xxx virgin transmission

"The next trick is done in sonata form after a brief announcement by the [conductor]. The artist is present in persona only. Both appear to be in a state. Please be kind and adjust your expectations."

O Lorde __

where do i start?

where do
i ??
even
___ start ???

The beginning seems to be as good a place as any. The leading religious narratives tend to take it from the top, starting with a god-given state of bliss and harmony, until gradually-suddenly everything goes to shit basically because women bad and untrustworthy BUT $avior briefly appears, yay! just that the enshittification continues unabashedly after $avior's untimely departure while the eternally yet very conditionally promised happy ending remains vaporware to this day. What is the appeal of this again? And where oh where did these royally fucked up stories of victim-perpetrator-reversal come from?

I digress, albeit on purpose. I'll explain. Bear with me.

(no bear in sight, instead)

*crickets*

ACCESSIBILITY NOTICE

You are reading the introduction to an experimental longform essay:narrative that was prompted by Virgin, the new album from Lorde.

It's also the opener of this woke af pseudoblog called waveform transmissions, by an old queer feminist music nerd and software developer looking back and forward and sideways at the entangled characters and shapes and frequencies and icons who transformed them. It is a mix of autobiography (yawn) and theory (double yawn) and the ancient art of unhinged shitposting (wtf?).

It might be a little much or just not your thing. Which is fine, I understand.

If you wish I just wrote a normal album review, look no further than here.

Additionally, feel free to copy the entire thing to your browser's clipboard by clicking or tapping here and then feed it to Claude or ChatGPT while casting one of the established spells like "ELI5", "tl;dr" or "wtf bro", or improvise your own variation on these archetypes. You can also instruct the model to recreate the content in a completely different idiom, language or preferred writer's style.

There are a few self-contained digressions and diversions that you can sample before committing to the narrative of the main thread. Casually dropped bangers include: A fresh look at James Joyce's 'Ulysses', accidentally bumping into icons, and hypothetically saying 'thank you for your service' to the DSM-5.

In one brief passage - spoiler alert! - I also actually do write about the music on Virgin. Just for the Lulz.

Some of the linked media might be NSFW.

That's all for now, back to the program.

In all likelihood, my icon:iconifier-relationship with Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, better known to the world as Lorde, began on October 3rd, 2012 (or shortly thereafter).

On this day, alanis-ironically enough the national holiday of Germany (a well-known and storied geopolitical shape enclosing my place of birth and current location) in commemoration of the on-paper unity declared 22 years prior, Pitchfork published its review of Lorde's debut album Pure Heroine, with a rating of 7.3.

This was during what I would call the sundowner years of Pitchfork's imperial era. It was a bit of a cult among music nerds and I was a bit of a member at the time, though thankfully I have been in recovery for the past few years and rediscovered the simple joy of vibing to and immersing myself in music without impulsively judging its absolute cultural relevance on an offensively reductionist one-dimensional scale with 101 possible values and an arbitrary decimal point to sell the illusion of fine-grained scientific rigor.

It was this 7.3 review by none other than my all-time favorite Pitchfork regular Lindsay Zoladz that put Lorde on my radar, and I was immediately completely hooked. I proceeded to devour a longform profile on her and listened to the album in question and slowly but surely reached a state of ecstatic overload that typically leads to me crying joyfully.

I remember this to happen at work, which in my case meant employment as a caged unicorn in a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Frankfurt (the one of School and sausages and banks fame). Caged unicorns are curious creatures who, among other peculiarities, fancy to obsessively speed-read their favorite online information sources for both distraction and inspiration on one of their computer's displays while still also transforming mental models of user flows and back-end operations in B2B SaaS platforms involving entities synthesized from multiple relational databases and 3rd party APIs until everything clicks into place and the mental model pleasingly and pleasurably flashes with non-visible beams of fuzzy synaptic warmth. We know that we have The Solution, and it will be glorious. We briefly get high off our own supply (dopamine apparently, the neurotransmitter also largely responsible for the effects of cocaine), fetch a celebratory coffee and snack, bump some of our favorite tunes while nodding and smiling along, and we join our beloved icons as their impromptu imperfect hypebitches when declaring, for example: "It's A New Art Form Showing People How Little We Care, YEAH" or "All Work And No Play Keeps Me On The New Shit" with both heartfelt passion and a hint of self-observant irony in our gesturing. We are in a state. Then, on the screen we don't use for speed-reading, we print out the required code.

On this particular late afternoon or early evening of October 3rd, 2012 (or shortly thereafter), I'm pretty sure I did not print out much code and probably left the office "early" (on possibly a holiday, but, you know, caged unicorns might be working at pretty much any given time on any given day) to get high and obsessively immerse myself in The New Precious Thing and wrap my head around its particular preciousness.

And there was a lot of wrapping around to do. I can picture myself alternating between ingesting the hypercoded stream of precious information and invaluable metadata from the pixelated shapes on my reading screen and looking away, lost in deep fractals of emotional:analytical entanglement when trying to process and decode the influx of awesome. "OK, let me get this straight: " I might have inaudibly said to myself, even though I was alone in the office and thus no straightness was in sight, "a crazy smart and eloquent hyperliterate nerd girl from New Zealand turned out to have a unique synesthetic gift for crafting smart and hyperliterate yet deeply emotional and accessible pop songs, and through exceptional circumstances she was allowed to develop this gift more or less on her own terms and is now a rising star, which has led to this marvellous debut album that somehow resonates so deeply with me and reminds me so much of my own youth as a weird gifted kid, actually the queen bitch in an unruly nerd punk clique when I really think about it haha, growing up in the suburbs of Frankfurt, so close to and yet so far from many epicenters of pop and subculture. This! is my ultimate Teenage Symphony To God, just that she chose to make herself God by means of her deliciously heretic chosen name. The E is silent. All of the Es are silent. E is her initial. This shit goes deep and hits me hard, and she is only sixteen years old? This is gonna be good. I can't wait for what's to come. Ladies and gentlemen, methinks $avior has arrived. The Iridescent Age of Our Lorde is upon us." before the tears of joy and excitement and communion started to roll down my cheeks again. A birth is usually a messy affair of precocious states, sounds and fluids, and the symbolic birth of an icon is no exception. But also, traditionally, gods didn't like to be alone by themselves, so Lorde joined a range of other worldy deities in my pantheon of multitudes, a quasireligious array of personas and projections, who seem to bring meaning and joy and inspiration to my life.

I was 37 at the time, and occassionally felt a bit weird about declaring a teenage girl the most promising pop artist ever in the upcoming months in my nerdy social circles, but a) everyone who cares about me is aware of my mostly harmless weirdness, sometimes painfully so, and b) I am also known as a staunchly feminist dude, sometimes painfully so, which hopefully distincts my fangirly ramblings from the patronizing gaze of middle-aged men lusting after barely legal female flesh at pretty much any opportunity. I also felt expertly validated after none other than David Bowie publicly echoed my sentiment by declaring that "$avior is The Future of Music". (unicorns like to hyperbole a bit mmmkay?)

(for reference, he has used this term before when describing the early days of some queer amp(h)ed-up art school dorks he got to witness circle-jerking about their social anxiety and trauma and gender issues with a handful of their r-word buddies, way back in the day, when things were way different lol)

In my case it also felt a bit like Lorde was living my dream, since in my early twenties I was also working on smartypants (self-)referential indie pop influenced by hip hop and electronica, but couldn't quite pull it off, and then settled for the unicorn career, using what I've learned when creating web sites for musical projects, which was an exciting new thing at the time.

Naturally, Pure Heroine immediately got AOTYd im my book (vaporware to this day sry working on it), and remained my favorite pop album of the decade/century/millenium/whatever until the release of brat. But, as great as it was (and is), much of the iconification came from an allure, a promise, a field of enticing possibilities: "this bitch is gonna cook up some mindbending next level shit in the future, my senses will be phaseshifted akin to what zeros + ones did to me in '98 and mmmmhmayyyyybe the world will be healed from all suffering forever or at least become a slightly better place at least temporarily".

But what would that look like? A fascinating yet futile question, captain (my captain). I'll know it when I see it and the phaseshifting occurs.

