But here it is. Audio recording: me reading some of my writing, talking about space anarchism futures, playing some ambient noise and loop tapes, and, umm, ahh, me talking some more.

Future podcasts, if there are any, will be better quality, linked to your standard podcast feed services, be better produced, and so on, and so forth. But there has to be a first one, so here it is.

POSZU Podcast #1

Cascadia

Cascadia currently has no sovereign rights as a state or territory, but its borders are generally viewed as encompassing the American states of Washington, Oregon, and northern areas of California, as well as the Canadian province of British Columbia. Different groups identify the borders according to their own primary locations and interests, but Cascadia is more a self-identification of independence and regional autonomy, than it is a desire for any particular historic regime, nation, or map. Originally known as an “bioregion”, for its mostly unified terrain and environmental concerns among the eco-activists who popularized the term, “Cascadian Pride” has also been utilized in the past by area sports teams, micro-breweries, and other businesses in order to promote themselves with a certain regional consciousness, and utilize images of volcanoes, snow-capped peaks, salmon, and tall evergreen trees in their marketing.

But when marijuana cultivation was legalized across these three states and the one province, and the joint interdiction/enforcement operation known as Operation Green Perimeter was launched by the American and Canadian governments, pro-Cascadian agitation grew exponentially more serious. The governments’ ability to monitor and tax marijuana cultivation in the mountainous and more remote regions was slight. Farms could be profitable with small crop areas scattered across the hills and valleys, where there were few roads open year round. Permits were purchased per quarter-acre, so it was quite common for a farm to purchase a minimal permit, and then exceed their legal footprint by sometimes as much as 50 times. Government estimates found that as much as one billion USD in licensing revenue might have been lost as grow operations exceeded their permits in those first years of legalization. To recoup this revenue, the Revenue Services of the US and Canada implemented the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Monitoring Network that formed the core of Operation Green Perimeter. Over one hundred war-class drones were sent to Cascadia for the task of monitoring marijuana farms throughout the region, to ensure their acreage remained with the license they had purchased.

This sort of federal government surveillance was not taken lightly in a region with already strong autonomous leanings. The notion of a separate Cascadian state quickly became popular in rural areas, as an antithesis to the federal government and the state governments that could not and would not stand up to the authority of the Revenue Services. The heavy tax imposed on cultivation operations was interpreted as unfairly targeting the rural farmers’ trade, while pharmaceutical corporations in cities paid a much lower tax rate. What began as autonomous hostility to the federal government eventually matured into open rebellion, with the amount of money at stake fueling armed insurgent groups that would attack ground patrols for the Revenue Services on back-country roads, building up weapons reserves, experience, and aggression in a very brief period of time.

After a brief period of open fighting with insurgents, the governments quickly won the upper-hand, and fighting subsided. The presence of drones in the air at all times made wide coordination between Cascadian-insurgent forces nearly impossible. The attacks on government resources continued, but were limited to sabotage, the occasional improvised explosive device, or ambush. The government eventually pulled out of the rural areas almost completely to limit their casualties in the publicly unpopular operation, instead limiting their policing to the shipments entering the cities, and to the UAV network overhead.

Drones

The actual number of drones on active-duty in the Cascadia region today are unknown, but analysts guess that the numbers are somewhere between seven hundred and one thousand, with nearly four hundred in the air at any given time. The drones fly at altitudes around 10,000 feet, and, according to the Revenue Services, their primary mission focus is mapping marijuana crops using a combination of visible-light spectrum and thermal imagery. Since the introduction of the geotag stamp system, which uses a combination of GPS tracking and RFID to track licensed shipments of marijuana from the registered production location to the processing facilities, the drones track the legal shipments, identify and backtrace any shipments that do not have paid and licensed geotag stamps, and then seize and fine the latter when they attempt to leave the rural areas. This minimizes the vulnerability of ground forces, as they don’t have to make incursions into areas where insurgents could strike.

The drones’ technological incursion is everpresent, as is their main striking armament: air-to-surface Hellfire missiles. Since the end of the major ground operations against insurgents, the official rules of engagement stipulate that drones may only strike targets that can be verified to be involved in violent, anti-government activities. Critics of Operation Green Perimeter and the domestic use of military drones say that this is a very loose definition, and that anything from mixing a large batch of concrete to fueling too many vehicles at once have been used as cause to fire at ground targets. According to standard procedure, ground forces are supposed to go and investigate any drone strike location, to clear up the wreckage and make post-mortem criminal charges. However, in practice this procedure can be delayed indefinitely by the ground forces, whether on account of perceived threats, weather, or simple bureaucratic delay. In reality, as long as the drones destroy their target, the mountain valleys often immediately return to stillness after a single missile has plummeted from the sky.

