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REVIEW: Assemblage Theory and Method (Ian Buchanan)

| May 2, 2026

Desire in its free state has the potential to be destructive, to carry us away or drop us in a black hole, so we need to interrupt it, capture it, manage it and put it to work. Ian Buchanan ‘Assemblage Theory and Method’

Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method sets out to define what an assemblage is (and is not), as well as make the case for why assemblage theory is useful and necessary.

The book begins with an introduction to the concept of ‘assemblages’. He pushes beyond the idea of an assemblage as ‘a random heap of fragments’, aiming to restore its ‘conceptual vitality’. It remains an incomplete project in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: a concept that invites us to complete and apply it ourselves.

With this in mind, Buchanan calls for a return to the original text to reclaim the concept. Rather than Paul Patton and Paul Foss’ translation of ‘agencement’ as assemblage, he argues that it could just as easily be interpreted as ‘arrangement’.

Assemblage is Paul Patton and Paul Foss’s choice of translation for agencement which Brian Massumi picked up and used in his translation of A Thousand Plateaus. It has since become more or less the default translation, despite the fact that – as several people have pointed out – it has its problems. In my view, however, these problems are not resolved by altering the translation and using a different word, but rather by problematizing it and opening it up to a more complicated reading, one that is more consciously attentive to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I would add that I think there is probably a strong case to be made for leaving it untranslated, as is increasingly the case with translations of critical theory concepts today, though that itself carries the risk of hypostatizing the term in a different way. Agencement derives from agencer, which according to Le Roberts Collins means ‘to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together’, whereas assemblage means ‘to join, to gather, to assemble’.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan argues that agencement effectively reworks the role of the psychoanalytic “complex” (Komplex): what was once a psychic configuration becomes, in their hands, a socio‑material arrangement.

Agencement is Deleuze and Guattari’s own translation, or perhaps rearrangement would be a better word, of the German word Komplex (as in the ‘Oedipal complex’ or the ‘castration complex’).
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, assemblage is more than just a question about ‘what’. It is as much a question about how, where and when.

In the remaining chapters, Buchanan develops this reclaimed concept of assemblage through discussions of strata, desire, territory, expressive materialism, and contemporary control.

The first chapter unpacks strata and the production of nature and history.

Strata are the product of the manifold processes that have over time constructed and produced the thing we call nature, whether by that we mean human nature or nature as wilderness. We have to be careful not to reverse this historicizing process by overemphasizing the apparent ‘naturalness’ of strata, that is, by forgetting that ‘strata’ refers to a concept that enables us to see and think about a certain type of process, the production of nature, not the thing itself.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

There are three types of strata: geological, biological and techno‑semiological (the linguistic / socio‑technical stratum). Each of these is formed differently. Each stratum is made up of two dimensions: content and expression, where there is always remainder, something escapes. These two bind the strata together to resonate. With this, strata are never inert.

Buchanan outlines four first principles that explain how strata and stratification work:

There is a chaotic flux of material and immaterial particles (including desire) that flows freely. The three kinds of strata are different, non‑analogical ways of capturing and organising this flux. However, they do not all relate things in the same way.
Stratification is the process that gives form to matters by imprisoning intensities, simultaneously organizing material processes and capturing desire. It separates the world into distinct layers (strata), each with its own unity and logic of composition, and with beginnings and ends, allowing for variations both between and within strata. It needs to be noted that with these differences and variations, the schema of one stratum cannot be straightforwardly used to explain another, since each operates with different modes of organisation.
Stratification is a process of capture which works by means of selecting and coding, as well as stabilising and territorialisation.
Each assemblage contains a single abstract machine, a diagram enveloped by the stratum that constitutes its unity. It can be glossed with the question, “Whatever could have happened for things to come to this?” Conversely, the abstract machine also marks what cannot be done within an assemblage.

Stratification is important as assemblages are not defined by their components, but rather by what they produce, and these productions are complex. It is useful at explaining the way in which everyday life is experienced in a multi-layered way, without necessarily being interconnected. It helps capture the discontinuous, uneven character of historical change. It also helps theorise a process capable of producing subjects and subjectivity.
In the end, Buchanan explains that stratification is key to any understanding of ‘I’ or ‘We’.

Without stratification there would be no ‘we’. Without stratification there would be no ‘I’. Without stratification we could not communicate with one another, nor even live together in anything like a society.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With this, he warns that there is a danger of destratification and simply opting out of a situation, without a clear path.

Deleuze and Guattari are not voluntarists; they don’t think one can simply opt out of a difficult situation. Rather, for them, it is always a matter of engineering escapes, of finding the means to build and execute the assemblages one needs to destratify, just a little, and make one’s getaway. But we cannot escape everything, all at once, because that too is a kind of death. So we must choose our lines of flight carefully. Whatever we retain after we have made our getaway is our strata: it is the bedrock of our existence.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

If Chapter 1 shows how assemblages are stratified in nature and history, Chapter 2 turns to what animates them from within: desire. Buchanan explains the importance of the concept.

Desire is primary; it is desire that selects materials and gives them the properties that they have in the assemblage. This is because desire itself is productive.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With regards to this, he explains how what it produces is itself actual, whatever the material it is in. In relation to the assemblages, these are an actual composition of desire.

The second part of the chapter explores the relationship between desire and bodies without organs.

Desire desires on the body without organs. One cannot speak of desire in Deleuze and Guattari in the absence of their concept of the body without organs just as one cannot speak of the body without organs without taking into account their concept of desire.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Bodies without organs are desire at degree zero, they are not in fact bodily but a surface on which desire flows.

If someone says their heart is broken, one does not imagine that they are in need of a cardiologist; one knows that it is not that heart that is the problem. The heart the broken-hearted speak of exists on a different plane to the physical body. It is real, to be sure, and its effects are real too, and its effects may even be felt in the visceral body, but it is not the same heart as the muscular organ that circulates our blood. Fixing this heart requires love, poetry, solitude, companionship, soulful healing and many other things besides, which may or may not pass through the body but are not necessarily bodily. Kind words can heal a broken heart but a heart transplant cannot.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, this all serves to remind us that, although desire is always potentially assembling, we must not assume that every configuration of things is already an assemblage. Some things really are just ‘heaps of fragments’.

Having established desire as the machinic heart of assemblages, Chapter 3 turns to how desire composes “liveable orders”: territories. As Buchanan touches on in regards to stratification, territorialisation is the conversion of flux into liveable order. It is the most immediate, local form of the assemblage, the way desire first composes a liveable order out of chaos.

We territorialize because we need to and we need to territorialize because we have to confront chaos, both in its originary form and in the form of black holes. The territory transforms not only the elements constituting it but its inhabitant as well (as both the territory’s creator and primary beneficiary).
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Unlike strata which is somewhat more stable, territory (reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation) occurs at a more local level, a part of the process of becoming. To explain this, Buchanan refers to F.Scott Fitzgerald’s discussions of cracks and the constant threat of chaos in our life.

Everything we do (insofar as it is an action of desire) carries this risk of plunging us into a black hole. In this sense then territory should be understood as a defensive concept because it describes our means of getting out of the black holes we sometimes find ourselves in either because we chose to go down a dark path or somehow our actions inadvertently lead us there. Deleuze and Guattari borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of the ‘crack’ from his short autobiographical piece The Crack-up to illustrate this idea. In life, according to Fitzgerald, there are three ways of cracking-up, that is, three ways the black hole can make itself felt in our daily lives. First, there are the big blows that hit you from the outside, that often present themselves in terms of choices – if only I hadn’t drunk so much, if only I’d kept my mouth shut and so on. The changes that ensue, loss of love, loss of employment, loss of respect and so on, stay with you forever but also feel strangely alien because one feels that if one had made different choices things wouldn’t be the way they are. Then there are the micro-cracks that occur when things seem to be going well – one might not even notice them at first. It is the corrosion that happens in one’s soul when a thousand slights resonate together and ramify. The first time someone calls you ‘fat’ or ‘loser’ you might not even notice the hurt it caused, but the damage is done, and every repetition of that slight causes the hurt to magnify as it resonates within. Last, there are ‘clean breaks’; these are the breaks you cannot come back from because it destroys all connection to the past. This is what people mean when they say about a former relationship that there is no ‘us’ anymore, there is nothing to go back to, the past has been volatized. We can also see that these are the types of situation that could drown us if we didn’t have some kind of lifeline: territory is that lifeline.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan explains that there are three ways of leaving a territory, or deterritorialisation:

Negative deterritorialisation is one that is overlaid by reterritorialisation.
Relative deterritorialisation overcomes the inertia of reterritorialisation
Absolute deterritorialisation where it succeeds in creating a new earth, a new beginning, one that does not lead back to old territories

Extending this discussion of deterritorialisation and chaos, Buchanan brings in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of fascism to show how a line of flight out of an unbearable territory can itself become a suicidal black hole.

