Someday Your Body Will Disappear

Air-gapped archives, hippy-dippy digi-dub, disappearing bodies, and music for after the end of the world

Hey I’ve got some good news if you’re one of the people who doesn’t listen to the Inter-Dimensional Music mixes because you don’t like the metal parts. Or if you like the idea of the metal parts but you wish the heaviness had more of a WOMAD Festival vibe? Anyone?

Inter-Dimensional Music is now “North America’s Gnarliest Mix of Heavy Mellow, Post-World Music, and Void Contemplation Tactics” because we’re playing more contemporary music from non-US/UK zones and presenting this as a metal-heavy show isn’t terribly accurate anymore. Lately it’s been a lot of sounds from SWANA and the Jamaican diaspora. Still some metal too, especially on the “Impure Flow” episodes, but hopefully more often with weirder percussion. None of this is particularly important during normal times, and it feels especially trifling given the dire state of the world in October 2025. But perhaps “post-world music” will continue to situate this project as an opportunity to take a break without completely looking away? At least now there’s fewer not-so-mellow heavy moments to interrupt those who tend to nod off during the New Age aquarium sounds portion of the program. The 90-minute ID Music SuperSession down below is a pretty good example, although there’s some Hawkwind-inspired hardcore from Singapore toward the end.

If you’re in a hurry to get to the ‘choons, scroll down for links to stream or DL “Inter-Dimensional Music SuperSession: When Your Body Disappears.” Or click below to listen while you continue reading.

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A lot of musicians who get filed under post-rock/punk/metal/hardcore are irritated about that: Maybe the “post” signals an artist is introducing non-traditional elements to the root genre. Like the dub, jazz, and avant-garde hybridization that makes Gastr del Sol, Lungfish, Talk Talk, or Soulfly stand out from their indie, alternative, punk, and nu-metal¹ cohorts. But maybe the metal band just wants to make droney, instrumental metal with folky interludes, not something that comes “after” metal. Russian Circles, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Neurosis are just good and imaginative metal bands that probably have a lot of fans who aren’t into Hatred Surge or Cerebral Rot. Who wants some music nerd to tell people that your band is more evolved than your buddies’ bands?

“World music” is annoying mostly for its use in the global north as a blanket term for everything from Riverdance and Deep Forest to Maalem Mahmoud Gania and Kishori Amonkar. Sorry to be a “the dictionary definition of”-type of guy, but as the first line of the “world music” Wikipedia entry reads, “‘World music’ is an English phrase for styles of music from non-English speaking countries.” All music is dance music, all music is world music, and the only moment is now.

Since people already get annoyed about world music, maybe post-world music is less annoying since it’s a critical affectation? Regardless, it’s a way of acknowledging that we’re playing more music from artists like Azu Tiwaline, Nihiloxica, DEAFKIDS, Duma, and Gnäw, people who are making hybrid forms that draw from a broad range of non-US/UK zones.

It’s music that is weirder, darker, or more experimental than the mushy global fusion directed at the regulars pounding raicilla Mai Tais at the Buddha Bar, or housing gochujang chimichangas at their local Rainforest Cafe. The “post” isn’t referring to the music part of “world music” anyway. I’m going for a doomer vibe: It’s music from after the end of the world. Inter-Dimensional Music and this Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter are tools for non-self improvement and finding equanimity in armagideon, guides for taking refuge in the mutual sufferation of our blackened new age.

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I’m especially aware of the language I use to describe things online at the moment because a friend reminded me a couple weeks ago that I am “referred to and discussed” in the Wikipedia entry for “minimal techno.” Oh no.²

I wrote a lot about techno and other kinds of dance music when I was an editor at URB magazine in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. That’s URB as in urban, not weed, but of course we wrote about drugs too. The official tagline was “future music culture,” but FUT doesn’t have the same mouthfeel, and the music we wrote about wasn’t necessarily futuristic or emanating exclusively from built-up areas. My citation on the minimal techno Wikipedia page still came as a surprise because most of that writing does not exist online. While I have a full run of URB in physical storage, small independent print magazines about hip-hop, raves, and club music are probably just as difficult to find in your library’s microfiche archive as they are to dig out of our very hot and cluttered bat habitat/attic. And the citation isn’t from URB anyway? Wikipedia editors dig deep into unexpected places, and in the ‘00s even freelance writers as bad at pitching as I was could make a couple hundred bucks every once in awhile writing alt-weekly event previews.

