A quick reading of the first two paragraphs from Post-Self on Radio Panik episode #516, “Adrift Reentry Norther,” December 14, 2025.
It goes as follows:
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death, we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
What if we let it slip before then? What if we were able to let ourselves loose and be as free as we can be? What if we got lost somewhere out there beyond ourselves? If it’s all going down, why aren’t we trying to push ourselves as far out as we can? If we try to hold ourselves together as we watch our world fall apart, we’re holding ourselves back for nothing.
In a mode appealing to members of any subculture, Roy Christopher’s dense but slim The Medium Picture charts the changes in culture as dictated by technology on both a personal and intellectual level. Like the history of our media itself, he first references large monolithic examples — radio/music and television shows — that have become embedded in our culture, then complicates and fragments our relationship to them. One example focuses on how the change from record to tape in the music industry helped to alter our cultural expressions and how we synthesize information. He moves through post-modern history and shows how more technology can create corrosive representations and information, like a copy of a copy of a copy.
A sort of punk rock luddite — Christopher has never owned a TV and hasn’t had a car since the 1990s — he draws from subculture crossover icons like Gang of Four, Laurie Anderson, and Ian MacKaye as well as well-researched academic theories from people like Marshall McLuhan to show how things like zines and mixtapes led to the tiny screens of today. The theory is sprinkled in references; I personally was drawn in with the often-cited works of William Gibson, a robust establishing of skateboarding’s relationship to his topic, and the dozens of chapter-opening quotations from films, poems, music, or authors like Kim Stanley Robinson.
Spike Jonze making marks in The Medium Picture. Photo by Rodger Bridges.
This vast collection of references is supported by well-referenced theory and research that mesh with the book’s easily readable format. Christopher’s claim of lifelong journaling seems very likely given the easy, conversational manner in which he delivers so much information. It is our insights into his own relationships to the theories at hand that make this book most compelling, and Christopher exudes a real love for the things he talks about. I maintained interest through loftier, hard-to-grasp ideas with clearly illustrated connections between seemingly disparate topics like metaphor and technology, while receiving new insight into everyday things such as walking.
The Medium Picture probes many of the questions and desires that we feel as people and may not have words for. The extremely clever title gives a very accurate idea of what the book is about — a play on words that folds in on itself from multiple angles. There is even a nicely designed title page logo calling attention to these interlocking angles, not to mention the pleasing chapter and section headers. Importantly, at only 162 pages, Christopher makes a seemingly intimidating topic appear tackleable and packs a lot into his punch. Perhaps the best thing The Medium Picture does, though, is recognize that it is a piece of a larger whole — a very important and often forgotten thing for cultural theory to do. For that and much more, it is worth your read.
Post-Self is a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms—technology, rapture, drugs, death—with a Foreword by the cultural critic Mark Dery titled “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”
“We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.” — from POST-SELF
The back cover copy reads as follows:
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
“Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing — the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
What other people are saying about it:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
I am proud to announce that the University of Georgia Press has deigned to publish The Medium Picture. To wit, I was born in Georgia, and I attended UGA briefly during my first attempt at grad school. This project is very close to my heart, and I am stoked to have the UGA Press putting it out.
Here’s the brief overview:
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, itshows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The book uses ideas from William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and Brian Eno, examples from Fugazi, Radiohead, Gang of Four, and Run the Jewels, and artists like Christian Marclay, Richard Long, and Laurie Anderson. It’s post-punk media-theory!
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Post-Self is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.
As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
My post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture, is now available for preorder from all of your favorite places: UGA Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon! Preorders mean more than you think. They’re very important for the life and success of the book. If you know you’re going to buy it, please consider snagging a copy early.
Preorders serve as an early indicator of a book’s potential success. They signal to publishers and retailers that there is interest in the book, which can lead to increased marketing efforts and larger print runs. For authors, preorders can be crucial in boosting their book’s visibility on platforms like Amazon. This can improve their sales rankings and increase exposure. On Amazon, preorders can affect the sales ranking before release, which might influence the platform’s promotional efforts. If you’re not sure, read on! Thank you!
Of all of my books, this is the one I’ve worked on longest and hardest. It’s the closest to my heart.
Here’s what other people are saying about it:
“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu
If you’re so inclined, you can post one these on the social medium of your liking. Link ‘em to your favorite online book outlet or just to http://www.themediumpicture.com
Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher: We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.
