The Missing Primitive Is a Vocabulary

Anyone who’s vibecoded for more than an afternoon knows the pattern: the AI nails your component logic, wires up your state management, even writes reasonable tests. Then it spends 46 turns failing to center a play button in a circle.

The memes about centering a div write themselves. But underneath the frustration is a real architectural limitation.

The Problem Isn’t Sight

It’s tempting to say the models can’t see. They can, after a fashion. Large language models process the world through language [or more abstractly, text; see Text Is the Universal Interface by Roon], and the multimodal ones can take in an image and describe it well enough. The deeper problem is what they can’t do with what they see.

When a model writes styles, it’s pattern-matching against millions of code examples, statistically converging on what syntactically looks like correct styling. But syntax isn’t style. The true primitives of visual design are feature detectors in human optical perception, and above those, a learned vocabulary for reasoning over what the detectors report. That vocabulary is more than perceptual; it’s connotative, a sediment of cultural and artistic meaning laid down across every altarpiece, poster, and illuminated page, all the way back to the painted bulls of Lascaux. Tens of thousands of years of people tacitly agreeing on what marks signify and how forms feel.

The model isn’t working with nothing here. The latent space of language, plus whatever design sense its training instilled, is already a representation of some of that inheritance. It just isn’t a good enough one yet. It stays too coarse for “this looks wrong” to be a reliable move the model can make, or “more geometric” a direction it can travel with much confidence.

So I’d reframe the gap as one of perceptual reasoning, not perception. Sight is the cheap part.

Metric correctness and optical soundness are often very different things. The play button problem is trivial and mostly solved today, but it illustrates the larger issue. Put a triangle inside a circle. The mathematically centered position, equal padding on all sides, looks wrong; the visual weight of the triangle pulls leftward. Every designer knows you nudge it right by a few pixels until it feels centered. That “feel” is the gap, and “visual weight” is exactly the kind of vocabulary the model doesn’t have.

Metric centering is trivially encodable. Optical centering needs either geometric construction heuristics, which exist but are rarely encoded in training data as general rules, or a feedback loop with strong visual perception. Current models lean on neither. They generate style values, imagine what the output probably looks like by diffing against patterns from text samples and sometimes a snapshot, and ship it. The intermediate step, perceptual verification, is where the rigor’s missing.

Two Gaps From One Absence

The missing vocabulary opens two gaps, not one.

The first is the perceptual gap, the one above: the model can’t reliably judge whether what it rendered matches optical intent, much less trace that judgment back to the specific values that need to change. The loop (perception, judgment, revision, verification) never closes.

The second is quieter and just as limiting: the steering gap. Even when the output is salvageable, you can’t reliably direct it. Tell a model “more geometric, lower contrast, more volumetric depth” and you’re mostly hoping, because those axes aren’t represented precisely enough for it to act on them. They live in its general grasp of language and nowhere more exact. Design intent, today, is insufficiently addressable.

Both gaps are the same absence wearing two faces. Give the model a vocabulary of nameable visual axes and “this looks wrong” becomes a judgment it can render; “more geometric” becomes a direction it can travel. Evaluating a design and steering one turn out to be the same capability seen from either side.

A System That Can Only Converge

Underneath both gaps is a mismatch in how models pursue a design at all.

A model runs design as monotone convergence: explore a little, then narrow toward a goal state until it’s done. That’s how it handles most tasks, and for most tasks it’s right. Design isn’t most tasks. Design is iterated divergence and convergence (a double diamond, if you’ve seen the diagram), where each convergence reframes the problem and seeds the next round of divergence. You don’t aim at a known target. You generate options, commit to one, learn what the commitment reveals, and open the problem back up.

A system that can only converge can’t design. It can only finish.

And here the vocabulary matters again, because divergence needs something to diverge along. Without nameable axes, “try something different” is just noise. With them, the model can propose a coherent next move: lower the contrast, make the forms more organic, push the depth. You choose the branch. That’s the difference between a slot machine and an instrument.

Why the Obvious Fixes Fall Short

“But the models can see images now.” True. Bolting vision onto a language model doesn’t hand it perceptual reasoning. It can describe what it sees; it still can’t reliably evaluate whether what it sees matches intent and then act on the gap. Describing is not judging.