The aforementioned “discussion” is a Wikipedia editor typing about how I typed something in 2003 about the influence of La Monte Young and Terry Riley on minimal techno in . . . “Party Arty” . . . a wholly inconsequential and otherwise forgotten article printed in an iteration of the Miami New Times that has been scrubbed from online outside of the Wayback Machine.

This is not something I’ve highlighted in my sparse selected bibliography. Most of which dates back to the era of print-only journalism: articles, interviews, reviews, and essays published by magazines that don’t exist on-or-offline anymore. Most of the things I wrote for RES, Spin, LA Weekly, The Big Issue, High Times, Miami New Times, and Budget Travel remain safely air-gapped, i.e. stored in a place that is not connected to online, beyond the prying eyes of Wikipedia editors or info-mulching large language models. There are also many many people who have written more eloquently, authoritatively, and in-depth about minimal techno so I’m not sure why my Miami New Times fluff from 20 years ago is the preferred citation for the definitive encyclopedia of the 21st Century.

I thought my “Party Arty” lede claiming that white avant-garde artists “invented disco” was obviously a cheap provocation? Regardless, at some point someone editing the minimal techno page went on to accuse me of ignoring the Black roots of techno, which was very disappointing because in this short and silly article from 2003 I wanted to make the point that techno and disco have more to do with dub and Detroit than ‘60s avant-garde dorks, an acknowledgement that bumping and grinding to Steve Reich would require more than “a basement, a red light and a feelin’.” This part of the Wikipedia page has been edited since I last visited a few years ago. Which is great because while I sometimes have bad feelings about being a has-been writer whose career disappeared, it would be an absolute nightmare to be remembered as a pretentious racist in the encyclopedia.

This was also ironical since as the editor of URB I wrote dozens of hyperbolic editorials accusing other people – pretty much anyone who used the words “electronica” or “I(ntelligent) D(ance) M(usic)” – of erasing the Black and queer roots of techno and house music. I was young and angry and insecure about being a straight white Midwestern ex-pat editing a Los Angeles-based magazine about hip-hop, raves, and dance music culture. A former hardcore punk poseur and recovering Evangelical Christian, converted by the gospel of club music after spending a year running around southern England with a merry band of crusty woodland squatters and druidic lesbian bikers.

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I was thinking about those UK pals from 1996, the year I spent at the University of Kent at Canterbury, while listening to Ullulators’ “Simply Conscious Dub” and “Eternal Now,” a reissued 12-inch from “the UK’s free festival³ dub pioneers” on the Toronto-based Spiritual World label. Ullulators make drippy digi-dub as fragrant and vibrant as the still-damp tie-dye stain on the single’s label. It has a wide-eyed drift specific to pre-millennial chillout tents and right-to-roam soundsystems broadcasting from behind moonlit hedgerows. The sort of “ethnic fusion” that is the privilege – for better and for worse – of curious British subjects coming up in the imperial core.

The goin’-to-goa-dub revivalists at Spiritual World don’t make any Fluxus connections, but they’re quick to declare Ullulators place in an avant-garde lineage, suggesting their wonderfully dopey fusion “evokes the kosmische tradition and aligns with the spatial sensibilities of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4.” Which helps me feel a little better about the whole “Terry Riley invented disco” thing.

Spiritual World is good at hyperbole, especially when it comes to outernational proto-rave music of the ‘80s: I first encountered the label through N1_Sound’s Mantras EP, a reimagining of the two mantras on Cabaret Voltaire’s deceptively titled 1980 album Three Mantras. N1_Sound’s versions are described as “a dance floor stepper that embraces white noise,” “funked-out waka guitar-pop,” and finally “conga rhythms smear[ed] with distant electro-plucks and lush erratic synth pads to create an off-world alien soundscape for our extraterrestrial brothers & sisters to enjoy as a token of our appreciation while they are stationed among us.”

The original is something a bit more clattery, in the vein of old-school 23 Skidoo-style “tribal” industrial. Spiritual World says that “Cabaret Voltaire’s Three Mantras might be the least known, most influential record of all time.” Yowza!