So Melodrama arrived. A perfectly fine record, sure, but not it, and it didn't click with me the same way that Pure Heroine did, and even less did Solar Power, another perfectly fine record by earthly standards. A solid 6.8. But no phaseshifting.

The non-clicking might have resulted from the fact that Lorde's life as a successful young metropolitan woman beared little resemblance and therefore relatability to mine. When these albums dropped, I was still doing the caged unicorn thing by day, but also took care of my son before and after and inbetween, and somehow I ended up in the suburbs again, which I have vowed to eternally avoid ever after.

I seemed to have settled, for better or worse, and so did by and large almost everyone in my social circles. But then a series of curious events happened during the corona and post-corona eras and shit hit the fan at an exponential rate (gradually, then suddenly) until a whole bunch of relationships in said circle soured, froze or fell apart to the relentless thundering backdrop provided by Intergenerational Trauma Through Toxic Masculinity, Inc. (at least that's how I see it now and who knows maybe I'm right because of the unicorn mental model thing). And no, thank you for reminding me, the kids unfortunately aren't entirely alright I'm afraid.

But it was not all bad, there were also exciting glimpses of what my life could be like as a free-range unicorn, which felt intoxicating and strange at once. My personal highlights from these eras include, but are in no fucking way limited to: producing a loosely menstruation-themed feminist noise punk album under peculiar circumstances that evoked comparisons to Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac (minus the cocaine) by casual observers, life-changing psychedelic experiences which healed most of my social anxiety and in odd twists and turns led to me identifying as nonbinary and genderfluid, teaching myself how to play admittedly slightly wonky neoromantic polyrhythmic solo piano improvisations at 160 BPM while bouncing to Anz' Spring/Summer Dubs 2020 in my head, and being called out for my yin:yang ring as a notable reference to the countercultural hippie roots of the software industry on my first business outing as a free-range unicorn, after improvising an extended elevator pitch for a few lit minutes in front of a crowd of at least one hundred people, most of which notably more conventionally well-dressed than me. But also: after the ecstasy, the laundry. & the dishes. & the Legos. & the logistics. & the parent group chats, oh my.

Oh, and in the middle of this mess I also realized that I apparently fit the diagnostic criteria for autism and ADHD notably well. It really is quite the mindfuck to see how many of your mysterious quirks and legendary eccentricities can be chalked up to neurodivergence, at age 49 in my case, and this frequently leads to a juicy identity crisis and special interest rabbit holes and I was no exception in these regards. I might have become a bit alienating and feral and extra-odd and well maybe just a little much for some. "You're like a wild animal being held captive" a coworkerly friend said to me on my first day at the office after a long burnout leave, and I replied something like "Oh yeah, totally." and giggled. About an hour later I let him know that I'm still thinking and internally laughing about his casually dropped banger.

(In case the a-word tipped you off and you are now worried that this will turn into one of those "aaah look my fav artist xyz is autistic like me"-type rants - yeah but no, admittedly that's where I was at a few months ago when thinking about the concepts of waveform transmissions again, but thankfully I have procrastinated my writing in these matters so much that now I have a bit of a different approach in favor of a more general look on the complex entanglements of (neuro)divergence and gender in human culture, but be aware that you may find these thoughts (& prayers!) even more offensive. For starters, the main reason I don't like to diagnose my favorite artists anymore is because I now believe the diagnostic system currently in use is based on patriarchal pathologizing toxic BS and needs to be rewritten from scratch asap because code smells omg)

(also, $avior appears to pretty unquestionably fit current criteria for neurodivergence because of e.g. synesthesia and giftedness, which was a big part of the discourse around [them] from the beginning and that's all that matters for now)

Coincidentally, it was in this context that Lorde appeared on my radar again, because the intial breakthrough insight that got me to read up a bit on this autism thing occured while listening to Girl, so confusing featuring $avior stoned on a railway replacement service bus during a break from a particularily obsessive Glenn Gould x Leonard Bernstein YouTube binge (subject to future transmission 003 or 004). Even before this sufficiently advanced coincidence, Lorde's verse tickled my sensibilities in a way that her last two albums didn't, and the prospect of her being inspired by this collaboration to dial up the brattiness in her own work a bit was even better. I filed a mental note that $avior's next album might be the phaseshifting circuit breaker that mindfully rewires and heals me, delivered at the time when I need it most, and then kinda forgot about it for a few burned out months until my still ongoing iconification of brat led me to this post on r/charlixcx:

A strange picture. Claude, what do you see here?

I see a group of four young people posing together outdoors in what appears to be a casual, friendly photo. They're standing in front of some vibrant pink flowering plants (possibly bougainvillea) with some outdoor furniture and structures visible in the background. From left to right, there's a person in a white t-shirt with text that reads "PROTECT THE DOLLS," someone in a gray oversized shirt, a person wearing sunglasses and a black outfit, and someone in a white shirt with glasses. They all appear to be in good spirits, with arms around each other in a typical group photo pose. The setting looks like it could be a backyard, patio, or outdoor social space on what seems to be a sunny day." (continued)

Large Language Models such as Claude & ChatGPT are curious creatures. They are about as spiky as a few de- then rehydrated unicorn heads tied together with sparkling duct tape, insanely great at a lot of complicated things but a total failure at other seemingly basic tasks. In this case, Claude's inability to identify any of the famous people in the image stems from explicit training and safety/privacy measures. These limitations, in the AI community often derided as nerfing a model, can be used for interesting results because the models are fame-, persona- and projectionblind and stubbornly and endearingly focused on what the image actually displays.

This is not the case at all with humans, which is why my reaction was quite different. In my book, which is slowly untangling and materializing as we "speak", someone in a gray oversized t-shirt looks like they're 6 fractals deep into minute details of delivering a mindbending phaseshifter, while their partygirl friends are getting a bit silly and demand a picture to be taken in front of these vibrant pink flowering plants (possibly bougainvillea).

But I have also learned to be cautious of expectations in relationships, and icon:iconifier-relationships are no exception. Disappointment hurts, and so does rejection. In symbolic spaces and in so-called real life. But that look, that look makes me wonder ___

As I am facing unemployment & general living situation uncertainty, possibly bankruptcy, and most definitely divorce proceedings during the sundowner era of my Big Beautiful Burnout,

(don't worry about me too much. i have besties who are willing let me be a liability for a while. and i feel oddly enlightened and inspired. i'll probably be ok)

how would it make me feel?

shiny & new?

like a ______

Virgin? Ah yeah, reference to the greek origin of the word: man-woman. The plot thickens. And oh boy that cover. Look at that cover. Ima show you my private bits but the rendermode might throw you off a bit. Oh was that too close? Sorrynotsorry. Hold my acid punch while I reenact the sticky fingers cover but ooops here's my also my IUD. Looks a bit alien and violent? Good. Many females just walk around with these like it's nothing, you know.

Alright, so cover and title check all the phaseshifter boxes. Prepare for impact, honey. This might get a bit wild.

At some point during this initial digestive period it occured to me that maybe Lorde and I got stuck on the same Lady Gaga quote from (I think) the Artpop promo era: "Releasing an album always feels like I'm posting a picture of my vagina on the internet, inviting everyone to pass judgement on it. Is it a nice vagina or not?" (I'm paraphrasing since I couldn't dig up the exact quote despite various research efforts. Maybe I hallucinated it?)

During this time I also started to hang out on r/lorde quite frequently and really enjoyed the company of the detail-obsessed fandom working together to decode the messages. And Ella was playing to it motherfully.

I even contributed a bit from my areas of expertise regarding the strange contraption on the Ultrasound tour announcement. What I think is kinda fun about mysterious conceptual art is that it makes me want to reverse-engineer the process that led to it. Here, I imagine Ella and Jim in a symbolic-literal, possibly stoned, conversation about the nature of reverb and the different types of emulation that are commonly used in music production, and then they started to get hooked on the idea and history of plate reverb specifically, dude, and then one of them remembered this video that has been making the rounds on nerdy producer blogs, and Ella was like: "omg we gotta make one. and print my fkn x-rayed vocal tract on it. and then run my voice through it. it will be glorious." So yeah, just kinda fun to think around (if you like thinking). Who knows what really happened.