As with ‘bodies without organs’ not being about literal bodies, Buchanan explains that it is more useful to consider territories as subjective states in a psychological sense.

Territory is an act, a passage, not a space. It is the composition of one’s own world.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

These worlds are composed of elements borrowed and stolen from the environments we are in. (Footnote: Buchanan explains that “Deleuze and Guattari are often portrayed as theorists of the body, they were actually more interested in the way the non-bodily, that is, words, can transform the body, without ever penetrating beneath the surface.”) This organising of environments also encompasses distance between bodies. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “critical distance,” Buchanan shows how territory regulates how close we can come to others of the same species and still coexist. Territory is thus the subjective spacing between interiors, the way a shared space is partitioned so that my “home” and your “home” can coexist without collapsing into chaos.

Buchanan then extends the conversation into language, or as Deleuze and Guattari described it, the “collective assemblage of enunciation”.

Expressed of an expression is not its meaning; it is the transformation of the world the expression instantiates.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan ends the chapter with a discussion of the association between territory and style. He uses the example of film characters and genre to demonstrate this, with repeated traits (the action hero’s walk, clothing, gestures) serving as “directional” signs, but their peculiar mannerisms form a style, which is “dimensional” and territorial.

Style is, in this sense, an exercise in redundancy – the more distinctive it is, the greater its power of redundancy, meaning the more we are able to internalize it and know its inner rhythms.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

The fourth chapter makes the case for Deleuze and Guattari as expressive materialists: neither reducing everything to ideas (idealism) nor treating all matter as equally “vibrant”. Every assemblage has an inseparable material side (form of content) and expressive side (form of expression). To explain this, Buchanan pushes back on Jane Bennett’s misconception of assemblages as ad hoc groupings, instead explaining why the actual collection of things matter or else you just have a “growing heap of fragments.”

As I have reiterated throughout, it has a material dimension (form of content, machinic assemblage etc.) and an expressive dimension (form of expression, collective assemblages of enunication etc.), a principle of unity (abstract machine), and it rests upon a condition of possibility (BwO, plane of immanence, plane of consistency etc.) which is criss-crossed by lines of flight (lines of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation). As we have seen above in my examination of Bennett’s version of the assemblage, it is not sufficient to simply enumerate an assemblage’s material components because these do not by themselves disclose the assemblage’s constitution, much less its purpose or function. One must also ask how these material components are captured by the expressive dimension and inquire too about its principle of unity and its conditions of possibility.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Assemblages permit wide internal variation, but not every variation is possible: their abstract machines impose a form of relative invariance.

In contrast to Bennett’s interpretation, Buchanan discusses Tess Lea’s work on indigenous housing policy in Australia. Lea’s analysis shows how the material arrangements of housing, funding streams, bureaucratic offices (form of content) are bound to a discourse of “policy” and “progress” (form of expression) that organises what can and cannot be done or even seen.

To conceive of policy as an assemblage means seeing it in terms of the kinds of arrangements and orderings it makes possible and even more importantly the complex and not always fully disclosed set of expectations it entails. To see it this way we need to separate ‘policy’ as a conceptual entity from its myriad iterations as this or that policy, for example, infrastructure policy, health policy, transport policy and so on, but also from all sense of outcomes and outputs. We also have to see so-called policy decisions as components of the policy assemblage and not as some kind of climactic moment in the life of a policy. Policy decisions are part of the form of expression of the policy assemblage, not the content. By questioning the very idea of policy Lea has enabled us to see it in its properly rhizomatic light. As Lea shows, policymaking takes place ‘in the middle of things’ but always pretends otherwise because it is locked into an image of itself as a special type of agency that defines and measures ‘progress’.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

He also discusses Löic Wacquant’s work on imprisonment in US. Wacquant likewise maps how the institutional complex of prisons, police, welfare retrenchment (form of content) is articulated with a discourse of “crime”, “delinquency” and neoliberal responsibility (form of expression), revealing imprisonment as a political technology rather than a neutral response to crime.

Wacquant argues that we cannot understand the prison system by focusing solely on enclosed world of prisons and prisoners, we need to pull back and look at the stratum as a whole (not his choice of words, obviously), which in this instance means factoring in what is happening more broadly at the level of the state. At this level it is immediately clear that neither drugs nor criminality nor even poverty were ever the main problem as far as the state is concerned. The real issue was elsewhere. Wacquant identifies the ascendency of neoliberalism as the main culprit because it placed the state in the strange position of having to give up all its roles and responsibilities except its right to exercise and control violence.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, what both of these examples provide is a way of not describing, but rather a way of analysing.

this is what the assemblage does. We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be, a way of analysing a thing or situation. Faced with any apparent assemblage we should ask, what holds it together? What are its limits (internal and external) and what function does it fulfil?
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, using assemblage theory therefore means rigorously tracking these doublings—content/expression, material/expressive—rather than simply naming any complex situation an “assemblage”.

The fifth and final chapter revisits Deleuze’s essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. This essay was written in 1990 at the end of the Cold War and as a “postscript” to the work of Michel Foucault:

Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.
Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.
Source: Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient by Cameron Shackell

Buchanan’s purpose in returning to this brief text is twofold: to show how pertinent Deleuze remains to “our contemporary situation”, and to foreground the largely overlooked role of the assemblage in the essay’s analysis of control.

For Deleuze, the panopticon that Foucault feared so much has been trumped by the rise in digital technology. With this, we have moved from individuals to dividuals:

Today surveillance is focused on controlling dividuals (not individuals), restricting their movement, limiting their access to credit and capital, determining where and how they can spend their money, and not, as was the case with disciplinary society, in shaping and forming them as particular social types (soldiers, doctors, teachers and so on).
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In a world of surveillance and restrictions, we are controlled by nudges and modulations.

In contrast to the old duality of management and trade unions today’s businesses ‘are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself’. Competition for its own sake lives and thrives on the intermittent highs of transitory victories (e.g. heart surgeon of the month), and never concerns itself with whether or not these victories add up to something meaningful like competency or a vocation. Not even education is immune from this trend, Deleuze laments. Schooling has been replaced ‘by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment’. To which he adds, showing uncanny prescience: ‘It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.’
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

To understand the machines of our times, such as cybernetic machines and computer networks, Buchanan argues that we need to appreciate the expressive dimension of desire. To do this, we need analyse the assemblage that the machine is a part of.

[Naomi] Klein argues that the mobilization of the logo enabled the dematerialization of businesses like Nike, but what she does not explain is the changes in desire that enabled this investment of desire in the logo. One might say then that she focuses on the machines of capitalism at the expense of its expressive dimension. ‘One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies.’ But, he adds, the ‘machines don’t explain anything’ by themselves; ‘you have to analyse the collective apparatuses [i.e. assemblages] of which the machines are just one component.’
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, Buchanan’s reading of “Postscript” reinforces the book’s central claim: that machines, institutions and technologies never speak for themselves. They become intelligible only when we map the assemblages that bind them together.

Assemblage Theory and Method is not an explicit guide. If anything, it is a book that left me with as many questions as answers. For Buchanan, the most important question that we must consider is: “What does the concept of the assemblage enable us to see that we couldn’t see before?” The book seeks to provide suggestions on how to use assemblage theory in as clear a manner as possible. However, it is no easy feat. As with so much of Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage theory is not a simple, straightforward process.

Buchanan’s book is best read as a sherpa: it carries conceptual supplies and points out paths, but we still have to climb the mountain ourselves. With this in mind, assemblage theory is more than a new name for complexity, and is better considered as a method for analysing how forms of control are composed – and, therefore, how they might be recomposed.

Thinking about this, I could not help thinking about Cory Doctorow’s work on enshittification, especially when Buchanan talks about the balance between flow of capital and flow of stupidity in the final chapter on technology and control.