The Ballads

Cascadia has long had a history of musicians in the folk music style, perhaps symbolized best by Woodie Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs, written in 1941. Guthrie was commissioned by the US government to write a few songs about the Department of the Interior’s hydroelectric projects on the Columbia River, running through the heart of Cascadia. Upon visiting, he called the region “a paradise”, and inspired, wrote 26 songs. Other artists have been similarly drawn to the beauty of the region, and stayed when their counter-cultural, pro-environmental, and anti-government sentiments found a home.

Norteño music from Mexico arrived with the influx of immigrants at the end of the 20th Century and beginning of the 21st, and with it, the sub-genre of narcocorrido or “narco-ballads”. These songs tell historical tales of drug violence and anti-heroism from the drug smuggling cartels. While few singers of Drone Ballads trace their musical lineage to narcocorrido specifically, the influence of the guitar-led, fast-paced, danceable sounds of Norteño is discernible among Drone Ballad musicians. As well, Drone Ballads have in common with narcocorrido the shared tradition of folk music acting as a vehicle for a culture’s coping with everpresent violence. Another point of comparison is the car-crash ballad of the 1950s and 60s in the United States. Again, it is not a direct lineage, but the emphasis on the violent nature, and at the same time almost unpreventable and fated event of drone strikes, finds comparisons to those traditions of singing songs about violent episodes in wistful, almost romantic style.

Another subtle point of influence comes from anarcho-folk music, or folk-punk. Drone Ballads are popularly thought to come directly from this style of music, which carries the fast, aggressive versus-chorus motif of punk to acoustic instruments, along with political rage. However, this lineage is false. Folk-punk groups in the cities of Cascadia were some of the first popular artists to introduce rurally popular Drone Ballads to a wider audience, transferring elements of their own style to the recordings of Drone Ballads in the process. However, folk-punk is first and foremost popular with the politicized youth of the urban areas, whereas Drone Ballads originated in the rural areas, where drones strikes still occur, sometimes on a daily basis. This is the home of the style, and the lifestyle that is its inspiration.

Drone Ballads are certainly pivotal to the urban-based activists who organize against the governments’ use of drones to police the Cascadia region. Certain tunes, like “The Great Swarm on the Fourteenth” (see below), have become anthems for the Cascadian liberation movement that is gaining popularity in the cities. But this political popularity should be held in context with the original writing and performance of these songs. The songs were written by musicians who live in the strike areas of Cascadia. Despite the constant threat from the sky, they have chosen to stay where they are. Certainly, profits from cultivation are enough to draw many to take the risk. But the lyrics of these songs express more than simply dedication to a lucrative task. The violence, internalized, becomes a dedication to the land, and to the lifestyle of being a Cascadian. The lives of Cascadians, told through Drone Ballads, are the lives of strong, stubborn individuals who look at living off-the-grid the way most view taking an umbrella when one leaves the house. These are the stories that the songwriters wished to tell, and the fact that these songs have proved popular with a wider audience simply shows that these stories find resonance and appreciation throughout Cascadia, and indeed, the rest of the world.

The Lyrics

One of the best known Drone Ballads is perhaps “Blue, White, Green”, which takes its name from the colors of the Cascadian flag. This song has been adopted by several Cascadian Secession groups as their unofficial anthem. The verses differ depending on the recorded version, covering various significant events of recent Cascadian history. But the chorus is the part that most Cascadians know by heart, and audiences always sing along when the song is performed.

Coast as wide, peaks as high, as
Prying eyes in the deep blue sky
Snows shine white, below thermal sights
We sleep as flames burn through the night
We will dream, of a Cascadia free
Without grey drones in the blue, white and green.

The words reference the colors of the Cascadian flag, along with their various inspirations in nature: the blue sky, the white snow on the peaks of the mountains, and the green of the forests. But the many references to drones, in and amongst the nature imagery shows the extent to which the current state of militarized surveillance has been internalized. There is a certain pathos in this acceptance, but additionally, a willingness to continue fighting.

