Thoughts on &friends's "folx"

"[...] folk voices summoned from beyond the grave are made to sing new songs [...]"

I don’t know how to string this together into a coherent review, so I’m going to be posting my thoughts in a broken-up out-of-order series of observations that hopefully can at least approximate an explanation for what this thing is and why it's special.

1. There's a bizarre thematic tension pulling folx, full force, in dozen directions at once, but maybe most notable are the fact that a) it's a glitchy dance-pop album at its core (it has hooks for days, it's unironically hugely influenced by AJR, and it's the catchiest thing I've heard this year) and b) it's suffused with mourning. Almost every aspect seems to be adjacent to, pointing to, or otherwise connected with a kind of grief. Mark Fisher's death lurks over every facet of the work; Sophie samples pop up with the frequency of producer tags (I’d be hesitant to read too much into this, but the extensive sampling of her work alongside Can The Circle Be Unbroken does point strongly towards the emptiness left by her absence;) and obviously, JC's father is an implied presence throughout the whole thing. I’m hesitant to talk about this last point because it’s so personal and I don’t want to seem like I’m reviewing someone’s expression of grief, but knowing the context of the album with regards to JC’s father, as well as the constant quoting of Fisher's work, hangs a heavy presence of absence over the release which thrashes oddly against the tone of the albums genres.

2. In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is not an album about Anne Frank; her life and her story got woven into the album's free-associative dream logic along with a dozen other recurring symbols and motifs. But she does serve as a kind of thesis for the release, or at least an identifying, easily decipherable statement of its general ethos. ITAOTS is grapples with the idea that someone with as much inner beauty and spiritual strength as Anne can exist, and that millions like her do then and now, and that blind forces pave over them unthinking of the loss, alongside countless others, and both of these things coexist with utmost intensity, in both history, at the present, and within human nature itself. Folx references ITAOTS at least three times; borrowing Jeff Magnum's voice like a mask (on We Shall Overcome), sampling it (on Do I obey economic laws), and extensively semi-quoting Jeff on The death model, literally spelling out with almost comical bluntness the idea that I was writing this paragraph to point towards - [aeroplane : anne :: folx :: mark]. The album is not about him, but his ghost haunts it consistently. Aeroplane was about the universal concepts of beauty and tragedy that Anne's life and death represented to Jeff. Folx is about the concepts of alienation, loss, cultural lingering, and mourning that Mark Fisher's life and death represents now. I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it approximates the situation here.

3. I think part of the divisive reaction to folx is because it's either a masterpiece or it's a disaster to any given listener. (Oversimplification again, but one I’m making for a reason.) If you see the pieces being laid down here (and click with the vision they pull together,) it's an endlessly rewarding, deeply felt labyrinth, a rhizomic mesh laced with dance-pop hooks to make it easier to swallow. That said, it only works as a masterpiece - it doesn’t really work as just another album. In the context of a masterwork, its extravagance makes sense, otherwise its a perplexing trainwreck if you fall on that side of its reception. Essentially, it is a self-aware masterwork and actively aims for that status; I’m reminded of Octa Sheffner’s Lux in that regard.

4. There's a lot of discussion surrounding it, and one thing I'm surprised to hear no one bringing up is how emotional this is. I've cried to most tracks on here at least once, and some ("Both Sides Now," "Can the Circle Be Unbroken," etc.) get me all foggy-eyed basically every time. It's entirely possible this reflects on me more so than the release, but I don't think it does. This is a go-to crying album for me.

5. The lyrics are unlike anything else I've heard (even ignoring the strange method of generating them, which seemed to involve a kind of mad-lib title coming first, followed by writing a song vaguely adhering to the hyperspecific perspective it creates, while working in elements of the folk song the song takes its title from.) The dissonance in the lyrics is jarring and oddly disarming. It’s about work; almost all of the lyrics here are about various forms of labor. They're about fantastic creatures and monsters engaging in actions for specific ends with a striking disconnect between the entity on hand (and sometimes the unusual action they partake in,) and the utter mundanity with which it is presented. It's like seeing a griffon working retail, with no special attention or value or anything attributed to it. It just works here. (I’ve seen discussion about whether folx is furry-related or not, and that’s not a requirement but it's a pretty succinct summary of the situation here, taken to a cartoonish extreme: an internal world populated by every form imagination can conjure, an external world that's banal and to which the internal world has little to no relation.) The lyrics are also, frankly, distressing. Most of these fantastic creatures that populate its pieces of narrative are either exploiting others, mistreating themselves, or being exploited or mistreated by others, with no sense of malice or even cruelty, just as an affectless product of their job. It's deeply dysfunctional and surreal in its sad banality. This could be read as a thinly-veiled mirror of experience of many, especially in the digital age; people are freed to internally become these alien things and internally sprawl into all the vistas of human emotion and feeling and identity, but are just human all the same, supporting those above them and clambering all over those below because what the fuck else are they supposed to do under the circumstances they are in and are forced to operate within.

6. The juxtaposition of silly and heavy/tragic subject matter (out-of-context MLP voice lines selected and presented out of context to mirror Fisher's ideas [the loss of potential futures, capitalism-induced guilt], Sonic the Hedgehog as parallel to Nick Land, the aforementioned fantastic monsters and their bleak labor environments, etc.) is very carefully and (IMO) tastefully used. "Cute/silly"+"edgy/dark" is a time-tested (and largely exhausted) trope, but the tense superposition of emotional states invoked here, trapped between silly and joyful and often downright shitposty, and sincerely emotional and heart-felt (if not -broken), is more than the sum of its parts and forces you to engage with the album on its own territory and with its own logic. It looks like a fucking mess outside of that logi, whereas within it, the juxtapositions work exceptionally well. Neither negates the other. The year is 202x and you hang out with your friends and do things you find fun and whatever, and all the time you know there’s looming crisis points coming in an uncertain but probably single-digit number of years, and neither negates the other. 

