Nihilist Optimism

Recently, I stumbled across two new musical acts that got me thinking about AI – not in the abstract, hype-ridden way we often do, but in a more grounded and specific sense. Let’s imagine this as a boxing match. In one corner, weighing in as perhaps the shoddiest manifestation of AI-generated music sludge you can currently find, we have   The Velvet Sundown . And in the other corner, lean, strange, and formidable, we have   Osmium .   Let’s start with  The Velvet Sundown , a band that seems to have drawn a fair bit of digital ink lately. They make music that sounds vaguely like 1970s psych-rock – but only in the most superficial, uninspired way. It’s as if an AI was fed the prompt: “Give me something that sounds like Tame Impala covering a few dusty Kansas B-sides after a long nap,” and the result was churned out with no love or curiosity. The music is formulaic, derivative, and worse, you can  hear  the telltale digital scars – glitchy artifacts, awkward t...

to accompany episode 38 of Mix Feelings , part of Firefly Frequencies . For Ozzy. Has he lost his mind? Can he see, or is he blind?
 That’s how it begins. A stutter, a stumble, a cracked open mouth from which language falls, no longer words but war cries, half-formed prophecies, fragments of distortion. What happens when the major language gets warped by the noise of the oppressed, the damned, the refuse? What happens when a solo tears through grammar like a chainsaw through doctrine? This is a minor sabbath where in the thick haze of minor literature, a minor mix, is detuned and fed through a blown amp. The minor is not a genre. It is not a theme. It is an operation. Robot minds of robot slaves / Lead them to atomic rage . It is the scream of the subjugated ripping through the correct usage of the master’s tongue. The minor begins when a minority hacks the major language – not to mimic it, but to melt it down, like iron into a new riff. In Sabbath’s lyrical apocalypse, English is not ...