Another song, “The Great Swarm on the Fourteenth” is a narrative account of the infamous June 14th drone strikes in North Central Washington. On that day, twenty total strikes were made in one valley, resulting in 273 deaths, and an iconic photo taken by a New York Times photographer of eight separate tendrils of smoke twisting up from the green forest, into the sky. This day of carnage directly resulted in the Bellingham Insurrection, later that summer.

Though the Insurrection was unsuccessful, this particular song chooses to memorialize the event that inspired that Insurrection, rather than the uprising itself. Ignoring the tactical and strategic mistakes of the response, the lyrics remember the pain and tragedy of the impetus, as a way of galvanizing resolve to keep going. Phrases such as “The day they turned our skies against us”, and “we rise in smoke/the woods grow dark” typify the undercurrent of rebellion in Cascadian consciousness.

But not all Drone Ballads are entirely tragic. There is a good humor throughout many of these tunes, that are honest about the futility of the situation when the drone network above is so thick and unmerciless. They deal with the state of affairs with irony, and with tongue-in-cheek criticism. While not as popular as political anthems, they form a substantial sub-section of the Drone Ballad style, and a healthy component of the Cascadian narrative.

For example, the song “Don’t Do Nothing” is told from the perspective of an overworked (in his perspective) marijuana cultivator, who sits on a hillside over a river, and enjoys a bit of his crop while watching a drone circulate above. He remarks upon the fact that he works so hard, while up in the sky the drones “don’t do nothing”. From the refrain:

Dams power irrigation pumps
pumps bring water up the hill
Water feeds the thirsty crops
And crops sometimes pay the bills
The drones don’t do nothing
But sit in the clouds and watch

Another amusing story with a darker side is the tale recounted in “The Mountain Swimmer’s Blues”. The song tells of a man who wanted nothing more than to build a swimming pool on his property for his lover, viewing it as the height of commitment. He went ahead with these plans, despite the fact that concrete was hard to come by, and he lived on a mountain side where the swimming season was short. He dug the hole by hand, carrying heavy rocks, while his neighbors looked on and laughed. And then he started laying the foundation, bending rebar, and tying it together in the evenings. People started to think that he’d actually finish when he began to mix the concrete. But then a drone saw his work, and figuring that what could obviously not be a swimming pool on a mountain side was the site of a bunker, it struck with a missile, blowing up him and his pool. The song ends with his lover recognizing that the futility of his effort and his death by it, was indeed the commitment the pool-maker wanted to intend. It is not believed that this song was inspired by real events, though there are certainly no shortage of stories of drones strikes precipitated by only marginally suspicion actions, such as home brick-making, and road repair.

The previously mentioned song included particular geographic elements that are unique to Cascadia, such as the obvious instance of the mountain, but also tidbits about “working in the morning mist”, and “cedar-bark loam”. One standout example of another Drone Ballad that specifically takes pride in Cascadian geography is “Modoc Forest Service Road”. The lyrics’ narrative are about a woman who knew the fastest route from Clear Lake in the Modocs, all the way through the Siskayous to the Pacific coast. She would fly back and forth in her trusty red jeep, delivering news and supplies, traveling by her secret knowledge of the old, poorly maintained Forest Service roads. The story intimated that perhaps she’s done some secessionary work, or at least the Revenue Services had suspected. One day, as she was clearing a ridge and entering the open area of a lava field, a missile from a drone found her jeep. This song does have some relation to a true story–Monica Jauntai was a reporter covering the insurgent conflict in Cascadia, who was known for driving a red jeep. There is controversy as to whether she was killed by a drone strike or an IED, but the story of her death was widely told in the mainstream as well as Cascadian media. However, she was killed outside of Detroit Lake in Oregon, not near Clear Lake in California, so the relationship would seem to be only inspirational.

Drone Ballads tell of heroes, of famous events, and of beautiful, evocative places–but a thread of sadness runs through them all. Even those songs that are inspirational find their power in the drive to face the futility of the political situation in Cascadia, and the drone network overhead that shows little sign of ever going away. This is an important sentiment to vocalize through culture, and it is the reason that Drone Ballads have grown so popular, as this conflict lingers on. There is little in the way of other expressive culture in the hills of Cascadia, as the drones make public gathering difficult. But music can be recorded, broadcast, or played for a small gathering, our of view of the unblinking eyes above. And the power of song is timeless, in this way. As the narrator says in “Victoria Island Song”, as he or she waits in vain for the return of a friend and lover from Victoria Island who will never arrive, because of the drones patrolling the open water:

Our islands cannot travel
over the sea
But songs are invisible to drones above
And can travel from you to me

This. If you read the blog post from Mudd Up, apparently the pointy boots is a thing.

