ID Music: Astra Taylor
Non-self improvement and doing less in the age of insecurity
The idea that “doing more is better” is hardly unique to the era of AI slop and digital-only productions, but the urge to apologize for not doing enough, or to flex over doing too much, has been wearing me down. The latter is something that seems more common to musicians, and it feels rude to complain about the artist who opens their bio by talking about the 20 albums1 they’ve released over the last year. I appreciate it when artists offer deep discounts on their full digital discographies on Bandcamp, but I’m happier shelling out for the most recent desert sand feels warm at night collaboration, rather than paying $1 for the full 25 album discography, a multi-GB acquisition that will flood my digital music library with literally hundreds of hours of long-form rainbow-smeared slushwave. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
if you prefer to go straight to the Inter-Dimensional Music, keep on scrolling
Contrasted with the newsletter writer who opens with an apology for not sticking to the arbitrary production schedule that they’ve set for themselves. It’s reassuring that a slower Vøid Contemplation Tactics publishing schedule has resulted in a boom in free subscriptions: More dharma rock and less dharma talk. Though the analytics also suggest that recommendations from the good people at Sermons, Strength Reversed, Range and Basin, and The Burning Shore are helping out. Thanks, friends!
It’s a gross ideology perpetuated by useless billionaires like Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who got yelled at in 2020 when he responded to criticism that Spotify wasn’t paying artists enough by blaming artists for not working harder and producing more product. While many vampire CEOs may be naughty little piggies indulging in bully-cuckolding fantasies2, antisocial nerds getting off when the cool kids tell them to get fucked in front of thousands of twitter followers, this idea is a long-standing component of cultural production.
Whether it’s a parasite like Ek telling musicians to churn out more slop so he can invest millions in AI murder machines; ghoulish tech bros telling their employees to sleep at the office while they get back to inventing new slurs in group chats; Republicans using AI to fast-track images of weeping immigrants in a “Studio Ghibli but fascist” style; Trump cabinet members suggesting that it’s patriotic to work yourself to death with three factory jobs; or breeding-kink fetishists offering Nazi-inspired medals for big natural broods, the message is clear: Do more3. And know that “more” will always be more. More will never be enough, at least not under the current cancerous hegemonic financial system.
It’s a point glossed over in a recent New York Times article about Generation X people who once supported themselves with their creative practices – e.g former magazine editors like me – melting down into existential crises because their once lucrative career was eliminated and the skills they developed became hobbies at best, annoying affectations at worst. It’s not as devastating as the elimination of sustainable incomes provided by unionized blue collar jobs, but at least those folks learned how to fix cars or repair stuff around the house. A solid understanding of AP vs. Chicago Manual style doesn’t have much application out in the garage or down on the farm.
The inevitability of this problem is lost in the NYT piece, but is foregrounded by Ek and other parasites getting rich as cultural landlords charging us to rent art from their brokerage firms, rather than buying it from the artist. Or at least it’s inevitable when art production can only be sustained by commodification, and healthcare is only affordable if your boss is feeling generous. The history of patronage stretches back to medieval Europe and the feudal eras of any number of other regions. It’s been long-established as a system that, paraphrasing David Graeber in Debt, his history of the concept of . . . debt, was never about elevating the artist to the same level as the patron.
This is amplified now as the tools that allowed artists to eke out a living by crowd-funding their next self-published PDF or passing the micro-transaction hat at the end of the livestream are taken over by the landlord class, hoarding more wealth siphoned off from the artist and fan through convenience charges, predatory SAAS fees, or Spotify’s decision to eliminate the already meager royalty payments for songs with fewer than 1,000 streams. This project is just a side-quest in the right wing’s decades-long project of manufacturing insecurity by dismantling social welfare programs and overthrowing any government anywhere on the planet that attempts to extricate itself from capitalist hegemony. Even if we’re speaking metaphorically, is it surprising that a scorched earth policy where there can be no good examples of alternatives to the current economic system trickles down from the substantial work the US does staging coups in Latin American countries implementing worker-friendly economic reforms, to undermining independent artists’ ability to make money?
As a bitter and confused (but mostly just sad) person who is ready to blame myself for not being able to pay the monthly T1D insulin-subscription bill4 solely by typing on the computer – rather than taking the creative industry’s inevitable capitulation to market forces into account – I think about these things too much. But it’s been on my mind lately after talking with friends about the terrible state of the world and usually ending up at the question of “but what should we do.” The non-answer I end up with most often is “maybe there’s not much to do.” Beyond being good neighbors, spending time with people we love, and trying not to make things worse. It’s great to go to protests, but I’ve been going to protests for three decades and even supposedly independent liberal entities like the New York Times continue to support every new conflict that comes along, from the invasion of Iraq to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. When people ask questions like “what would you have done in 1930s Germany” they’re probably gesturing toward things like the Warsaw Uprising, rather than buying toilet paper in bulk, or leaving messages with the interns at your National Socialist representative’s office, asking them to please do fewer National Socialist things. But may as well give your congresspersons a call anyway, if only to waste their time.