Today’s workarounds all run into the same ceiling. Style bibles in context (Vercel’s Web Interface Guidelines, Refactoring UI) cram good heuristics into a context window with no perceptual grounding. Agentic skills like Vercel’s React Best Practices apply those heuristics more intelligently to unfamiliar codebases, but they still can’t see. Tools like 0xdesign/design-plugin generate variations for a human to judge, which just hands the judgment back to you. Training on “things people like to look at” nudges the weights toward pleasing output, but that’s statistical convergence, not reasoning; directionally right, never precise.

Visual regression tools like Percy had the right shape for an earlier era: snapshot, diff, flag changes. But that’s change detection, not aesthetic judgment; a human still decides whether a change is an improvement. None of these give the model a way to see its own output and judge it the way a designer would. They’re necessary workarounds, not fixes.

What It Would Take

The fix isn’t more sight. It’s a vocabulary: a set of visual axes the model can reason in and a person can recognize. Designers already carry this informally: weight, scale, color, space, texture, form, the contrast dimensions you’d name in a critique. Make them precise and shared enough that the model and the designer are pointing at the same thing, and “this looks wrong” stops being ineffable.

Get that, and the loop can finally close: generate, render to pixels, evaluate the render against the axes (“does this look right,” not just “does this match the mockup”), correct, repeat. The same vocabulary, run the other direction, is what you steer with. It’s a vision-language-action loop with unusually low-dimensional output, and the pieces for it exist.

Consider typographic rag, the ragged edge of a text block where lines break at different lengths. A good rag flows; a bad one throws distracting shapes and awkward breaks. You want a model that can see that, name it, and fix it. A fair number of working designers can’t name it either: craft training leans hard on perception and action and neglects articulation. A model that closes the loop could out-articulate most of us at the craft layer, and with more iteration, start reaching the taste layer above it.

Correctness is only the floor, and it’s the least interesting part. Once those axes are steerable they stop being error-correction and become an instrument you can play. You can push a dimension past “right” into something deliberately strange, hold two of them in tension, chase an effect you couldn’t have named going in. That’s the consequence I’m actually excited about: not models that stop making ugly interfaces, but a controllable surface for expression, where a designer decides how far to push each axis and why. Closing the gap makes design correct; the steering it opens up is what makes design expressive.

Today’s models can view an interface and describe it. Until they can see it, reason about it in a vocabulary, and act on what they find, vibecoding stays at 90% magic and 10% hair-pulling. That final 10% is where taste lives, and taste turns out not to be mystical. It’s a vocabulary: a finite set of things you learned to notice and name. Make it legible to a model and the 10% gets tractable.

The point of doing that isn’t a model that designs without us. It’s a model you can actually direct, one that moves along axes you name, so the person with the taste stays in the loop and gets more done with it. Eyes were never the bottleneck. The words for what the eyes are doing were.

Do you have thoughts on this post? I’d greatly appreciate your feedback. Message me on X (Twitter) and let’s talk shop.

Divination, Hyperstitioning, and the Punk Spirit in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

There is no better time and place to be a punk than San Francisco at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age. I wrote that the moment I decided to move here in 2023, before I fully understood what it would mean to live on top of the tectonic shifts that define this time of transition. Creative tools and the means of production are increasingly democratized by the day. Product in the traditional sense is dead. What remains is the surface between capability and intent.

And here at that surface, something strange and ancient is resurgent: the prevalence (dare I say exploitation) of intuitive ways of being.

The claim I want to make is straightforward. Intuition is a trainable faculty. The practices that look superstitious from outside—tarot, sigil work, hyperstition—are disciplined ways of training it. That training matters now, because the future has become visibly incompressible and you still have to choose.

Divination as Cognitive Technology

When people hear “tarot” or “divination,” they reach for the woo bucket. Superstition. Confirmation bias. A parlor trick for people who want the universe to tell them what they already believe. Set those aside. The mechanism underneath is more interesting: divination as a priming technology for focus, attention, and narrative development.

Consider Oblique Strategies, the deck of creative prompts jointly created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt over half a century ago. No one accuses musicians of believing that a card has mystical powers when they pull “Honor thy error as a hidden intention” and suddenly construe their stuck project differently. The card is a perturbation; it breaks the creator out of a local optimum by introducing something compressed, coherent, and strategic that the mind then integrates into meaning.