Now content has been volatized by the new digital formats and ‘set free’ (to use the jargon of the techno-utopians) and made free to obtain, making it almost impossible to capture and control. This is why, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, the flow of capital is always balanced by an equivalent flow of stupidity, which stifles both technical innovation and social and economic revolution.
Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

As a quick thought‑experiment in this mode of analysis, I found myself thinking about a platform like Spotify and what assemblage theory would enable us to see that we could not see before. On the content side we have servers, catalogues, licensing contracts, recommendation algorithms, mobile apps, headphones, playlists, financial flows between labels, artists and venture capital. On the expressive side we have discourses of “discovery”, “mood”, “productivity”, “chill”; metrics, moods and genres as classificatory systems.

Thinking this way turns Spotify from a platform with features into a control‑society assemblage that captures listening, partitions time and attention, and organises the circulation of musical labour and value. Where Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist tracks Spotify’s cultural and economic effects, assemblage theory pushes us to ask how its very architecture of moods, metrics and recommendation functions as a territorialisation of listening – a way of capturing and modulating desire under contemporary conditions of control.

Similarly, as a set of questions an assemblage analysis might pose to a cultural figure, I am left thinking about
my current deep dive into the world of Prince. What would it mean to treat “Prince” as an assemblage rather than a singular genius or a linear artistic evolution? Form of content might include instruments, studios, collaborators, production techniques, contracts and formats. While form of expression might encompass genre labels, press narratives, iconography, gender and sexuality discourse, fan practices. The key questions would become: what abstract machine gives “Prince” his relative invariance across wildly different configurations, and what external historical limits shape him (format shifts, MTV, streaming, post‑9/11 politics, digital control societies)?

This approach would work against the easy story of linear “evolution” from early funk to late spirituality, instead mapping discontinuous reconfigurations of desire, territory and media strata. In Buchanan’s terms, the question would be less “Who is the real Prince?” and more “What arrangements make ‘Prince’ possible across such different historical and media conditions?” The obvious caveat is empirical, for at some point the available material may not support a robust mapping of the assemblage, and what began as analysis risks becoming conjecture.

Assemblage theory, on this view, supplies a set of questions and distinctions to guide research, but it still depends on the available archive, that is, the concrete mapping of form of content, form of expression, abstract machines and lines of flight has to rest on empirical traces or it risks becoming purely speculative. That dependence sets limits on method: some assemblages are poorly documented, evidence is always selective, choices of temporal and spatial scale shape what relations can even appear, and the work of linking material and expressive dimensions always involves judgement.

I feel like I have always dabbled with Deleuze. Initially dipping in during my university degree. I was also pulled back in via the work of Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson and Ian Guest. Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus have always sat on my bookshelf seemingly taunting me, calling me to return, sitting next to Claire Colebrook’s Understanding Deleuze. I actually downloaded Buchanan’s papers on ‘Assemblage theory and schizoanalysis’ and ‘Becoming Mountain’, along with some others that I found, with the intent on doing further reading on the topic. However, somewhere along the way I got distracted and it became another loose end left untied. I actually stumbled on Assemblage Theory and Method by chance while looking for secondary material on Fredric Jameson, while reading Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

What I find interesting is that although I feel I have only ever touched the surface on the concept of ‘assemblage’ I still regularly used the term in my writing (see this post for example), usually to capture the general interrelated nature of things. I must admit my understanding was vague. (Buchanan talks about how it has become a ‘received idea’.)

Ironically, having a clearer grasp of the basic concepts has mostly sharpened my sense of how partial my understanding still is. That, in a way, is Buchanan’s point, that “assemblage” is not a label to apply but a way of asking better questions. If the book has left me with a richer sense of what the concept can do and where my own reading remains unfinished, then perhaps Buchanan’s assemblage has already done its work on me.

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REVIEW: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

Aaron Davis

| April 20, 2026

It is very rare to see a five-paragraph essay in the wild; one finds them only in the captivity of the classroom. John Warner ‘Why They Can't Write’

John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities is a critique of how we fail to properly teach writing in the modern era, with a particular focus on the college system in the US. While it’s easy to point the finger at the “five-paragraph essay” as the primary villain, Warner argues that this rigid structure can be seen as a canary in the coal mine. The true issue lies in a systemic obsession with testing, surveillance, and “efficiency” that has effectively hollowed out the act of writing, leaving behind only an imitation.

One of the ways Warner makes sense of the problem is by making the comparison between modern writing instruction to an acting school where students only learn impressions of other actors, rather than how to build a performance from the ground up.

Imagine an acting school where rather than helping students develop the individual skills of building a performance, students are instead required to learn a series of impressions of genuine actors performing a role.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

In classrooms, students are not asked to write, instead they are asked to create artefacts that look like writing but lack the spark of human choice.

To write is to make choices, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Writers choose what they want to write about, whom they want to write to, and why they’re writing.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

When these choices are replaced with a template, students are not taught a skill, rather they are being trained for compliance. The five-paragraph essay is the “ab belt” of the classroom – a shortcut that promises results without the “sit-ups” of actual thought.

If writing is like exercise, the five-paragraph essay is like one of those ab belt doohickeys that claim to electroshock your core into a six-pack, so you can avoid doing all those annoying sit-ups.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

In response to this, Warner proposes moving away from “competency-based” assessments toward a model of practice. He defines a writer’s practice through four dimensions:

Knowledge: Understanding what writers know about the world and their craft.
Skills: The technical ability to conceive, draft, revise, and edit.
Habits of Mind: How a writer thinks—curiosity, empathy, and audience awareness.
Attitudes: Believing that writing is a difficult, iterative process of discovery.

In this situation, the goal is not a perfect final product, but the “noble failure” of trying to say something meaningful and falling just short, only to get back into the arena and try again.

As long as students are writing, and writing with purpose, their writing will improve.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

The focus here for the educator is to support students with the metacognitive reflections required to see the links between different writing-related tasks. Associated with this, there is a call to end the tyranny of grades.

These should be our goals: We seek to increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing. We seek to change the orientation of school from only preparing students (poorly, as it turns out) for the indefinite future to also living and learning in the present. We seek to provide experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection. We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In return, they will be required to embrace the same ethos of self-assessment and reflection expected of students.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

I remember starting this book a few years ago, but never got around to finishing it. It was interesting to return to this with the changes brought about by the explosion of Large Language Models. Written before their explosion, Warner’s highlights are somewhat prophetic. If writing in school has become a “simulacrum” or “pseudo-academic BS” designed to trigger an algorithm, then AI is the ultimate fulfilment of that broken system. The answer is not better AI detectors, rather it is about doubling down on what AI cannot replicate, that is the agency of solving problems for a particular purpose.

We should not ask students to write anything that will not be read.
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

Writing instruction must shift toward the “potholes”. The problem is that if it is “frictionless” (as AI makes it), no learning occurs. We need the “heat” that comes from the friction of a student struggling to find their own words.

Technological solutions to the problems of learning value a “frictionless” experience, but we shouldn’t forget that friction makes heat and heat is energy. As Bernard Fryshman, a professor of physics with fifty years of experience, says, one of faculties’ most important roles is to “jostle students into active learning.”
Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

This has me thinking again about Seymour Papert’s idea of hard fun.

It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don’t let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
Source: Hard Fun by Seymour Papert

The question I am left with is what this means in the early years and the move towards direct instruction?

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REVIEW: Night Train (Martin Amis)

Aaron Davis

| April 16, 2026

We're all still walking, aren't we? We're still persisting, still keeping on, still sleeping, waking, still crouching on cans, still crouching in cars, still driving, driving, driving, still taking it, still eating it, still home-improving and twelve-stepping it, still waiting, still standing in line, still scrabbling in bags for a handful of keys. Martin Amis ‘Night Train’

Night Train by Martin Amis is a noir detective novel told from the perspective of Detective Mike Hoolihan, a female detective who is charged with the task of finding the motivation for Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide.

Structurally, it continually sabotages its own mechanics and constructs. While a traditional detective novel usually puts the pieces together until every motive and movement is accounted for, Amis instead creates a space where each new piece of information breaks things open until we get to a point where it seems everything is up for debate other than the basic facts that someone has died.