Spiritual World’s reissue makes the Ullulators look quite sophisticated, so you might not have any idea how beautifully corny these guys are if you don’t visit their Bandcamp page. Their deep catalog features many more shreddy guitar solos than you’ll find on an Astralasia or Rabbit in the Moon collection, along with a mish-mash of chanting and singing that is casually non-specific as to the ethnic and/or cetacean groups from which it may or may not have been appropriated. A well-intentioned vernacular attempt at post-colonial world music perhaps, but a ways to go before decolonizing world music.

I like a lot of this stuff, and if you’re intrigued by the idea of Mad Professor⁴ taking on the Windham Hill catalog, you might enjoy it as well. Make it past the title, and “Duck Nipples” from Monads of Mangonia could be The Ocean Blue remixed by Adrian Sherwood. However it’s fairly obvious why Spiritual World went with the gentle dubbing of Beyond The Gates of Ull’s “Simply Conscious” for the reissue treatment, over, say, “Sloshy Sausages,” which begins with 30 seconds of digitally-distressed gargling before improbably shifting into something closer to a Soundgarden demo tape.

The Ullulators, via Discogs

As for their look, The Ullulators are outfitted exactly like we hoped they would be. A crew that would’ve been right at home passing a comically elongated UK-style origami spliff around the grotty living room in Kent with those friends that I haven’t heard from in 30 years. Right down to the bugged-out eyes, mohawk-mullets, and fingers up their noses.

I only have a couple disposable camera rolls from the year I spent in Canterbury. And my pals were involved in a lot of black market commerce anyway, so I don’t have much documentation from this foundational chapter of my youth. As I recall from an adventure that took place years later where I had to help an obnoxious magazine photographer escape the outlaw weed farm where we were working after she went off her meds and started threatening dangerously paranoid armed people, taking snapshots of people doing crimes is not always the best way to make new friends. As my friend Dave – who did chronicle some of those adventures, albeit with the details obfuscated – puts it, “Soft criminals are especially tense about getting put in cages by men with guns.”

I was introduced to these Hash Queens of County Kent after asking one of my housemates where to score weed. My inquiry prompted an unannounced afternoon pop-in from a woman with a shaved head, draped in purple robes. Before she would tell me where she lived so that I could come and buy chunks of compressed cannabis resin, she wanted me to know that she knew where I lived, in case she ever suspected me of sharing her address with uninvited parties. I was extremely intimidated and very excited.

Because I was good at being quiet, open to being endlessly ridiculed, and knew how to operate the kettle, I was usually allowed to linger on the couch after securing my resinous plant medicine. Sinking into the musty cushions in my Jarvis Cocker cosplay, kitted out in a thrift store mod leather jacket, black turtle neck, and oversize glasses, watching the crew tease and torment the common people as they came to get sorted for hash and grass. In addition to the usual tea on offer, in the winter months I learned the proper ratio for mugs of “hot Ribena,” boiling water mixed with syrupy blackcurrant juice concentrate.

I had a hard time finding my place in college, trying to decide between anarchist punks and fratty Phish-heads, the common ground being an enthusiasm for cannabis and hiking. I hoped my time in the UK was going to be an escape to a Britpop drum & bass fantasyland, not understanding that Canterbury is a world away from Camden and Bristol. The reality was closer to a wholesome Trainspotting epilogue where the gang finally kicks junk and retires to the countryside, or a reboot of Performance from the The Young Ones writers. The unexpected hospitality of lesbian bikers and goofy dreadlocked forest-dwelling Dutch tinkers covered in comedy tattoos – my favorite was a green skeletonized hand with the text “Legalize Cannibals” inked underneath – set me on a path that I’m still walking today, a middle-ground between freak constituencies, happy to stand with crossed arms on the perimeter of Dead Congregation circle pits or Dead & Co. drum circles. One of the advantages of outlaw drug culture is that if you want regular access to the contraband, you gotta learn how to keep your head when you’re off your head in a weird stranger’s living room, regardless of what’s playing on the stereo.

