. An illuminated wall’s a lot easier on the eyes than an array of blazing LEDs.

But then a message from my phone’s deep archive of contacts pops up, or a vaguely familiar email address catches my eye in an inbox choked with newsletters (like this one! thank you!) and spam. Once or twice a year there’s actually physical mail!? All life-sustaining pings from good old buds who found me on the late night Chihuahuan Desert airwaves, or who have been rooting around in the Inter-Dimensional Music archives online: fresh episodes here, flashback clas-s-sicks here.

It is a weird feeling to put 15 years into making an FM radio project that hasn’t grown much in all that time, but it’s easier to think of myself as a low-key cult classic rather than a dead-end sad-sack when one of these shows strikes a chord with a fellow lifer sufferah. It’s a reminder that – by definition – hollering one’s voice into the wilderness rarely results in a call-and-response exchange. Especially if you’re hollering naive anarchist interpretations of paradoxical Zen aphorisms over a mix of melodious aquarium sounds and gastric death metal. Thank you, my friends: You know who you are, and I had even more fun than usual making the episodes archived here because you hollered back.

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It’s always a relief to stop wishing things were different, to ease up on fighting against the sensation of what is. This surrender to the present moment is all the more worthwhile when “life as it is” means a connection to another human out there in the world, trudging through existence right next to me. The realization that we all suffer means “you are not alone,” and compassion – and rest, or at least a few moments of NBA with feline roommates – follows.

These two episodes archived below correspond to the February newsletter’s anarchist remedies for capitalist spirituality. This time the concepts are more paradoxical, but paradoxes are an essential part of Zen training. Acceptance through confusion is preferable to the black-pilled illusion of cynical understanding: Only don’t know.

Anthropologist David Graeber asks “what are the conditions that would enable us to wake up and imagine and produce something else?”

Zen teacher Joko Beck answers: “There’s nothing else in the universe but this. That’s life. That sensation. That’s all you are. Life springs out of that, not from our attempts to figure everything out.”

Katz!

I haven’t been listening to much metal lately, so these episodes lean toward heavyweight ambient and outernational “post-world” sounds. Plenty of new sepulchral death metal and fractalized hardcore festering on my hard drives though, so rest assured and/or consider yourself warned: more Impure Flow sessions on the horizon.

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As always, thanks for reading, listening, subscribing, unsubscribing, lurking, sharing this with your nice friends, or keeping it hidden away from your not-so-nice friends.

blessing up and blessing down,
DC

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.03.09: David Graeber

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artist – work
Kevin Richard Martin - Glisten
WEMA feat. Msafiri Zawose, Photay, Penya - ZEZE (Acoustic Version)
Holy Tongue - The Bigger Tutti
Black Uhuru - Slaughter
Herbie Hancock & Mwandishi - Toys (1972.03.18 - Kantonschule, CH)
Alex Albrecht - Coney
Crooked Light - Pelagic Concavity
Magical Revolution - All My Dreams
Kevin Richard Martin - Evaporate

For this week's practice, we'll start off with acoustic Tanzanian Gogo-fusion, post-punk rollers and steppas, and abattoir roots in dub. From there we'll drift through an artisanal blend of expansive psychedelic and ambient jazz and jazz-like sounds from Herbie Hancock and Mwandishi, Alex Albrecht, and Crooked Light.

Familiar language throughout the broadcast excerpted from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules, as paraphrased and read by your host.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. The hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?

Capitalism is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore. This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?

David Graeber
Utopia of Rules

Our session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with liquified bass-forward drones from Kevin Richard Martin's Melting Point.

Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.03.23: Joko Beck

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artist – work
Israel Martinez - Cuando muera (edit)
Six Organs of Admittance - For Gaston Bachelard I
Gnod - Pilgrim's Progress
C6Fe2RN6 - Degree of Dispersion
Saapato - Active Decay (feat. Patricia Wolf)
Annette Brissett & The Wackies Rhythm Force - Hard to Find
Israel Martinez - Cuando muera (edit)

This week’s session includes another selection from Gnod’s most recent transmission of dirtbag devotional chorales, a cryptical dedication to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and psychedelic jazz-adjacent experiments from my longtime dharma brother Nick Terry and Rob Mazurek.

Language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck:

Just feel this.

There’s nothing else in the universe but this. As long as you can do it: three seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever. Just surrender to that sensation. Seems like such a stupid thing to do. See, that’s life. That sensation. That’s all you are. That sensation.

What sensation are we talking about? Doesn’t matter. As long as it’s in the present moment. I’m not saying to fixate on the muscles. That’s not what I’m talking about. Just an open allowing, and nothing in the world but that.

Nothing.

Which doesn’t mean that thoughts may not float through, but no attachment to them. Even two or three seconds changes your life. And the longer we sit, over the years, the reason it’s easier of course is we begin to lose some of our interest in this drama that unfolds out of our minds. This noise that we like to manufacture, constantly.

Slowly our hope, our hope for ourselves that something or someone . . . something’s going to take care of us somehow. So we think . . . and we think . . . and we think. That begins to weaken our ability to just sit. It doesn’t mean that thoughts don’t come up and kind of float through. But they don’t distract [from] this central state of not knowing, just allowing, just being. And when it’s firmly established, then life springs out of that. Instead of out of our attempts in our little mind to figure everything out.

Until it is fairly strong at least, we’re not really living. We are potentially living, but we’re not actually living. And who wants to die and think “I’ve never lived.” And of course if this is firmly, firmly established, then death is no problem. Which doesn’t mean you have to like it. If we don’t understand this – at first even though you listen to it you may not understand it – but this core, if it’s not fully understood . . . well, without it there’s nothing.