The thing that stood out to me was the continual battle for meaning and understanding. With this in mind, I was left thinking about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari‘s discussion of re-territorialisation vs. deterritorialisation. With this in mind, the detective is the agent of re-territorialisation. They take the chaotic “lines of flight” (the murder, the missing clues) and pull them back into a rigid structure revolving around the case, the motive, and the conviction. In Night Train, Hoolihan attempts this. However, Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide acts as a pure deterritorialisation. Jennifer had “everything”- beauty, intelligence, love, and professional success. By removing the “why,” her death refuses to be captured by the detective’s logic. The more Mike investigates, the more the structures break down.

The investigation of a death also reminded me of Gayatri Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, in which she discusses the suicide of Bhuvaneswari, who waited to be menstruating before killing herself to prove her act was not motivated by an illicit pregnancy. Despite this, her motive was still lost to history, displaced by the dominant narratives of the time.

In a some way, Jennifer Rockwell performs a similar, act. Although she is the “elite” rather than the subaltern, she chooses a death that is particularly silent. Hoolihan acts as the “intellectual” in Spivak’s framework, attempting to represent or explain Jennifer’s “why.” By trying to find a motive (a “reterritorialisation”), Hoolihan is essentially trying to force the silent to speak.

Another way in which meaning breaks down is with the metaphor of the “Night Train” that reappears throughout the book. Each recurrence provides a different twist, from background noise, to cheap-blues soundtrack, to a cosmological-suicidal vehicle, then finally to Mike’s own, half-chosen ride into the dark. In the end, it becomes something of a dead metaphor, capturing everything and nothing at the same time.

I vaguely remember studying Martin Amis’ Night Train at university. In the middle of my honours thesis, I felt I did not really give it the time of day so want to return to it. It definitely leaves you seeing things in a new light, something I touched on after watching The Beekeeper. It was also interesting to think about it alongside Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, another novel that seemingly subverts its own structure and meaning. As well as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and the way in which meaning is continually made while also seemingly being deconstructed.

I listened to a reading by Linda Hamilton’s via Spotify.

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REVIEW: Half Deaf, Completely Mad (Tony Cohen)

Aaron Davis

| April 13, 2026

I’m a fan of listening to albums, and in full. That’s what the artist intended – a collection of songs, in a particular order. Even if there’s one or two you don’t like, it’s an entire package. To pick out individual songs seems like a silly thing to do. Tony Cohen ‘Half Deaf, Completely Mad’

Reading a memoir released after its subject has passed is always a haunting experience. With Half Deaf, Completely Mad, the sensation is even more acute. Tony Cohen began the project in 2012, but it was John Olson – who had been brought in to help with the project – who finalised the manuscript following Cohen’s death in 2017.

I [John Olsen] interviewed Tony and his colleagues from May 2013 to July 2016 and the manuscript has been completed as envisaged, in Tony’s own voice.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

The result is a book written entirely in Cohen’s own voice: a conversational and irreverent tone that makes it feel as though he is sitting across from you. As Mark Mordue commented in his review:

You leave this book wishing he was still talking. But the tape runs out and it’s over.
Source: Saturday Review

I imagine that some readers might approach this book looking for technical secrets. While there are “clues” (like recording in cupboards or toilets), the real takeaway is Cohen’s devotion to experiential learning. As Cohen attests:

I’ve got a strange, scrambled way of working. I know how to use most pieces of equipment, but I don’t necessarily know what they do, or why they do it. That works for me, but I’m not recommending it. Find your own way of working. Be unique, you’ll hear if what you’re doing sounds good.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen did not attend an audio school. Rather he learnt by doing. He dropped out of school when he was fifteen and managed to get work Armstrong Studios.

There was no such thing as audio schools, no one really knew this job existed. It was the other side of the glass, where all people did was fiddle a few knobs … I learnt from the best: Roger Savage, Ernie Rose, Graham Owens, Ian MacKenzie and Ross Cockle.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

He learned by “fiddling with knobs” and embracing trial and error.

Every new thing you do gives you more experience and knowledge that you can use in later work.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

His philosophy was a mix of “gut-level instinct” and the “secret” doctrine he learned from Molly Meldrum: exaggeration.

I listened to everything, working hard to understand his doctrine. And Molly’s secret? Exaggeration. If you listen to the White Album now on good speakers you’ll hear exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no flat bits, everything in the mix jumps out and grabs your attention. It hits you in the bloody face. When mixing, people get too sensitive, they fiddle about listening on studio monitors and get the balance sounding even. Don’t. Be dynamic. Keep the action up and push the extremes. Turn things up louder than is considered tasteful. It might sound like you should pull it back, but resist that temptation. Turn it up a bit more! You’ll find that when the song makes it to another medium, into people’s cars and homes, there’s a presence. The mix is moving, it’s alive.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen lived for the moving, alive quality of a mix, rather than clinical perfection.

You can hit the odd fucking foul note as long as you give a fantastic performance.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

For Cohen, the studio was a playground for inventiveness.

With all the tales, there is an undeniable “apocryphal” energy to the book. Cohen is, in many ways, an unreliable narrator. We are asked to accept an ironic sense of clarity in his recounts of driving down the Hume Highway while tripping on magic mushrooms:

I ran out of money driving back and found that eating the mushrooms destroyed my appetite so, as a result, was tripping the whole time. I know, I’m lucky to be alive, but Minis are like dodgem cars: you can hop out of the way of trouble, as long as your reflexes are working.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Or tripping around the Royal Botanic Gardens:

A friend of The Ferrets sent over an envelope of ‘brown barrels’ from London. We were sitting around having breakfast when they arrived. ‘I’ll try one!’ I said. Oh boy, that was an intense couple of days. I can understand why some people think tripping is a religious experience. I wandered around the Royal Botanic Gardens and it was spectacular. The hills turned to liquid, rainbows shot into the air – just like The Beatles’ animated film, Yellow Submarine. When someone asked me where the duck pond was all I can remember is them running away in fear. God knows what I said. Maybe it was my eyes, big black holes staring back at them. I shouldn’t harp on about it. Don’t do drugs, kids, they’re very bad for you.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Like Bobby Gillespie’s recount of tripping in his memoir Tenement Kid, I found myself questioning how someone could remember such vivid details through such a chemical haze? Yet, as a reader, you want it all to be true. Whether he is “scoffing” Split Enz’s champagne or dealing with the “leather man” Bono, the stories are told with a rueful laughter that makes the “gist” feel pure, even if the details are sometimes a bit blurry.

While some biographies of the era sanitise the lifestyle, Cohen places it front and center. His life was one of indulgence, and eventually, the bill came due. The book captures the stark contrast between the high-flying world of record executives and the reality of Cohen’s later years: living in a caravan, battling hepatitis, diabetes, and pancreatitis.

As the producer I was supposed to get royalties for The Cruel Sea, but somehow it didn’t happen. I received $1000 once – big deal. The only band that has consistently paid me producer royalties is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Mick Harvey always kept an eye on things. He was interested in the music business and it’s just as well because they could have been ripped off as much as every other band.
So it’s due to Mick I receive royalties. There was never an agreement with the band’s label, Mute Records, but he made sure I got included. I can’t thank him enough.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Yet, Cohen does not present himself as a tragic figure or seek pity. He emerges as a figure of boyish mischief. Even as his health failed, the book suggests he was equally a victim of technological change. The shift from the “creative misuse” of analog tape to the “prissy” glitches and endless choices of digital recording signalled the end of the era Cohen helped build.

When digital recording first appeared I was keen, but I never took to it. I found it prissy. Misusing equipment was part of the creativity of recording. With analogue you could thrash the meters and natural tape compression would make the sound better. I miss that. Dare to slam a digital meter into the red and see what you get? It doesn’t distort, it glitches. Digital took away things that I enjoyed, but it did make recording cheaper and easier for artists.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Interestingly, this is something that Susan Rogers captures in her own work, contrasting the warmth of analogue music, compared the abstract coolness of digital processes.

Half Deaf, Completely Mad offers a fascinating peek behind the curtain of the music industry. From the bizarre reality of “live but not live” performances:

I often wondered how people like Madonna managed to sing while dancing and leaping about the stage like a maniac. Lip-syncing, that’s how they do it. Ernie was alarmed to find that Madonna had eighty tracks of vocals prerecorded for the show. When she’d get puffed out, the front-of-house mixer would turn up the required vocal.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

To a discussion as to how ARIAs are decided.

I was told record company representatives would meet and say, ‘Well you had last year, we want this year’, then decide which one of their acts were going to win.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen demystifies the glamour.