7. This has nothing to do with anything else, but Take Me Home, Country Roads sounds like something from Garden of Delete by Oneohtrix Point Never. Hypergrunge isn’t dead, I guess.

8. The album's approach to cultural revivalism is clearly very carefully thought out and careful. It wears Mark's lamentations for a zombified culture on its sleeve, and yet constantly peruses the past for source material in a way that feels like a manic research project, drawing on each cultural pointer and weaving them into a network that sounds nothing like its source material. Most plunderphonics, sample-based works, or highly aestheticised 2020s cultural revivalist electronic albums, or basically any post-modern art that relies heavily on self-aware jabs at pre-existing culture, are equivalent to quilts in their patchwork approach. This is not derogatory, I love a lot of that stuff. I indulge in cultural pastiche often. That said, to extend the metaphor, this is a web, not a quilt. The ways it connects its gathered cultural pointers seems quantitatively different.

9. It's a violent, bitter, tongue-in-cheek, silly, maximalist celebration of what music can be and can make you feel, without losing sight of the sensation of slow collapse, stated or otherwise, that underscores the cultural strata all art now stems from. It's the first album produced in the 2020s that actually deals with what the decade is, and I feel confident in making a statement that bold. Maybe that's why it hit me so hard: it put into words the feelings saturating 2020s culture but which almost nobody is acknowledging or engaging with in any actual way.

10. There’s some Freudian concepts, I believe, about linking love and death, eros and thanatos, and the former being motivated or connected to the latter in a psychoanalytical sense. If you take the perspective that conventional love is connected with an awareness of individual death, this album seems to propose another kind of love which is connected with awareness of extinction. I have no real way to justify this, but I have a tendency to fixate on existential risk and folx seems to play with its emotional perspective in a way that seems related to that. (Maybe update or remove this part later.)

11. The usage of AI voices is very interesting and a tough thing to analyze. It's very tongue-in-cheek and self aware; JC and the others obviously have the skill to do all the vocals here, there's no need to put on dead (or living!) musician's voices like ghastly masks and they know it. If we're now going to be plunging into a zombified future of 90s revivals and 00s trends (and now the kids are romanticizing the 2010s in an increasingly tight loop of feedback and regurgitation) - if we're gonna be cosplaying our own recent past instead of attempting to project a meaningful future, we should deal with how ghastly that is. The discomfort of the AI voices is just what we're already doing, wearing recently dead culture's flayed skin; this just makes you actually face that fact. The voice cloned conversation with JC's "father" is a good thesis statement for their usage of voice cloning in the album: "I didn’t consent to this. You don’t have permission to use my voice. You’re talking to yourself." Shoving your words into Jeff Magnum's voice is a bizarre and offputting thing to do and friends& is acutely aware of this as they do it. It opens some questions worth considering about sampling and ownership, cultural recycling, our degree of identity with and living through the personalities of others. Vague parallels exist between the mostly public-domain folk songs the album is built around in which everyone owns them, and to what degree that extends to modern culture, and how far you can push that idea until it gets too uncanny-valley-ish. Nobody owns a folk song (at least until the influence of labels and big business, another major point here); in the current era, do you own your voice? Is it right to give up your "self" as artistic material to others, in the spirit of the folk-culture sharing of oral traditions? I don't think the main point the cloned voices are making is about AI itself (but that's definitely there - if this album has anything, it's layers,) and more so about cultural lingering (I want to say hauntology but I’m always worried I’m misusing that word,) and the degree to which past culture and media influences/infests current culture ("the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present,") in both pop culture and indie music. Pitchfork and /mu/ are obviously heavy influences in friends&, JC acknowledges both, and the (slow breakdown of the) interplay between art-makers and the surrounding magazines, websites, imageboards, subcultures, etc. [unfinished part] Whenever we listen to these canonized albums, they play though us; we project our own perspectives onto the singers, and put their words into our literal mouths. This is normal and the way we've been interacting with music since forever. The stolen voices used here are an opaque and provocative way of playing with this concept, one that vaguely gestures at an array of questions and avenues of discussion but without really providing answers. I can forgive engagement-bait when it comes from a place of good intentions.

12. Folx is horrifying, blissful, incredibly fun, silly, the highest-effort shitpost to date, obviously heartfelt, deeply distressing, and incredibly comforting. It's a patchwork with a million pieces I will spend the next year at least tracing over. Folx is a masterpiece and I don't expect literally anyone I know to like it. JC, he would be so proud. Thank you for this.

Final thoughts: this album is a bottomless pit.

Excerpt from something I forgot

"I pass over your letters and I wonder where you are. You left so little for me to remember you by, and I couldn't dream of how I would reach you now, where you might have gone to. I never went anywhere, if you wanted to find me. The idea that the hand that wrote these words still moves and lives somewhere out in the great wide world settles over me on nights like this, where the trees outside my window are still and spike into the darkening sky and I can't help but realize how everything seems to be illuminated only by the gradually fading light of those days gone by. I don't remember the last thing we talked about, or quite why you had to go. It always seemed to matter just as much to you as it did to me - I try to tell myself that what we shared must not have been quite so important to you as it seemed, but I remember how it felt, and how you held me, and I can neither explain nor forget it. I know all things must flicker out like the sunset giving into another winter night, but it feels like those days never ended, in some far-off sense, like those sunrays we felt and moments we shared burn on somehow. On nights like this, I can't do anything but flicker through the pages again and stare at them empty-eyed, whether its the actual papers or little echoes I still hear. I should go to bed."

Musings

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a vaguely defined cluster of largely online art scenes coagulated themselves out of the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem, defined by a post-internet (the term that I will be describing, however inaccurately, to this scene/phenomena as a whole) aesthetic sensibility, awareness of and active usage of both the cutting edge digital mediums then available, a deliberately oblique usage of older cultural artifacts, and a Tumblr- or blogosphere-centric nature. I would describe vaporwave, seapunk, witch house, bloghouse, some aspects of what has been retroactively termed “indie sleaze," early epic collage, and bubblegum bass as various facets of this general nebulous trend.