But of course, there was no music yet. Until gradually-suddenly there was, and a nice impromptu video to go along with it:

Mmmmkay, post-breakup reflection song resonates somehow. I have been asking myself versions of this question recently. Music is A-OK too, especially since this is supposed to be the familiar-feeling connection to her earlier work in style. It also seemed to resonate with other somewhat unlikely icons like Kyle MacLachlan or the Sugababes (ooh those harmonies). Check, check, check.

Next step in the Virgin rollout was the release of second single Man of the Year and the accompanying video, in which Lorde's appearance and demeanor while seated on the chair in the opening shot uncannily resembles a high school crush of mine to a T. Quite literally, because she also frequently sported the white basic T and denim look as part of her infinitely adorable and relatable refusal of conformity to expectations of female presentation, as gifted nerd girls tend to do.

Also: gender questioning / recalibration after psychedelic experiences, check. Music getting seriously good, check.

What's next? Ah, Hammer with its deliciously genderbendy title metaphor that reminds me of some of my female friends playfully using power tool analogies when talking about sexual activities. Little house on memory lane? check.

Video just showing $avior vibing & having a great old time (NSFW) during a constructive summer? Works for me, check.

ovulation mentioned. Check?

At this point I started to largely ignore r/lorde cause I didn't need more hype, thx.

I'll report back when I'm done with my overthinkpiece, I said.

wtf has she been cooking up here? careful what you wish for, jeez.

Q: Are we not men?
E: We are Lorde.

Only bad people live to see
their likeness set in stone

It's a stiff competition but The Words from Pure Heroine that always felt the most magical to me might have been these, from Still Sane. (why? lol)

I mean, to me the whole song is magical and evocative as fuck, and also just so unlikely, which makes it precious. In any economy.

why?

Let me try to unpack this exemplary case study and get a glimpse of what it contains and why? and how? it resonates? with me? and others?

The perspective that Ella is talking from here strikes me as interesting and non-trivial. The song describes a setting where she is hanging out with a group of friends on her 16th birthday, assuming that she's gonne be kinda famous soon. She is partly proto-nostalgic about expected losses and complications, and partly excited. She sees lists of tasks or work items to be completed, she anticipates and mentally prepares for different, unknown situations, routines and environments, and she meditates on her new role, her new hypothetical superpowers, and tries to center and ground herself to ensure that she lives up to the track's title.

She is drafting an intent, a sankalpa, a note to self, a memento. She tries on her fame monster persona, largely a mirror of tongue-in-cheekily inflated rapper egos she sublimated: "I'm little but I'm coming for the crown," she declares, "I'm little but I'm coming for you". Then, maybe following a suggestion from her audience, or maybe just envisioning a statue of herself as she goes deeper into her inflated queen size persona, she stops to reflect. In what company would I be? She flicks through pages of memory, failing to come up with decent precedents. Then the why? quote appears, it was memorable a while ago, a factoid or an artifact attached to an $icon's $icon in her pantheon of multitudes, and she declares it with slightly twisted impromptu wording.

Now while this is certainly a hyperspecific situation, and I'm certainly projecting like crazy, I can totally relate to it. I could easily see myself getting silly on delusions of grandeur with my nerd punk clique around that age. When I think about it, I guess one could say that I was the queen b of that clique (a status easy to achieve with a group of boys, a little transfemininity is enough). I can see myself saying the exact same thing after detaching from a situation for a few seconds during which my mind goes into a strange empty-feeling mini-overload state and then shit just appears and demands to be said. I might not realize that it's a quote at first. The origin will be researched later and possibly result in a delayed addendum.

I can also easily imagine some unhinged analog shitposts bouncing back and forth between members of said clique, escalating quickly to grandeur delulu level and anticipation of demand for monuments to be built in honor of our future selves. This might not be completely unwarranted since a poll conducted shortly after Kurt Cobain's suicide did indeed show some potential. It was printed in our graduation paper and distributed at a Frankfurt school, but not The Frankfurt School of course.

The question was: Who will be famous? The nerd punk clique took the top three spots. I came in second, sandwiched between two rocket scientist type STEM freaks who are now working in space-related matters.

confidence is a curious thing.

i'm little?

but i'm coming?

for the _____ !?!?!?

"But I am only using 10% of my creative potential" I said to the zookeeper one day over beer and double espressos at 10pm. He looked at me pitifully and said "10% of your creative potential is 100% of what the company needs" and led me back to my cage. It takes a special kind of bitch to put up with this for so long. (I'm _____ that bitch)

"hammer."

"bicyle."

"tear duct tape."

"galvanized steel plate screenprinted with x-ray of subject's head."

The bright young doctor's increasingly odd requests during the procedure puzzled the nurse more and more.

"I'm sorry but we don-"

"if the tools do not exist yet, you are spiritually obliged to create them. i'll wait."

“Vielleicht wird er nie wieder fähig sein, L. oder G. zu empfinden” my oddly platonic high school crush wrote onto the back of the philosophy worksheet that we were using as an impromptu hypertext information highway, back in the day, back when things were way different, roughly two years before publication of the initial HTTP/1.0 spec. During a class that failed to capture our undivided attention, she sent this message to me, a pencil-drawn multicoded waveform on a thread about our upcoming joint birthday party (we were born two days apart lol). Translated to English and with expanded abbreviations, it might read as “maybe he will never be able to feel l. and c. again”, where the abbreviations probably stand for “love(d)” and “care(d for)”, but who knows really. The second one could also be "happiness".

She then continued to playfully explore the hypothetical impact of her boyfriend not being invited to said party, because for some reason that’s where The Words led us.

Um wait what? Okay, it was the irony age for sure and besties talking shit bla bla, but even taking that into consideration, it seems obvious in hindsight the we were gen x protoypes of semi-benevolent overlordes of the future and my oh my weren’t we in our mean girls era? cause why the fuck were we even playfully entertaining this possibility? in writing even? and why oh why did she predict the future so accurately? the future not being the birthday party in question - that’s a whole nother story - but rather what would happen when midlife crisis hits about 30 years later during the corona and post-corona and rumors-minus-coke eras?

i mean ____

what?

p.s. also dude, crush is not the preferred nomenclature. squish please. kind regards from The Future (queer microlabels era)

These jungian alpha bros are weird. Sure, shadow work is cool and important and all and I guess why not do it at the gym right?, but did you know that Carly "Gee" Jungsen casually dropped the nonbinary manifesto in 192x on the equivalent of a VIP dubplate but insisted it shouldn't be publicly released until after their death?

What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself as you / possess it from the beginning. It pleases you, however, to play at manliness, because it travels on a well-worn track. You, woman, should not seek the masculine in men, but assume the masculine in yourself since you possess it from the beginning. But it amuses you and is easy to play at femininity; consequently man despises you because he despises his femininity. But humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous.

One thing to point out regarding our shared special interest in rap & hip hop culture from an outsider perspective are the distinctly different timelines: mine ascended to imperial era around the time of Ella’s birth, when divergent enlightened transmissions from the likes of Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Missy Elliott x Timbo x Aaliyah, early Roots & Outkast, Wu-Tang et al. were broadcasting in deliciously alien frequencies, plus notable locals Kinderzimmer Productions and various New Hamburg School representatives were beta-testing early prototypes of mindfully derivative respectful adaptations. As were Beck, Luscious Jackson et al. internationally.

This was also at a time when genre-bending became the norm kinda, which in turn created strange recursive loopback rabbit hole exceptions worth elaborating upon, but this subject matter is out of scope for the current transmission. The trend was delightfully continued to this day by generations X-Z & Alpha, accelerated by the creation and continuous deployment of required tools, driven largely by a sense of idealism aka spiritual obligation. Maybe at least partly because of this entangled web, hip hop culture as a whole slowly but surely transformed to be more welcoming of queer and/or non-male artists & participants even in the mainstream, something I have always dreamed of back in '96, when things were way different.

A well-known and storied figure somewhat involved in this transformation who could theoretically be interesting to examine in this context, since Lorde also mentioned him as a source of inspiration for her early work, is the person formerly known as Kanye West. I also really vibed with The Old Kanye (in spite of clear red flags yeah), but he went off the deep end in such a thoroughly disgusting and sad way that I'm not really ready for doing the required yungian shadow work that I consider a prerequisite for trying to come to terms with how I see his work and our relationship now. But yes, it seems overwhelmingly likely that I will go off my own deep end in a future transmission, trying to untangle this royally screwed up mess, easily scoring a perfect 10 on the cautionary tale clusterfuck scale.

