We look at metric governance, a structural phenomenon where administrative systems produce systematic harm through quantitative targets and selective measurement rather than explicit intent.

Éliane Radigue is not a composer who failed to succeed in the music industry and survived anyway. She never accepted the premise of the experiment in the first place, attempted to build a career, scale an audience, or translate practice into product on an industrial timeline. She simply worked.

\m/

Cover for Cairn Barebones Edition by @amandalee.bsky.social. There is no one else as good as her, nope

If life is a fabric, holes wear thin, rips and tears happen, threads unravel. You mend what you can, patch what you must, and learn to live with the wear. This particular patch has had its stitches, its modest embroidery, its frayed edges-and it feels like time to let this little spell loose.

"It's happening! It's all happening!" -Penny Lane, Almost Famous

MÖRK BORG is worst thing to happen to TTRPGs since darkvision.

#FlyingSaucerAttack don't really enter the room. They're already there when you notice them. Their records don't announce a position or propose a future. They don't feel like interventions. They feel like something that was happening anyway, and happened to be recorded.

The number of dead dwarfs…

Hmmm, mages decked out in papier-mache plate mail to sidestep armor restrictions while not looking like the party’s glass cannon….

❝Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.❞ blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/k...

Retired Royal Navy, went searching for the Franklin Expedition. Haitian pirate queen, relocated to New England. Former operative, Bureau of Onmyō. Civil War widow, now a spirit healer outside Arkham. All touched by The Current, their paths converge.

Next month I will launch Cairn Press. I tried to make a publishing agreement that is fair, free, and mutually beneficial. Once the lawyer approves final contract I'll release it as CC-BY-SA, if possible. I've also written up a "plain English" version that you can read here: cairnpress.ink#terms

Skulls for the skull throne? A real life Khornate cultist there for the Inquisition. Very heresy. Much Exterminatus. Wow.

There is a long-standing temptation to describe every new #Ulver album as a “reinvention,” as if the band were engaged in a restless chase for novelty. Neverland is not a reinvention so much as an adaptation—an adjustment to conditions that have changed, both around the band and within it.

Damon Krukowski's Why Sound Matters insists that sound is material, labor is real, and the way we treat both reveals what we value. Noise pollution, streaming's devaluation of recorded music, the saturation of shared soundscapes—these are not abstract problems. Yes. And.

Systems compress complexity into legible proxies, and someone always absorbs what the compression erases. The proxies offer clarity by flattening something that resists flattening. They also create a gap between what the number claims and what actually happens to people when the number is wrong.

In moments of national crisis, Americans have always faced a fundamental choice: retreat into division and distrust, or reach across our differences to defend the principles that hold us together.

A Micro-Campaign TTRPG Setting: Every bullet is a seed. Every corpse is compost. Every trench is a nursery. What the world calls a plague is only the beginning of a spring no one asked for. Transformation. Bloom-through-death. A war that accidentally created a new ecosystem.

There’s something reassuring in seeing the gray hairs and wrinkles as these folks enter the fourth decade of being Belle & Sebastian.

Amateur Hour is a TTRPG framework for playing incompetent criminals attempting elaborate heists that fail magnificently. Instead of pulling off the perfect crime, you watch everything collapse spectacularly while discovering that failure doesn't mean the end.

When Kendra Smith pulled off her vanishing act into the woods of Northern California, left behind in that puff of smoke were the two LPs from her previous and most recognized band, Opal. Their absence became structural rather than accidental, culminating n a brief, abortive reissue campaign.

T-shirts have the right to children. #BoardsOfCanada

Perfectionism doesn’t just arise inside individuals; it is pulled into shape by external forces—economic, cultural, relational. Gravity acts on everyone, but not everyone stands at the same altitude or with the same fuel reserves. Some people can slow down without falling. Others cannot.

A tabletop game about rabbits vs. bulldozers. A zine about soup and mourning as resistance. An essay about crossing ten miles and three worlds. One question: what's the moral value of persisting when victory isn't on the table?