I’ve spent my entire life basking in the echoes of this subculture, poorly defined as it might be. In spite of its ostensible current nonexistence - its inherently archived nature as opposed to a living phenomena or a scene one can now live through - even its echoes carried more vitality and light than almost anything happening at present in the form of a coherent large-scale “scene.” I’ve spent my entire life talking to digital ghosts - uploads from 2010, the remnants of tumblr blogs and subcultures that no longer exist, every piece of art with an implied “last online X years ago” tagged onto the end.

It’s hard to miss the fact that, in an attempt to seem cutting edge via the usage of then-relevant technological visuals and references, so many of these art pieces accidentally fossilized themselves within 201x permanently like a spider in amber. Glass Popcorn rapping about Google Plus in 2012 was a then-relevant, tongue-in-cheek reference to something that was ubiquitous and hypermodern, something that related to nothing but the immediate present; it’s important to realize that the post-internet scene was, at the time, completely of its era. The symbiotic relationship between the music scene and the blogosphere substrate it grew from in real-time is essential here; for every song, album, and musical trend, you have to imagine a cluster of dozens of blogs posting about it, a real-time conversation being had across now-obsolete or buried social networks.

In the screen-recordings that make their way into these videos and cover arts, they are permanently burned into their respective year, almost identifiable down to the month based on the webpage layout or MacOS edition being used. What was supposed to look like "now," like the then-present, like the real-time experience of watching teenagers and modern artists on tumblr run circles around establish magazines and build their own, cooler pop culture continuum, now just looks like November 2010. It now looks like a memory, and the infectious, enthusiastic vibrance of it, the incredibly aliveness of it, is poignant even despite the fact that its obviously just echoes, and that much of the metatextual part of the whole subculture (the surrounding substrate of Tumblr and music board posts) are now either buried or gone. Obviously, all past-decade subcultures and scenes were lived through in the moment, but they were lived IRL, sufficiently separated in time as to not fall into the uncanny valley of semi-relevance that the post-internet scene (2009-2016?) does, which was lived URL, and thus we can wander through it's ruins (and arguably do, every day, given that its influence is so omnipresent now as to be almost banal.) It feels like it was built to linger.

"deleted, hope you got what you needed"

Pointless ramble

I'm by no means an expert on the topic (despite my efforts thus far,) but it seems like the recognizably furry artstyle evolved out of a mixture of mainstream western cartoon animals (Disney, mascots, etc.), 80s anime (imported and tape-traded in the CFO days, which led to heavy overlap in the early funny animal fandom and early American otaku community,) and underground comics (Fritz the Cat comes to mind as an obvious reference point, but I think there was bigger influence from lesser-known and less documented comics, the kind that ran in zines, were distributed hand-to-hand, etc.) (About that last point, when I went through the 1980s AD&D Dragon magazine scans, the fan-submitted artwork resembles early furry art styles a lot, and I think they were both stemming largely from the same source, that being amateur comics from young adult nerds.)

I’m even less well versed in kemono subcultures, but I think it’s safe to say that the continuous bleedover from modern anime aesthetics is why it looks the way it does (and has the same kind of unique manifestations, such as kemono utaus and v-tubers in more recent years.) (That latter example's a thing, right? I don’t keep up with this much.) It’s kinda like two branches on an evolutionary tree - the Western furry community was heavily influenced by 80s anime but hasn’t taken much anime/manga influence since (no doubt there’s some, but it’s fairly minimal. It’s essentially a closed-circuit culture that’s influenced mostly by itself until it stabilized in its current, very distinctive aesthetic that’s proven surprisingly resistant to change in the last 30 years.) The kemono culture is what would have happened if they never diverged and the influx of otaku influence just kept on going unabated in the decades since, with all the recent anime artstyles and surrounding culture having their influence. (I would quite like to know more about early kemono communities though, especially their influence or connection with western furry communities. Was there any, or was it just convergent evolution? I'd imagine there was some degree of both but I have no evidence here. ("source: dude trust me"))

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I think I just wanted to bring up Nagabe because while obviously rooted in kemono aesthetics, his style is very different and doesn’t look much like anything else really. I’m curious where he’s visually influenced by because it doesn’t look much like most kemono or furry art at all and resembles nothing quite as much as some 1910s western anthro art. I was going through old scans and got thrown for a loop because the lanky human proportions/realistic animal features and clean linework on some pieces really did look like his work to a surprising degree.

(Pointless ramble, might update into something with some degree of value if I come up with any non-inane observations on the topic.)

Musings

It’s such a minor thing that it’s probably not worth noting, but it’s interesting that the actual presence of AI/machine-generated media has carved a weird hole in language where phrases like “AI generated" used to be and where no terminology has really come in to take its place. In the descriptions of like, 2015-era PC Music (QT, Hannah Diamond, all that) "this sounds like if a computer made a song"/"robot attempting to process emotions and failing"-ish comments are quite common to try to communicate what those works felt like. What this meant and what they were trying to communicate (that it was a wonky, clinically precise distillation of human emotion that proceeds from some mathematically pure but alien understanding of it) was easily able to be communicated with these metaphors and terms. Now that computer/robotic terminology actually has a real-world presence, one that has nothing to do with the way in which those 2010s comments imagined it (instead of being precise, clean, mathematically sterile, it's defined by this faux-human mushiness that feels nothing like that at all,) looking back on them feels strange to say the least. There's no easy shorthand now for trying to say what those comments easily said; the cultural reference point has dropped out and disappeared (or been murdered by the new reality, basically.)

Inspired by alephnullification's post on Reflections.

Screenshots (2026/06/20)

Musings

I know I overestimate the value of some art and music, but I would much rather overvalue or read/misread too much beauty or meaning into things than undervalue or under-read, even if it is not exactly objectively justified. In a world in which I have access to such incredible art/music, I feel I have the right, if not the actual obligation, to overvalue rather than undervalue them, given that the perception/creation of beauty and meaning is to some degree a self-justifying end.