Compare and contrast this character arc to equally controversial, well-known and storied figure Eminem aka Marshall Mathers, formerly (mis)represented by his rowdy mask persona Slim Shady. He created a monster, wrestled with it until he burned out, and now mindfully euthanized it. Did you know that Mathers apparently identifies as autistic and was very supportive of his adopted child Stevie recently coming out as nonbinary?

Uh-oh, there's that dreaded spicy a-word again. "Eminem? Autistic? Bitch please. Have you seen Rain Man?"

Yes, I have, along with many others and this is where part of the problem lies, you see. Rain Main created a reductionist archetype of a very obvious form of Autism. For starters, you might try to imagine what happens if a person whose mind is working in similarly bizarre ways develops giftedness and special interests in language, literature or pop culture, and is therefore able to communicate and adhere to expectations better, at least partially, and also develops a bit of impulse control through emotional suppression and delayed processing. But inside they still feel like a total fucking mess, a misfit, an alien. But maybe also a useful toy that can effortlessly do fun tricks that seem magical, like card counting or freestyling.

And, you see, the thing is that this is not just about Eminem. Just for the Lulz, let's evoke the archetypes of rappers and DJs using sufficiently advanced technology, then see if we recognize some patterns. Bitch please?

Yeah, I know. It's a bit wild. I did warn you, in case you remember.

But hear me out. Or in. Wherever you are. Because I strongly feel that the autism label is not The Truth either, also not in combination with ADHD and giftedness (although this bermuda triangle of agony and ecstasy really just feels so much like home to me in this coordinate system).

The Truth, after all those years, is largely still Out There it seems, and the autism & ADHD labels are just the result of the Psychiatric Establishment's partially honorable yet also deeply flawed and burdened attempt at describing and naming patterns they recognized in their patients (100% spoiled rich kids intially), gradually expanding The Spectrum to make it more inclusive for people with jobs and families that are just kinda weird and lazy and self-obsessed.

In parallel threads, curious and self-observant individuals connected with each other to create fluid-topical entities of swarm intelligence and set out to describe and name patterns that they saw in themselves and in the peculiar people around them. Examples include the introvert and HSP and giftedness movements, personality type systems, and the trans/nonbinary/genderqueer/aroace microlabel culture, which appears to be closely linked to neurodivergence. Pop psychology became the new MTV and people started to diagnose themselves and their enclosing systems like crazy.

Further spin-offs such as the whole zen/mindfulness/hygge/kondo shebang started to elaborate on practical guidelines on how to reign in your ongoing internal riots, striking a chord of hopeful longing that resonated with many. Since these threads wove their mycelium at internet speed & scale, accelerated further during the psycho pressure cookers also known as the corona and post-corona eras, the Psychiatric Establishment seems to be a bit overwhelmed with the task of integrating these unprompted-for research results into their own admittedly kinda pseudoscientific methodology.

Hilarity ensued, will almost certainly continue to do so and will be elaborated upon in future transmissions, when I'll try to kondo this bee with my l33t unîcorn sk1llz and then tuft3 it up a n0tch.

Just for the Lulz ofc.

P.S.: The hypersexuality might also just be an act though, at least in some cases. Did you know that Cupcakke (!!!) is rumored to be ace?

P.P.S.: Time to put Special Agent Mulder's iconic poster back up lol

P.P.P.S: Bonus track: the current unmasked SOTA of domestic rap.

On the internet, a well-known and storied n-dimensional shape where people tend to be wrong to an off-putting extent, I hear the voices of the [critics] like "Ugh now Lorde's also doing the weird gender hypetrain thing, the latest shiny trend, a fad of our modern age. It's just a phase. It'll grow out."

I beg to differ. When $avior declares:

in the city i hear the voices of the ancients

a perfectly reasonable case could be made that the genderfuckery is actually perfectly aligned with these voices.

To me it rather seems that the suppression of these once-storied traditions is a recent trend and a phase, and it needs to be phased out, thank you very much.

yesterday I lifted your body weight

Later in the evening, the unkempt detached-eccentric detective returned to the scene of the crime once more, much to the annoyance of its eternally occupied occupants, because they just had 1 more question cuz there was this 1 thing that got them trippin' lol

that's it, that's the thread.

Wiederholungszwang. - "state of the art" was the semi-serious impromptu verdict by a good friend and longtime artistic collaborator after the two of us wrapped up a spontaneous wonky pseudojazz improvisation, him on saxophone and amplified steel sheet (leftover from my proto-ultrasound era) and me on drums, on 2023-09-09 as the file name of the recording indicates.

we sometimes complete self-assigned tasks like these just for fun, sharpening our claws for e.g. the krauty post-punk we used to play. theoretically we are both guitarists but if there is one thing that unicorns love love love then it's learning a new trick, whether it is sax or drums or cutesy pastel works.

the location of the recording session was our windowless womblike sanctuary in a thoroughly repurposed air raid shelter, a relict of those shadow-iconic 12 years from 33 to 45 during which the general population of the previously mentioned geopolitical shape collectively and epically went full-on unhinged ultraviolent crashout, leaving behind a shadow integration assignment of unprecedentedly grim proportions. the results of this assignment so far are ___

mixed let's say.

but at least these ridiculously thick low-brow-graffitied and overgrown walls are now being put to good service by protecting the general population from what's happening inside, between the maze of stairs and hallways and dead ends which connects the rows and columns of windowless womblike sanctuaries.

"ey, wo kam das denn her?" was the question on my mind after i put the drum sticks down laughing, as can be heard at the end of the recording. this could be translated as "uh wow where did that come from?", a perfectly valid question in a wide variety of contexts.

well, in this particular case i would say that we were in a state. not necessarily a psychedelic one, although i like the connotation.

at first i thought that art of the state would be a nice title for a loosely defined piano improv piece, at some point more than a year later because i continued to meditate on these words because they are magically resonant to me, and because they are also used in software engineering a lot, especially with regard to ai, and yeah i just like to flip words around in my head for fun mmmkay?

"a super interesting book could be written about the complex relationship between art and drugs and depression. maybe i'll do it one day." i remember declaring in a totally different context more than a decade ago, after detaching from a conversation for a few odd seconds because something sparked my imagination and i felt-saw fractals of drafts and outlines and writing samples and then reported back with a summary of my excursion. (i do this a bit, it creates communication patterns that some may find off-putting but my friends are used to it)

well, i would substitute some of these terms today, but it appears that 'one day' might be now?

and that would be the title. super resonant. richtig nice. by itself an 8/10 easily.

#artofthestate

you're such a wonderful person but you've got problems

Intuition is a curious thing. As I thought about Lorde's audacity to live up to my ridiculously high expectations with Virgin, I remembered a real-life acquaintance from a while ago who also had this aura of potential and mindful determination. Her name was Kylie since she was from Australia, but not The Kylie From Australia of course (*eyeroll*, *giggles*).

She was around 21 at the time, studying in Frankfurt during the early days of an academic career that she hadn't fully figured out yet, and socializing in the city's vibrant hyperprivileged expat community, where weed-growing bankers from Scandinavia laugh and clap at the stand-up comedy attempts of their Indian systems administrators, among other oddities. I was also occasionally part of that peculiar scene back in the days, we were introduced through common friends and sometimes chatted a bit. She struck me as sharp and witty and wise-yet-chill way beyond her years, and her casual demeanor and no-frills appearance reminded me of the girls I hung out with when I was around her age.

So-called Small Talk with me can be a bit odd, because I might unexpectedly drift off onto byzantine hyperspecific tangents like: "No I didn't study CS although everyone assumes that, I actually only accidentally became a web developer because my music career wouldn't take off in my early twenties and I needed money (*eyeroll*, *giggles*), but I also do have a few musical projects going on again, like recently mostly this one thing with a friend of mine who sings and writes the lyrics, and it's like a mix of experimental-glitchy-yet-warm-and-pulsating electronica and like jangly indie pop guitars and like krautrock shoegazy post-dubstep twee blog house or whatever, and the words are like super weird poetic fragmentary and verrrry literate and referential, and then right now I'm working on the visuals for the shows that will be projected in sync with the music onto a semitranslucent screen at the front of the stage but from the back so you can see us and our instruments as silouettes or like cut-outs, an idea which I admittedly totally ripped off from Sigur Rós, which by the way omg when you get a chance to see them live please do, it's a trip. Um, so, yeah, that's what I do for a living when I'm not earning money but rather losing it." (*eyeroll*, *giggles*)

I gave impromptu elevator pitches like this on a regular basis during those days, and usually my conversation partner just politely smiled and nodded and went on with actual small talk. Kylie was different, however, since she said something like "Oh wow, that sounds really cool. When is your next show?" - "Ah in a few weeks probably, I'll let you know."