Joko Beck
“Bodily Sensation Practice” dharma talk

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with excerpts from Cuando Muera, Israel Martinez’s contribution to the Petit Bardo project, “a series of sound works and recordings in which sound artists work with the listening act in existential finitude situations.”

Martinez describes his composition like this: “A suspension of time, body and, specifically, the ear, through a few sounds that in life we could classify as ‘ambient’ or ‘atmospheric’, without a climax, without much narrative, just that: suspension. . . I know it is difficult, almost impossible, but I would like to be able to listen to it in my last moments of life, in the transition towards Silence. Not being able to do this, I would like it to play in my farewell ritual, or for someone to remember me listening to it.”

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Though as mystics and seekers in the many Taoist-derived schools of thought have suggested many many many times over many hundreds of years, maybe there’s never been much new to say: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

In one of the early chapters of Fritjof Capra’s charmingly dated 1975 book The Tao of Physics, he expands on the mystical concept the undergirds the rest of the publication: “The fact – obvious from any reading of the newspapers – that humanity has not become much wiser over the past two thousand years, in spite of a prodigious increase in rational knowledge, is ample evidence of the impossibility of communicating absolute knowledge by words.”

So I keep coming back to two of the familiar concepts that have given me comfort – however cold that comfort may be – during difficult times. They’re both pieces of language that I’ve featured on the radio show and here in the newsletter over and over. The first comes from Zen teacher Joko Beck. It’s a bit of a downer but in a way that might be healthier for some of us than the inevitable letdown that accompanies more optimistic mindfulness riffs.

​“Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life,” she writes in Everyday Zen. “But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.”

The starkness of Joko’s dharma talks do not offer the easiest passage into Zen practice. As a longtime dharma brother who studied with her once told me, “Joko yielded the sword of compassion wisely. She was tough.” As my longtime teacher at the Indianapolis Zen Center once suggested, “Maybe don’t start the introduction to meditation sessions with dharma talks about giving up hope?”

But for some of us it’s a welcome counterbalance to the persistent appropriation of Zen, yoga, and other Buddhist-adjacent schools of thought into the abominable capitalist spirituality cult of “McMindfulness.” Meditation is not a panacea. It’s not for everyone. Buddhism is the ideal spiritual practice . . . for Buddhists. The potentially harmful effects of meditation have been well documented for as long as people have been meditating. Zen can be put to many uses, including as justification for brutal imperialism. This risk of harm may be amplified when people commodify these practices into things as innocent as “5% happier” or as nefarious as attempts by corporations to pacify their workers, or military applications intended to turn soldiers into even more resilient killing machines.

“There's no doubt that people are suffering from anxiety and stress and depression,” McMindfulness author Ronald Purser told the CBC in a 2019 interview. “The problem is: what is the remedy? The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large.”

Joko’s language – from a collection first published in 1989 – isn’t a direct response to the rise of what Purser calls the “new capitalist spirituality.” But for me it works to douse some of the fire fueling such paradoxical grindset dharma. It’s helpful during such dark times as these when the reality seems to be that things are not just as bad as they seem, but likely worse, and with seemingly no help coming. It’s a practice that produces neither happiness, nor hope. For me, it results in acceptance, equanimity. It’s “non-self improvement,” i.e. taking a break from self-improvement in order to rest. And then return to effort.

“To do this practice, we have to give up hope,” Joko writes elsewhere in Everday Zen. “I mean that we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there's some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.

“When I say give up hope, I don't mean to give up effort,” she continues. “We have to sit with pain and we hate it. I don't like it either. But as we patiently just sit our way through that, something builds within us. . . It's not by anything we think, not by something we figure out in our heads. We're transformed by what we do. And what is it that we do? We constantly make that choice. We give up our ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are.”

David Graeber’s borderline optimistic anthropologically-informed take on impermanence works well with Joko’s advice on seeking equanimity. Not surprisingly, the anthropologist and anarchist activist’s language has been featured on ID Music broadcasts almost as often as Joko’s. This line is originally from 2015’s Utopia of Rules, but is perhaps more widely recognized as one of the first images in Adam Curtis’ 2021 documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head.

Like similarly pithy Zen aphorisms, it offers a profound paradigm shift in just a few words. And so it remains one of my last and most reliable safeguards against becoming fully black-pilled. His use of the word “differently” is one of the reasons I find the concept so helpful. It points to the core Buddhist concept of impermanence, the idea that nothing remains the same. This language is excerpted from a passage in Utopia of Rules that suggests what “effort” might look like as well. I’ve included the full text here, emphasis mine:

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another . . . borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like “all power to the imagination” expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?

Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore. This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?

The German anarchist Gustav Landauer had a similar idea in the early 20th Century when he wrote “the State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it be contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” If it works for you like it works for me, sitting meditation practice can be one method for learning to behave differently. Giving up our “ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are” allows us to drop our defenses, and let go of a desire to control our lives. In the quiet space left behind we have more room to imagine patience, kindness, and compassion. Enlightenment is waking up.

As Graeber would go on to write with David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “Our species has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.” Current illusory political dichotomies are yet another false binary that clouds our ability to “imagine and produce something else.” Without this sense of possibility, a grim assumption of inevitability sets in.

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The oligarchy and its political enablers’ naked cruelty and contempt for kindness and compassion makes it easier to answer Graeber’s rhetorical question “who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?” The comfort here is that this world was not inevitable, but the coldness seeps in when we understand that it was produced to be this way with clear intention.