Cell phone photography, 2026

 

loose words 2024-2026

collection of personally evocative phrases scraped from google documents and notebooks from last few years. abandoned track titles, writings that went nowhere, half-sentences I didn't want to lose, unsent messages. lots of personal meaning, but almost certainly 100% lost in translation. melodramatic word vomit poetics. i hope there's something of almost-value here, terribly sorry for being so self-centered.

#15. “everything quiet and at the center of the world is a small rabbit”

as soon as it enters; too easy to lose [...] the sound of something you miss more than anything and its never coming back and it doesn't matter [...] formalware / vest / belgian hare / english cobblestone streets [...] just cold fur [...] long long long, swoon swoon swoon [...] sent you my tape so that something of me would be drifting in your life [...] hand with dagger cloaked in shadow, parisian black cat [...] there's a world that isn't there anymore [...] forever united ever bright [...] somewhere out into the snow [...] warming yourself by a fire that went out a long time ago [...] a safe port of habit [...] hollow echo of a world [...] the cat becomes the wind / you can't unmake a martyr [...] there's nothing left for you here [...] winter 1994-1995 [...] sheep in wolves clothing [...] the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off [...] "I remember how right it felt in his arms" [...] windswept heartbreak [...] cold muzzle [...] i've only ever lived in haunted houses [...] briskly around soft black moth [...] the last picture show [...] i dreamed of something precious but it fell right through my hands [...] he acted like he was afraid too [...] doe kisses (and would still die) [...] the longest goodbye [...] “Se tutto il codice dovessi volgere, se tutto l’indice dovessi leggere” [...] i want you to follow me home one day [...] the deepest of waters [...] veneration of ashes [...] protruding shoulder blades like little wings [...] all among the little stars (falling back to heaven) [...] memories stored on oversaturated film, precious moments encoded in incomprehensible blurs [...] garden wall of sleep, keyboard covered in moss (climb the cell phone tower and see the lights through the coverup) [...] a distant echo, a torn piece of a photo, two water-damaged frames from a silent film [...] the silence in that room after you / stumble and falter, laughing into ice cold / snow grey street forever dead deer / i don't understand the map of universal psychosis, i will always love you [...] there's an awful lot of space in between existence and nonexistence; things that live in that space [...] certain cold natures of self [...] skin and bones / wandered many a weary [...] a winter without beginning or end [...] days spent in rain, holding hands [...] last winter, my friends [...] twee pop as children's music for terminally melancholic adults [...] internet ghost in eternal empty bedroom and creaking empty old house, aching paws skitting around my own silent home / old worn out blankets and hardwood floorboards grey cold foggy tired day forever. skin and bones staring into faint outlines in tv static and falling falling falling… the house settles at night [...] walked all day and ending up in this weird vertical neighborhood on steep hillsides where it was already autumn in february [...] i wish I could make it sound the way you make me feel [...] hanging out with you would be special even if I got to do it everyday [...] this will kill me and I will let it [...] persistent ruminations [...] (would you believe me if I said you fill my heart with forget me nots? would you believe that you’re curled up at the center of my tired little world?) [...] tattered banners, winter soldier, Псоглав (blood of hyacinth) [...] flowers by the road [...] rest in windchimes [...] dreams covered in birds [...] church library autumn leaves falling on granite and my thoughts twirled and fell into your arms [...] hugging black falling rainbow stars [...] impressions of ever expanding mosaic visions, stumble outside and puke on the lawn [...] lapping up your rainbow blood [...] the rabbit with checkered ears / land of ten thousand frozen lakes / windchime snow in church soft static skies [...] fog bank through an empty house, skinny dog headed figures skittering around while I sleep in stop motion; no one home [...] i dreamed of unicorn boys and woke up tired [...] harsh noise for harsh winter / subzero parking lot, blood trail to treeline [...] black stars poking through everything blurry rainbow blood laughing laughing laughing [...] and we saw / the norfolk hare choir / always winter, never [...] the abysses of amnesia / all among the little stars [...] wolf attacks on the eastern front [...] "we can make something perfect" [...] talking in circles because I think in circles because I feel in circles because I talk in circles because I stumble and fall in circles and love in circles and grieve in circles [...] document the feeling of a goodbye hug in the sound of a jet engine [...] crushingly important memories recorded on overexposed polaroids, precious moments encoded in incomprehensible blurs [...] (did i already say this?) — [...] first winter morning brittle everything [...] isengrim lullabies softly humming obliteration dissodelia [...] I recorded some English rain through an open window [...] you're a single snowflake falling at night with no one around to see it / weighted frost blankets soon though I promise / those calico affections, shaking in my arms [...] A Case Report and Review of the Literature [...] Куда бы ни пошла моя душа, там друг мой будет со мно (wherever my soul goes, there my friend will be with me) [...] lullabies for extinguished interiorities [...] brittle autumn dawn [...] i shine only with the light you give me [...] counting calories again [...] so it goes [...] sleep beneath the night; not cold enough [...] panned sound signals at low respontial frequency ratios [...] “cartoon existentialism” [...] endless desperation / fantasies of mutual falling tender like an open wound and [...] after i died i was alone and it was very quiet [...] a holiday together, never seen again / that golden twilight [...] I tried doing that and turned around and looked behind me and there was a little rainy world — going from floor to floor in my memory — everstruck by the data flow — everything is cartoon animals forever — to recompile a heart [...] prying, absorbing data, vomiting it back out textual, images [...] grey days — heartstring acoustics, run through a garbling haze of MP3 compression — rainy in my heart [...] infinite beauty of raindrops crashing on the Giant parking lot under car headlights I could die here [...] perception of lights coursing through darkness [...] every individual wolf from 1970 [...] it's stars of ice in my heart forever [...] seeing dragons, feeling sick [...] a pathetic howl of [...] gonefadingeverything [...] friends forever [...] I wish we were little wool cats [...] "the world is ending and i will never get to tell you i love you" [...] the fall of the leaf and the fall of the stone [...] I don't know anything about [him] or what they had in mind with the [...] pumpkins rotting on the doorstep and in the fields, patchwork blankets worn thin / wet autumn leaves and grey weather getting colder, jackets / soft uneasiness in an empty house home alone [...] black dog notkilleveryoneism [...] there will never be [...] “somber physicist does drugs” [...] crystalized thoughts, minus 50 degrees [...] emaciation desire expression [...] (do you dream of me?) [...] "as new paradigms are uttered from the mouths of the dead" [...] three eared rabbit, the belstone fox (nattvardsgästerna beloved) [...] then, alone in the rainstorm; wet cat-like silhouette, saw you there [...] pray with pain in your heart [...] gabumeicutter bloodrainbowlaughter nothingleftwrackingsobsrippingupandoutthrougheverything [...] broken stone / hares breath / a change of seasons / lost buildings [...] there is a light [...] childhood onset anhedonia / "i didn't realize” [...] cried wolf [...] and i feel gardens sprawling and laughter and little white flowers growing over everything sobbing jagged out through the chest foggy field on the top of the hill and distant business complexes glowing red and tiny points of light through it seeing stars and your arms, somewhere in love at the end of time and i'll never get to tell you raging grief the second