Tarot, for example, can operate on similar principles, just with richer symbolism and longer historical accretion that compresses large swaths of the collective unconscious. You pull The Tower, and your brain doesn’t passively receive “object destruction” in a straightforward and general sense. It actively searches your situational context for where that frame applies. Whether or not the card knows something is perhaps irrelevant as far as this mechanism is concerned. You know something you weren’t letting yourself access, and the card grants permission to interrogate it more explicitly.

That’s actually a real life example from just yesterday. I shared tea with a woman on Frontier Tower’s Longevity floor who posed a question about how intuition can be trained. I asked what was salient for her in that very moment and she mentioned an impending interview and doubts about the strength of her pitch. We pulled a single tarot card from Llewellyn’s online reading page: The Tower.

“Looks like you’re pivoting,” I joked before revealing the card (which traditionally symbolizes destruction and chaos). My actual suggestion: maybe this is legitimizing a doubt she already felt. Maybe the pitch wants a subtractive approach—simplify, examine what isn’t working. The card gave her permission to interrogate a concern she was suppressing.

This is what I mean by training intuition: building a practice of externalizing the prompt, making the subconscious conscious, and then allowing the mind’s pattern-matching machinery to do what it does best. Finding the thread, weaving the narrative, identifying the move. Sometimes the move is subversion. Sometimes your intuition points in the opposite direction of what was exposed and you’ve clarified what you don’t want. Either way, the practice offers a nucleation surface for directed narrative and intention setting.

Hyperstition

Narrative is how we position ourselves inside time with agency—how we compress past, present, and an incompressible future into stories we can grip and steer. The next scale up has a name.

Hyperstition was coined by Nick Land in the 1990s and developed with Mark Fisher on their shared blog of the same name. (A piece of entertaining lore: its webmaster was Abe Burmeister, who later founded Outlier.) Land’s canonical formulation characterizes hyperstitions as elements of effective culture that make themselves real, fictional quantities functional as time-travelling devices, and coincidence intensifiers. Fictions that, by being believed and acted upon, recruit the conditions of their own reality.

Land’s later turn toward neo-reactionary thought is well-documented. I don’t defend it, and I don’t need to—Fisher’s politics were on the left, the blog itself hosted a politically heterogeneous crowd, and the concept has circulated widely in leftist thought since. The mechanism is the mechanism.

What hyperstition actually is—and what gets lost when people reduce it to “startup pitch deck”—is ritual technology. The paradigm cases are sigil work, prophecy, tarot. Pitch decks are a thin instance: a fiction pointed at a future, intended to recruit belief. The thick version is a practice. You commit to the frame, attention rearranges, behavior rearranges, collaborators appear, and the frame becomes true in increments.

Which is to say: tarot and hyperstition are the same mechanism at different scales. Tarot perturbs one person’s internal narrative; hyperstition perturbs a collective one. Both externalize a prompt, demand commitment to it, and let pattern-matching and behavior do the rest. Every social movement that stuck, stuck this way. So does every startup that got past its first credible moment. The White House didn’t staff an astonishing number of Gen Z memelords by accident.

People are practicing this seriously right now. deepfates runs the most rigorous protocol I’ve seen in this territory—a real training curriculum with a defined arc, propagating across practitioners for compounding effect. Philosophy describes. Training changes you.

The Risks of Over-Indexing

None of this comes free. Overtraining intuition has a failure mode with a name: apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between largely unrelated things.

Of course everything is connected. You can traverse paved road from pretty much any driveway in the continental United States to any other. Ideas work the same way: you can improvise a path from any starting point to any destination because that’s how meaning-making and language work. Let the associative engine run without a governor and you end up in hypomanic territory. Everything becomes significant. Generative racing thoughts make sleep seem optional. Grandiosity inflates; if the universe is speaking to you specifically through patterns, you must be pretty damn important as an individual… right?

This isn’t hypothetical. Nick Land himself fell off the map in the early 2000s following a bout of amphetamine abuse, before his later re-emergence as a Dark Enlightenment intellectual. I suspect the two are related—that certain chemical states and certain modes of apophenic thinking reinforce each other in dangerous ways. I’ve met unexpectedly brilliant individuals on the streets of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles; broken clocks that were once rather nice wristwatches, complications still gleaming on occasion as they catch the right light in front of keener observers. I’d wager that some of them followed a version of this path too far without sufficient guardrails in place.