Ultimately, the book does not pretend to have a deeper psychological meaning or a coherent artistic “arc.” It is simply the story of a man who worked on instinct, lived on the edge, and left the world of music sounding a lot more interesting than he found it.

I’ve always worked on instinct. It’s not a boast, I just never had a clear idea what I was doing. I would follow what the artist led me toward, and if not I’d make something up. Perhaps from memory.
Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

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REVIEW: England, England (Julian Barnes)

Aaron Davis

| April 11, 2026

It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge. Julian Barnes ‘England, England’

England England is a story about the creation of an England theme park on the ‘empty’ Isle of Wight. Terra nullius anyone? This park is a curated conglomeration of culture and history put back together over time, whether it be Robin Hood to the planes of D-Day, all flattened.

FROM HER OFFICE Martha could experience the whole Island. She could watch the feeding of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, check throughput at Haworth Parsonage, eavesdrop on snug-bar camaraderie between straw-chewing yokel and Pacific Rim sophisticate. She could track the Battle of Britain, the Last Night of the Proms, the Trial of Oscar Wilde, and the Execution of Charles I. On one screen King Harold would glance fatally towards the sky; on another posh ladies in Sissinghurst hats pricked out seedlings and counted the varieties of butterfly perching on the buddleia; on a third hackers were pock-marking the fairway of the Alfred, Lord Tennyson Golf Course. There were sights on the Island Martha knew so intimately from a hundred camera angles that she could no longer remember whether or not she had ever seen them in reality.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

These aspects are stripped of their context and turned into commodities. This occurs at the same time as a demise of the real, where England is returned to the past of Anglia / Albion of towns.

This creation of a hyperreal touches on the work of Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is a state where the map (the simulation) precedes the territory (the reality). He suggested that we have reached a point where the “fake” is more satisfying than the “real” because it is designed to meet our expectations.

‘What is real? This is sometimes how I put the question to myself. Are you real, for instance – you and you?’ Sir Jack gestured with mock courtesy to the room’s other occupants, but did not turn his head away from his thought. ‘You are real to yourselves, of course, but that is not how these things are judged at the highest level. My answer would be No. Regrettably. And you will forgive me for my candour, but I could have you replaced with substitutes, with … simulacra, more quickly than I could sell my beloved Brancusi. Is money real? It is, in a sense, more real than you. Is God real? That is a question I prefer to postpone until the day I meet my Maker.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

What we are looking at is almost always a replica, if that is the locally fashionable term, of something earlier. There is no prime moment.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Talking about history, Barnes (and Baudrillard) argue that we have cannibalised and commodified the past through ignorance.

It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Baudrillard argued that we turn the past into a museum, a theme park or a film because we are unable to face the complexity of the present.

Today, the history that is “given back” to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a “historical real” than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fun damentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation.
Source: ‘History – A Retro Scenario’ in Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

In Barnes’ novel, the Isle of Wight is the ultimate Simulacrum: a copy with no original. What is interesting is the way that the flattened history always has a means of breaking free, with reality pushing back, becoming strange and uncanny.

The Island had been his idea and his success. The Peasants’ Revolt of Paul and Martha had proved a forgettable interlude, long written out of history. Sir Jack had also dealt swiftly with the subversive tendency of certain employees to over-identify with the characters they were engaged to represent. The new Robin Hood and his new Merrie Men had brought respectability back to outlawry. The King had been given a firm reminder about family values. Dr Johnson had been transferred to Dieppe Hospital, where both therapy and advanced psychotropic drugs had failed to alleviate his personality disorder. Deep sedation was prescribed to control his self-mutilating tendencies.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

I guess the only way of maintaining the simulacrum is by continually consuming the uncanny. As Sir Jack states, “You do it by doing it”.

“Jacky, you ask of me how you do it. My answer is this: You do it by doing it”
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms, each new narrative tweak is a re‑territorialisation that keeps the system from collapsing.

I initially read the demise of England as a commentary on Brexit, especially the turn to Anglia / Albion.

New political leaders proclaimed a new self-sufficiency. They extracted the country from the European Union, negotiating with such obstinate irrationality that they were eventually paid to depart; declared a trade barrier against the rest of the world; forbade foreign ownership of either land or chattels within the territory; and disbanded the military. Emigration was permitted, immigration only in rare circumstances. Diehard jingoists claimed that these measures were designed to reduce a great trading nation to nut-eating isolationism, but modernizing patriots felt that it was the last realistic option for a nation fatigued by its own history. Old England banned all tourism except for groups numbering two or less, and introduced a Byzantine visa system. The old administrative division into counties was terminated, and new provinces were created, based upon the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Finally, the country declared its separateness from the rest of the globe and from the Third Millennium by changing its name to Anglia.The world began to forget that ‘England’ had ever meant anything except England, England, a false memory which the Island worked to reinforce; while those who remained in Anglia began to forget about the world beyond.
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

However, its 1998 publication date and further reading revealed it was actually a reaction to ‘Cool Britannia’. Barnes was writing at the height of the ‘New Labour’ push to rebrand Britain as a creative powerhouse (the 1997 Demos report), while the actual economy was pivoting toward what Robert Hewison called the ‘Heritage Industry’. The novel mocks this split-brain identity: trying to be a modern brand while selling a sanitised, ‘stone-cottage’ version of history to the world. Barnes saw the irony: by trying to “sell” a nation’s soul, you eventually lose the actual country. I guess it feels like a Brexit book because it captures something of this crisis too?

Stylistically, the tone reminded me in part of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the everyday nature of Martha Cochrane and her ability as a omniscient narrator to dip in and out. I was also left thinking about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with the way it reimagines the past. However, where Barnes differs is that he is always detached. He does not celebrate the mess (like Smith) or the myth (like Rushdie), rather he can be understood as pulling back the curtain and shining a light on the emptiness behind the myth. I think it is this approach that leaves the novel lingering afterwards.

What I enjoyed the most is the fine line Barnes follows in sitting within the in-between. He never quite falls into polemics. Although you feel he has an opinion, it is always left off the page as far as possible. Instead, he allows the absurdity of his characters speak. (Interestingly, this reminds me of TISM who seemingly critique everyone in equal parts, nothing ever seems sacred.) In England, England, it feels like nothing is spared. Not the high-brow intellectuals, not the greedy corporations, and not the nostalgic peasants of Anglia / Albion. No group is granted moral purity. I guess, by refusing to take a side, Barnes (and TISM) forces the reader to acknowledge that everyone is part of the performance.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Mullin. ‘You see, I thought you were one of us.’

‘Perhaps I’ve known too many us-es in my lifetime,’ said Martha
Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

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The Creative Condition – On Music and Being a Musician

Aaron Davis

| March 30, 2026

Art is everything you don't have to do. Brian Eno ‘BBC John Peel lecture - 2015’

I was recently introduced to someone, with the person do the introducing stating, “He is a musician too.” I was caught unaware. It felt strange. Yes, I play music, casually, whether it be tinkering with guitar and electronic instruments, but I have never labelled myself or identified as a ‘musician’. Especially reading how Tom Morello describes a musician, that is certainly not me:

“I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them. I see [Tom’s 2018 all-star solo album] The Atlas Underground as a Trojan horse. I want it to turn a new generation of kids on to cranking up the guitar.”
Source: Tom Morello: “Metal will be here long after other genres have come and gone” by David Everley

While reading memoirs by composers such as Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, I often feel out of my depth. They live in a world of musical theory, whether it be counterpoint or rhythm, that feels foreign to me no matter how many Jacob Collier or Andrew Huang videos on I watch. I get it, but I do not really get it. If I was using a Solo Taxonomy, I would be ‘Relational’. (Sadly, there was no discussion of circle-of-fifths in my guitar lessons growing up, while I definitely cannot sight read. If I had to I could find my way through music notation, by it would be somewhat laborious.) Clearly I know stuff, I am comfortable finding the chords to a song to accompany my children, but it does not feel that proficient or ‘Extended Abstract’.

In regards to performance, I remember reading Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller where he reflected on the difference between being a live musician as opposed to a session musician. On the high-tension recording sessions for The Colour and the Shape, he made the decision to re-record William Goldsmith’s drum parts as they were missing something. Grohl explained how the “session” mindset as one of surgical precision and perfection, often influenced by the intense pressure of a producer (in this case, Gil Norton). He noted that while a drummer can be incredible in a live setting, carried along by energy, vibe, and the visual performance, the studio is a microscope. In this world I am all vibe and could not even imagine playing with any semblance of the studio precision.