This is why I continue to go on the Internet. Hang out for the full video.

via Beyond the Beyond. For the heart-warming play by play of what this is, read Bruce’s description there.

I’ve listened to this track, named “unknown sixteen minute Palestinian drum machine party stomp”, about ten times now.

I love this sort of thing. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. We crank this shit up when we drive my crappy mini-van around Portland, and really weird out the “Keep Portland Weird” people.

Now, before I say I don’t love it just because it’s exotic, let me say I do love it because it’s exotic. It is so refreshing to hear something a bit different than all the typical remixes of the typical tracks. I listen to a lot of weird things, and this isn’t even that strange. This is not so much better than “typical” tracks; it is just not the same. I love not understanding the words. What am I missing, the deep poetry of American music? The subtly of crunk lyrics? I’d rather just hear sound. Raw, loud, sound that is new, different and unheard.

But at the same time, it isn’t exotic at all. If you listen to this, you hear the exact same thing you hear in Western club bangers. A heavily rhythmic, repetitive pattern, stretched as long as possible, with just enough mixing up of the particular pattern to keep you listening for the changes. Every thirty seconds or minute, the dude repeats into a verbal hook, to remind you what you are listening to, and to add another pattern to it. And then back again, to the same pattern you started with, dropping the beat, whether on a synthesizer or double reed instrument. Cause really, what’s the difference?

You just turn it up loud, and nod your head.

Actually, maybe I like it the most because it’s sixteen minutes long.

They’ve got a bottle and are passing it around. They’re paired up. It’s very clear. Body language is everything for kids that age. Girl in the red is with the guy in the light, and the girl in the yellow with the guy in blue. Girls are sitting next to each other, shoes off on the hillside. The guys are flanking them, like bookends. The bottle keeps going around.

Guy in the light suit keeps getting to his feet, pacing back and forth on the steepness, performing a bit for his friends—for the girls, mostly. His friend keeps trying to jump in on the lines, but not succeeding. Light suit’s red tie matches his girl’s red dress, and its waving in the breeze, as he gestures with his arms. His friend’s blue tie matches his girl’s blue dress. Maybe it is a fashion of some kind.
He says:

“But to have one’s voice given a certain respect! How does one attain this respect? To begin with, there are the things one can do, to further the process. Practice a certain craft of speech, of course—to ensure the dignity of the words are not compromised by error or awkwardness of phrase. And to keep a definitive form to one’s speech as well, not only free from error, but maintaining a style, a hallmark, and a trait that is not necessarily aping the tendencies of the most eloquent, revered, and respected talkers, but distinct in and of itself so when one opens the mouth, there is no possibility of rhetorical trademark infringement.”

He seems to have given this a bit of thought. It’s not the first time he have given the speech, even if only to himself. He pauses to take the bottle from the girl in red. He stands in front of her now, looking at her, maybe at the dress. The girls giggle, a nervous, bouncing intensity. The kid reacts in the way one would expect, tightening, and accelerating down on his course.

“It is easy to mock those who speak with such deep inhales, as if to gain further gravity from an inflated weight of the lungs. The Shakespearean actor’s overplay into paradigmatic seriousness is now a trope, and just as it is always expected that couplets are delivered with a heavy iambic stomp, it is contrarily a sign of overbearing pretension to add the same to any common, or off the cuff address.

“But I believe the times are changing! We are young, no doubt, and have plenty of time on our hands. We can pursue of frivolous things because we have time to waste. Capriciousness is not only our adjective, but our motto, which we accept with the same vigor as everything else we do. But why need it be simply so? Why should we not take advantage of the loose stance others take when confronting us, and step forward immediately, to knock them off balance? Are we necessarily as clumsy as we are light and fleet of foot? We have time on our side, and therefore have no time to waste! Our voices are bold, and this is an important feature. We have the ability to gain weight…”
He takes a swig as he says it, providing the girls another opportunity for laughter. His buddy makes a comment about the inopportune pause as well. He widens his hands, palm down and gesturing with the bottle.