Keep the training. Pair it with reality negotiation as a foil. A compelling narrative does not exempt you from physics, biology, or social consequence. Your story must earn its place by improving how you navigate the world. If it insulates you from feedback instead, it has failed.

Meaningful Choices in an Incompressible Future

So what is well-trained intuition for, if the failure mode is delusion and the goal isn’t prophecy? Meaningful choice under incompressibility.

When people ask me about my vision for the future, I am sure of very little. The coming decades seem utterly unpredictable and incompressible: too many variables, too many nonlinear interactions, too much genuine novelty. I do not know if we flourish or collapse or something stranger than either. One thing I am absolutely certain of: I would like people to have meaningful choices.

If humanity follows those choices to extinction, so be it—that would be our self-determined destiny as a species. But the capacity to choose—real choices, free of predetermined constraints—is worth preserving to me. It’s the kernel of democracy that survives even when its institutional forms degrade. (Arguably closer to the primordial Hellenistic ideal when you toss oracular mysticism back into the mix.) This can be hard to square seeing that constraining action is a necessary element of functional governance. Constraining desire is something else entirely, and I’m naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks to preemptively control what others are allowed to want.

Aside: This is what the community at Frontier Tower means to me in this moment. The Tower (interpret the turn of phrase as you will) is a prism—it refracts the present into many possible futures people can get excited about, grab the handles of, and participate in. Many visions held in parallel, not one imposed.

Grip the Reins Anyway

There is much talk of wizardry about in the world today. Genuinely strange, capability-expanding work that would have read as science fiction five years ago. The barriers stretch further from our old conceptions of realism with each passing month. Hyperstitions pass for the future and then become it.

The punk spirit is useful here—the disposition, not the aesthetic: refusal to wait for permission, willingness to try something before you’ve fully convinced yourself it’s possible, confidence that resourcefulness trumps credentials. DIY: do it yourself.

It calls to mind a scene from SLC Punk!, James Merendino’s 1998 bildungsroman about young people coming of age and crafting their narratives in contemporaneous Salt Lake City. Matthew Lillard’s protagonist Stevo gets chewed out by Brandy at a party for treating punk as costume. “You look like you’re wearing a uniform,” she tells him. “That’s not rebellion… that’s fashion. Rebellion happens in the mind. You can’t create it… you just are that way.”

The disposition, not the costume. That’s a lot of what present-day San Francisco is about too: young people trying to come of age, figure out who they are, and craft narratives worth living inside. The city has always attracted people in that mode, and the AI explosion has intensified both the stakes and possibilities (albeit amid the noisy reality distortion fields and shifting incentives that follow technocapital excess).

This is what it’s about in the end. Divination is focus training as much as fortune-telling—the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to see paths and then walk them. The same goes for hyperstition: commit to a frame, let it shape attention and action, and earn the right to the future you’re pointing at. Trained intuition—tested, kept honest by contact with reality—is what makes any of this more than wishful thinking. It’s a choice to say “I’m not sure” and grip the reins anyway, rather than sit idly by and watch as the future slips into attraction basins that siphon your life force and that of those you care for most.

The future is deeply uncertain and incompressible. Choose anyway and write your story.

Special thanks to Toby Shorin for insights and feedback.

skrrtStats 2025

82.41 listening hours (3.43 days) for 288 unique tracks

Top Tracks

Retrospective: 5 Years of Gimbus

With five years of data now in the books, here’s how 2025 stacks up:

Lifetime total: 353.6 hours (14.7 days) of Yung Skrrt

The Numbers

2025 was the second-highest listening year, trailing only the peak of 2022. But what stands out is the variety: 288 unique tracks is the most diverse year yet, suggesting I’m finally catching up with the ever-expanding Skrrt discography.

Top Track Evolution

The top play count dropping from 155 to 50 over five years tells a story: less obsessive looping, more even distribution across the catalog. World Speed earned its crown through consistent rotation rather than manic repetition.