This tension between ‘vibe’ and ‘precision’ left me wondering: if I am not a ‘musician’ in the clinical sense, what am I doing when I pick up the guitar or play the synthesiser? It had me looking past the mechanics of music and toward the fundamental nature of being creative.

In the 2015 John Peel Lecture, Brian Eno challenged the idea that the arts are merely a secondary “luxury” compared to STEM fields, instead asking the fundamental question: “Is art a luxury, or does it do something for us beyond that?” To structure the conversation, he provided a broad definition of art.

Art is everything you don’t have to do.
Source: BBC John Peel lecture – 2015 by Brian Eno

While we must eat and move to survive, the way we style our food or the way we dance are the essential stylisations that make us human. Just as children learn through play, Eno argued that adults create little worlds through art, immersing ourselves in alternate realities that act as a psychological flight simulator.

Children learn through play, but adults play through art. So I don’t think we stop playing. I think we just carry on doing it, but we do it through this thing called ‘art’. And so the reason I made that big list of things – which could, of course, have been endlessly long – was because I want to say that all of those things, from the most exalted (with inverted commas) like symphonies, to the most mundane like cake decoration or nail painting or something like that, they are all doing the same thing. They are all the construction of little worlds of some kind.
Source: BBC John Peel lecture – 2015 by Brian Eno

These spaces therefore provide a safe place for interesting experiences, allowing us to explore the joys and freedoms of a false world so we can better navigate the complexities of the real one. In our modern era, where we are all specialists now and often isolated in our professional silos, Eno sees art as a vital cultural ritual we are contributing too.

Coming at the question of art from a different perspective, Brené Brown talks about the importance of play and creativity as being essential to embracing a full and rich life. For Brown, play is doing things with no goal other than enjoyment.

Opposite of play is not work, it is depression.
Source: Dr. Stuart Brown

She argues that there is no such thing as “creative” and “non-creative” people. Instead, there are those who use their creativity and those who do not. The problem is that unused creativity is not benign, instead it metastasises into shame, grief, judgment, and resentment.^[1] When we play, we loosen our grip on perfectionism. When we create, we practice being vulnerable. Together, they form a “rebound” effect – the more you play and create, the more resilient you become to the shame triggers of the outside world.

To create is to make something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than that.
Source: Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Brown argues that we often stop using our talent to avoid the feeling of being “flawed.” This can stem from a paralyses associated with a memory of an experience where somebody told us that we are not very good.

I felt this paralysis a few years ago, when I sold my gear in the name of seriousness. The mixers and synths I had bought over time – a Roland MC303 and a Korg MicroKorg – felt like clutter in a life that no longer had ‘room’ for them. I kept my guitars, but in letting go of the electronic tools, I did not realise I was amputating a part of my identity.

The ‘condition’ of creativity does not just go away because you clear the desk space. It is for this reason I eventually found myself re-purchasing various pieces of kit, including a Roland MC-101 and an Arturia Microfreak. The challenge now is not about having the ‘stuff’, it is about finding the time to do stuff with no purpose or guilt.

Coming at the question of talent from a different angle, Michel Faber, in his book Listen – On Music, Sound and Us, devotes a chapter to asking whether everybody can sing. He explores the limits we place on ourselves and others. This might include such constraints as physiology, health, age, training, and temperament which set boundaries on how and what you can sing well. In the end, Faber concludes that everyone can sing, the challenge is often about finding “what your voice was meant to sing.”

How many people are born to sing superbly? Not many, I suspect. As many as are born to compete in the Olympics, perhaps, or play professional tennis. The others make do with what they’ve got, and sometimes manage to turn their humdrum pipes into distinctive, emotive instruments which compensate for their lack of might and purity with bags of character.
Source: Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber

To extend Faber’s argument that singing is often about finding what is right, I wonder if being creative in general is about finding what your creativity was meant to create?

With Eno, Brown and Faber in mind, I wonder if the issue with being a “musician” is as much mindset? Yes, I could be more proficient and I could spend more time practicing.^[2] However, neither of those aspects prevent me from being a musician?

Listening to people like Adrian Sherwood or Jamie Lidell talk about music, I realise that maybe it is not always about proficiency in theory or even technique. Or maybe proficiency comes in different shapes and sizes? For example, in Jamie Lidell’s conversation with Kieren Hebden (FourTet) on the Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast (Episode 78), the two dive deep into the philosophy of creation versus the mechanics of gear. While both are known for their technical wizardry, the discussion regarding technical proficiency was somewhat subversive. Hebden made the case that technical proficiency is not about knowing every tool, but about mastering a specific, often limited, workflow until it becomes like an extension of your body.^[3] Hebden also shared that he lacks a strong background in formal music theory. He views this not as a deficit, but as a technical advantage. By not knowing the “correct” way to resolve a chord or build a scale, he allows for more serendipity and “happy accidents.” Sometimes deep theoretical knowledge can lead to predictable results, whereas Hebden’s “weakness” forces him to rely on his ears and taste.^[4]

Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas touch on the formal theory dilemma in their book This Is What It Sounds Like. In talking about authenticity in music, they contrast the ‘naive’ music that comes from the heart as opposed to ‘cerebral’ which comes from the head. They given the example of The Shaggs as being from the heart, whereas Sebastian Bach being from the head.

The naïve, below-the-neck authenticity of the Shaggs reminds record makers of what honest, uncorrupted feeling sounds like. I’ve listened for it in every record I’ve made since I first heard Philosophy of the World.
The opposite of naïve music is sometimes called “cerebral” music. Composers and performers of this kind of music express their feelings using deliberate principles and well-honed craftmanship. Johann Sebastian Bach is a good example. His music communicates a wide array of potent emotions, from dramatic expressions of triumph and sadness to more nuanced feelings of longing and spirituality. He accomplishes this feat not by spontaneously expressing the tides of his heart but by carefully deploying a well-honed arsenal of polished techniques. Simply put, Bach could authentically express sadness without being sad. Musically untrained listeners can experience the sadness (or joy or anger) of Bach’s music in an immediate and intimate way, while a musically trained listener can deconstruct Bach’s methods and identify the specific compositional techniques he used to achieve his emotional effects.
Source: This Is What It Sounds Like : What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

What is significant is that both The Shaggs and Bach are musicians and authentic, but following different paths to achieve this. The question then is whether being a musician or an artist is about what what is actually done or produced?^[5]

In Julian Barnes’s memoir on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, he argues that art serves as a means of escaping death.

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers – two or three if lucky – which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson unpacks a number of myths associated with technology. One point that comes up again and again is the way in which technology can extend us and how it already is. A particular example of this is the way in which the internet and blogging can help clarify our thinking.

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.
Source: Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter – How Successful Networks Nurture Good ideas by Clive Thompson

Austin Kleon extends on this idea of figuring out what we think in his discussion of portals.

You step into the portal and sometimes discover what you didn’t know want to know.
That is the gamble. The roll of the dice.
A book is the safest portal, and a diary is the second-safest portal. They are both private. When it comes to public portals, a blog, I think, is one of the safest, most forgiving portals.
Source: Stepping Into the Portal by Austin Kleon

What each of these things touch upon is something done. This reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s discussion in The Human Condition of the labour required to make thinking tangible:

If labor leaves no permanent trace, thinking leaves nothing tangible at all. By itself, thinking never materializes into any objects. Whenever the intellectual worker wishes to manifest his thoughts, he must use his hands and acquire manual skills just like any other worker. In other words, thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the “content” of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage. The work itself then always requires some material upon which it will be performed and which through fabrication, the activity of homo faber, will be transformed into a worldly object. The specific work quality of intellectual work is no less due to the “work of our hands” than any other kind of work.
Source: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

My wonder of such labour is whether art without something to show for itself is really art? Or to come back to music? If musician plays music in the forest and nobody hears them, did they really play?

During a discussion of USB002 by Fred Again … on the TapeNote podcast, Fred Gibson made the remark that he estimates only 2% of the work that he creates actually gets published. Some of this is unfinished ideas, while some is work done producing for other artists. Is this then the reality of the labour associated with art and music? Although there is validation in publishing something, this is never the measurement of the final outcome.

Coming back to Austin Kleon, he makes the case against publishing everything, suggesting that it is important to have a private space left fallow.