You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.
Forty-Seven
I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.
Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,
Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?
Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.
David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”
Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.
Let’s look at another one.
Forty-Three
It started as an amount of change.
Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.
BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.
Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.
Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.
By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.
Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.
“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, BeingJohn Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”
When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the lingering Marxism of late-Capitalist society as hauntological, mashing together the words “haunting” and “ontology,” he couldn’t have imagined what the era might sound like. Bay Area beat maestra Mars Kumari captures the grit and grief of loss we all feel now, haunted as we are by what was here and is now missing.
I met Mars Kumari at Oblivion Access in Austin in the summer of 2023, where she gave me a demo CD of her record, I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023). I already had her record for deadverse, Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021), so I was stoked for the preview. She’s moved on and on since then with collaborations in the works with legends like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dose One and a new solo record for Handsmade Collective.
Mars Kumari. Illustration by Eleanor Purcell.
Roy Christopher: How’d you get into making music in the first place?
Mars Kumari: I first started learning music theory through piano lessons from age 6 onward, but didn’t start making my own music until around age 15/16 when my older brother gave me a pirated copy of Ableton. It was on version 8 at the time but 10 years later it’s still my weapon of choice. It took a lot of trial and error to learn (also YouTube tutorials). Throughout that period of time I’d absorb the music my brother listened to via these mix CDs he’d make, which is how I discovered MF DOOM, Del the Funky Homosapien, Crystal Castles, Flying Lotus, Nujabes, and Earl Sweatshirt, among so many others that ended up being core influences of mine.
I spent a year or so making beats by myself until I met my lifelong friends Keyvon and Shishan around 2015, and we all learned to produce and rap alongside one another. In 2019 and early 2020 when I was in university I performed alongside my good friends Nina Spheres and Parish as part of a dark ambient drone trio (collectively titled Nina Spheres). I learned much of what I know about sound design, layering and harmonics from that experience.
RC: More than any era of hip-hop, I hear the second wave of industrial acts (e.g, Scorn, Skinny Puppy, Justin Broadrick, Kevin Martin, the more ambient moments of Meat Beat Manifesto, Wax Trax Records output, et al.) in your work. Is that me just superimposing my own listening history, or do you find kindred sounds in there?
MK: I’ve been getting into the work of Justin Broadrick (specifically JK Flesh) since I saw him at Oblivion Access! I’m familiar with Skinny Puppy and Meat Beat Manifesto, but I need to get into their catalogs more. There are too many artists that influence me to name in one sentence, but Boards of Canada, dälek, Clams Casino, and Burial are some big ones for sure.
RC: What do you call it?
MK: My music?
RC:Yeah.
MK: I usually just say I make beats, even if that’s sort of oversimplifying it. My foundations have always been in industrial hip-hop, drone and shoegaze, but over the last 3 years that I’ve been performing for raves and nightclubs in the Bay, I’ve been listening to a lot more jungle, hard techno, dubstep, digital hardcore, things like that. I had listened to these kinds of music before but being around so much of it the last few years has had a major influence on my sound.
The context and emotions I associate with these kinds of music are consistently integral to the concepts behind my albums. For example, a lot of what I incorporated into Daybreak reminds me of some of my favorite memories of being surrounded by other trans people I love at parties and raves (places I’d be hearing the sort of music that inspired this) coupled with the comparative isolation of waking up the following morning alone in a world that hates people like us. It’s both of those feelings in equal measure behind the sound.
Given how important to the music the memories are, I guess I’d call it hauntology, but to me that feels more like a guiding philosophy and spirituality than a useful descriptor of the way it objectively sounds. There are many different sounds that the word hauntology describes; I think what unites them is more abstract.
Me and Mars at Oblivion Access in Austin in 2023. Selfie by Mars.
RC: What does hauntology mean to you?
MK: Mark Fisher defined it far better than I ever could, but in the context of music I would say it refers to sounds that evoke the distance between yourself and something you remember. The core memory is important, yes, but all music evokes memory on some level. Hauntology centers that temporal distance between you and your memories along with the feelings that may summon (usually nostalgia or a nonspecific feeling of loss). To me it’s more of a guiding set of principles.