“Tell me honestly, fine fellow and fellowesses: do you enjoy being treated as minor characters in the narratives of the day?”

His eyebrows raised, he waits for response. The girls pay rapt attention, shaking heads, and his friend does as well.
“Then why not claim the terrain of respect, which should rightfully be ours? Are our elders less erroneous than we? Is their experience ever utilized efficaciously? Or is it merely excuse for a preponderance of pontification? A pithy opportunity for pretense! A pestilence of petulance! They are given all the respect, and what do they do with it but waste it, cashing it in, via their oligarchical opportunism. They care little for the power behind the respect given to the spoken word, and more for what it can get them. Well, friends, I submit to you that it is time for a change. I say it is time we speak up, by talking down to our elders and so-called betters, to put them in their linguistic place by partaking in the craft of speech, of which we are quite capable.”

And now with a flourish of the bottle, and a little bow.

“For it is only when we have stood upon our own two feet to speak our minds that we can be said to have made up our minds for ourselves.”

They applaud him madly, and gesture for the bottle. He gives it gladly, and sits next to his girl. There’s more talk. It’s more of the same. His friend, the girls each take a turn, gesturing and repeating, echoing and clapping. Other conversation as well, carried out with heads bobbing close together. Hands on hands, on shoulders, on thighs. The boy in the light suit leans in, and whispers into his girl’s ear. I see her smile from where I sit. She tugs a bit on the edge of her dress. He kisses her, on the ear. They lie back and look at the sky. They are still talking, all of them all at once. The sky is brilliantly blue, lit incandescent by the sun. Three lines of contrails curve, crossing across the azure dome, seemingly just out of reach. Boy in the blue suit kisses yellow dress on the lips, and light suit has his hand on red dress’ leg, underneath it maybe.

I hear the sound of a cell phone ringing, across the hillside. Boy in the light suit pops to his feet, putting the hand in his pocket. Putting it to his ear, his other hand covers the other ear, blocking out the loud speech of his fellows. He walks quickly a few paces away, to cause a distance, and then slows, walking in aimless direction as he speaks. He says nothing for some time, staring into the grass, phone to his ear. His face grows darker. Much darker. His mouth closes.

His friend in the blue suit is paying attention to the girl in the yellow, but looking at the girl in the red. Red ignores them, looking at the back of the light suit. The suit is a bit small for his frame, though he is not a large person.
He has taken the phone away from his ear. It rests in his hand, on his thigh, by his waist. He is still looking at the grass. I cannot tell, but his head might be shaking back and forth, just slightly. The phone falls from his hand, and he bend at the waist, slowly, over. Both hands are on his knees. His head is definitely shaking now, his eyes wide and gray. His elbows bend, saplings in the wind.

With a roll to his spine he lifts his head and lurches it forward. Out of his mouth comes a stream of vomit, pale brown, solids and liquids. He leans past his shoes instinctively, into the roll of his stomach. He stops, and saliva drips from his lips, wide and quivering. His eyes are closed, watering. Another lurch, and again.

His friends have stopped talking and look, but do not get up.

He bends lower and lower, to let it all out. There isn’t any more. Still, one more time he lurches. Nothing comes out but sound—low, guttural. A bit more saliva. His eyes open, red, weary. His breath is ragged, in fits and starts.

The cell phone lies, uncaring, on the long grass, propped up by chance upon his motionless, brown leather shoe.

Here’s a bit of that, from what I was able to get down.

The program printed this, about Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

“They came to the conclusion that the two time-based arts should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way. Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition-such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax-were abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself.”

All well and good, I thought to myself as I read the words before the performance. I had heard the same thing said about writing before-but these elements are so characteristic of our conscious thought that if we are going to interpret any sort of meaning at all, it must be in terms of cause and effect, directed motion, and by extension, human relationships. There is cut up text to be sure, but the fact that it is “cut up” shows that it had meaning, it has only been obscured or mutilated.

But once the performance began, I was surprised. Most of the dance I have seen live (the good, technical dance) is ballet. Cunningham’s choreography showed me just how much ballet relies upon cause and effect, and psychological relationships. The pas de deux is pure sex. You might, for all intents and purposes, be watching two people engaging in the act of love on stage. You can add one dancer, or take one away, but the sex remains, only the relationship is made more complicated. The male and female dance as classic male and female components, the epic duality, the cosmic pair, the A and B. You can have A, B, AA, BB, ABA, or BBBB, but one is still spelling this body-phrases with the same two letters. We are consigned to writing in the narrative of classical sex, bodies become symbols. It is the endless story, told countless times both with and without words every time a human being thinks of touching another.