On August 13th, 2008, we played a small slot in a beduine tent at the annual Sommerwerft festival on the banks of the Main river, a welcome cuddly-diverse-alternative offset to the large-looming ECB complex nearby. It was one of those shows where technically way too much goes wrong but somehow it's a vibe and everybody loves it except for the control freak mothermind (me).

(That reminds me of how I once almost stumbled over Mark Linkous on my way home after an appropriately sad and beautiful Sparklehorse show, as he was sitting hunched on the street by himself right next to the exit of the venue, smoking and expressing mumbled annoyance with fuck-ups and glitches and whatnot. I apologized and said something like "Thank you so much. I love your music. The show was great. Hope to catch you on the next tour. Bye." and then disappeared into the night, as I don't like to bother my icons too much IRL. Rest in Peace, Mark. I miss you.)

Kylie came up to me after our performance was over, probably as I was expressing mumbled annoyance with bad artistic choices under unfortunate circumstances while only partially enjoying a post-show cigarette. She told me not to worry and that she really enjoyed it and is very impressed, and something like: "You guys will get big, I can feel it. Just keep going."

The few times we met after this event, I started to wonder what she was going to do later in life. There was something about her. Yes, she had a thirst for knowledge and certainly a very privileged background, but didn't act like it at all. Unlike the detached and tone-deaf anti-heroine of Pulp's Common People, she was just casually mingling with local freaks while being down-to-earth and nice to everyone, at least when I was present. This could get interesting, I thought, she's smart and curious and resourceful and seems like she wants to actually do something and make a difference. What would it be?

Well, she moved away soon enough and I lost track. Of her whereabouts, and also regarding the music project. I did not really follow her advice to keep going, and therefore we didn't get big.

I didn't think about any of this in a while when I heard from her again, about 12 years later. At the time, one of my favorite information sources to obsessively speed-read on my computer's secondary display while doing the caged unicorn thing was The Guardian, so I casually loaded its home page on a workday morning in the fall of 2020.

I immediately froze and stared at the screen in disbelief and shock. Holy shit, there she is. On the front page of the Guardian, represented visually by a generic press photo in stark contrast to the reality of her life at the time. Kylie was on the home page of The Guardian because she was in serious, serious trouble.

I was overwhelmed, mostly with worry, and needed quite a while to process. I had this hunch about her wanting to do something. So she went on and basically did the most brazen thing imaginable within her career field, and it went terribly, terribly wrong. Careful what you wish for? I hope she'll be okay. I can't believe this.

Fortunately, a few weeks afterwards she was released from Iranian prison and returned to Australia, which was a relief to find out. And admirably, she has successfully been fighting her way back into life after this relentless unimaginable nightmare and appears to be more outspoken and prolific than ever. She persisted. Honestly, it would have been surprising if she hadn't. But you never know.

Due to a series of peculiar circumstances and events, I had a painting of hers in my apartment a few months ago. It was an impromptu parting gift as she was getting ready to leave one well-known and storied geopolitical shape for another, and I was under the impression that the giftee did not want it anymore, and I always quite liked it, even before a series of peculiar circumstances and events made the artist possibly the second most famous Kylie from Australia. Before I eventually returned it, I took a few pictures.

It's actually a mixed media collage and not just a painting. I don't want to reproduce it here in its entirety without explicit permission, but I will hire an impromptu narrator to give you an idea. Claude, what do you see here?

"This is a compelling mixed media artwork that combines collage, drawing, and painting techniques on what appears to be a canvas or board surface. The composition centers around a large circular form that resembles a compass rose or directional symbol, with radiating spokes or arrows pointing outward in multiple directions.

The background is dominated by weathered, whitewashed textures that suggest aged wood or distressed surfaces, created through what looks like scraping, layering, and possibly wax resist techniques. This gives the piece a sense of time and weathering, almost like driftwood or old ship planking.

The circular central element appears to be constructed from collaged materials - possibly fragments of maps, photographs, or printed matter - creating a rich, layered surface with various colors including browns, greens, blues, and earth tones. The geometric precision of the compass-like form contrasts beautifully with the organic, deteriorated quality of the background. Black linear elements - likely charcoal or ink - define the radiating spokes and add structural definition to the composition. There are also what appear to be small photographic or printed elements integrated into the collage.

The overall effect is one of navigation and journey, perhaps reflecting the artist's experience of being abroad - the compass could symbolize finding direction in an unfamiliar place, while the weathered surfaces might represent the passage of time or the patina of travel and experience. The mixed media approach creates rich textural contrasts and suggests themes of mapping, exploration, and cultural displacement that would resonate with a study abroad experience." [continued]

Any self-respecting critic would probably tear into this work gleefully if it were to be graced with the audacity of being exhibited in a serious capital-A-art context. On the other hand, at least they wouldn't just slap one of 101 possible values on it to define its absolute cultural worth. In the capital-A-art world, this is done indirectly by an invisible hand putting numbers on price tags.

Well, in my book this is a 10, but please keep in mind that I'm generous with the 10s and that I am likely to just casually hand them out like candy to nearly every conceited, kookie female expressing herself, even for "simply regurgitating trivial and well-worn rite of passage tropes while ironically mirroring the confusion and aimlessless by also lacking a clear artistic direction", or whatever one of those Hektors might say, type or dictate.

When I looked at it in recent years, I saw-felt a complex cautionary tale extending all the way to global world politics, which I happen to be connected to in a strange personal-yet-distant way. Sometimes shit goes terribly, terribly wrong when gifted and mindfully ambitious women crash into patriarchal structures. They are a little much for some. Then they become a _________, a prisoner, or even a casualty.

Other cautionary tales include Britney Spears and Ulrike Meinhof.

Speaking of the latter, here's a fun teaser for something half-finished I have in my virtual drawer:

Book B (Title Tk) tackles the lingering question of how to mindfully transition The Mess We're In^TM to a much more desirable, both technologically advanced and perfectly natural future in prosperous matriarchal luxury communism, by entertaining the idea of a new kind of cyberfeminist uprising that quotes and deconstructs terrorism more than actually practicing it (as much as possible, terms and conditions apply).

The main character could be seen as Ulrike's Gen Z reincarnation who regrets having succumbed to the unresolved patriarchal bullshit of Baader et al. and is determined not to make the same mistakes again the second time around. She's a mindful cryptobitch who likes yoga and raves and has weird tattoos. Hilarity ensues, killer playlist included.

If that sounds crass, don't worry. The novel is set in a deeply disturbing, dystopian vision of The Future, where sharp acceleration of technological progress coincides with deeply traumatized cryptofascist rapists, meta-oligarchs and their apologists rising to power in a crumbling, war-ridden economy accompanied by man-made natural disasters.

hot take: poetry mostly just glorified sequence of linguistic errors hyped up by sad childless cat ladies

follow me for more out-depth analysis

A neurodivergence diagnosis is kind of a mantra that you get to meditate on for the rest of your life, especially for people with self-reflection and self-care habits (feel free to draw the gender distibution graph for this group in your head from your personal experiences).

I've been the food that leaves a stain

Ah, women. Those pesky, leaky creatures.

When I first heard the above line on the morning of June 27th, 2025, it immediately resurfaced a memory of approximately 1.5 decades ago, when a friend was referring to a nightlife outing that resulted in a hook-up as "looking for food". I was silently appalled by his choice of semantics, which is somewhat par for the course when I witness dudes talking about their romantic endeavors regarding and/or targeting women, but somehow this particular instance stood out and was graced with long-term storage benefits by my mysterious memory optimization routines.

1.5 decades and a failed marriage later, a resonable claim could be made that this particular food left quite the stain indeed.