As is obvious and baffling to everyone that you and I know, the world’s allegedly richest human – and his cohort of openly fascist billionaires – could spend his life doing anything that humans can do. He could fulfill every medical crowdfunding campaign, live a life of luxury surrounded by his family and friends, or hook himself up to a ketamine IV and disappear completely into video games for the rest of his days. Instead he’s firing park rangers and weather forecasters, traumatizing post office workers, setting up concentration camps for immigrants, harassing trans children, and denying food, shelter, and medical care to the most vulnerable members of our society.

Peace and blessings to the right wing politicians and partisans who are having second thoughts about Trump, and the Tesla owners with buyer’s remorse, but Elon Musk has always1 been terrible, and dismantling the already meager US social safety net in order to usher in a libertarian dystopia of universal rent extraction and surveillance-based eugenics has been the aim of the right wing project since the end of World War II, if not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution2 in the 17th century. Dystopia may be utopia for the people running the dystopia.

Enforcing global capitalist hegemony by sowing death and discord around the world has been one of the primary US foreign policy goals at least since the Soviet Union accepted the Nazis’ surrender in 1945. And the tech oligarchy is only returning to Palo Alto’s foundational mission of “building better bombs and information systems for the military.”3 It’s only shocking because there’s no more pretense, even when it comes to the government and the oligarchy’s intention to use these weapons domestically.4 As one of the hosts of the Trash Future podcast summed it up on a recent episode: “The people who are most able to bring about the apocalypse simply by kicking away all of the supports of everyday life – this is a huge amount of what DOGE5 is doing – a lot of them are openly fantasizing about the apocalypse all the time.” This is the correct answer to Graeber’s question.

An apocalyptic ethnic cleansing of humanity is the common goal of Christian nationalists and Silicon Valley’s rationalist death cults. The idea that “it can’t happen here” is one of the greatest and most tragic expressions of American hubris. European fascists made “it” happen “there” using American6 blueprints. The policies of the Nazi regime were directly inspired by and modeled on Jim Crow and America’s immigration laws. This was here before. And they’ve been telling us this is coming back for a long time. This is life is at it is.

But Graeber’s not pointing to hope, nor telling us how long of a moral arc we have to endure before it bends toward justice, or at least flexes toward affordable health care. He’s talking about possibility. “Differently” could be better, or it could be worse. Gesturing back to Joko: “In the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.”

Joko’s cold but peaceful take on Zen says that we can rest in “life as it is,” regardless of whether we’re having a massive myocardial infarction, mundane heartache, or an ecstatic heart-opening experience. When combined with Graeber’s open-ended but still comforting optimism, I’m left with the ultimate hidden cold comfort: Life is as it is, but this wasn’t inevitable. Life can be made into something different. But we make change with effort and practice, not through communicating absolute knowledge with words. Regardless of whether our effort is sustained by hopeful daydreams or hopeless meditation, we start by behaving differently in our own lives.

Phew! Okay. Now to come down with a couple of recently archived Inter-Dimensional Music broadcasts that are free of heavy metals, consisting of mostly nice ‘n’ easy if not always bright ‘n’ sunny vibes. I’m also experimenting with Substack’s audio hosting, as it doesn’t seem like the Mixcloud page is very active and I find their interface to be annoying.

As always, you can find more from many of these artists in the ID Music Bandcamp library. If you end up buying something, perhaps let the artist know where you heard their sounds?

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Vøid Contemplation Tactics is free to lurkers and free subscribers alike, but the generosity of paid subscribers gets passed on to the musicians you hear on our airwaves: Thank you.

ID MUSIC 2025.01.11: Flujo Puro

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It’s the first 2025 installment of Pure Flow, our intermittent experiment in imagining an ID Music that offers more dharma rock, with less dharma talk. Sit together with us for an uninterrupted hour of long-form acoustic psychedelia and mesmerizing kosmische drones from Gnod, Agate Flow, Haress, and CAN.

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with vintage cassette-tape earth psych in the form of Illuminated Offerings from Deep Magic.

artist – work
Deep Magic - Illuminated Offerings (edit)
Gnod - Peace at Home
Agate Flow - Gentle
Haress - Litres Into Metres / Susurrus
CAN - Zwei (Keele 1977)
Deep Magic - Illuminated Offerings (edit)

ID MUSIC 2025.02.23: Ordinary Life is The Way

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For this week's practice, we'll sit with Leslie Keffer and Nyoka Shoje’s collaborative naturewave drift, a slightly sinister wetlands pastorale oriented toward the sounds of dusk and twilight. From there, we move into meditational nyabinghi riddim and voicing from A. Doeman, Ras Michael, Lloyd "Bullwackie" Barnes, and the Roots Radics Band. We prepare to return to the provisional realm of names and forms with Strategy's box-fresh ambient electronics that “rest in stillness beneath a blanket of snow.”

Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with celestial drones recorded live in a gothic church from Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

Language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck on how to have an ordinary OK kind of day, regardless of the season.

artist – work
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri - Live at Le Guess Who? (edit)
Leslie Keffer + Nyoka Shoje - Bayou Version
A. Doeman - What A Dreadful Set Of Them & Version
Strategy - The Rabbit Hole
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri - Live at Le Guess Who? (edit)

Thanks for reading the words, listening to the music, coming to the yoga sessions (when they come back!?), subscribing for free, subscribing for money, lurking anonymously, or smashing that unsubscribe if our monthly transmissions have become less than enjoyable.

blessing up and blessing down,
DC

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Also while I have a couple social media accounts I haven’t been looking at them often so apologies if you sent me something and I didn’t write back. I logged off after accidentally following a fact-checking clickpath that ended up at a chart showing how many more people were deported repatriated “removed” under Biden and Obama than during Trump’s first term. Fact check: Ethnic cleansing campaigns in Gaza, United States, and around the world often benefit from broad bipartisan support.