On a personal level, that’s where I look to the practical Zen and anarcho-optimist writing that we’ve been listening to on Inter-Dimensional Music the last few episodes: Life is the way it is [boo!!!] . . . but it doesn’t have to be this way [yay?]
ID Music: Joko Beck x David Graeber
Anthropologist David Graeber asks “what are the conditions that would enable us to wake up and imagine and produce something else?”
Zen teacher Joko Beck answers: “There’s nothing else in the universe but this. That’s life. That sensation. That’s all you are. Life springs out of that, not from our attempts to figure everything out.”
On a macro-historical level, there’s a different but complementary reason that I end up back at “there’s not much to do.” It’s something that we’ll get deeper into in future newsletter issues and FM episodes – assuming Marfa Public Radio survives the ongoing Republican attack on their funding sources. It’s the cold comfort that I get from scoring household chores with “parapolitical” podcasts like Ghost Stories For The End of The World.
If there’s something that we could do, some secret action or proclamation that would set the world right, there’s an implication that we – me, you, and most (?) of the people reading Vøid Contemplation Tactics who I assume lack any substantial individual political power such as casting a vote in the US Congress – could’ve done something to stop it. In other words, it’s our own fault for not voting harder. Like how the Earth’s climate is collapsing because we forgot to take the reusable bags to the grocery that one time, and not because of decades of uncompromising corporate resistance to environmental regulation. As Zen teacher Joko Beck, the unofficial patron saint of non-self improvement, says in Everyday Zen:
. . . we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there's some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.
Unlike Zen, it’s not easy to come up with a pithy explanation of parapolitics, especially because it often intersects and overlaps with more outlandish conspiracy theories: Saying “it’s not conspiracy theory” is the easiest way to convince people that you’re pushing conspiracy theories. Or as the leftist parapolitical “independent researchers” say of their right wing equivalent “do your own research”-researchers of the QAnon movement: you’re so close! Parapolitical people also usually don’t want to talk about UFOs, and the adjective “spooky” is neither an antiquated slur nor a reference to the supernatural.
The best I can come up with is that parapolitics is a materialist approach to the history of political and economic power. As opposed to the idealistic suspension of disbelief required to have faith in more spectacular conspiracy theories, or to have faith in the essential goodness of the US government. It’s looking at the shared goals of organized crime, intelligence, and powerful financial, business, and political entities. There are no good guys, and the bad guys are hardly five-dimensional chess geniuses or galaxy-brained protocol-following puppet masters. It’s acknowledging that these groups want many of the same things, and there’s no reason to assume that a CIA director or CEO is more ethical or trustworthy than a drug cartel leader or mujahideen commander. The host of Ghost Stories sums it up with language from The Wire’s Lester Freamon: ”You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.”
I’m trying to write something about how this approach to understanding the chaotic bad news that floods the present moment via rude leftist comedy podcasts paradoxically makes me more optimistic, or at least prevents misanthropic black-pilled-ness. It has something to do with the relief that comes from abandoning NPR’s dulcet tones of centrist acceptance for the host that exclaims “fuck these people” after coverage of the ongoing US/Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign, or exclaims “fuck these people” while discussing the Q-pilled moron who expects a Republican administration lousy with rapists and allied with celebrity sex traffickers to finally reveal the full scope of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sexual blackmail operations.
But due to a lack of editorial input here at Cosmic Chambo Studio, that issue keeps bleeding over into another grand unification theory essay. So in the meantime, these three most recent ID Music episodes feature language from activist and writer Astra Taylor’s Age of Insecurity. Her interview with Tech Won’t Save Us is somewhat easier to digest than Ghost Stories for The End of The World’s excellent 15-hour-long podcast series about the intersections of CIA pro-apartheid operations and the international arms trade with the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.
Taylor provides a helpful distinction between the “existential insecurity” inherent to human life and the “manufactured insecurity” that is giving rise to so much suffering in the present moment. Manufactured insecurity has been essential to creating a supplicant workforce since the aristocracy’s encroachment on public land in 12th Century England, through the industrial revolution, and up to the ways that employer-based healthcare undermines our willingness to participate in political protest. But it all comes down to the reality that “capitalism thrives on bad feelings.” Here’s the paraphrased excerpt from Age of Insecurity read by your host on the Inter-Dimensional Music episodes archived below:
Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less. Consumer society capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design. No matter how much we have, we are ensnared in systems that are structured to trigger insecurity, propelling us to endlessly strive for an ideal that we will always fall short of. This is why no advertising or marketing department will ever tell us that we're actually okay, and that it is the world, not us, that needs changing.