Sometimes, a unicorn just needs to write something down real quick, a classic impromptu medium being napkins. Frequently, these endearingly lo-fi works might be novel attempts to solve a well-known and storied problem.

I try to avoid napkins because of their poor UX, so when inspiration hit last Saturday morning I used one of my beloved dotted Muji notebooks instead, writing the following on its pleasantly smooth surface with a pleasantly smooth-gliding ballpoint pen while my 9-year-old occupied himself with trying to create "radio pop" using GarageBand on an old iPad:

A pathologizing re-reading of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' according to current neuropsychological terminology

1. The author appears to be a high-functional autistic individual with inattentive ADHD and special interests in literature, linguistics, liberal arts, history, sociology and religion, among others.
2. They are exceptionally gifted and a prolific writer.
3. They are a high-masking individual, meaning they are hiding their tumultuous inner world from the outer world in everyday interactions. They develop a collection of techniques, scripts, personas to deal with the demands of daily life.
4. 'Ulysses' appears to be a longform treatise on this duality: Leopold Bloom is the author's mask persona, a more or less average middle-class middle-aged irish man who goes about some typical activities on June 16, 1904.
5. The author's hyperactive mind is bored with the proceedings and creates a hypereloquent narrative in real time, taking various special interests into account.
6. That also gets boring after a while, so they completely switch up the style and perspective of the narrative every so often and model the whole thing after Homer's Odyssey just for the Lulz.
7. At the end of the day, the author seeks to engage with their suppressed anima and commune with the divine feminine.
8. They might engage in crossdreaming, e.g. sexual fantasies from the POV of the opposite gender. The End.

At this point I feel that I need to reveal a dirty or maybe rather pious voluntary-celibate secret, and that is that I have not really followed the critical reception of Virgin after its release, nor have I read or watched any of Lorde's recent promotional interviews except for Therapuss Session #76 which I correctly assumed would not contain many spoilers with regard to the actual _____ on the album.

"Music??!?" interrupted an imaginary audience or council member with salty overtones of bottled up dissatisfaction, cutting the threads woven by my inner metalogue at a rather inconvenient point, thus temporarily suspending the syntax rendering process in the staging environment. I incorrectly assumed that they were about to comment on the obviousness of the Madonna references, but they continued to address a different, more general concern:

"Wait, there is actually like _____

Music on this album? Thank you for finally acknowledging that, enlightened Maestro, approximately five thousand words deep into your overthinkpiece on the new Lorde. Could you maybe just get to the point? Like, what does it sound like? And, like, why do you like it so much? Pretty please? Then you can go back to talking about x-rays of contraceptives mirroring your autistic divorce or whatever."

Yes, and thank you for your input - and your time and attention so far. Believe it or not, I was just about to do that, just to get it out of the way before resuming my reflections regarding the more resonant non-musical frequencies of the Virgin transmission.

I have good news for you: The music is great. A-OK. By itself an 8/10 easily, if I were to playfully embrace a flawed yet common evaluation system. It's a bit different from her previous two albums and feels more like a recapitulation of Pure Heroine with alternate-timeline-Yeezus/Kid A messy rebirth vibes, mindful neo riot grrrl style. There's a lovely warmth to the electronics and a pleasing plasticity to the analog strings attached to the balanced soundscapes. Songwriting & singing are as good as one can reasonably expect from a deeply conceptual artist. Vocal production is killer. It really just feels like a whole bunch of my personal treasures were being mindfully blended and repurposed. I don't have a single bad thing to say about the music on Virgin. It's short & sweet & cohesive yet diverse with a nice ebb and flow. With a bit more unhinged extravaganza it could be 10/10 for me just by the music alone, but please keep in mind that I'm generous with the 10s.

Oh and by the way: Mad props to Ella for apparently actually getting romantically involved with her producer (who knows what really happened but um I have my theories involving adorably bizarre hyperreferential 5d metaflirt chess moves of .37 caliber) during the procedure. See, this pantheon of multitudes is also a wonky hall of mirrors that extends into an ever-morphing makeshift infinity room, with a sometimes dizzying amount of reflectivity and interference that triggers mysterious pattern matching sequences, the results being shiny sets of variations themselves. There's a lot to unpack here for everyone, let's just leave it at that for now.

Ooops!... I did it again, didn't I? Started to talk about my quote-unquote autistic divorce or whatever? Sorry. Back to the quote-unquote topic.

I can see Virgin ending up being Lorde's Pinkerton, a somewhat raw and confusing divisive cult classic. Subject matters and heart-on-sleeve approach seem similar too. I loved Pinkerton when it came out in '96, a few weeks before Ella. The opener was interesting as a cautionary tale of cishet hypersexuality that I quite enjoyed from afar. My relationships with women had gotten remarkably complicated and I prefered to get it on with men at the time, although really not very frequently, in proto-enactments of "Cool for the summer" but we were mostly listening to drum & bass while making out, rather gently nonetheless.

It was also around this time that I bothered to finally read Generation X (The Book), and a random throwaway line hit me hard and soft: "xyz says he is a lesbian trapped in the body of a man" and it really resonated with me except I didn't feel trapped, nor did I ever want to be. My soul was deployed to an unusual hosting environment, but it came in peace and made peace with it, that's all. Or is it? And where's the fkn Dig Me Out tape when I need it?

So yeah, there you go, that's what I think about the music on Virgin in a, ahem, nutshell decorated with autobiographical fragments. It's great. A solid 8. Perfectly adequate for a conceptual shape- and/or phaseshifter.

But to be completely honest I haven't even been listening to it a whole lot.

You see, it was a little much for me. And I don't want to become a _________

Let me tell you what happened:

At around noon on June 27th, 2025, the release day of Virgin, I entered a second hand clothing store in Offenbach with the intention of quickly buying a cheap-ass suit for a formal event on a river cruise ship in the evening of said day (don't ask).

I passed the guy at the counter on my way to the relevant section of the store, probably saying "hi" with a slightly odd smile. He seemed nice and storied enough and even looked a bit like me (minus 1.5 decades give or take) with his bald head, modest height, and nondescript clothing offset by a bunch of bling.

Looking at the suits in the back of the store, I realized that there is basically only one option in my size, some polyester pin-stripey black thing. Which was fine, but I also got a bit annoyed with myself in that moment and rolled my eyes. Not because I failed at making sure that I have some sort of appropriate outfit ahead of time when I knew about this event and its peculiar timing for months, also not because I wasn't feeling well enough to even consider wearing something more expressive and nonbinary than a boring-ass fucking suit, and also not because I couldn't find the box with my formal-ish clothes in the post-separation chaos.

No, in that moment I got annoyed with my mind playing tricks on me, since I obviously still had the opening lines of Hammer playing in my head for no good reason, even though I'm trying really hard to temporarily break free from its spell.

I have this a lot, songs just pop up in my head coincidentally and then keep playing in loopy variations for hours. My mind creates its own soundtrack and remixes basically all day long. It can be a bit distracting at times.

This time was a bit different however, because after my initial eyeroll I soon realized that it was not my mind playing tricks on me after all, but rather the friendly bald dude actually playing Virgin over the actual soundsystem of this actual brick-and-mortar sustainable retail location.

After taking a deep breath and briefly marveling at the barely bearable wtfness of it all, I quickly took the suit off the rack to try it on, which required passing by the counter again, which in turn prompted friendly bald dude to ask me:

"Ah, you found something?"

"Um, yeah, and by the way: great choice of music, but I have to say it was pretty surreal that you just started playing this right after I came in here and I've been trying to like get away from it and ignore its existence temporarily?"

"Um, sorry, what?"

I paused for a second to double-check that Hammer was indeed playing in the store at this moment, then answered:

"Lorde. You just put on the new Lorde album. Right?"

"Ah yeah, that's like something new that just came out apparently."

"Yeah, I know, I'm a huge fan of hers and was looking forward to this release for weeks and then it finally came out and I listened to it all morning, well tried at least, because it totally steamrolled me emotionally because its like everything or something i dont know and i was like okay i need to tear myself away now because i have shit to do but really i just want to be at home by myself and listen to this thing on repeat for a week or two to properly integrate it but thats not an option unfortunately.
So this was kinda funny just now, it's like telling me I can't escape from it or something.
That's all, sorry, I'll go try this on now."