When you walk into an Xmas market and walk out with a bass guitar....

A TTRPG one-shot set in an imaginary Chicago that takes Robert Chambers' 'Repairer of Reputations' with the "healthy" green glow of radium. The players are new arrivals to a bustling hub in the Republic of Madame Lumière, and they're definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

In a coastal town that outlived its own future, the archives remember too much. Server farms came and went. The warehouses remain. The town continues at a different pace: fishing, barter, fog most mornings. Driftwood tangled with fiber-optic cable. A faint background tone no one can quite silence.

It’s quite a plug for downtown Portland which has been the butt of much ribbing this year (and the year before that, and the year before that, and so on and so on). @thatoregonlife.bsky.social

A small TTRPG experiment around a shared folktale of persisting after the gold rush.

'Bergtatt,' the debut album by Ulver and the first installment in their "black metal trilogy." Not the heaviest, most aggressive, or blasphemous, but who cares. It's... um, nice to be able to listen to metal with some sonic headroom.

Kudos and gratitude to @phinnweb.bsky.social for turning me onto this absolute gem of dusty beats and breaths. I'm transported to the time when Mo'Wax was on regular rotation and 'Endtroducing' was about to emerge.

Happy 76th Birthday, Tom Waits!

If Spotify says your listener age is 68? That’s not a roast. It’s your D&D level. High listener age means you’ve wandered deep, carried strange bootlegs, learned the old paths. Listener age isn’t years; it’s arcane depth. Some travel decades. Some roll a natural 20 and go straight to wizardhood.

The Fujita performance at The Orange Show was in one of the warehouses & extremely cold - an observation, not a complaint. I hoped for a fire barrel, but no such luck There WAS a fire barrel at the coldest show I ever attended - almost precisely 35 years ago last night. I still think about it A LOT

The story of indiepop leans heavily on a familiar romance: youth, accessibility, color, escape, lineage. It’s a beautiful frame and an incomplete one. The scene itself is animated by contradictory desires, and tracing those tensions doesn’t diminish the music. Ultimately it grounds the celebration.

"The Directory of Primes: A Field Guide to Dangerous Configurations" systematically catalogs the relationship between the size of a musical ensemble and its capacity for catastrophic resonance or anomalous operational effects.

"Spotify Wrapped. Roy Anderssonin elokuva."

I went to jury duty for three days, and all you get is this lousy EP.

A couple of K Records shirts dyed for a respected mutual 🫡

Finland clings to happiness crown as economic gloom deepens reut.rs/43Q33BP

#Propaganda's voice, calling from 1984, arrives in 2025 not as nostalgia but as a transmission we're only now equipped to decode. #JillSinclair and #AnneDudley crafted the recursive architecture of #ZTT that allows it to exist in multiple timeframes at once.

#TheBigBoxSet has all the hand-crafted charm of old school public access TV with the kind of production values that the cable channel folks could only have dreamed about. Full disclosure: my wife is playing bass here. #Rocketship #indiepop

The frontier city of Port Meridian sits at the edge of a war nobody fully understands. Offworld megacorps, independent militias, smugglers, foreign advisors, and desperate locals collide in a place where loyalties shift with the next shipment or the next whispered betrayal.

The through-line connecting Stevie Wonder's metronomic drums to Sacred Harp's collective surge, from basement rehearsals to authenticity influencers, is the recognition that constraint produces meaning. Musical expression doesn't emerge despite limitations but through them.

Four decades back a major label released a debut album that sounded like almost nothing on earth while still sounding incredibly familiar. Our man in San Francisco Ned Raggett takes stock of it all Happy Birthday to the JAMC's Psychocandy, which turns 40 today! buff.ly/nflmjN6

Soon. www.makeship.com/products/mr-...

We're all lobsters. The water is genuinely boiling. And the truly absurd cosmic joke is that understanding this changes absolutely nothing about our evolutionary programming or our thermodynamic trajectory. But at least we can laugh about it.