This manufactured insecurity is quite unlike the existential insecurity that is inherent to human life. Where the latter is an ineradicable feature of our being, the former is a mechanism that facilitates exploitation and profit and is anything but inevitable. Capitalism is a kind of insecurity producing machine. Insecurity is not an unfortunate side effect, but a core attribute of the system.
This isn’t to say that the situation is hopeless, or that there isn’t worthwhile work that needs doing. The message is “this is not your fault.” Stopping the Republicans is the job of the Democrats, but the Democrats are very bad5 at doing their job. So if you’re getting by on getting by and also not being a shit head to the people around you: give yourself a break from figuring out what goods to stockpile before the tariffs hit, make friends with your neighbors instead.
This is also a suggestion from a former compulsive doom-scroller that burning ourselves out trying to understand how to fix things by staring constantly into the flashlights that give us an endless stream of breaking bad news is not the healthiest way forward, that “more information” doesn’t help us do more good work. That’s another thing that I enjoy about getting my news – and social media garbage gossip – in digest form via podcast: Even though I might be alone pushing a vacuum cleaner around the apartment, I’m consuming the information simultaneously with analysis and dumb jokes: the podcast as proverbial “friendship simulator.” It’s a reminder that it’s important to not look away, but it’s just as important to not look constantly. It helps when the takeaway is “fuck all of these people.” But the real relief comes from hearing someone explain that everything hasn’t gone to shit because you and I didn’t do enough. We are actually okay. It’s the world, not us, that needs changing.
Now on to the Inter-Dimensional Music . . .
ID Music 2025.03.30: Astra Taylor I
download | mixcloud
For this week's practice, it's an hour of Zen-informed environmental meditations, solemn vaporwave groovers, slow-motion ambient jazz, and a heady blend of gamelan, synths, percussion and dub. Language throughout the broadcast excerpted and paraphrased from Astra Taylor's Age of Insecurity, as read by your host.
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with vintage Japanese New Age meditations from Kenichiro Isoda.
artist - work
Kenichiro Isoda - 水車小屋について (with Stream & Birds)
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - The Milky Sea
days of blue skies - Tfakkira
Kevin Richard Martin / Dis Fig - Silent
Early B - Imitator
Gamma Knife - The Seven Heavenly Elements
Kenichiro Isoda - 水車小屋について (with Stream & Birds)
ID Music 2025.04.06: Astra Taylor II
download/stream
For this week's practice, we'll sit with mournful deconstructed corridos about "the geographic and cultural entropy caused by people and their pursuit of money, power and joy," the long-form recreation of a ceremonial Rasta gathering featuring chanting, Bible readings, and tenor saxophone; and meditative synth compositions for total relaxation and contemplation.
Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with The Chi Factory's “bucolic conception of ambient ecological music.” Language throughout the broadcast from Astra Taylor's The Age of Insecurity, as paraphrased and read by your host.
artist - work
J. Derwort - Bamboo Music (Part 1) (edit)
nudo - soñando jales
Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Grounation
Former Selves - ceremony / patience / many moons
J. Derwort - Bamboo Music (Part 2) (edit)
ID Music 2025.04.20: Astra Taylor III
download/stream
For this week's practice, it's an hour of ambient reggaeton-blackgaze joy, bleak non-self improvement ASMR, and "a sonic-spatial matrix" that "transmutes trans-local experience" using the sounds of Nairobi and Berlin as instruments.
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with, vintage cloud-based private press New Age music from Brent Snyder. Language throughout the broadcast from Astra Taylor's The Age of Insecurity.
Brent Snyder - Excursion (edit)
Luis & Lis Dalton - timmy chalamet
PYRAMIDS - Fools Gold (Mi Vida Ha Ido Pa Atras)
Andy Stott - Science and Industry
DJ Python - ADMSDP (feat LA Warman)
KMRU - CPR-12*
Pole - Rondell Zwei
Brent Snyder - Excursion (edit)
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Except for vaccines! Fewer of those these days as measles becomes endemic in the US, on the orders of the brainwormed eugenicist heading up Health & Human Services.
Not to worry: I can afford insulin because my partner has an OK job at a modest Midwestern public university.
I understand it like this: The Republican mission is to defend fully unregulated capitalism at any cost, while the Democrat mission is to try their darnedest to avoid any criticism of capitalism, the economic system that ensures that the Republicans will always eventually win. Abundance daydreams, interest-free loan to start a small businesses, and a first-time buyers’ tax credit on a house that I can’t afford to buy doesn’t help me getting groceries later this afternoon,.