ID Music: Joko Beck x David Graeber
There’s nothing else in the universe but this, and other Zen remedies for capitalist hexes
Few things boost my spirits more than hearing from old friends out of the blue. The endorphin rush takes on a special tone when the impetus for the unexpected re-connection comes from one of the projects that I document here in the newsletter. This is especially helpful when I’m struggling with one of the (many, many, so many) unfinished essays that I’ve always had a hard time organizing.
As I get older and the world is overwhelmed by the manufactured insecurity that only compounds the existential insecurity1 that is inherent to human life, I’m spending even more time staring in impotent frustration at a screen full of thousands of words of disorganized sentences and a journal full of scribbled mind-maps and thought bubbles. When did this mess stop coalescing into something that makes sense, rather than dissolving into an endless theory-of-everything essay? Is this actually useful, or is it just bitter and confusing navel-gazing? When did I lose the ability to make a living as a writer? Did I forget to take my afternoon amphetamines? Is it because I haven’t been keeping up with morning meditation? Or is this just who I am? And if so, should I try and fix it?
Why not log off and go watch basketball with the cats? Ever since we ditched the TV for a projector, late-night screenings are less disruptive to circadian riddim and snoozing. An illuminated wall’s a lot easier on the eyes than an array of blazing LEDs.
But then a message from my phone’s deep archive of contacts pops up, or a vaguely familiar email address catches my eye in an inbox choked with newsletters (like this one! thank you!) and spam. Once or twice a year there’s actually physical mail!? All life-sustaining pings from good old buds who found me on the late night Chihuahuan Desert airwaves, or who have been rooting around in the Inter-Dimensional Music archives online: fresh episodes here, flashback clas-s-sicks here.
It is a weird feeling to put 15 years into making an FM radio project that hasn’t grown much in all that time, but it’s easier to think of myself as a low-key cult classic rather than a dead-end sad-sack when one of these shows strikes a chord with a fellow lifer sufferah. It’s a reminder that – by definition – hollering one’s voice into the wilderness rarely results in a call-and-response exchange. Especially if you’re hollering naive anarchist interpretations of paradoxical Zen aphorisms over a mix of melodious aquarium sounds and gastric death metal. Thank you, my friends: You know who you are, and I had even more fun than usual making the episodes archived here because you hollered back.
It’s always a relief to stop wishing things were different, to ease up on fighting against the sensation of what is. This surrender to the present moment is all the more worthwhile when “life as it is” means a connection to another human out there in the world, trudging through existence right next to me. The realization that we all suffer means “you are not alone,” and compassion – and rest, or at least a few moments of NBA with feline roommates – follows.
February 2025 Void Contemplations
Anarchist dharma vs capitalist spirituality, pastoral ID Music updates, and other cold comforts
These two episodes archived below correspond to the February newsletter’s anarchist remedies for capitalist spirituality. This time the concepts are more paradoxical, but paradoxes are an essential part of Zen training. Acceptance through confusion is preferable to the black-pilled illusion of cynical understanding: Only don’t know.
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.”
I haven’t been listening to much metal lately, so these episodes lean toward heavyweight ambient and outernational “post-world” sounds. Plenty of new sepulchral death metal and fractalized hardcore festering on my hard drives though, so rest assured and/or consider yourself warned: more Impure Flow sessions on the horizon.
As always, thanks for reading, listening, subscribing, unsubscribing, lurking, sharing this with your nice friends, or keeping it hidden away from your not-so-nice friends.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.03.09: David Graeber
download | mixcloud
artist – work
Kevin Richard Martin - Glisten
WEMA feat. Msafiri Zawose, Photay, Penya - ZEZE (Acoustic Version)
Holy Tongue - The Bigger Tutti
Black Uhuru - Slaughter
Herbie Hancock & Mwandishi - Toys (1972.03.18 - Kantonschule, CH)
Alex Albrecht - Coney
Crooked Light - Pelagic Concavity
Magical Revolution - All My Dreams
Kevin Richard Martin - Evaporate
For this week's practice, we'll start off with acoustic Tanzanian Gogo-fusion, post-punk rollers and steppas, and abattoir roots in dub. From there we'll drift through an artisanal blend of expansive psychedelic and ambient jazz and jazz-like sounds from Herbie Hancock and Mwandishi, Alex Albrecht, and Crooked Light.
Familiar language throughout the broadcast excerpted from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules, as paraphrased and read by your host.
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. The hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?
Capitalism is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore. This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?
David Graeber
Utopia of Rules
Our session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with liquified bass-forward drones from Kevin Richard Martin's Melting Point.
Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.03.23: Joko Beck
download | mixcloud
artist – work
Israel Martinez - Cuando muera (edit)
Six Organs of Admittance - For Gaston Bachelard I
Gnod - Pilgrim's Progress
C6Fe2RN6 - Degree of Dispersion
Saapato - Active Decay (feat. Patricia Wolf)
Annette Brissett & The Wackies Rhythm Force - Hard to Find
Israel Martinez - Cuando muera (edit)
This week’s session includes another selection from Gnod’s most recent transmission of dirtbag devotional chorales, a cryptical dedication to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and psychedelic jazz-adjacent experiments from my longtime dharma brother Nick Terry and Rob Mazurek.
Language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck:
Just feel this.
There’s nothing else in the universe but this. As long as you can do it: three seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever. Just surrender to that sensation. Seems like such a stupid thing to do. See, that’s life. That sensation. That’s all you are. That sensation.
What sensation are we talking about? Doesn’t matter. As long as it’s in the present moment. I’m not saying to fixate on the muscles. That’s not what I’m talking about. Just an open allowing, and nothing in the world but that.
Nothing.
Which doesn’t mean that thoughts may not float through, but no attachment to them. Even two or three seconds changes your life. And the longer we sit, over the years, the reason it’s easier of course is we begin to lose some of our interest in this drama that unfolds out of our minds. This noise that we like to manufacture, constantly.
Slowly our hope, our hope for ourselves that something or someone . . . something’s going to take care of us somehow. So we think . . . and we think . . . and we think. That begins to weaken our ability to just sit. It doesn’t mean that thoughts don’t come up and kind of float through. But they don’t distract [from] this central state of not knowing, just allowing, just being. And when it’s firmly established, then life springs out of that. Instead of out of our attempts in our little mind to figure everything out.
Until it is fairly strong at least, we’re not really living. We are potentially living, but we’re not actually living. And who wants to die and think “I’ve never lived.” And of course if this is firmly, firmly established, then death is no problem. Which doesn’t mean you have to like it. If we don’t understand this – at first even though you listen to it you may not understand it – but this core, if it’s not fully understood . . . well, without it there’s nothing.
Joko Beck
“Bodily Sensation Practice” dharma talk
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with excerpts from Cuando Muera, Israel Martinez’s contribution to the Petit Bardo project, “a series of sound works and recordings in which sound artists work with the listening act in existential finitude situations.”
Martinez describes his composition like this: “A suspension of time, body and, specifically, the ear, through a few sounds that in life we could classify as ‘ambient’ or ‘atmospheric’, without a climax, without much narrative, just that: suspension. . . I know it is difficult, almost impossible, but I would like to be able to listen to it in my last moments of life, in the transition towards Silence. Not being able to do this, I would like it to play in my farewell ritual, or for someone to remember me listening to it.”
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More language from Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity soon coming.
Just to say that this project remains one of my favourite things on the internet. Truly nourishes my brain and heart. Thank you for all this incredible work.