before hitting the ground [...] it could’ve been so special, but by now you’re just another closed door [...] a cold shoulder to cry on [...] the boy i love will disappear along with everyone else ​​when the great blackbird settles its soft wings over everything and that’s what bothers me the most about all this [...] certain moments of eternal nothing wrap me like soft sleep and reflections of overcast skies on my radar; data nexus returns silence unbroken and dull steel is slowly grown over with lichen and moss as the snow falls [...] you are an enigmatic and interesting creature that needs to be studied / and by studied I mean wrapped in flowers and snow kept safe little blanket kisses and grey days, tell me all about it (dissociative crush ramble) [...] the computer lit early mornings we share, the hollow spaces we both know so well [...] world consisting entirely of churches and windchimes and wind through trees and skittering leaves down suburban roads [...] late autumn, october cafe / frost on the train windows [...] small and fearful creature / off to kittengarden [...] slow blink and purring silhouette in the clouds [...] this merciless blight descends like twilight upon the trees above [...] porch kiss, dead pets, blood in snow, winter twilight watching your car leave [...] extinguished interiorities / considering animals as martyrs / theriocide ethics [...] saturday mourning cartoon [...] feeling prodromal [...] the ending of things [...] grey skied distant lover [...] all seems permeated with it, this thing without name, without object or direction, softly setting down over everything now [...] i know it know it won't mean much, the cascading ache you know as well as I / forever soft drowning first snow against the window pane and staring into the fading daylight distance / i wish i had a train to catch / first snow, cold kisses / to drift and falter and fall [...] something about fuzzy feelings and blankets and chronic wasting disease [...] the 2013 burning windmill hug as image of present state of culture [...] this would imply that the ultimate artwork is the absence of all language; pure colour field. Instances of this can be [...] anw aphrorisms [...] =^-.-^= [...] “all i can do is carry on the echos of others / i carry all these hearts inside me” [...] black dog, black ships, black snow [...] “they did not kill each other” [...] "everything, forever" / the ontology of extiction / standing at the gallows [...] the world is ending and all i can do is whisper / first winter morning in the car and it's snowing and it doesn't matter [...] still makes me think of everyone I've [...] forever always [...] rainy day affections [...] driven ceaseless and maniacally by fear of forgetting [...] leaving everything behind / winter rain / for ever, for never / auld lang syne / drifting away / midwinter death [...] “I just feel like I’m watching the world end” / “I’m living in the ashes of a world that ended a long time ago” [...] raised hackles, precious suffering [...] home video release, taped-over VHS ghost in the machine [...] suicide euphoria laughter / with you in a room somewhere and it's funny and it hurts [...] ruminations and essay fragments [...] between everything always on a world careening towards [...] “to write the perfect love better before the world ends” [...] the deteriorated signal is returned in its entirety to a greater light [...] love is pure ethics / all that is is light [...] (your arms shake in the darkness, tears well in great grey eyes —) [...] incessantly repeating as if by sheer momentum [...] constant desire to go through your computer as a form of intimacy [...] "when it's deep November and the nights are dark and rainy in the countryside / and it's all i can think about" [...] anonymous users, unknown identities, unidentifiable samples, detritus and ephemera [...] the room is dimly lit by purple Christmas lights [...] it's hard when the people I love are so far away [...] soft static skies [...] flowers at the end of everything [...] i was born the moment i met you and not a second sooner [...] here lies what little remains [...] howl of a wolf betrayed / dead deer covered in snow/ “post-everything” [...] the fading future that never came [...] digital laments, isolated loops from forgotten media sources [...] i want you to follow me home one day [...] borrowed voices / winter rain [...] norfolk anorak, trains in snow [...] fragmentology of a whole that never existed [...] a kind of worthless freeform poetry [...] swooning over 18th century wood cuts [...] “a distorted nimbus of cels” [...] quiet erosion [...] “stay warm out there” [...] eyes in the dark just outside of your vision, inhuman motions of a stranger [...] everything i am now was formed by your skinny arms intertwining with mine / it all rips through me like a rain of roses and razor blades / sugar high mixed with heroin and a knife to the throat shredded in a storm of roses and razor cuts first crush death love suicide euphoria evisceration [...] devoted to the aesthetic study of [...] 秋日疾走 [...] linguistic shards; complete disintegration essentially [...] I keep on forgetting we're kittens on an adventure / I was born to meet you [...] entropy as physical linkrot, the process of forgetting as (psycho/physio)logical [...] breaching post-selfhood / distorted flashes of cynocephali when I close my eyes [...] compulsion to save everything I can before it's too late / fighting linkrot tooth and nail since 2019 [...] I enjoy fragmenting myself into a kaleidoscope such that I can look at myself from a great distance [...] every memory is a location, and every photograph a tattered memory dragged through the encoding of years / articulation of inarticulatable feelings [...] a tape left in a hot car for years, or a memory on the verge of being forgotten / final-wave emo / tender as a wound bedroom recording, teenage apocalypse in 128 kbps [...] black cat of memory and the idea that it might never happen, in front of a train passing through snow — i know your shaking hands we deserved better we deserved the school roof and walking home we got nothing [...] standing in your bedroom / aching paws skitter / roller skating through fog / some things last forever — when i close my eyes / little ghosts / autumn leaves in my dreams all the time / goosebumps vision cough medicine — diet energy drinks / stay in bed all day [...] black clouds rolling in / walking at night / small and frightened animal / whatever it takes [...] gentle claws and starting to shake raining again autumn getting closer listening to the leaves scraping over suburbia grey pavement and the walls of churches [...] this is one of my favorite moments in all cinema because for a moment the crumbling tumbling radiator machinery distant city hum wandering nightmare monologue wave of dread crashing crushing falls away and all that's left is three rabbits holding each other [...] field recordings of Svalbard Global Seed Vault [...] the person who first made my heart shake like a leaf moved away three years ago and when you went away you took a part of my heart with you and i can’t access it anymore, please keep it safe [...] stream-of-consciousness upon frantic research; spammed into private Discord channel [...] post-modern collaged dissociative abuse love poems & scrapped/aborted writings from 2025 in various degrees of fragmentation; desperate connections and digital death anxiety [...] three layers of blankets [...] blood noise wall [...] heaven in your arms [...] janus cats and near term extinction [...] black dog heraldry [...] in the arms of god raging bloody fucking rupture and knives through through through never betrayed my heart disconnect sobbing ripping up through endless repetition feel you in looming ending feel you in poorly xeroxed forgotten deaths and whispered confession in empty classroom please let me have this [...] dozens of windchimes suspended around a church or churchlike space; held in winter and with no heating, possibly with windows open; ideally while snowing [...] you can tell that something here meant the world to someone once; it meant more than could possibly be said, but there's no way of finding out who or what that might have been. — The names and faces are lost in the murk of time, but something exists that can never be forgotten, and that burns somewhere close to the core of everything long after we're gone, for those who know to listen for it [...] 