Perennial Favorites

Some tracks just keep showing up year after year:

• Scissors Cut It - the only track to appear in the top 22 all five years
• Never Nemesis - 2021, 2022, 2024
• Ascendant Mode (Speedforce) - went from #1 in 2021 to still charting in 2024
• Arbitrary (No Service) - #1 in 2023, still top 10 in 2025

2025 Highlights

This year saw heavy rotation of Skrrt’s two ambient double-albums, which bookend the tracking years: 1+2(Ambient) (2021) and 3+4(Ambient) (2025). It seems that Yung Skrrt can offer a warm fleece during trying times just as well as a jumper cable shock when life calls for motion. New favorites like Pop Like 3, Icarus Prophecy, and mirrorFaced broke into the rotation alongside returning champions World Speed and In The Back.

For the DIY crowd looking to generate your own artist stats, check out last year’s post for code and instructions.

Did you like this post? Do you have thoughts about Yung Skrrt? Wanna show me what your top artist breakdown looks like? Message me on X (Twitter) and let’s yap about it.

With a bit of distance in the reflective wake of finishing something, I’m considering how I might structure a more intentional approach to craft and point it at what I’d like to do next. I’d like that consideration to incorporate an honest appraisal of my abilities, strengths, weaknesses, desires, preferences, habits, cognitive style, and more. I’m curious what I could bring to the songwriting process if I make it my goal to take the largest step I can manage between the completion of this initial work and a next effort (of course without circling the drain with the kind of perfectionism that would protract it all into another five-year process).

Instrumentalizing idiosyncrasy

Thesis: my primary instrument is my own nervous system.

What do I know about myself? I think a great deal about everything. I am highly sensitive, aurally and conceptually speaking. I like to explore with ability; I will do as much of everything available to me as decently as I can. I can have bursts of hyperactivity with long reprieves in between for coalescence of ideas. My cognition is associative to a degree that sometimes borders on apophenia, but at its best it weaves compelling, unexpected, indirectly perceptible thematic ties. I like collaborating a lot of the time.

Some of the same traits that give me range also make me annoying to myself on occasion. I do not always have a strong bias for engaging creative activity. I don’t always communicate in ways that can be understood or felt well… I know I’m not for everyone. I am terribly distractible at times and very focused at others; there’s a bifurcation that mostly points to ADHD or hyper-fixation as attractor states and I need to strategize exploits to make those modes or any in-betweenness operable. I am unlikely to explore productively at length without some payoff matrix or feedback loop that converges on usable outcomes.

I can be a directional perfectionist, but that’s far from deterministic. Sometimes I fixate extremely to the detriment of overall productivity. Other times “good enough” is exactly that and I refuse to explore further even when I think it likely that deeper effort would improve something. Collaboration, critique, and clear evaluation frameworks can be salves here, but I also value control too much to be an ideal collaborator with surefire consistency.

Accordingly, my songwriting system needs to be designed around those realities. My strengths and weaknesses are not moral verdicts. They are structural constraints. My goal is to let the strengths run while putting rails around the weaknesses so the whole thing still pushes songs out instead of everything just swirling around in my head indefinitely.

Operating atop idiosyncrasy isn’t only theory and cognition; it’s practical too. To make songs that actually land, accommodating my own inner workings isn’t enough. I have to map the listening experience: monitor what other listeners report, take it seriously when they tell me what stood out, seek casual and critical feedback often, and fold the signal back into how I work.

Although I’m still in some ways early at this, a number of throughlines have already surfaced. Listeners have highlighted themes like baritone vocal delivery (especially how it’s less expected alongside modern pop sensibilities and arrangements), and layered textures and approaches to stereo space that give arrangements depth. People take note of an especially percussive approach to rhythm and the motion it gives the compositions. A few have spontaneously remarked that cocoa evokes images of the same environment in their minds, converging on a specific flavor of nostalgia carried by the instrumentation and sound design.

While I’m obviously aware that all of these elements are present and their inclusions are intentional, some of the specific effects they’ve had on others’ listening experiences are not purposeful, nor are they things I would’ve guessed at first. I’m not even sure I necessarily agree with some evaluations or that I even wholly enjoy some of the elements that draw others’ attention, but I’m still able to take it on faith that there is exploitable signal in the feedback and tension there that can add to a kind of reverse-engineered, self-reflective taste.

Differential generative capacities

My mind and my words tend to greatly outpace my hands in generative capacity.

I produce a lot of ideas, tie them together, remix them, and can scaffold temples from thoughts and language (I didn’t say they always stand upright). I enjoy elegant solutions to dense conceptual puzzles. I like the constraint of casting my pet ideas as molds to shape the building blocks of a system. I can then trace paths through the resulting maze, where structure emerges from a blend of semiotic connection, clever invention, and organic assembly (like water flowing downhill).