So I’ve been watching basketball games and bird videos with the cats, playing beautiful and aimless open-world video games, walking around in the IRL slush, reading extremely depressing and very weird science fiction, and listening obsessively to Radiohead bootlegs. All mundane but comforting activities that offer a gentle deja-vuey balm, narratives that dissolve into abstraction, experiences that are simultaneously new and familiar. Suffering and change are the only inevitables, but at least the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder seem to find great joy in playing basketball so beautifully together. Although of course we have to wait three days to watch Pacers games despite paying for an NBA League Pass subscription, see preceding commentary on the inevitability of suffering.

The weekly Inter-Dimensional Music heavy mellow FM radio meditation project has also been running slowly, but we’ll resume new broadcasts next week as long as there are no more home “studio” SNAFUs. Although to be honest it’s been stalled mostly because I am tired and aimless. Part of this is the usual Muncie Winter Blooze. The Pacific Northwest has aestheticized and monetized its gloominess much more effectively than we have, but the Midwestern Rust Belt lays claim to four of the 10 cloudiest cities in the US according to NOAA (RIP?) data that I saw on some website that I accidentally closed already.

Our Ohio neighbors in Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo are gloomed-down more than 50% of the year, while fellow Hoosiers an hour up the road in Fort Wayne suffer under cloud cover 186 days of the year. It’s one thing if there’s crispy snow to go crunch around in, but more often than not our winters are characterized by temps that hover just above freezing, making for slopped-up mud walks by day and slick roads overnight. It’s easy to stay inside, even when openly fascist tech bros and other right wing partisans aren’t looting the federal government at the direction of the Republican party as the culmination of a multigenerational project that has been unfolding in plain sight since World War II or so, depending on how much you rely on the cold comfort of parapolitical podcast commentary.

Here are three ID Music Flashback Clas-s-sicks from February 2021 that have been airing on Marfa Public Radio and WQRT Indianapolis over the last few weeks. They’re streaming in the old Mixcloud archive from when the site offered unlimited storage space. If you’d prefer to download them, hit me up and I’ll hook you up. Each features language from Alan Watts, alongside guided meditation from me. You can also find the original Watts recordings in Out of Your Mind, a collection of his lectures and dharma talks available in this public archive.

More to come, and hopefully sooner rather than later? Until then . . .

An hour of cold, damp ambience; oily tears, non-alcoholic nyabinghi, and alcoholic Zen from Alan Watts. Guided meditation from your host.

Pulse Emitter – Space Frost
Grave Upheaval - II-IV
Primitive Man - Oily Tears
SUNN O))) - 606Day2_LM Song6
NKISI - Secrecy
Luke Stewart - 1
Ras Michael & The Sons Of Negus- Don't Sell Daddy No Whiskey
Jamire Williams - (Interpretation 14)
Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - In the Air Tonight
Gnarl - Cold Rain Will Fall

An hour of blackened ambient synths, volatile cosmic jazz, and screwed and chopped reggae. Commentary throughout from Alan Watts, with guided meditation from your host.

Indricothere / Geryon - One Million Years
Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra - Helmets of Our Poisonous Thoughts #16 / Awaken the World [Sardegna, Italy]
Shabaka and the Ancestors – ’Til The Freedom Comes Home
Al Cisneros - Yerushalayim
Steel Pulse - Rollerskates (DJ Screw - Chapter 012 edit)
Infinite Spirit Music - Rasta
Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics - Anglo Ethio Suite
Indricothere / Geryon - One Million Years

An hour of "dark-doom-psychedelic-ritualcore" along with language from Alan Watts. Guided meditation from your host.

Sentinels of the Arctic - Huldufólks Souk (Trade in Twilight)
Senyawa - Istana
Philip Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble - On The Beach
Locrian - The Great Dying
Krallice - Aspherance
Princess Difficult - Symphony Of Emotions
I JAHBAR, prod. BIG FLYTE & VELKRO - LIGHTER THIEF
Actress - Rims
Sentinels of the Arctic - Vættir (Tomten II)

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I try to avoid social media – I am too old and I am not good at it – except for when I need to promote one of my projects to the philistines who have not yet subscribed to this good newsletter. Or when I am bored or depressed and interested in becoming less bored at the expense of becoming more depressed. But for all of its false promises, Bandcamp’s extremely limited social dimension means it’s one of the only social medias that still feels good to me. Though if you want occasional sad-posting or cat pictures, you can find me on Blue Sky or my only slightly less inactive IG account. But you’ll get a faster response here!

One thing that was floating around the socials last week - possibly in commemoration of the annual Spotify surveillance report on its users’ listening habits that people share on social media to help advertise Spotify? - was a post about how a person asked a musician where they could purchase their music, and the musician was very surprised at the concept that someone would be willing to pay for their work, and had no e-commerce URL to offer up. And so in the spirit of the people who are self-righteously yet inconsequentially posting their Tidal end-of-year data summaries, I’m doing a quick overview of a dozen or so things that I acquired on Bandcamp.

It’s cool if you want to feel better about yourself for using Tidal or whatever instead of Spotify, but as one person put it on r/Tidal a year ago, “According to Producerhive's calculations Tidal pays most, but to be honest, all this means that artists receive two peanuts instead of one peanut.” If you want to help artists to purchase three or more peanuts, buy things directly from them: Abstaining from Spotify as an individual doesn’t do much. After all, Neil Young himself left the service but it didn’t make much difference so he came back. I don’t feel guilty about streaming Cinderella’s “Gypsy Road” on my partner’s account, just depressed.

If you do feel guilty but you don’t know what to do with MP3s anymore, you can subscribe to this newsletter as most of the $1000 or so that I bring in annually from 30 or so paid subs (literal angels, you mob!) goes into acquiring tunes for my hard drives and the FM airwaves.