My year in Canterbury ended with the traumatic and untimely death of one of our group, which is one of the reasons I lost touch after returning to the United States and moving to Los Angeles. Her decision to leave us gave my long strange overseas study trip a heartbreaking end point. I’m mindful of indulging in these reminiscences too often. It’s a testament to the weight of memory that finding my only thirty-year-old photo of my dead friend in the arms of her wife still produces a few quiet tears. Followed by a memory flash of a gap-toothed Mongolian biker club chaplain, the Motörhead-roadie-looking brute who mentored us through the brain-scrambling medicine circle of her chemically-indulgent wake. Memories that recede, but remain potent even as micro-doses. Selective reminiscence, impressionistic recollections of grief and the joy that preceded it, a kind of post-mourning.

A bunch of those crusties had already opted-out from a grid that was much easier to drop off of in the ‘90s. I don’t have Facebook, so people that I’m not actively in touch with disappear from my radar pretty quickly, regardless. A few years ago a dear old friend – my girlfriend at the time I lived in Canterbury, and the only person still in my life who can confirm that it wasn’t all a dream – found one of the robed druid hash queen’s social media profiles. Who knows how far removed someone’s actual life is from their online presence, but this bohemian diva was now working a boring-sounding job at a bank or an insurance company in a larger city far from Canterbury. Her hair was longer, and styled conservatively. She looked tired, in the way that most of us look tired after making it through a couple decades of trying to live differently, the weariness that arises from making attempts to feed ourselves and pay the rent by doing work that is in line with our personal values. I wonder if she would’ve looked tired in a different way if she’d been wearing home-styled pagan robes instead of a business suit, or if her wife hadn’t decided to end her life so suddenly, so long ago.

I don’t know if she’d want to hear from me, and I’m not sure if I want to hear from her, but I hope she’s happier than she was when I last saw her. Sometimes it’s good to forget, and to be forgotten. It helps to remember that one day it all disappears.

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In related news about forgetting and disappearing, the complete run of Arthur, the singular boho-subculture broadsheet where I did most of my writing in the ‘00s, is now available online as PDF files. Freeloaders like us can find individual issues at arthurmag.com. If you’re more methodical about rooting around in digital archives of musty newsprint broadsheets, Arthur’s editor-turned-preservationist Jay Babcock writes in his Landline newsletter: “Academics, students and other scholars who are interested in using Arthur in their research can find the complete run of the magazine at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale.”

I’m proud enough of the dozens of self-righteous ham-fisted editorials I wrote for URB to have hauled my boxed-up archive across Southern California to Far West Texas and finally up several flights of stairs to the attic here in East Central Indiana. But in the three decades since I worked there, I’ve only opened those boxes a couple times, usually when I’m procrastinating during a move. Sure, the moving truck’s gotta be packed by tomorrow morning, but I wonder what I had to say in my review of Dj WAlly’s The Stoned Ranger Rydes Again from 1999? TBH it holds up pretty well!

I am more stoked that my contributions to Arthur are being preserved by a group of music journalism hoarders on a medium more durable and easily distributed than newsprint. There are a couple things in the new PDF archive that have otherwise disappeared from online, including “Dr. Moustache and The Egyptian Gentleman,” a two-part travelogue about the month I spent with my brother in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. I don’t talk with my brother often, and considering he’s a respected historian at Columbia University with several prestigious books to his name, I don’t know how he’d feel about being reminded of his perpetually unemployed older brother’s account of what happened when my Imodium wore off during our visit to that Hezbollah museum in the Beqaa Valley. But unless I decide to repost it here, you’ll have to search the index and download a PDF to find out.

My first Arthur contribution was a very long story about an art-car race in Humboldt County. “A Slow Strange and Grueling Thing” appeared in the March 2004 issue.

My Arthur debut from March 2004 – “A Slow, Strange, and Grueling Thing: Venturing behind Northern California’s Redwood Curtain for the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race” – is still one of the best things I’ve written. I was not alone in this assessment, as it was included in that year’s Best American Non-Required Reading anthology, albeit as a line-item in the post-script of also-rans.

I was more honored that some OG Humboldt County freak folks tracked me down years later to ask if they could excerpt language from the 20,000-word travelogue for a play they were writing about Kinetic Sculpture Race founder Hobart Brown after he died. It means more to me that a few aging hippies and backwoods dropouts found something meaningful in a story that I wrote about their dead friend in a free underground newspaper. It means more that someone read those lines aloud in a community theater in Ferndale one night, than it does to be included in a momentarily prestigious but now-forgotten anthology available from any used bookstore for a buck or two, or cited as a techno expert in the encyclopedia. Likewise, I’m relieved that the URB editorial where I suggest that Deleuze & Guattari invented techno has disappeared, or at least remains forever air-gapped.