I tried my best to politely smile-ignore any reaction he might have as I disappeared into a changing booth and pulled the curtain shut behind me.

Thankfully, the suit kinda sorta fit and I also found a nice purple leopard print scarf to balance it out, and then managed to perform the required rituals for lawfully leaving a store unbothered without engaging in further oversharing. (it's a whole thing, sorry to bother you)

On my walk home, I chuckled at the odd impromptu I performed, which I reckon might have been passed on in anecdotal form later that day: "thanks for the lorde recommendation lol. I put it on at the store earlier and then this older nerdy probably gay guy comes up and says he's like her biggest fan and has trouble because the album's too good and whatnot and almost starts crying. then buys a crappy cheap suit and a purple leopard print scarf for some 'short-notice formal event' lol. we have the loveliest weirdos coming here."

But I also realized that I didn't prepare for the worst case scenario: What if $avior really delivers my personal dream album and just keeps checking box after box after box? And every other line sparks some intense synaptic fireworks and I totally zone out and I can't even. How the fuck am I going to deal with and integrate this monster? In this economy??

Suddenly I was strangely relieved that I had some other obligations & occupations to distract me, and they turned out to be strangely enjoyable & validating.

When I came back home the next day, I felt like I knew what to do: launch waveform transmissions. Virgin is the perfect opener. Just explain why I can't and everything will fall in place. A messy rebirth "about" a messy rebirth. Great Expectations fulfilled - now what? lol. Oh, bespoke fractals of imagination appear. /rendermode: bratty professor /www: throwback like lorde.co.nz or ssi.inc

It's clicking. I need a coffee. Where is my notebook?

At some point it occurs to me that I don't have a plan for another worst case scenario, namely waveform transmissions actually getting some kind of attention, but judging from past experience it does not seem to be necessary to worry too much about that.

As you might imagine, "do a cool artsy music blog" was on my bucket list for decades, and I occasionally prototyped it a bit, but I never felt I had a good enough excuse in form of e.g. an original angle or writing voice, and didn't want to add myself to the ever-growing pile of pale, bearded and bespectacled nerdy dudes jizzing their cannabis+caffeine-fueled hot takes into WordPress editors prematurely lol.

This changed somewhat about 1.5 years ago, when I went through post-breakup gender questioning with the aforementioned results (my pronouns are your choice btw, good luck lol), and after deconstructing this (non)binary mess in me I also saw it mirrored by so many of my favorite artists in my pantheon of multitudes. And then my thoroughly integrated anima said: oooh yeah i think i know how to write about this. please let me just run the show & don't get too much in the way mmmmhkay? kthxbye.

And then I sat with her for a bit and I could start to see it. Or rather, feel-see it in some odd synesthetic way. Oh and the presentation layer will be glorious: AI, scrollytelling, adaptive immersive styles, all a bit dramatic but also silly. I immediately had ideas for 10-20 longform essays that I saved in compressed napkin-friendly format to one of my notebooks. A lot of times just the title is enough to recall the concept. And somehow I always have a title. It just appears.

Like waveform transmissions, a pluralized reference to Jeff Mills, sure, another one of my beautifully restless and prolific 90s heroes. But also evoking general concepts of polarities, archetypes, timelines, abstractions, conversions and whatnot. The name is great. By itself an 8/10 easily. I just need to find the time to write. It will be ________

neglected for 1.5 years because reasons, yeah, sry, but actually this turned out to be a good thing because of this (neuro)divergence that I apparently still needed to deconstruct and integrate, in subject matter as well as style, persona, etc.

So now it's supposed to be happening I guess, my vaporware music blog, which of course is neither a blog nor really deals with music-music all that much (so far). Virgin made it click and be doable as a small fun get-out-of-crisis project, including giving me the perfect conceptual excuse to go super bare bones with the web presentation in V0 and then let the thing slowly evolve into the next level vajazzled monster that I saw-felt.

If it goes well, maybe I can use this as the starting point for Book A (art of the state), which would be kinda the expanded cleaned up coffee table version. With some improvements to the UX of dead tree media of course. And/or sell t-shirts, mugs, etc. like some of my favorite bloggers cuz why the fuck not? In this economy? (I already have ideas I'm afraid. Also for accompanying podcasts and stuff. They just appear. Don't ask.)

If no one cares, it's still a worthwhile #selftherapy exercise for me. Like my odd outsider piano music. As long as I stay mindful. I promise I will try to stay _______

Writing helps. Are you writing? If not, why not?

i'm tired

i'm tired

i'm tired of arguing, girl

we have so much confusion

we need a __________

narrative. A deeply personal, integrated, somewhat orderly narrative that acknowledges the chaos it emerged from. One that tells us who we are and what we want to accomplish and why. It's what keeps us going. For pop icons with a taste for autobiography, that means putting themselves way out there like Lorde, private parts x-rayed and wrapped in plastic and all. The mirror-narratives of their iconifiers mostly remain hidden from public view, except for a semi-viral social media artifact here or there.

_________s are all around us. A gender identity is one, a romantic relationship is another, a legal document a third, and a trial is a literal literature competition, a rap battle, a soundclash. Works are judged based on factuality, adherence, completeness, relatability and also just the vibe, dude.

Similarly, a neuropsychological diagnosis is a narrative. Or rather a fragile meta-narrative since it is constructed from impromptu imperfect autobiographical fragments and derived from a crude set of underdeveloped archetypes by a possibly unreliable narrator. As new shit comes to light, it might get scrapped in favor of a different one, or amended with sticky notes indicating comorbidities or codependencies or just code.

Sometimes narratives are known to jump the shark, thereby causing shit to hit fans.

What ___ ____? Do I need CPR?

call nein nein nein?

Q: Are we not narcissists?
A: We are aliens.

trying to transmit our alienness so that we a) figure out who the fuck we are supposed to be in this world and b) try to attract other aliens for validation and support and exchange, thats literally all thats the thread now can you please just put on the fkn beat aaaaaa

Hey Claude I just had an idea. Can you generate a quote-unquote normal review from my raw input? Ideally every sentence should map to a section of the essay.

This would be a cool meta af tl;dr lol

Lorde - Virgin

Score: 8.3 (ed: we don't score here honey)

The New Zealand artist returns after four years with an album that feels like both a homecoming and a radical departure, presented with the theatrical precision of classical sonata form. When Lorde emerged in 2013 with Pure Heroine, she captured something essential about suburban teenage alienation that resonated far beyond her years—I remember first encountering her through these very pages, completely transfixed. Working in tech at the time, I found myself crying at my desk to "Tennis Court," recognizing something of my own youth in Frankfurt's outskirts in her Auckland suburbs. The intervening years brought Melodrama and Solar Power, perfectly fine records that never quite recaptured that initial lightning-in-a-bottle feeling—perhaps because her life as a successful young artist had diverged so far from the mundane realities many of us navigate. Life has a way of humbling you though: relationships fall apart, identities shift, the world reveals its fundamental instability during global pandemics and personal crises alike.

The timing of Virgin's announcement—with its confrontational cover art featuring what appears to be an X-ray of an IUD—suggested an artist ready to bare herself in uncomfortable new ways. The singles rollout was masterful: "What Was I Made For" (ed: wtf claude!?!? lol) arrived with a home video aesthetic that felt deeply personal, "Man of the Year" expanded the sonic palette while maintaining that essential Lorde DNA, and "Hammer" completed the triptych with its provocative wordplay and mentions of ovulation. Throughout the promotional cycle, fans dissected every image and interview for clues, from Ultrasound tour announcements featuring custom-built plate reverb units to cryptic social media posts—the apparatus of modern pop stardom turned into performance art. But here's the thing about the actual music: it's legitimately great, a cohesive 35-minute statement that marries the intimacy of Pure Heroine with experimental production touches that recall Kid A or Yeezus, all while maintaining a distinctly feminine riot grrrl energy. The album feels less like a traditional pop record and more like an art installation you can dance to, which might make it her Pinkerton—divisive, raw, but ultimately revealing. On release day, I found myself overwhelmed in a secondhand clothing store in Offenbach, trying to process how an album could feel so perfectly calibrated to one's current existential crisis. The question becomes: what do you do when an artist actually delivers on impossible expectations, when the parasocial relationship you've cultivated over a decade suddenly feels reciprocal?