1. The breath of a rabbit sleeping and dreaming in its burrow / 2. Long midwinter walks alone, dead trees spiking into white sky / 3. Highly compressed flipphone footage of blood ground into gravel, flesh wearing away against pavement / 4. The barest touch / 5. Rain on bedroom windows and the world is cold and still / 6. The tired haze of happier memory, eviscerating blurry light / 7. Hiding under the boardwalk, hearing the crash of waves echoing; returning years later / 8. Early morning, hands shaking / 9. Supernova sobbing ripping through and out over everything complete loss rainbow blood splatter / 10. Fieldstones in the dead leaves / 11. The actual occurrence of irrevocable physical injury / 12. A bouquet of flowers scattered over the floor / 13. Exhaustion / 14. “You hold me in your arms” [...] improvised, minimal wandelweiser-inspired piano music recorded in the empty piano hall at school; hitting individual notes and letting them ring out into silence; recorded on worn cassette [...] It does not matter if I die early because I will die in love with you / I care not that the bomb will find me, because it will find me in love with you. [...] love is pure ethics [...] I'm constantly infatuated with this shy/weak/kind wolf image/symbolism because it epitomizes post-biological “failure” and the beauty of those values to me. A body wired for strength and power and associated with those values culturally rejecting it succumbing to grace (Gubbio) [...] betrayal of biological values is what ethics is [...] you make me feel like there's still a future, some indeterminate number of years into which i can meaningfully project anything at all [...] throw up in my bed and curl up and know that you're an angel [...] stranded between the digital and the physical [...] the normalization of the human form into digital abstract / the role of noise as texture and signal [...] and moments of / are their own virtue / that will matter on and on (the little pieces of light you carry [...] the shards i carry light the way [...] I feel like a little rabbit eating clover in a field somewhere with a hawk circling overhead. give me shade. i will die in a field of clover on a day just like today [...] swooning over the hexham werewolf apparition 1973 [...] kneel beneath animal kings [...] silk tears [...] love me point blank [...] no time no time no time at all [...] you stood at the doorframe of my life, neither coming nor fully going [...] rabbithearted [...] winter relapse [...] foxglove falling [...] a kind of digital here-be-dragons [...] wielki duch wszystko na dobre zwróci [...] dragging your feet as you walk, i can hear the wind [...] the pulsating textural geometry on everything like leaves in corners all shriveled up and dried in the stairwell at school [...] lots of little flowers ／little stars in my arms [...] everything forever quiet and at the center of the world is a small rabbit [...] I have pictures I made a snow angel once there [...] winter trees and and everything [...] twisted paw [...] lycanth flor de lis [...] gone to visit the black dog [...] ฅ (A ω Ω) ฅ [...] watching you bleed out; turning you into a location and a time and an image [...] weaved of wildflowers [...] "ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος, lit. "human") and morphē (μορφή, "form")" [...] planting my love next to would have been a flower garden [...] histoires d'autres histoires; stories of other stories [...] i drone of dream [...] ​​and all remains in its course [...] more love less snarl [...] lonewolf lightweight [...] addicted to heaven [...] falling down to the bottom of the stars [...] a small and rapidly emptying world [...] you'd like me less if you knew just how much i think about you [...] shimmer scamper, flash your fangs [...] a self-justifying existence / a singular paradigm in which it can exist [...] “like putty in my paws” [...] can you feel me thinking about you? / love is an abyss [...] everything forgotten still happening in my dreams all the time [...] taking photos of the darkening sky on the way home from your house [...] and even my friends are starting to see that place in their dreams [...] when the blood leaves me all I will see is flowers [...] The last day before the summer ends [...] I found a new way home [...] staring into space and calling it enough [...] sheep in wolves clothing [...] studying every pixel in your last video, like i can find a hand pressed against the screen if i look hard enough [...] snowfell overdoser [...] all the world a cenotaph [...] The thing that will kill me is already undergoing gradient descent [...] “and suddenly I felt his incisors sink into the back of my neck" [...] i kept the lightbleed on holocene [...] high on xrisk / pure logistics / if you died, i think i would too / designer ambient / i remember nothing [...] "thousands of cats looking through abstract spaces" [...] dematerialized voices swarm and abound / my heart is full of dead flowers [...] dearest eustace / theriocide ethics / winter spent in your arms [...] feeling like the future in 2014 [...] Still, my frantic rabbit heart [...] absence makes the heart grow harder [...] the swirling ache [...] two masks become one [...] driving past myself in light snowfall [...] post-violence [...] run rabbit run [...] tiecelijn & réisciatháin [...] unreleasable coyote [...] junkie twee, rejection of societally accepted violence (akin to a mirror-logic punk) through the grace of [...] i will die on a day like this [...] blood on the rails [...] a core aspect to absolutely everything I do is an interest in the phenomenology of recording, the creation of a space between the happening and the forgetting, and the traits inherent in that space [...] the post-internet experience articulating itself for a moment of infinite light [...] when the cold of winter comes i will be ready [...] “let us go to the rose” / the longest goodbye [...] "i know weather is almost painfully banal talk, but i do want to know what it's like where you are." [...] signal decay (all forms) / empty rural spaces / you are a two headed lamb / it breaks my heart [...] last fall picking up medicine in the snowstorm [...] the train tracks behind my college [...] winterreise [...] blind rabbit choir / harehearted [...] how would I even begin to breach your world? — post-internet identity and all-consuming — a mediatized being, made of information — as totality, as it was — everything is one thing and it's all you to me [...] the most beautiful of all patterns / finding moments, finding memories / wandering with you looking for drones, walking through that dead mall in January / starving affections [...] the person is almost not present, it barely feels like there was one at all [...] strange echoes of data loss tragic / love through all no dialectics between man and grave / just so quiet / that picture of me in the snow / all those days in the snow / everything always forever [...] a flower pinned close to his heart [...] briefly crossing lines / train passing through snow / staring at your coat on the bed / the world is a quiet place / falling down to the bottom of the stars / its raining again / in my daydreams I live alone / just sleep through the snowfall [...] when I die I’m going to a place where it’s snowing all the time [...] raised hackles, muzzle under the rainy awnings [...] wind up wolf [...] weird tired warmth that I haven't felt in the longest time [...] love song for people alone in their bedrooms [...] Je me retire de moi [...] did your shepherd die? did your shepherd leave? [...] "quiet erosion" / drone strike in heaven [...] shaking snow off like a wet cat [...] worn out valentine buried in closet [...] I think the average person can feel the world ending now [...] drone strikes that look more like celestial events [...] “We meet the mists on the horizon, we unite with them” [...] it always feels like the first time, it always feels like the last time [...] it always just isnt enough time for it. information is an important part of my life [...] ichizo [...] tiocfaidh ár lá / saoradh [...] Azeroy / Ihatov / Tumbolia / "white gate calling me won't be long now" / "a wave of black snow" / "the blue gates of death" / black dog, black rabbit, black clouds, black snow, black ships / The Black Rabbit of Inlé (death symbols) [...] playing with a yarnball or dangling string on clothing [...] leaning against your jacket on the way home [...] spot of shaved fur after surgery [...] formal definition of interiorities [...] snowshoe hare dreaming in burrow [...]