I find that my diary is a good place to have bad ideas. I tell my diary everything I shouldn’t tell anybody else, especially everyone on social media. We are in a shitty time in which you can’t really go out on any intellectual limbs publicly, or people — even your so-called friends! — will throw rocks at you or try to saw off the branch. Harsh, but true.
Source: Why I keep a diary by Austin Kleon

Thinking about the perspective of the musician, I wonder what happens if something is not finalised or published? Some musicians spend their whole life dedicated to mastering the works of others. Maybe then it is all simply about a deliberate process? To come back to Brown, maybe it is about enjoyment? Maybe, as Prince suggested, it is about a higher truth?

Try to tell me how to paint my palace
That isn’t where it’s at
That’s like trying to tell Columbus that the world is flat
If the song we’re singing truly is the best
Then that, my brothers, is the ultimate test
Source: Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got by Prince

Looking back at that moment of being introduced as a “musician,” I feel that my initial discomfort stemmed from a binary view of talent. However through the lens of Eno’s “flight simulators” and Brown’s “vulnerability” a third path emerges. The reality is that being creative is not a status that is just conferred by a degree or a 500-page theory book. It is, as Hannah Arendt suggests, the “work of our hands” to make the intangible tangible. Whether that work reaches an audience of thousands or remains fallow, the act itself can be considered as the definitive marker.

In an interview with Zan Rowe, Damon Album describes creativity as a condition. Coming from Brown’s perspective, maybe it is a condition we all have that we either embrace or let it transform into something else. ↩
I wonder if Chris Hemsworth learning to play drums for Ed Sheeran in the documentary series Limitless demonstrates what is possible with time and effort. ↩
Fred Again makes a similar point during a TapeNotes interview, suggesting that what matters it liberating your mind. “You want to do the things that liberate your mind to be hearing well, not whether or not [you’re using] this compressor or this distortion or this distortion… the thing that’s most dangerous about getting into that is that you’ll forget about whether or not the chorus is wrong, or whether or not the chord progression is actually not serving the feeling right.” ↩
Hebden also highlighted that a different kind of “proficiency” comes from active listening. He mentioned his practice of listening to a full album every single day. For him, the “technical” work of a producer is 90% training the ear to recognize what makes a record “sit on the shelf” next to the greats, rather than learning how to use a new plugin. ↩
On The Next Big Idea podcast, Susan Rogers provides a different perspective on the above and below argument, touching on the ease and accessibility of creating and being a musician. “It’s becoming less of a refined art and more of a practical utility in our lives. This, by necessity, will change music’s form. Producers will be making records that are a little bit more utilitarian.” ↩

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REVIEW: This Is What It Sounds Like (Rogers and Ogas)

Aaron Davis

| March 29, 2026

Listeners are an essential part of the endless cycle of music because all music makers start out as listeners. Out of that listening are birthed singers, dancers, performers, composers, DJs, record executives, technical innovators, sound designers, and record makers, all eager to show the next generation, This is what it sounds like . . . to me. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas ‘This Is What It Sounds Like’

In This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Susan Rogers (along with co-author Ogi Ogas) provide a scientific scaffolding for experience of falling in love with a song. At the heart of the book is the Listener Profile, a methodical framework that categorises our musical “sweet spots.” Rogers breaks down the listening experience into seven primary dimensions:

The “What”: Melody, Lyrics, Rhythm, and Timbre.
The “How”: Authenticity, Novelty, and Realism.

While Rogers’ background as a cognitive neuroscientist shines through, she balances this with various “behind the desk” anecdotes from her time engineering for Prince during the Purple Rain era and her work with Geggy Tah and Barenaked Ladies. These snippets provide a necessary human pulse to the clinical approach.

One of the interesting aspects was Rogers’ discussion of novelty and our appetite for musical risk. This is captured by a novelty–popularity curve: simplest, most familiar music on the left; boundary‑pushing, complex music on the right; sales/popularity on the vertical axis. This curve is ever evolving and what might be considered complex today, can easily become more familiar in the future.

Though its shape remains the same from generation to generation, the curve itself slides steadily to the right along the axis of novelty as different musical innovations become commonplace. The peak of the curve – along with the most popular style of music -retains a balance of familiar and novel elements, but what those elements sound like changes as audiences get accustomed to musical advances.
Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I could not help but draw parallels to Raymond Williams’ theory on cultural evolution:

Dominant: The music that defines the current “mainstream.”
Residual: The sounds of the past that still shape our present.
Emergent: The new, “novel” expressions that push boundaries.

Rogers argues that our “Record Producer Brain” is constantly scanning for these elements. However, taste is rarely static. You might find that your profile shifts as you age or changes depending on your social environment. This fluidity suggests that the Listener Profile is not a fixed DNA sequence, but a living document that evolves with our life stages.

The identities we construct for ourselves are reflected in the things we collect and like, so much so that when we unveil a drastic change in the food we eat, the hobbies we enjoy, or the genres of music we’re into, people who know us understand that something important about our identity has changed. Empirical research has shown that our conception of personal identity is linked to our musical choices.
Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

Another thing that stood out was tension between Rogers’ profile and the concept of guilty pleasure. When we align Rogers’ science with Donald Winnicott’s concept of the True Self and False Self, a “guilty pleasure” is often just a conflict between our True Self (the raw, emotional response to a melody) and the False Self (the persona we present to fit social expectations). Rogers’ intent with the framework is to provide the structures required to strip away the “False Self” and understand why a specific timbre or rhythm resonates with us, regardless of its perceived “coolness.” It was interesting thinking about this alongside Chilly Gonzales’ Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures and how it comes to grips with personal taste.

During quiet moments in the studio, I enjoyed asking record makers to name a guilty pleasure—a record you would be embarrassed to admit you liked. Such confessions can be deeply revealing. The records we treasure covertly reflect facets of our musical self that we’d just as soon not have others know about.
Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I was once told that “no one likes your music.” Of course, the comment was said in spite, but ironically it is true for when it comes to the Listener Profile, we are all unique, there is no average. As a combination of neurological wiring, personal history, and emotional associations, our relationship with a song is unique.

If Michel Faber’s Listen – On Music, Sound and Us is a soulful, visceral exploration of the act of hearing, Rogers’ work feels like its intellectual counterpart – an exploration written “from the head up.”

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REVIEW: Night People (Mark Ronson)

Aaron Davis

| March 21, 2026

The start of any set is like treading water. You have to keep people in the room without burning through the big songs. And this is the DJ’s dilemma. Mark Ronson ‘Night People’

Night People is deliberately “the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for”. It is not about the super‑producer, winning Grammys, but about the working DJ who spent years “lugging crates into bars and nightclubs,” reading rooms and igniting the dance floor.

Throughout, Ronson is candid about drugs and nightlife excess. He provides accounts of mixing substances at Tunnel, accidentally taking heroin, watching people slip into K‑holes, and showing how thrilling and grim that world could be at the same time. He claims that it was anxiety and panic attacks that seemingly saved him from addiction.

The book is equally honest about the world of access and privilege he grew up in. From the rock‑star stepfather, Mick Jones, who was the lead guitarist in Foreigner, with crates of funk and soul he can quietly “borrow,” the mother who bought him Technics on condition he got into college, a trust‑fund safety net set up by his grandfather, and the general proximity to fame. With all this, Ronson is often modest about DJing and the side‑doors that this privilege seemingly opened, such as getting straight into Peter Gatien’s Club USA while others grind for years.

For most DJs, getting into Gatien’s clubs meant years of playing tiny bars and dimly lit backrooms before earning a spot at Club USA. I should have needed that long—building connections, making my way up gradually. Instead, I stumbled right into it. I already had advantages that most others didn’t. My mother bought me the gear. I was raised by a musician with a home studio. But this was an absurdly lucky break, even for me. The thought of playing Club USA was surreal. I felt way too green for such a big stage. But no way was I turning it down.
Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

What I found interesting about the book was how Ronson took us behind the decks of a seemingly lost art. He recounts the experience of buying his first decks at Rock and Soul, figuring out how it all works, learning to read different rooms and audiences, building sets by BPM on sticky labels, bombing, biting, improving, and slowly earning respect. I was particular interested in his experience phoning an older classmates, Manny Ames, for scratching lessons.