Reminiscing over a few greatest hits feels justified now that I’ve hit the half century mark. But as I harbor fantasies that a repost of one of these dusty 20-year-old long-form articles about hip-hop artists, compost wizards, or making small talk with Syrian border guards will win Vøid Contemplation Tactics a few more subscribers, it’s good to remember the importance of forgetting. For me, there is more value in being remembered in an unexpected note from a person who didn’t forget a story I wrote a lifetime ago, than there is in an impressive number of people clicking the subscribe links in this newsletter.

Eventually even those singular memories will go, every day another day closer to the day when my entire body of work, and my actual body, disappears. As the ever-cryptic Zen Master Seung Sahn says in his trademark broken English in this excerpt from a video of unknown provenance:

Good situation, good society, everybody has much money, good car, good house . . . good situation. That’s wonderful. But good situation - bad situation. Bad situation – good situation.

Only relax, “Oh meditation’s not necessary! Why suffer?”

That’s bullshit!

If everybody has good food, good life, then dying is no problem. Why have meditation?

But, when your body disappears . . . not wonderful, not wonderful. Someday your body will disappear. At that time, what can you do?

Inter-Dimensional Music
Someday Your Body Will Disappear: October 2025 SuperSession

mixcloud / download

For this extended newsletter-only supersession, it’s a hypnotic post-world music flow of dubwise devotionals for Mauritanian pilgrimages, uplifting ashram ambiance, melo-rhythmic trance music offering guidance for difficult times, drippy deconstructed lover’s rock, bleak psychedelic hardcore from Singapore, and the sounds of “humid synth sequences chewing on bone-rattling acoustic percussion and dissociated traces of humanity.”

In keeping with the theme of dissociation, we’ll hear language throughout the broadcast on preparing for the day when your body will disappear from Zen Master Seung Sahn.

Our session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with an excerpt of field recordings and tape loops from William Basinski’s studio in 1982.

These episodes aired in edited form on Marfa Public Radio in August 2025, where you can catch Inter-Dimensional Music on the Chihuahuan Desert airwaves each Sunday evening at 11p CT. As always, Inter-Dimensional Music is mixed live-to-FLAC on the yoga mat here at Cosmic Chambo Studio. You can also find many of these selections in the library at bandcamp.com/interdimensionalmusic.

artist – work

William Basinski - 92982.2
The Horrors - I Can See Through You (Blanck Mass Remix)
Hype Williams - businessline
NKISI - Pona Nini

Nilotika Cultural Ensemble - Praise Jah
LLWCH - The Gold Translucent (Part 1)
Æolus - Ecstasy
Surya Botafasina - Ashram Sun Sai Anantam with Nate Mercereau
Akira Umeda & Metal Preyers - Olhos De Faca o
SEEKERSINTERNATIONAL - MeetMeAfter
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force - Nimzat
Light-Space Modulator - Her Name
Leslie Keffer - Fallow
Star House - Black Tape (side two) (edit)

Sial - Kita Dilahirkan Untuk Melawan
Star House - Black Tape (side one) (edit)
William Basinski - 92982.2

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Previously in Vøid Contemplation Tactics . . .

1. Does the coincidence of nu-metal and post-metal suggest a heavy music multiverse? Perhaps I will soon recirculate the lost ID Music “nu-age metal” special, an hour of sounds from Soulfly, the best – and only? – nu-age metal supergroup.

2. More importantly, I think it’s very charming that my friend – who knows a lot about minimal techno! - was reading the minimal techno page on Wikipedia.

3. For more sounds that use nostalgia for the heady early-days UK raves to create something wide-eyed and beautiful for the modern age, Imagine This is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities is a welcome dose of full-spectrum optimism from friend-of-the-show James Holden and The Animal Spirits.

4. If you want to trigger an infinite “techno <-> dub <-> disco <-> kosmische <-> disco <-> dub <-> techno” loop look no further than the Mad Professor remix of Alex Kassian’s Balearic edit of Göttsching’s canonical proto-techno kosmische improvisation. Vinyl on Bandcamp if you’re feeling spendy, but Boomkat has the FLAC for £3.95.