It’s surely a privilege to be able to spend money on music, but the aggressive devaluation of music by Spotify and their cohort can also make the the proclamation “I bought a lot of music this year” feel like a self-own. Especially when we’re still paying down debt acquired for unexpected repairs on the 2012 Subaru or the very scary ER visit that insurance deemed unnecessary or the MRI that my doctor ordered that insurance neglected to cover since everything down in my guts is apparently fine. Also since it’s January and our deductible has reset, I’m back to $100-300 visits to the CVS pharmacy each month to pay for my lifelong T1 diabetes hobby. I believe the word you’re looking for is “patron of the arts.”

Going through the 365-ish pieces of music that I purchased or otherwise acquired on Bandcamp in 2024 is exciting because when I am stoned and up late and I find things for less than five bucks I sometimes buy them, forget about it, and then lose them in the 2TB digital library of music that will probably get thrown in the trash when I die. Although to be fair, a lot of the CDs I stockpiled over the course of the ‘90s and ‘00s are already landfilled because I get too confused trying to sell them on Discogs. Maybe we shouldn’t think of supporting artists as a financial investment? Maybe cultural production shouldn’t be fully dependent on profit margins?

Too late!

There are very few people who will think that my favorite pieces of music are among “the best” releases of 2024 – as usual, I invested in a lot of spacey contemporary reggae and dub along with inscrutable death metal demos and several vaporwavvvy Fleetwood Mac covers and at least one questionable Grateful Dead mash-up for a mix that I made to score a friend’s “medicine journey” – so rather than pretend that I have any sense of significant trends in music beyond what I observe from the weird little East Central Indiana Rust Belt soundsystem bubble that I inhabit with my wife and two cats, I am going to give you a list of some things that I liked in 2024 that appear in fewer than 100 other collections on Bandcamp. If there are still things where I’m literally the only person who bought the music, please go buy a copy for yourself for $1 so I don’t feel like a stalker.

Capsule reviews below, or click on the big image to browse the 2300 (!?) titles available in the Inter-Dimensional Music Bandcamp Library.

Various Artists
Boomarm Nation Family Album 2024 (Boomarm Nation)

Boomarm Nation was new to me in 2024, but their polyglot dub transmissions are easily recognizable as part of a spiritual diaspora stretching back 400 years. For the purpose of situating their soundsystem in the era of commodified iration, it’s an aesthetic that harks back to the liberation technology incubated in the Black Ark, transmuted in the early ‘80s by On-U Sound, and carried through the ‘90s by the illbient junglists at Wordsound, dreadlocked desert ravers, and the irie industrial artists on compilations like 1995’s Macro Dub Infection. The signal seemed lost when trip-hop tried to segregate the riddim from voicing; or when the term “dubstep” was rendered meaningless, applied to artists as diametrically opposed as deadmau5 and 5hackl3ton. But with the return of these Boomarm compilations – they’d been on pause since 2018 – we once again have access to fresh tunes from the missing channel, ranging from bass-forward PNW polyrhythms and proselytizing from chillout tent griots, to post-nyabinghi abstractions and nuevo new age rollers and steppas from beyond the ultraworld.

Sundials & Don Fe
River (Woodland Records)

The Paradox Musicians
Blue (Junior Wize Production)

If ‘90s-style chillout tent dub is your thing like it is my thing and you have access to a proper soundsystem then we should be in touch because I am acquiring a lot of these Mixmaster Morris-sey [loud boooing and simultaneous clicking of unsubscribe buttons] jams and I would love nothing more than to play them for people hanging out somewhere on a Sunday afternoon. “River” is a three-part flute-forward digi-dub symphony from “dub for social change” label Woodland Records1. Meanwhile, “Blue” from The Paradox Musicians is a lovely sort of Balearic guitar dub from Japan that brings to mind aquatic and astral livities such as “Beau Mot Plage” and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. All relayed over a backdrop of easygoing nyabinghi drumming and Jamaican field recordings compiled by fellow ID Music alum Akinsanya. Eventually I’m gonna get bored by ambient music worn out by metal and just listen to stuff like this.

N1_Sound
Mantras (Spiritual World)

As I mentioned above, I really really love the zone where industrial and dub overlap, possibly the result of getting turned on to King Tubby and Throbbing Gristle at the same time in high school. This was the early ’90s in Central Indiana so both forms of rhythmic psychedelia were equally inscrutable, and there was really only one older guy in the local hXc scene who was enough of a head that he could sort of explain to me what all these musicians were doing. He was a Deadhed as well, so I totally had a confusing adolescent crush-not-crush on this beautiful long-haired and very funny person who smelled like weed (though I didn’t know that was what weed smelled like yet). In other words, transmissions like N1_Sound’s waka-waka-guitar and congas tribute to Cabaret Voltaire’s most dubwise meditations bring back really pleasant Midwestern teenage daydreams. Also! Another nice thing about Bandcamp is when you run across the user profiles of artists that you like and find new things based on what they’re listening to, so credit to Al Wootton – a remarkable producer of contemporary “psych industrial dub ritualism” who will be well-familiar to regular listeners of our airwaves – for unknowingly boosting this on to my TL.

Jayve Montgomery
some folks’ heaven

In an auspicious intersection with concepts found in both Zen and Rastafarianism, Tennessee-based artist Jayve Montgomery presents a improvisational saxophone meditation on finding heaven in the present moment, a brief opportunity to pause and take a break from self-improvement. He continues: “the concept of 'heaven later' has always bothered me, as have the concepts of white heaven. and segregated heaven. in my forever endeavor to ween humanity from promises of a life one can never experience as we know experience, i present these sound works to stimulate earthly thinking. 10 minutes to meditate on heaven now.”