Cunningham instead presents his dancers as motion. It is physics, a swarming pallet of vectors, directed in flows around each other on the stage. There is material there-it is not devoid of meaning, or blank substance. But we are no longer watching a story. We are viewing a building, reading a blueprint, or falling into a diagram. It is architectural-he presents cross-sectional images, elevation views, rotational, cartesian, angular phenomena. As I watched his performance, the video images echoed the motions of the dancers, spinning lines and angles above the stage, as the bodies performed excellently, portraying the curves, stretches, fittings, and joints of the body’s frame and range of motion. They did not move like people, who stumble, bend at the waist while sitting and standing, hold their sore points as they struggle for the flexibility they lost in an ancient youth. Those are stories, and these dancers moved in pure physicalities, in possibilities and probabilities of encounter rather than personification of what we know and are able to think.

But still-these are people, directed to act like machines. They are not an assembly line, not an automaton. They are humane, bodily machines to be sure, but their only design has been for aesthetic purpose, to depict a visual, phenomenal scene, not to build or produce unseen within the confines of a factory or site. We are still watching a stage, after all.

Isn’t this the way that we want our machines? We aestheticians of mechanics, who find beauty in the clean lines of a well-made device, or in the subtle depth of a diagram describing a physical form not yet realized. We want our machines to burst outward in exploded view, whirling upon three axes so that we can see and admire the closeness of their components’ motion, the tight fit of the gears, and the quick pace of the electronics converting our clever programs into physicalities we ourselves could never achieve. And more than that-we design new machines in our minds to fill the still-present voids. Rube-Goldberg machines of cause and effect are the easiest, taking our current machines and lining them up into narratives to complete the tasks that still weigh upon our own fragile skins. We name our devices, love them, and love to peek inside to see what they hide from us. How is it that they work? Why do they still fail us? When will the machine come about that will never break, and will do everything, looking beautiful while it whirls about the stage of our imagination?

The function of machines in our lives is always metaphor, always narrative. We do not love our machines for the aspect ratios of their gears, though we might hold these lovely measurements up as the proof of our attraction. We love them because they function; we love them because they mean something to us. Design is never an accident, never natural, and for that, we love it as we wish to love ourselves.

We can’t see the aesthetics of our machines as we would like. They are never as they appear in our minds, or on the blueprints. We want smooth transfers, gentle harmonics, rotational symmetry, and tight, tight belts. Instead we get rusty cam shafts, stuck and broken interfaces, dangerous vibration and pinch points. The male/female connectors are frustratingly non-sexual, despite our designs and naming. There is no good and evil in binary code, no matter how complex we make it, spitting lines of digits fruitlessly to infinity. The clean lines, tempting us with the narrative of non-narrative, that human fantasy of what is beyond humanity, and the repeating regression that will not find a straight line because there is no compound of quadratics able to approach the fundamental instability of emotional ebb and flow-all of these dreams will remain unfilled. Not even robots can live for ever.

There is no truth in metaphor, but still they speak. “What it is like,” is not actually what it is like, but that is the only think that it is like! The dance has music, movement, video, and no words. Still, words come from the dance to the humans who watch it. The dance is not a machine, nor completely human, but it tells a story of machines to us through its mechanical non-narrative.

And in the background, completely separated, Sonic Youth plays ambient, distorted sounds. Distortion is easy to play, but Sonic Youth are the masters. There is aesthetic to it as well, as the sounds ambulates, oscillates, and resounds through what we typically know as music. Is it music, or is it noise? Does it tell a story, or no? Is there really no pleasure in inserting a ¼” jack into an amp?

As they move around the things they refuse to describe, these art forms have an exacting form of a approximation. Definitive cuts, loose measurements, always fitting, because what they are attempting to assemble is not strictly material. The motion of construction, this design on the fly, this performance of the aesthetic principles before our very, un-describing eyes-they move close and around meaning through the means that inspire narrative within us, though not directly representing any to us. They require no symbolic narrative or psychology; they are mere machines. Aesthetic machines-making phenomena.

For us humans, the poorly-functioning, drunk poets of the machine world, this is as close as we get. We call it beautiful.