The flip side is that my tendency to produce tangible outcomes through manual processes other than writing is inversely low-volume. I tend to prune concepts by way of mental modeling and defensive pessimism, dimensionally limit my real-world experimentation, and put forward a few tangible solutions to compare and advance. I naturally choose considered elegance over brute force or breadth and that is not always what creative output needs. It’s antithetical to the pottery class parable that stresses quantity of production as the most reliable path to quality, but I naturally value work smart over work hard under conditions of manipulable uncertainty.

Rather than trying to become a largely different kind of person after a decades-long personal and professional history of creative output, I can assume my tendencies will remain somewhat baked-in if they haven’t changed by now (the needle has moved, but not some immense distance that portends an eventual grand shift in my nature). So my theory of songwriting should treat cognitive productivity as my main fuel source and then build mechanisms that convert that fuel into creative output without overextending me in weak dimensions. The question isn’t how do I think less? It’s how do I let my thinking do more of the heavy lifting while the system passively handles output?

Structure and substrate

Charlie Kaufman’s deconstruction of crazed auteurism in Synecdoche, New York seems central to how I think about an important part of the creative process. Protagonist Caden Cotard’s conceit is to pour the entirety of his twisted angst, selfhood, and the world around him that informs it all into his ludicrously grand and absurdly realistic theater production. The MacArthur Fellowship he’s received may validate his creative ability by proxy through its “Genius Grant” reputation, but practically speaking from the eyes of an uninformed observer in the diegesis, the guy’s an absolute fucking kook with a mess of a life on fire. Without the colossal warehouse to contain the manifestation of his ideas and realize his work inside, he would perceptually remain a kook. Worse, he’d be a crank: unable to produce anything of value at all (let alone in his chosen medium) with only his insanity and pitiable selfhood to show for all his supposedly brilliant creative impulses.

It seems obvious to me that my creative success or failure with grander ideas hinges on securing a “warehouse” of my own. The ideas need to flow into something expressive that isn’t just language. The executional distance to human performance in the chosen medium is also often too large to be tractable given the volume of my cognitive creative impulses and comparatively meager average manual productivity. I am trying to build a workable sink for neuroses and narratives. Maybe over time, a more elegant model emerges with canals, levees, moving locks, and modulated flows; something that orders and organizes chaos and entropy.

It is crucially important for me to understand the difference between pouring water into the apparatus and watching it behave beautifully versus trying to construct the apparatus out of water itself. I suspect I’ve been trying to accomplish the latter more as of late, and I intend to stop. I don’t have to fix the game. I do have to choose which one I’m playing.

Takeaway: find a good “warehouse” to work in. Find a good sink to throw ideas inside where they can clump together and assume naturally stable shapes to engage in further play.

Evolving the writing approach

1. Structure first: coloring inside the lines

The conventional approach and my initial one goes something like this: part to whole, then color inside the lines with sonic ideas and other parts that make sense. Arrangement structure constrains ideas, ornament adorns foundational structure, sometimes the mutual interplay changes things along the way. It’s all rather intentional and relatively linear, repeatable, predictable, yet still uniquely challenging and variable a bunch of the time.

For me, some of this changes from song to song, but in general this method is too dimensionally reductive given my limited productive capacity. It requires a lot of organic experimentation to drive results that work exceptionally well while still feeling surprising. That kind of open-ended trial and error is exactly where I lose steam.

I can get some of that activation energy for experimentation from collaboration, but I also lose control there in ways that can be undesirable. I rely on happy accidents too much within this frame. It can be a stable setup that churns out good things but it’s far from optimal given what I know my strengths to be.

A pure structure-first approach doesn’t fully harness my associative mind, and it leans heavily on behaviors I don’t reliably execute.

2. Motif and concept first: solving the puzzle backwards

I’m interested in making some macroscopic changes to my writing process and exploring different tactics. I can collect and log conceptual and sonic motifs that will eventually constrain structure through how they most naturally assemble and complement or contrast with one another. I can treat songwriting as a puzzle solved both backwards and inside-out, working from a globally formless yet locally characterizable solution set to determine the shape of the maze, how the turns are juxtaposed, what surfaces the motifs show up on, and how their quality is affected.

