Channel: Features

From infinite mathematical points to AI paranoia, ‘The Singularity’ haunts our age. But what if these supposed endpoints are just clown cars packed with paradoxes? To understand our digital present, we need to track the ghosts of weird history.

An imaginal descent and a psychic transmission: Baiocchi’s Theta unravels the secret negotiations between life and entropy, while Mason’s tribute to Schaeffer reconnects acousmatic listening to its primal roots. Both works ask the listener to slow down, attune, and inhabit sound as a living terrain. The crossing, once entered, is hard to leave.

It’s a dangerous world to be a woman in Rebecca Baum’s The Brood—but the predators aren’t the male characters. The shocking power of this tale comes from an utter breakdown of female solidarity.

The tyrants of our time call upon us to ask “Who is like unto the Beast?” From Silicon Valley’s AI worship to ancient Rome’s imperial machine, Jonathan Cobb traces how the Antichrist is not a future threat but a present reality—the mechanization of society that promises kingdoms while demanding our souls.

Paul Turner’s Four Walks in Three Parks explores shifting sonic strata, high strangeness, and imaginal listening in this latest Acousmatic Crossings installment.

In a world obsessed with comfort, Ordeal-ology explores why we crave ordeal and apocalypse. From The Walking Dead to ancient shamanic rites, the essay asks how deliberate difficulty might restore our resilience, creativity, and meaning. Through psychology, philosophy, and myth, it calls for a new “ordealology”—a practical wisdom of constructive distress.

Enter the imaginal realm of sound with Murmuri’s “I Like the Cold Aesthetic.” A meditation in motion—where form, texture, and silence blur into transformation. Listen closely, and let the Acousmatic reveal what lies beyond the visible.

My essay is an examination of Vertigo and a personal account of the unexpected and synchronistic involvement it has had in my life, particularly with regards to my queerness as a trans person and the influence of Jungian ideas on my transition.

In Visitation, Jean Patier leads listeners through sonic ruins where memory, time, and imagination intertwine. Each piece unfolds like a meditative walk through forgotten sanctuaries, where sound becomes scripture and silence breathes. Patier’s lush electro-acoustic textures blur the boundaries between the seen and the heard, the past and the becoming. This is music as contemplation—an aural pilgrimage toward the sea of eternity.

This piece explores the metaphysical, epistemological, and biological implications of sound as a formative and ontological force. It draws on modern Cymatics, Islamic metaphysics, critical theory, and contemporary epigenetics.

This was the moment I’d been hoping for: standing at the edge where curiosity and danger meet, where every step forward carried a paradox of adventure and risk. A place called Amazonia.

Dive into the raw, gritty fusion of acousmatic mystery and trance-like intensity, where polyrhythmic percussion and searing, bone-rattling electronic tones collide in a sonic inferno. This Camouflage Trance creation strips away visual origins, unleashing a wild, immersive storm that hits with unrelenting force. Check it out and brace for the impact!

Free will or fate? This paradox shows how knowing the future reshapes choice, challenging the very idea of absolute prediction.

This is about both the worst and most meaningful day of my life, the day I began to awaken from the intrinsic hypnotic effect that ‘life’ has upon us as endless, and yes immortal beings in a very mortal world—and universe.

A non-space of entropic delights—Deliverance offers a listening experience shaped by imagination, sensation, and the apophatic limits of language. It is at once minimal and infinite, a sonic passage that belongs to no one and to each listener alone.

A surreal, comedic dialogue with Chase Griffin on improv, tone synesthesia, pratfalls, flamingos, grief, comedy as spell work, and finishing the unfinishable novel.

We’ve long tried to measure intelligence using a single number, from IQ scores to AI benchmarks. This article explains why that approach fails, and why a multidimensional view is essential for understanding both humans and machines.

Paul Beaudoin’s ein kleines klangportrait is a tightly woven sonic miniature, where the familiar sounds of piano and percussion are extended and entangled through tape to form a restless “hyper-instrument.” Faruk Mehić’s ePrelude op. 18 no. 3 offers a contrasting sense of space and pace. Flowing with a restrained elegance, the piece beckons close listening through finely shaped dynamics and spectral detail.

This Acousmatic Crossings installment brings together plastov’s Omega Amoeba and Jiajing Zhao’s Back to the Ocean—two pieces shaped by paradox. Each begins in quiet and seeming inertia yet reveals immersive sound worlds teeming with subtle morphologies. What first appears static becomes animate; what feels empty begins to overflow. The minimal becomes maximal—if you’re willing to stay with it. Headphones required. So is surrender.

Margaret Phanes’ luminous digital art offers a meditative journey into light, consciousness, and the soul’s transformative power.

Near / The drummer’s fire / Will each his song at last / Conceive in heart / And breathe white smoke / Upon his youthful days; …

A metaphysical letter from Turīya—the fourth state of consciousness—addressed to the waking self. Blending poetry and philosophy, the piece invites the reader to return to the silent, ever-present witness behind all thought, identity, and experience.

A haunting soundwork by Rafael Ramirez using broken vinyl, turntablism, and memory to explore loss, hauntology, and imaginal worlds of sonic mourning.

A young woman discovers a piece of porridge has stayed on her hand after washing up. During another heartless hook-up with her less-than-desired girlfriend Derek, the porridge attaches onto the other, and her body is haunted by the staining of life.

What if Jung’s collective unconscious has a biological basis and Darwin missed evolution’s communication network? The DNA Resonance Hypothesis proposes that DNA functions as more than genetic storage—acting as a quantum antenna that enables non-local information exchange between organisms. This interdisciplinary exploration bridges psychology, evolutionary biology, and quantum physics to suggest that communication, not just competition, drives evolution and collective behavior.

What if music wasn’t made, but revealed? What if the earth’s magnetic breath or the mingling of East and West across the astral plane whispered secrets only the most generous ears could hear? In this latest Acousmatic Crossings installation, Amanda Stuart and Andre Perim invite us to the kind of cocktail party where thunder becomes code, whistlers become wisdom, and the hourglass of perception flips. Presence is requested—resonance is required.

AI power is warping elite behavior: The article critiques how certain influential figures in the AI world—rationalists, longtermists, techno-optimists—are using esoteric, hyper-rational ideologies to justify risky, manipulative, or self-serving behavior.

Sirius returns with a vengeance, with a chorus of fellow outlaws bent on turning the ghost of the 1990s into an electro-psychedelic séance for today’s burned-out attention span.

A visionary encounter with death and the spirit realm, weaving Hawaiian ancestral wisdom with personal revelation about life, water, and eternity.

Forged from live electronic improvisation, this story-sonic hybrid drifts into deep space and deeper states of consciousness. As the crew enters torpor, reality warps, perception fractures, and sound becomes the medium of transmutation. This is speculative audio-fiction at the edge of signal and dream—where every frequency might just open a portal.