Favourites

☙ Favourite texts ❧

1. Ambient Drone and the Apocalypse (Joanna Demers, 2013)

2. A Future of Ice (Kenji Miyazawa, pub. 1989)

3. Ghosts of My Life (Mark Fisher, 2014)

4. Suicide Note (Mitchell Heisman, 2010)

5. "bare branched sycamore trees" (American Pleasure Club, 2017)

6. My cat is sad (Spencer Madsen)

7. angelicism01 (collected works, 2020-2025)

8. Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

☙ Favourite funny animal art pieces ❧

1. Monotone Blue (Nagabe)

2. Wie die Tiere den Jäger begraben (Moritz von Schwind, 1850)

3. Foxbunnyfunny (Andy Hartzell, 2007)

4. @mucknagabe "はわわ" https://x.com/mucknagabe/status/1493206319159201793

5. claubles "promise me" https://x.com/CLAUBLESHAHA/status/1832659369970090143 (hard to pick a favourite of claubles, I love them all)

6. meeting (focus, 2022) https://internetbasedghosts.neocities.org/storage/img/2025-07-205.jpg

7. https://www.furaffinity.net/view/9553660/

8. https://ysengrm.tumblr.com/post/792712467483590656 (Komako Sakai)

9. Józef Wilkoń Illustration from ‘The Story of the Kind Wolf’ by Peter Nickl, 1982

10. W. Heskes’s Reinaart de Vos (circa 1922) [link]

Media preservation ramble

Lost media preservation efforts should focus less on pop culture and more on the constantly-uploaded, constantly-fading art and music by independent webizens. YouTube videos with barely any audience, teenage artists recording demos in their bedrooms, anonymous postings and chatroom ephemera have been close to my heart my entire life and I have yet to find a symphony or classic film or critically acclaimed piece of core pop culture that makes me feel half as much as the kind of things I've heard coming from the hands and voices and keyboard and internet connections of absolute nobodies. I admit, I find it very difficult to imagine a coherent strategy to actually document the lesser known corners of the inherently disintegrating internet (beautiful vent blogs that rarely last a year before getting deleted, hundreds of broken bandcamp links in my bookmarks, "unavailable videos are hidden for this playlist," etc.) beyond what Archive.org (God bless their hearts) is already doing and what people like myself are doing on a small scale. I think on this front you just have to do what you can for what you care about; CTRL+S everything that feels special, carry it with you, keep backups, and share what you have with likeminded individuals.