Willow Skye-Biggs
Dreams in Suspension (Inner Islands)

Willow Skye-Biggs music is one big reason why Inter-Dimensional Music exists. It feels corny to put it this way, but along with fellow “New Weird Utah” travelers (see also Seven Feathers Rainwater, Silver Antlers, and Wyld Wyzyrdz) Biggs’ Stag Hare project made sounds that – when I first encountered them on audioblogs like Weed Temple and Microphones in the Trees in the late ‘00s – I’d been waiting my whole life to hear. Stag Hare’s music hybridized the dank and dubby drone of Not Not Fun with the sometimes sinister ambient drift encountered in the Emeralds extended universe. Albums like 2011’s Spirit Canoes offered a sublime blend of organic and silicate percussion and chanting: the fecund nyabinghi float of Ras Michael emerging from the high desert sandstorm of David Crosby’s mescaline meltdowns.

“So much of ambient music can be about a passive listening experience, which is intriguing, but I have always been interested in engaging the genre as a very deliberate and active experience,” Biggs writes of this foray into mostly beatless ambience under her own name. “It is, to me, an exercise in focusing on a particular moment and tracing that moment consciously, which creates temporal contrasts, shadows and reflections – in that way seeing the world in a new way, being more aware of the present and more aware of what does and does not exist here.”

Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd
Unforgiving Heatwaves of Psychosis and Deforestation (Vigor Deconstruct)

Ostensibly an outgrowth of the black metal biome, Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd is making some of the strangest music I’ve heard in a long time. The only artists I can think to compare them to are both purveyors of similarly unclassifiable heavy psychedelia rooted in naturalistic kvlt abstraction. The first is Markov Saroka, who records stomach-churning metal and depressive atmospheric psychedelia as Tchornobog and Drown, and is credited with mandolin and production here. And then there’s the Brazilian artist Caio Lemos who records long-form rainforest folk-metal under the names Kaatayra and Bríi, among others aliases.

For those keeping track of such things, Unforgiving Heatwaves of Psychosis and Deforestation marks the onset of a new song cycle from Lightning Ridge, Australia’s top-ranking apocalypse audio ecologists. It follows such classics as Ecological Grief - Relentless Visions of Fire and Aridification and Deadly Floods of Hurricana Humiliate our Higher Grounds. To fall back on a tired but nevertheless accurate cliche: the album titles are a good suggestion of what the music sounds like, with their latest featuring more mandolin than you might expect. They recently opened pre-orders for the next album – the aptly titled Rotting Crowns of Failed Emperors Burn Atop Mountains of Smoke and Greed - with a portion of the proceeds going to Pasadena Humane Society “as they support animals displaced and burned by the ongoing wildfire infernos raging in Eaton, California.”

Sarine
Vento Febril

Oh hey while we’re talking about Brazil . . . I’m unaware of any new jams from DFKDS (tafka DEAFKIDS) outside of live shows since their excellent 2023 Ritos do Colapso collection, which still gets heavy airplay on the home soundsystem along with their 2020 collaboration with ex-Sepulturan Iggor Cavalera. However! DFKD drummer Marian Sarine released several variations on psicodelia transcendental percussiva under his given name this year. This EP features hypnotic sounds inspired by Nigerien-Ghanaian organist Mamman Sani Abdoulaye and the early ‘80s “Sabar grooves” and “Mbalax musings” of Gambian acid rockers Guelewar.

Leslie Keffer
Sanctuary (Coherent States)

Leslie Keffer + Nyoka Shoje
Bayou Version (Shield Maiden)

One of the pleasures of making ID Music for almost fifteen years2 is in discovering new music, but it’s also deeply satisfying to follow the careers of a handful of artists as their sounds evolve into fascinating new forms. Along with Al Cisneros, Carlos Niño, Shackleton, Shabaka Hutchings, Krallice, Nihiloxica, Liz Harris, NKISI, timber rattle, Sunn, Azu Tiwaline, Tzompantli, Primitive Man, et al we find Ohio-based polymath Leslie Keffer. I’m waaay late to her sprawling solo discography, which seems to begin in 2003, and has taken multiple side-trips into power electronics, white noise, and something one reviewer refers to as “waves of junk filtered radio wash and siren chants” over the last two decades. Also worth digging into scores of collaborations with artists ranging from Thurston Moore to Unicorn Hard-On.

Of her 2024 releases that I’ve been able to spend time with, Sanctuary and Bayou Version are most helpful in demonstrating her aesthetic range. Sanctuary is in a similar vein as the 2022 albums Aethereal and Perceive. Where those sibling LPs were Keffer’s attempt to "capture the feelings I became aware of after having spiritual experiences, and interpret them through music" in a series of graceful ambient compositions based in large part on her own vocals, Sanctuary is both “an immersive ode to Nature in all her enigmatic and tempestuous forms” and a tribute to fellow buckeye Albert Ayler's seminal 1970 free jazz masterwork, Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe. While Keffer’s catalog makes it clear that she is capable of summoning a righteous cacophony worthy of Ayler and his cohort, here she manages to channel sonic healing into a form that isn’t far removed from Boards of Canada’s bucolic electronics.