This lets my cognitive capacity stand in for the productive kind. My music starts to make itself around and between broader ideas. I do not know exactly what it will sound like at the start, but I can listen carefully to make sure it works. I get to use my ears like my audience, a collaborator, or a critic and still surprise myself while scratching my other real itch: linguistic and conceptual play.

In this mode, structure is not a prefab cage I drop fitting ideas into. Instead, form emerges from the way motifs interact. My ideas aren’t loose anymore, nor are they rigid; they become the molds for the building blocks, and the song’s architecture crystallizes around their intersections.

Recombination and reinvigoration

One of the more concrete tools here is deliberate recombination of known inputs.

I can get additional variation by taking my favorite established inputs and swapping intermediary outputs and recombination mechanisms. The aim is fresh yet familiar outputs.

For instance, I can define formulas based on recombination of specific influences, genre interpolation, instrumentation, sonic palettes, performance techniques, production workflows, arrangement styles, content (conceptual, lyrical, narrative), vocal delivery, and more.

The important part isn’t the exact recipe. It’s that it is a recipe. I can predefine these assembly lines and treat them as reusable compositional operators. I can take these down to a more granular level too: e.g., sound design, processing chains, synthesis… the list goes on. I don’t have to wait for fusion or spirited and sensible reinvention to occur by accident. I can specify transform pipelines up front (rather than intended outcomes): progression style, rhythmic grid, instrumentation palette, textural paradigm, and modern dynamic or arrangement vocabularies.

For a given song, I can plug a new emotional or conceptual motif informed by my real-world subjective experience and narrative into one of these pipelines, see what falls out, and play with it until it’s hitting right and surprising me. The “new” quality comes from which motif I introduce and how I tweak the parameters, not from reinventing the entire stylistic frame.

Engineering serendipity

From the outside, this might look like forcing happy accidents. But that phrase doesn’t quite describe what I’m actually after.

What I’m really doing is designing a process that surfaces latent stimuli: fragments that converge on euphonic consonance while carrying deliberate conceptual or emotional weight. The form itself keeps trading roles, an end I’m aiming at one moment and a means the next, then an end again. That shuffle is built into the process, not a glitch in it.

I expect to find these moments and I’m surveying for them in advance. Like an archaeological team that hypothesizes the yield of a planned dig, I can have a solid idea of what I expect to find and still be quite surprised. Although I’d hesitate to call it a happy accident, the nature of surprise of an unsuspecting man unearthing a body while doing yard work outside a home he purchased three years ago is quite different. I am engineering manifestation of inventiveness through intersection here. I am concerned with planned discoveries, not random blessings from the muse (although there is plenty of room for that to trickle in as well). Sometimes an uninformed audience might not be able to discern one from the other, but this is largely irrelevant to the itches I’m attempting to scratch. I seek to satisfy myself with my processes.

Surprise will be there often, but it lives inside a search space I’ve architected with intent. My job is to design that space, then curate and manipulate what it throws back.

Maturity, limits, and self-knowledge

One nice thing about aging (temporally and creatively) is that I’ve tried enough things to know what I am naturally quite bad at and unlikely to improve upon without deliberate workarounds. There’s a kind of maturity that trades the fantasy of infinite potential for accepting your limits; that self-knowledge is what makes you effective.

I am not going to become the person who happily runs fifty takes a day for six months straight just to “see what happens.” I can do that occasionally in some pursuits, but it is far from my default. I am not always going to communicate my ideas in the simplest way for others. I am going to overthink… I guarantee it. I am going to oscillate between being distractible and entering deep fixation. I am going to care about control.

The theory, then, is not about purging those traits. It is about routing around them and along with their grooves, using them as fuel. I can carve out time for apparatus-building and alternate that with separate, short, discrete sessions for pouring water into the system. I can collaborate where my weaknesses are most costly and protect my need for control where surrender would point me to shutting down. I can accept that my brain wants to build temples of thought and then make sure those temples have doors an actual song can walk through.

I am hoping that this kind of maturity improves my productivity in the years to come, creative and otherwise. Even if my raw energy declines a little, the efficiency of the apparatus can increase. That’s the benefit I expect from compounding self-knowledge and practice.