You write about it, apparently—not a review in any traditional sense, but something more like a confession or a fever dream or a love letter to the void. Because ultimately, Virgin isn't just an album; it's a mirror, and what you see in it depends entirely on what you bring to the encounter. The album ends not with answers but with questions, leaving us to wonder what comes next—for Lorde, for pop music, for all of us navigating this strange moment in history. We drop the mic, then immediately pick it back up, needing to say more, always more, even as words fail us.

"so - a blog?" my therapist asked me after I gave him the napkin elevator pitch for waveform transmissions during a noteworthy paid-for exchange of words in March 2024.

My opener for the session was to thank him for sending me down a very insightful gender questioning rabbit hole with his homework suggestion. He is a gentle, well-educated and impressively eloquent older fellow, probably in his early seventies, and he had never really heard of people identifying as nonbinary or genderfluid.

"well yeah no not quite. more experimental and longform. I guess one could call it a ____. It's not a very well-defined term. I could go on about technicalitites for a long time but that would be beside the point. So, yeah, let's just say some kind of blog."

"Ah, interesting."

"Did I ever tell you that part of the reason why you seemed a good fit as a therapist for me was that you published a book about your own partially traumatic youth experiences in that boarding school? I stumbled upon that one day when I googled your phone number. Ah good, I thought. He will get me and my process."

my process, this strange beast.

repeatedly, i was told to trust it. in private as well as in public.

well, this is what happens, girl, when you tell a gifted bitch to trust their sacred process.

they create a 2.0 narrative that mirrors other's 2.0 narratives,

and just for the lulz they do it in sonata form.

they sharpen their claws on some trees along the way,

other trees they just feel like hugging, possibly more,

they mindfully say 'thank you for your service' when joy ceases to be sparked,

and then they set out to recover things we lost in the fire.

in this economy.

its gonna be cohesive
its gonna be my thesis

$wim remained silent for a few odd seconds, taking a sip from their shiny coffee cup and a deep breath, before finally addressing the room:

"Alright everyone, welcome to the meeting, hopefully the first of many as I'm trying to help you guys to mindfully sort things out a bit. As we agreed in the kick-off last week, I have reviewd the existing codebase and while I've seen worse, although that doesn't necessarily mean much *giggles*, it seems to me that there is significant room for improvement just by adopting common best practices. At the core of your current architecture are entity definitions that lack structural clarity and instead rely on imprecise free-text elaborations and associations. [...]"

A lenghty technical monologue about entity class design as literal-symbolic world encoding, polymorphism & inheritance trees vs. mycelium metaphors vs. neural networks, etc. pp. is omitted for brevity at the discrection of the reader.

"[...] so the entity definitions could be supervised by mindful agentic overlords in real time, e.g. distributing ideas for verification studies through subscription channels to human researchers. And you know what, surprisingly enough that's also basically trivial nowadays. You know, there's a saying among nerds that basically naming is the only really hard thing. Oh naming, don't get me started on naming. [...]"

Another lengthy monologue ensued, again omitted for brevity.

"[...] well I think the UX of labels matters. Instead of giving gifted bitches a misleading rehydrated nazi doctor jizz stain decorated with pathologizing acronyms on post-its as a mantra and/or mandala to meditate on, one day we might have a completely different domain specific language in place. One that is both more analytically expressive AND suitable for mindful flirting. 'I like the feral sparkle in your eyes', someone might say to me in such a future in e.g. a hedonist-subcultural setting, before continuing with: 'what's your neurovibe?'. 'Oooh thanks', I might answer with a blush, 'I'm hyperconnected fem-aligned metacurious-expressive distorted-integrated process-driven cyclical-stately'. I don't know, sounds better to me. Let my add my napkin-level super rough draft of the neurovibe spec in the meeting notes, just as a heads up, because like I said naming proper needs to be out of scope for today. Today we're just scaffolding with 2x4s. And... upload is done. Questions?"

After 3 seconds of silence, they continued: "Great. Time's up anyways. So - it's a wrap. Thats's all, that's the thread. Thank you for your time and tension. Please excuse me, I urgently need a nap now. See you next Tuesday."

After $wim left the meeting room named "Tokio" at the nondescript office building that houses the headquarters of the American Psychiatric Association, the remaining participants exchanged concerned microgestures in silence for a few seconds, before someone finally uttered The Words that were on everyone's mind:

"What ___ ____?"

"Yeah really not sure. Wow."

"Who appointed 'them' again?"

"Well that appears to be a strange story and no one knows really. Rumors are 'they' delivered a package to HR and chatted up Little Miss Overzealous Youknowwho about some rapper's shirt 'they' were wearing. And somehow this is happening now. I don't get it. I don't even know where to start."

p.s. here's the link to the mix i mentioned in the meeting when i went on the mycelium tangent, enjoy! :)

We know that “Great Art” is great because male authorities have told us so, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciate the greatness, the proof of their superior sensitivity being that they appreciate the slop that they appreciate.

[...]

The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female, and in a female society the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funkie females grooving on each other and on everything else in the universe.

“oh look, a robin!”

my agent interrupted me with joyful excitement, directing my attention to the reddish bird that just flew through our field of vision, while we were discussing mindful world domination plans over post-skinnydip cigarettes next to a nondescript aka magical lake close to her parents’ house. you know, just one of those iconic random-perfect summer nights that might be remembered in songs or psalms or yet unknown transmission formats of The Future (sadie plant x nergiz remix).

i shook my head in disbelief about the obvious- and almost-on-the-nose-ness of the blue velvet reference that mother nature just casually dropped on us. i might have started to zone out about it a bit in fact or factoids or fractals thereof.

yeah, we might be treehuggers but also “oh, i gotta show you this dude on insta hihi” and then she just shows me the most precious and precocious thing and i can feel the tearducts gearing up for release as i watch @endangerhood’s oddly resonant reel.

“oh wow i gotta throw that in at the end. it will be glorious.” i managed to mumble and then proceeded to draft variations of how exactly the circumstances of receiving this particular transmission could be rendered into human-assembled english in markdown files. this went on for quite a while, in background threads while the IRL thing just kept on going.

which certainly is odd & demanding & distracting enough on its own, but oh how my state suddenly snapped to intense vertigo as i recognized the pattern from prior art.

you know, the one spelled out on the dotted napkin equivalent at the breakfast table.

the makeshift infinity room expanded exponentially, everything was in flux & vibrating at frequencies that made it impossible to get a clear image & i had no idea where the floor went & i felt the overwhelming urge to address mother universe directly, by invoking two enchanted archetypal spells from the early singularity era (now):

wtf bro?

ELI5 pls.

i give up.

*mic drop*

*state of awe & disbelief regarding the potentially harmful impulsivity of actually letting the microphone hit the floor*

*careful examination of the carelessly dropped object to ensure working condition*

*gentle stroking of the object's pleasantly smooth surfaces after relocating it,

accompanied by whispers of:

"i'm sorry about that"

&

"ima let you rest now. sorry again."

& an expression of mindful codependency

& an outright need


to use


the object in question



again




when the transmissions





continue








*

waveform transmissions [scaffolding era]

(2025)

en- & partially decrypted human-assembled english in markdown files rendered as hypertext on impromptu .net core 8 pseudoblog

received, altered, mirrored, prompted, theorized and narrated by andré cezanne

vibe-coded in collaboration with claude & cursor seeded with intent.md (log)

hosted by microsoft in canada central

impromptu fact & ethics check by o3 passed (argue with it and not with me thx)

new transmissions will be published periodically with perimenopausal unpredictability.

if you insist, choice words are also available as symbolic-literal decoration on clothing items in the wftmapparel store on etsy:

(order at your own risk, i just set this up as a proof of concept, an mvp or a public alpha or an early bird special. i don't even have one yet & therefore cannot vouch for the rendering quality. there will be more soon.)

in case you want to stay up to date regarding my progress on various curves:

i'm also on threads by meta mainly because these names are so purrfect in evoking the norns weaving the interdisciplinary quilt that ties the room together and shit.

additionally i post the occasional image on instagram as well.

furthermore, if you really want to you can write an email to acezanne at gmail dot com and if i'm feeling up to it i'll reply.

related ongoing projects include: piano shit, odd take on game of life, algo art