ID Music: Let's Not Have Hope

The sound of the heart's luminous emotional capacities, shattered by great, perhaps unbearable suffering

Lots going on here at Cosmic Chambo Studio, and all of it is going very slowly. Because of a persistent inability to balance hyperfocus and wandering mindstreams, I’m attempting to extricate myself from the entire Adobe Creative Suite at the same time as moving this Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter from Substack to Ghost. Which means I haven’t extricated myself from anything: I’ve only become frustrated with Ghost, Gimp, Reaper, and Audacity, stuck halfway through a hastily dug escape tunnel leading from Adobe’s sleek SAAS prison into the buggy open source wilderness.

If you are a subscriber you shouldn’t have to do anything if I relocate to Ghost, but heads up that you may receive notification of such movement. And if you are one of my 200 “followers” (?) on Substack, please subscribe if you’d like to stay in touch: It’s free! Or you can help me keep it free for everyone by signing up for a paid sub. This may not happen for awhile, but just in case, now you know.

We have subscribed to the print edition of The Onion, and it’s good to remember how much fun print periodicals can be.

This week is the first time I’ve produced an entire Inter-Dimensional Music broadcast using Reaper – a totally decent digital audio workstation with no AI (I don’t think?) and a $60 license that includes multiple updates. And it only took me three times as long to do it. To celebrate, I’m sending you all an expanded version of the show that will air this Sunday evening at 11pm Central on Marfa Public Radio.

Maybe if I can keep my head together I’ll start posting new shows on a regular schedule? Maybe not every new broadcast needs a 5,000 word preamble? We’ll see!

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Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.11.02
Let’s Not Have Hope Supersession

Image from the requisite Buddhist pastoral sequence in John Woo’s otherwise relentlessly bleak Bullet In The Head (1990).

mixcloud / FLAC

For this week’s practice, we begin with riddim, voicing, and electric guitar shredding from Count Ossie & The Rasta family, before fading into an excerpt from Miles Davis’ 1975 Agharta septet, creating a sound that Lester Bangs¹ described with a Patti Smith lyric, calling it “a branch of cold flame.”

“I have finally learned to think of Miles’ most recent music, and what he has done to his art,” Bangs wrote in “Kind of Grim,” an Agharta essay published² posthumously by NME in 1983, “as taking a jewel, a perfectly faceted diamond as big as the earth shining brighter than ten thousand suns, suppose you took that jewel and with implacable, superhuman, malevolent hands crushed it in on itself, compressed by a force beyond comprehension until it was half its original size, black all over, and a cold and unbreakable lump.”

He continues: “I think of that diamond as the emotional capacities of Miles’ music, as Miles’ heart; my theory re the musical personality of Miles Davis is that he has committed upon himself , his heart, just exactly what was done to that diamond, for reasons having to do with great, perhaps unbearable suffering.

“In Patti Smith’s words, his music now to me is ‘a branch of cold flame,’ and I think that, crushed as that heart is, the soul beyond it has not been and cannot ever be destroyed. Like Graham Greene’s ‘burnt out case’, perhaps that is all that is left. But in a curious way that almost glows uniquely brighter in its own dark coldness; and that, that which is all that is left, is merely the universe.”

From there, we move into Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer’s bass-forward retrofit of Arvo Pärt’s sacred choral music, sweaty secular dancehall, and several varieties of psychedelic ritual trance music, including hybrid and non-hybrid forms of devotional carnatic jazz. We’ll eventually find ourselves overwhelmed by “the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with devotional drones from Kali Malone, Stephen O’Malley, and Lucy Railton.

Familiar language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck, as read by your host. This piece is taken from the “No Hope” chapter of her 1989 collection Everyday Zen. My practice is not always a diverse one: I stick with what works for me, and “let’s not have hope” works for me.

Her teachings on the subject of hope can come across as pretty bleak – when I lived at the Zen Center, the guiding teacher suggested that language about the rewards of “giving up hope” on the Intro to Zen nights was not necessarily an easy entry point to our practice. But when things are as bad as they are right now, this clarity feels like an actual resting place, rather than the “vain hope for a resting place.” This chapter is framed with Joko remembering a friend who committed suicide: It’s explicitly not about giving up on life, but about finding ways to remain present with the pain of existence.

If we practice without hope, what will we get? Nothing, beyond the realization that this life – the experience of breath, body, and the environment – is the only thing that’s real. And this life is nirvana.

I’m reading an abbreviated version on the show. Full text here:

We spend a lot of time looking for something called the truth. And there is no such thing, except in each second, each activity of our life. But our vain hope for a resting place somewhere makes us ignorant and unappreciative of what is here right now. So in sesshin, in zazen, what does it mean to have no hope?

It means of course to really do zazen, to just sit. Nothing is wrong with dreams and fantasies. Just don’t hold on to them; see their unreality and turn away. Stay with the only thing that’s real: the experiencing of breath and the body and the environment.

Now none of us wants to abandon our hope. And to be honest, none of us is going to abandon it all at once. But we can have periods when for a few minutes or a few hours, there is just what is, just this flow. And we are more in touch with the only thing we’ll ever have, which is our life.

So if we practice like this, what reward will we get? If we really practice like this, it takes everything we have. What will we get out of it? The answer, of course, is nothing. So let’s not have hope. We won’t get anything. We’ll get our life, of course, but we’ve got that already. So let’s not be like my friend, failing to appreciate our life and our practice. This life is nirvana. Where did we think it was?

As always, ID Music is mixed “live to FLAC from the yoga mat,” and in this case that means there are a bunch of flubs because the power on my DJ controller kept dying. I left them in as a special “human touch” treat for all of you.

artist – work
Kali Malone - Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.1 (excerpt)
Count Ossie & The Rasta Family - Drums For Wise Men
Miles Davis - Theme From Jack Johnson (edit) (Agharta version)
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Rekondakion
Shackleton - Mountains and Waterfalls
James Holden - Worlds Collide Mountains Form
Gav & Jord - Appiness
Periya Mēlam - Misra Jati Triputa Tala Mallari
Saagara - Earth, Water, and the Holy Groove (The Shackleton Sessions)
Muslimgauze - Blue Mosque
Agriculture - The Reply
Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Samia
Kali Malone - Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.2 (excerpt)

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Previously on Vøid Contemplation Tactics:

1. This newsletter’s dek is taken from an especially poetic summary of Bangs’ essay found on the Agharta Wikipedia entry.

2. I found the full essay archived as photos of the newsprint broadsheet on one of Simon Reynolds’ old timey blogspots called Pantheon.