Meanwhile, Bayou Version is pure naturewave drift, a self-described “mystical” collaboration with Louisiana-based artist Nyoke Shoje. More specifically, it’s beatless ambience “oriented toward nature and the sounds of dusk and twilight.” It reminds me of Julianna Barwick’s like-minded celebration of Louisiana flora, as well as Keffer’s 2022 Horror Pilation series of ambient albums with Arvo Zylo as Blood Rhythms. That six album sequence of highly-textured and deeply visceral vocal drones is intimately naturalistic, internal field recordings from the human circulatory system, and an appropriate soundtrack for many Basking in Gravity sessions. Her collaborator’s music is entirely new to me – when people in the noise underground describe an artist as “elusive” you can trust that they’re under the radar – but Shoje has a similar range as Keffer, moving from harsh noise to the endless soothers found below on the “24/7 Healing Stream Archive”:

MIL KDU DES
GXH (Ingrown Records)

Before we leave the underground noise zone, I would like to draw your attention to our dinner preparation soundtrack from a couple weeks ago, which is intended as an alternate soundtrack to the 1971 kaiju film Godzilla Vs. Hedorah. The film is described by critic Steve Macfarlane in the liner notes as one of the “most novel in the Godzilla canon,” a conflict between the iconic kaiju and Hedorah, a smog monster that is “less the traditional diamond-encrusted invader from outer space than a sprawling manifestation of industrial Japanese growth after World War II, a red-eyed effigy in sludge.” Meanwhile another critic more well-traveled than I in the cassette tape freak scene describes MIL KDU DES latest as “a sprawling beast that vacillates between minimalist cosmic post-freakout comedowns and maximalist tribal funk jamz.” I’m not sure yet where this blends into an ID Music broadcast, but it was great for bopping around the kitchen chopping up mushrooms and dolloping spicy chili oil into steaming bowls of fully-loaded ramen!

Häxa Komät
Negative Dream Body Transference (Unity Temple)

I can't accurately talk about a lot of the music I've encountered while getting lost in the world of contemporary hardcore – second wave crasher crust?! – but am confident saying that the complementary anti-fascist ambient music happening alongside it is excellent. How’s that for a segue into ID Music’s first full-on dive into proper modern hXc?

DECLARATION
what is the reason for tomorrow? (Full Force Hardcore Destruction)

One of the only releases on this list that didn’t hit in 2024, DECLARATION makes the cut because a) what is the reason for tomorrow? is such a great album title, and b) they share members with SIAL, one of my favorite bands that I’ve encountered on this survey but who have a considerable following already. Like SIAL and like a surprising number of other modern hardcore bands (see also Yellowcake, Kriegshög, et al), I catch a Hawkwind-ish psychedelic edge to their walloping deluge of infuriated D-beat. As the charmingly enthusiastic writer at the still-alive-and-kicking and refreshingly ad-free Maximum Rocknroll website puts it, “I urge you to keep checking out the Singaporean/Malaysian punk scene, it is full of delight.” Agree!

Svaveldioxid
Fr​ä​mmande Samtid Skr​ä​mmande Framtid

In my late 2024 rediscovery of hardcore, most of the roads I traveled led to music made by young(er than me) people inspired by grotty ‘90s käng-punk bands from Sweden or histrionic ‘90s Japanese punk/metal “crasher crust” like Framtid, who are conveniently name-checked in the title of Swedish D-beat acolytes Svaveldioxid’s latest blackened crust crusher.

Atomic Prey
Atomic Prey (Iron Lung Records)

It is also not super surprising that Portland, OR remains an epicenter of hardcore and underground punk. I’m still figuring out how to write about this sort of music and this newsletter is already super long so I’ll go with the label’s description for Atomic Prey’s debut, which has been the soundtrack to afternoon walks through a wintry Rust Belt mix of freezing rain and short-lived snowflakes: “. . . a total psychedelic d-beat smasher that amplifies the overstimulation, disorientation and emotional extremity of modern life - a debilitating HELL. Fourteen feedback soaked minutes of inspired, hard-hitting noisepunk tackling years of chronic illness, death, demons, poverty, PTSD and inherited ancestral anxiety.” Sometimes you wanna assuage the emotional extremity of modern life with balmy ambient soothers, and other times you wanna retaliate with your own version of debilitating hell sounds.

Haruspex Chants
Demo MMXXIV (Rotted Life)

In order to appease the two or three of you who follow along because of a genuine interest in the aforementioned inscrutable death metal demos, I will close out with a “lightless descent into suffocating death metal and funeral doom” from Cincinnati’s Haruspex Codex Chants.

If you don’t enjoy death metal, it’s probably not going to win you over! But if you dig slow grimy death metal that sounds old and wet and weird with plenty of tolling bells, phlegmy roared vocals, cryptical chanting, copious pinch harmonics, and the sort of New Age-y keyboard intros and outros that mean you can actually blend it together with New Age music for an understandably unpopular yet surprising persistent community radio art project, this will likely be relevant to your interests.

Thank you as always for reading along, streaming the mixes on your afternoon walks, ignoring the music and looking for info on the next yoga session (stay tuned), lurking anonymously, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (!), or smashing that unsubscribe if these monthly-ish dispatches are starting to chafe.

blessing up and blessing down,
DC

P.S.

Isolation Drills
The Way to Ruriden (The Mutual Appreciation Society)

I don’t seek out promos often because community radio is not a super powerful pitch when it comes to exposure and I feel weird asking people to send me things for free, especially if I don’t get around to playing them out! But it is deeply satisfying when musicians who’ve caught the show seek me out to submit music for consideration. Indianapolis’ Isolation Drills is one such example, and while I haven’t yet found a place to mix them into the FM flow, their heavyweight drone-into-shoegaze post-metal has been a welcome companion on grim wintertime drives through the denuded industrial agricultural wasteland of the Midwest. They’re also on my mind as part of the lineup with Emma Ruth Rundel, Converge, and Bongripper for Naptown’s kinda incredible-looking 2025 Post Festival. Shout out to local woodworker and crisis precipitator neil still online for the heads up!