“You got any stickers?”
I scrambled for some Maxell cassette labels. He peeled them off casually and showed me how to mark up two copies of the same record by attaching the sticker from the center hole outward, like the needle on a compass.
“This way you’ll always know where you are visually while you’re running two records back and forth,” he said, sharing something both straightforward and mind-blowing.
The stickers allowed him to spin the record back to precise spots—2 o’clock, 7 o’clock, etc.—by tracking each revolution of the disc. Each position on the clock face corresponded to a specific sound: the kick drum might be at 3 o’clock, the snare hit at 9 o’clock, making it possible to consistently find and repeat any part of the beat.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this insight, Ronson demonstrates that success is hours, not magic.^[1] This included eight gigs a week, carrying endless demo tapes in his pocket, playing Tuesday nights in tiny rooms. Ronson calls out the place of effort and practice after watching DJ AM re-order lyrics using two records.

“Dude. How’d you learn that shit??!!” I asked, still trying to process.
“Man… just been in the crib watching old DMC battles and teaching myself the routines. Crazy what you can do when you quit smoking crack.” He gave a gallows chuckle and took a drag of his cigarette.
Looking at the scattered VHS tapes and overflowing ashtrays, I said, “I guess it helps you haven’t left this room in a year,” half joking, half in awe.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this recognition of effort, Ronson rues this lost world, an era where endless hours would be spent crate‑digging and obsessing over pressings and B‑sides. He contrasts this with his modern setup of a laptop running Serato. Although this change affords new creative possibilities and relief for his own aging body, but there is also something lost in working within the constraints of physical, story‑filled crates and mildew‑stained sleeves.

I haven’t DJed with records in years. Instead, I use Serato, software that lets me manipulate songs on my laptop via turntables and CD players. Instead of crates, I have a MacBook. My back thanks me, but the truth is, I’m not the DJ I used to be. Back then, limited by crate space, I’d sit on my apartment floor crafting my entire set beforehand, agonizing over every choice. Should I pack the hefty double-disc Classic Funk Mastercuts or the equally bulky Classic Jazz-Funk Mastercuts? Asking myself, will the crowd be funky or jazz-funky? Do I bring the Isley Brothers’ Go for Your Guns, with the all-time slow jam “Footsteps in the Dark (Parts 1 & 2),” or their album The Heat Is On, which has “Fight the Power” and “For the Love of You”? Now, with Serato, I rock up to the club with the entire history of music under my arm. But the sheer number of choices is paralyzing. With seconds left on Drake and Wizkid’s “One Dance,” I frantically scroll through thousands of tracks and land on “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash purely because the computer says they’re both 104 BPM. Meanwhile, these songs have as much in common as a goldfish and a lampshade.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

Along with insight into DJing, Ronson takes us into a pre‑gentrified New York, with grimy clubs, record stores, basements and lofts, club‑kid Times Square, and a nightlife ecosystem (promoters, doormen, record‑company promo guys, bouncers) that feels both hyper‑specific and now mostly gone.^[2] With this there is a lot of name dropping. However, it feels different in tone to say Moby’s memoir Porcelain as I would argue that Ronson is placing himself in other people’s orbit, not vice versa.

On side note, Ronson’s acknowledgments at the end of the book spell out his writing process in a way that could be seen to mirror his crate‑digging. Inspired by the realisation that memories and people were starting to fade, he interviewed hundreds of DJs, promoters, dancers, doormen, bouncers to reconstruct a vanished. However, more importantly, in calling out this process he recognises that the number of people and choices involved in any creative art. Something that it is easy to forget at times.

Overall, Night People provides an insight into not only Mark Ronson, but a world now seemingly lost. For me it sits alongside Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with the album Only the Shit You Love and Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop. Each have a penchant for the small incidental stories, always wary about getting too Glenn A Baker. Although he has discussed this world in the past (see his Crate Diggers interview for Fuse), the book goes into more detail. It was also made even better having it read by Ronson himself, which I found via Libby.

This reminds me of a comment from Tom Morello and the willingness to practice: “I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them.” ↩
It is interesting to contrast Ronson’s New York with Phillip Glass’ New York as detailed in his autobiography Words Without Music in which he lived in a loft on 22nd Street. I guess the reality is places never stay the same? ↩

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REVIEW: Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Julian Barnes)

Aaron Davis

| March 18, 2026

What you can’t find out, and where that leaves you, is one of the places where the novelist starts. Julian Barnes ‘Nothing to Be Frightened Of’

Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confounded my expectations of autobiography. I had naively‑imagined a cradle‑to‑career narrative, where it begins with or before birth and proceeds from there. Instead, Barnes assembles something more fragmentary and different. It is a book that has all the usual autobiographical ingredients, discussion of his grandparents, parents, brother, and childhood incidents, but this is all constantly rearranged around a single gravitational force: death.

Throughout, Barnes provides a narrative with multiple threads weaved together like a tapestry that at a distance creates a coherent picture, but at its core is full of contradictions. For example, a childhood story about his grandparents’ duelling diaries comes up again and again, with his grandfather’s record of “Worked in garden. Planted potatoes” counted by his grandmother’s “Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden”. Elsewhere he contrasts his own “colouring in” of memories with his philosopher brother’s suspicion of memory altogether:

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

The focus on death also extends to discussion of free will, evolution, the brain, and religion. Barnes makes those extensions explicit. At one point he asks whether his “death‑awareness” is bound up with being a writer, and imagines a doctor offering him a brain operation that would remove his fear of death at the cost of removing his desire to write:

We have devised a new brain operation which takes away the fear of death … you’ll find that the operation will also take away your desire to write.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Late in the book he reflects on genetic inheritance and free will when he notes, almost dryly, that aspects of his and his brother’s mannerisms—“the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw … a particular kind of polite laugh”—are “definitely not expressions of free will” but “genetic replicas” of their father. Here I am reminded in some ways of Christos Tsiolkas’ lecture on doubt, fence-sitting and the importance of questioning:

I’m not proposing we always sit on the fence. However, I am suggesting that as writers, playwrights, intellectuals, we are required to doubt and we are required to question.
Source: 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture: Christos Tsiolkas by library.gov.au

Stylistically, the book feels as much like fiction as his novels feel like non‑fiction. Barnes argues that the novelist is someone who lives in the blur between memory and invention:

A novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Throughout, he keeps crossing the line between essay and story, memory and scene. It reads like an autobiographical novel that is honest about its own constructedness and place in time.

I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

These authorial asides reminded me of Paul Auster’s games in The New York Trilogy. They make the memoir feel self‑consciously written, as if the subject is not just death, but the sheer artificed nature of any story we tell about it.

Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Along with Barnes’ self-conscious style, chronology is repeatedly sacrificed throughout to theme. Interestingly, stories are actually often repeated, with a slight tweak each time. Early on Barnes warns that “there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them dead, and quite a few of them French,” and quotes Jules Renard’s line that “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish”. That warning is also a kind of method statement: the book lurches from family anecdote to Renard, Montaigne, Flaubert, Koestler, Zola, Stravinsky, and others, not as digressions but as parallel case studies in how human beings have tried to live with the knowledge of extinction. However, there is also something ironic about using anecdotes from fictional authors in that it we are never quite sure what is truth and what is narrative.

With this, we are told a story that could be true, but could also be something that we somehow will to be true. Barnes is repeatedly explicit about this risk of “willing” coherence. In a key late chapter he pushes back against his GP’s idea that dying is the “conclusion” to a life‑narrative. For him, life is “one damn thing after another” rather than a musical score with “theme … development, variation, recapitulation, coda”. He argues that although he respects our desire for narrative, it is often “little more than confabulating.”

So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Alongside narrative and coherence, misremembering is something that comes up again and again, he even quips “misremember me correctly, we should instruct”.

Having recently read Departure(s), a novel that too includes autobiographical threads, I came to this book wondering how it might be different. Clearly, it is different in that it does not purport to be fiction. But then maybe it is not really that different at all as both are forms of artifice and expression. Barnes makes the case that all art (I assume that autobiography and fiction is ‘art’?) is our feeble attempt to say “I was here.”

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers—two or three if lucky—which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Ironically, I am not sure where that leaves me, reading a book and writing a review. I am left wondering.

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REVIEW: Futuromania (Simon Reynolds)

Aaron Davis

| March 15, 2026

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention. Simon Reynolds ‘Futuromania’

With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.
Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.
Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,^[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.
Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.
Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

“The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame… The interiorization of the narrative… encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole… The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.” From A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