Unfinished essay scrap

[...] I am particularly enamored by the trend in some music videos to use transparently fake VHS filters, seemingly not in sincere attempts to resemble the grainy rot-texture of the decayed, time-worn physical media it imitates, but as a deliberately synthesized, artificial rendition of that aesthetic [...] (/watch?v=gCLwXyoB3XY) [...] Parallels can be seen in the use of autotune in the same musical scene; a tool designed for the correction of errors in pitch is instead used to de-tune and distort, and while conventional autotune usage goes hand-in-hand with its own concealment (making less than pitch-perfect pop stars voices into radio-ready material with as little attention drawn to the audio airbrushing applied as possible,) here the artifact of the technology, its presence itself, becomes the defining signature of this particular cloud rap style. Autotune becomes a co-singer. (Maybe remove this part) [...] Absolutely no one is fooled by the cheap VHS overlay, and I don’t think the intention is to fool anyway (although plenty of less media-savvy, more trend-hopping artists certainly do so - here I refer only to those who use it deliberately and are fully aware of its unconvincingness.) It’s a distinct phenomena from the lo-fi aesthetic/tendencies that preceded it, such as genuinely VHS-recorded videos or tape-recorded bedroom demos. It’s more akin to the addition of cassette clicks bookending a digitally-produced track or the usage of prepackaged vinyl crackle SFX (both tropes often seen in lo-fi hip hop,) blatantly ripped from YouTube or a sample pack. The track in question has nothing to do with that medium, it doesn’t otherwise carry its texture or connotations; these SFX serve as a kind of obligatory nod to a non-digital framework to simultaneously reap the benefit of the digital medium while carrying some semantic pointer to a non-digital medium as a kind of disarming gesture. You can thus interact with an MP3 or MP4 without having to deal with what it is [...] a kind of antithesis of net art, a deliberately anti-net art gesture, an attempted negation of it as internet art - an attempt at removing, in a lazy enough manner to reveal its slight-of-hand, the capacity for it to be taken within its digital context. [...] Pure faux-”nostalgic” cultural pointers that indicate not personal nostalgia but the hollow suggestion of a hollow suggestion of it, thirdhand simulacra for post-nostalgic generations born after the death of futurism in which the mere suggestion of any time or technology beyond the present is sufficient for their aesthetic purposes. 2000s camera compression, tape hiss, VHS filters, anything will do [...] As the cultural debris of previous generations, having permeated the digital landscape, obtain reanimated afterlives not as an accidental feature of no-budget media but as signifiers pointing to that kind of media, playing a kind of aesthetic dress up. The shitty VHS overlay acts as a curtain between clear footage of reality and the viewer, abstracting it as a self-aware recording as opposed to the pure reality it documents; a flashing neon light shouting “this is a memory,” shielding the video from the unforgiving clarity of HD footage [...] an attempt to attach the semantic/visual weight of years of media rot as soon as it comes into existence (or at least as soon as it is uploaded.) The same case could be made of more authentic efforts at positioning the video in a recorded past - genuine digitized camcorder footage, secondhand 2000s digital cameras, the usage of hardware and recording techniques that position the footage in a distinct era of the past - but the lazy usage of filters probably shows this concept at its most basic and minimal and in doing so reveals exactly why it is done; the self-awareness of digital media produced by post-internet denizens that actively doesn’t want the weight of its digital nature attached to it, or try to point back to the indefinite past as an escape of present aesthetic and cultural trappings. (This one's kinda shit, sorry. Wrote it all in one sitting.)

𓃹 (poems)

the depths of last winter 

its hard to not remember all the time

my grey hearted boy

falling, falling

in a cold soft room in england

late last autumn, october cafe

in a memory or a dream or between trembling moments

let me walk you home

i don’t know anything that isn’t a memory

i don’t know anything that isn’t fairy lights and things that aren't coming back

no matter how it threatens to swell up and drown me

i can go back but nothing’s left there anymore

and i do, all the time

autumn leaves skittering in the stairwell

i miss you too

love me bloodied and soft and cold

"it won’t be much longer, now

it won’t be much longer"

___________

when the cold of winter comes i will be ready with medicine and dead leaves and tired little grey feelings

staring into faint outlines shifting on the ceiling and expanding outward forever

(“i don’t want to go back, i don’t want to go back”) until the bitter cold plunge

and when i do i’ll google current snow depths for where you are to feel closer to you

it was cold and i took the last train home

your bony arms and tears falling and soaking into hardwood floor until there's no more left

momentary flicker of silent cathedrals and hands barely brushing hands stained glass

bloody fucking everywhere up and through december snowfall my arms shaking just thinking about it

there is grace too in this world, howling like armageddon reaching up and ripping visceral infinite and endless

up and out gutted candy kisses grief raging (isengrim body wracked sobbing little flowers forever)

"cascading realities, drifting vision" distantly typed while falling two years ago now

(but it didn't matter because it was too late to go home anyway, and there was snow on the ground

still ended up in another state crying on the phone, sick in a nameless town gas station)

good god, aren't you a sight for sore eyes

i saw the way it hurt

i saw the way it crashed down over everything

i promise i'll take care of you too

___________

i'd do anything to go back to last november

when i felt you in every autumn breeze and falling leaf

and heard your laugh like churchbells when it got too quiet

some part of me will always be trudging through the snow

some part of me is left in an empty field i couldn't place on a map

to refuse to become callous is to become an open wound forever

and i'd never want anything else

___________

soft as silk embroidery

as cold as sinking into dissociated backroad snowbanks wondering if i’ll be found in time if i stayed here

just stayed here

words tinged bitter, carved to cut

halfhearted laugh under london skies

and walking home together

i close my eyes again as the train blows past

the black cat of memory and the idea that this might never happen

i know your shaking hands, thousands of miles away

we both deserved better than we got

snowbank, freefall

train goes by

___________

wisterias into the distance

burning house precipice

i swear that i meant it

cascade relapse

held through tempest

rusty wire wrapped in circles through your heart

storm clouds

black snow

a closing horizon

and still i meant it all