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🚨🚨🚨
I'm cancelling (or hopefully just postponing) the Basking in Gravity session currently scheduled for tomorrow (Sunday, January 12, 2025).

I'm dealing with an annoying persistent cough, and while I don't feel terrible (and I'm COVID negative), I feel uneasy leading a session based around breathing together in between annoying coughing fits. We've all been to events where there's one guy hacking in the background and we're all thinking "dude go home" and I don't wanna be that dude!

Stand by for updates, and thank you for your patience.

🚨🚨🚨

A few quick notes to close out the year:

• For the final two 2024 Inter-Dimensional Music FM broadcasts on Marfa Public Radio and WQRT Indianapolis, we’re revisiting “Cold Comfort: Winter Solstice Drones & Dirges,” two extraordinary episodes from 2023 that are available to you wonderful newsletter heads as one longform mix. It’s an expectedly convoluted two-hour session for the wholly dazed and solstice confused, mixed live from the yoga mat and festooned with language from Dōgen’s Extensive Record, a 2010 translation of the 13 Century Zen Master’s collection of dharma talks, poetry, and other writings. Find the annotated setlist along with streaming and download links in this previous edition of our publication:

In the first hour we'll drift from new age vibrations, old time feelings, and high altitude Christmas gloom, into tranquil overtone singing, avant-goth drone, downpressing folk music, and glacial piano ambience. For hour two, we’ll continue to float through our drafty virtual mediation chamber with Teenage Fanclub covers, gargey pink noise, soft-as-snow shoegaze, anti-capitalist country music, and laid-back winter sludge. Listen for selections from Coil, David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir, Dhyana, Palace Songs, Depeche Mode, Sun Araw, Gavilán Rayna Russom, My Bloody Valentine, Boris, Wooden Wand, Merle Haggard, and Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.

• If more Dōgen verse about cold weather meditation suits the vibe but you’re in the mood for moderately seasonally-appropriate listening that includes more of a North African focus along with detours into vintage California industrial hippie freakouts and some primo CDMX vs JA digi-dancehall, then perhaps consider “Snow Makes The Mountains,” a VØID SUPERSESSION from January 2024, conveniently re-upped to the streaming archive and download library. You can find the mix at the end of a long newsletter about colonoscopies and Freddy Got Fingered below . . .

. . . or you can skip straight to the DL, stream, and setlist here. It’s another live-from-the-yoga-mat session that I’m very proud of! Not much metal in this one, though we do make room for blackened world music from Sepultura plus a super mellow Soulfly jam. Also listen for Tuluum Shimmering, Lamin Fofana, Azu Tiwaline, Cinna Beyghamy, Drexciya, Crash Worship, Aswad, Shackleton, Mdou Moctar, and Robyn.

Basking in Gravity is a meditative space allotted for contemplating connectivity, and a reminder that we exist in concert with all living beings, not in hierarchical order or in competition for names and dominions, but in constant exchange. Or you can tell your friends that it’s a heavy metal yoga class and let them be hopefully pleasantly surprised! We’re back at Healer – Central Indiana’s top-ranking all-ages DIY hXc LBGTQ+ NOTAFLOF dreamatorium – on January 12 from 1-3pm.

Each Basking in Gravity session is unique – our soundtrack is mixed live while we practice, and we almost always switch up the videos as well. The sequence of yin poses stays mostly the same though. Once we have enough regular participants I think it would be rad to do some kind of wordless improvisational slop-style butoh-adjacent version of the project but that’s for later in 2025 at the earliest.

The January sessions are often busier than usual since January is the month when everyone suddenly feels the pressure to fix everything in their lives. Which helps us to distinguish our non-self improvement approach to seeking equanimity in armagideon times from this death cult narrative of endless growth and infinite improvement. Find all the details on our Basking in Gravity info page:

The practice is intended to be accessible for all bodies and experience levels, so feel free to get in touch ahead of time if you have specific questions or concerns.

In the interest of staying busy over these dark and cold months, I’m planning to start producing guided meditation videos once again. As long time listeners to our airwaves, readers of our blogs, and watchers of our videos will know, this newsletter started out as a series of guided meditation videos that I produced with the support of our dear friend Amy Peddycord and Invoke Yoga Studio. It was an attempt during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to give people an opportunity to maintain their practices in accordance with the core principles of compassion and lovingkindness, concepts that meant staying at home was more important that visiting dharma rooms and studios. Too bad we didn’t stick with that plan and over a million people died unnecessarily, but what are you gonna do? Capitalists gonna capitalize!

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I’ve created a new dedicated page on the Vøid Contemplation Tactics blogspot with that initial series of six videos, featuring language from Seung Sahn, Joko Beck, Lewis Richmond, Fritjof Capra, and Ezra Bayda. I’m grateful to all of the musicians1 for giving me permission to use their sounds as part of the project. Contributors include Wife Signs, Inner Travels, itta, Mary Lattimore, Joe Denardo, and longtime friends of the show, PJs. Links to all of their tunes can be found on the page as well.

The videos are all part of the ongoing White River, Slow Flow project documenting the riparian corridor that runs through Muncie, Indiana. The new ones will probably be like that as well. You can find other fragments of this project scattered across many previous newsletters, but the video I made with PJS for their longform ambient soother “Eco” is probably the best one . . .

. . . followed by the drainage channel documentation video work that accompanied the November and December Basking in Gravity sessions at Healer and in Berkeley at The Alembic . . .

As always thanks for reading these words, clicking the links, listening to the shows, looking at the videos, coming to the yoga, lurking online, sharing this with your friends, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (!?), or unsubscribing if any of this is getting on your nerves. Here’s to cultivating equanimity in good times, bad times, and in-between times in 2025.

everything is connected
nothing lasts
you are not alone

xox
DC

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