However, as a broader philosophy of ghost-like things and temporal disjunction, it strongly informs my relationship to identity (especially gender identity). My own experience of transition has been one of constant tension between past and future selves. Early on, I felt as if the future I had chosen to seal away by transitioning was still haunting me; these days what I feel is more of a sense of having the past selves live on as revenants in my body alongside who I am now. Even the phrase “who I am now” feels relatively meaningless when the present self is never without past or future iterations.
RC: How would you chart the progression of your sound over your last five records?
MK: I put together my first album Anhedonic Mirages (2020) using beats I had made across the previous 5 years which I resampled and reshaped using a lot of distortion, reverb, and grain delay. It serves twofold as an exploration of a new sound and a reflection of where I felt I existed spiritually and temporally in my transition (and by extension the way in which past and future selves behave like revenants). It’s very washed out and bathed in noise and the song structures across this project follow a sort of dream logic. The whole thing is pretty “lo-fi” so to speak; from here I’ve tried to achieve clearer and clearer mixes with each album.
Mars Kumari Type Beat (deadverse, 2021).
I released my next project Elysian Mourning(2021) the following February. This album is a bit more sparse and dreamlike; there’s less percussion than in the last album and what is there is subdued. The drones were the focus here. I used my SP-404 extensively for this one; something I like about the original model is the way that electrical noise stacks and multiplies the more you resample something.
Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021) once again re-centers the drums. Some of the oldest beats I’ve ever put out are on here; as such it’s much more varied in its sonic pallet. There are alternative versions of tracks from the previous two albums, beats I started in 2015, and lots of samples from tape reels. I originally released it for Bandcamp Friday that August, and dälek took a liking to it and offered to put that out on deadverse. I’m endlessly grateful that he took a chance on me.
I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023).
My next album I Thought I Lost You (2023) took two years to complete and release. There were often field recordings and found sound in the backgrounds of previous albums but they’re much more in focus here, serving as leitmotifs. For example, the ambient passage at the beginning of the final track is lifted from a cassette I found with a recording of someone’s funeral. The atmosphere of that room comes through even in the absence of the eulogy. Even when these kinds of recordings aren’t so closely tied to death, the nature of them is inherently ghost-like in their detachment from any identifiable source. All you have is the recorder’s voice, the room they were in, and to a subtler extent what they were feeling. All with no semblance of an idea of who this was, what they were like, or if they’re even still alive. A voice with no name or body is a ghost in my eyes.
Anyways, I Thought I Lost You is stylistically similar to Anhedonic Mirages, but much more refined, versatile, and massive. There are elements of jungle, noise, industrial hip-hop, and plunderphonics, all texturally united with a dense veil of dark ambience. I wanted to instill a sense of immersion into a new world. Conceptually, it’s grief as a dimension. This was released via Bruiser Brigade Records and mastered by Raphy.
Daybreak (Handsmade Collective, 2024).
My latest album Daybreak (2024) is my attempt at deconstructed club, fusing hard techno and drum and bass and house with industrial hip-hop and gossamer layers of ambience. I wanted to make something that felt really crystalline and pretty that would sound great on a live soundsystem. Most of the songs here were designed for live performances, and many times I’d audition my mixes by playing them at shows and seeing how it sounded and how people responded. I try to wear my influences on my sleeve less these days, but it is very much inspired by artists like Burial, Arca, and Eartheater. I used a lot more synths and software drums here than in earlier albums (which were mostly or entirely sample-based, it’s more of a 50/50 ratio here). I’m really proud of the mix on this one. This is my first record with Handsmade Collective.
In summary, my sound has always had industrial trip-hop and dark ambient at its core, but over time has incorporated elements of deconstructed club and IDM with an increasingly glossy finish. Improving my mixing from one project to the next has always been a priority, and the results of working toward that are showing more and more in the increased clarity and scale of the sound.
RC: What’s coming up next?
MK: A full-length album with Del the Funky Homosapien has been in the works for most of the year. It’s about halfway recorded, and I’m aiming to have it out sometime midway next year. It’s tricky for me to say how it will sound given that it’s still in the works, but in a way it unites the grit of I Thought I Lost You with the gloss of Daybreak. I just started work on an LP with Dose One as well. There are other LPs and EPs planned as well, including one with my friend Q3, one with Uboa and Hook Operator, a noise EP with Lucas Abela and another solo record. Besides that, hopefully I can get a pet rabbit soon.