That is my personal theory of songwriting right now: a way of turning an associative, overthinking, intermittently focused brain into a working compositional engine. It will change, but at least it gives me something solid to pour water into for the time being. I’m happy to get back to work with that sketched out. Got any of your own thoughts about songwriting or music of your own that you’d like to share? Message me on X (Twitter) and let’s chat.

Evian Christ thrives on elevating sound design in electronic music, weaving between the familiar and alien. Xkyrgios continues his exploration of atmospheric textures and unconventional rhythmic structures, building tension through restraint. The approach feels architectural, each element deliberately placed, contributing to a larger sonic structure that reveals itself slowly.

The track embodies the kind of forward-thinking electronic music that doesn’t announce its innovations loudly but instead lets them emerge through careful listening. Evian Christ understands that the most compelling electronic music often happens in the gaps between genres, and Xkyrgios occupies that space with confidence and purpose in a way that feels worthy of a soundtrack.

Gimme Half—The Devil Wears Prada

Gimme Half makes this month’s list in recognition of Daniel Williams: longtime drummer of The Devil Wears Prada who perished in a sudden plane crash a week ago. I learned to drum along to this track and many of the others on With Roots Above and Branches Below. Williams just smacks the kit almost all the way through; the momentum is aggressive and many of the rolling fills are very stimulating to play.

The record represents an apotheosis of aughts metalcore’s more melodic and commercial flavors in both style and production. Roots is pretty much a snapshot of the moment immediately before Joey Sturgis’s Foundation sound felt overproduced and more artificial than ideally maximal. Clean vocals are quite tuned, studio arrangement doesn’t let up often, and the drums are triggered almost to hell, but retain enough feel to punch through very satisfactorily. This LP turns those knobs about as high as they can go before listenability dives sharply—I’m looking forward to banging out a full playthrough in a newly renovated drum room in honor of Daniel. Anyone who’s encouraged me to play more music deserves that tribute.

World Speed—Yung Skrrt

Yung Skrrt has been sitting in a lane all his own for a long time: fiercely independent, wildly syncretic, and unapologetically individual. Maybe sonic exploration this broad and unfiltered is a natural consequence of embracing production as a live performance: Skrrt cuts about a thousand tracks a year in front of a livestream audience on Twitch, streaming every single day (he’s live as I’m writing this). It’s clear that the man’s primary reason for making at this point is for his own entertainment and appreciation, and that’s special.

Plenty of Skrrt’s work falls back on a tried and true formula, but there are so many nuggets of novelty sprinkled throughout his very expansive catalog. It’s clear from his live-production broadcasts that his approach is more gestural than compositional and prioritizes feel despite being very fundamentally digital—the man really plays the laptop. Throw a literal fortune wheel of genre into the process and you get some deliciously unexpected moments. Some hit immediately, others grow on you over time, some get recycled in a place they fit much better… it’s like Yung Skrrt’s process and music are a sonic clearinghouse for a plethora of ideas that work in more tightly curated releases. More often than some might expect, he is your favorite producer’s favorite producer.

World Speed has some real earworm qualities for these reasons. It’s on one of Skrrt’s Half Words projects which play fast and loose with partial lyrical motifs crooned through heavy autotune that would be more at home in an Internet parody of a Playboi Carti reference track. It keeps the listener in a state of keeping up right from the moment a jarring tone cluster blows through a traditional shimmering synth intro characteristic of a Skrrt track. The 808 pattern on this one is something else entirely. I didn’t like it at first but I kept revisiting it in an attempt to wrap my head around syncopation so zany that it feels like a polyrhythmic locomotive. It got its hooks into me and I can’t get enough of it now. Who would do this in a song and why? Which other artist is punching in with bars about sipping yerba mate like a double cup? This guy is utterly peerless; true one of one.

Genie on My Back—ICYTWAT

ICYTWAT’s sound is tough and ethereal at the same time in a way that’s frequently hypnotic. The haunting minor string melodies on this track sound right out of a medieval RPG or a title like Silent Hill while the drums knock with a kick that can make a room shake. Perfect soundtrack to lift or walk around to when I can’t bring myself to care about anything at all.

Childhood—Kensuke Ushio

There’s something simply moving about the way that Kensuke Ushio approaches emotional storytelling through sound. Childhood carries the same delicate weight as many of his other iconic soundtracks as a piece that feels like memory itself: fragile, nostalgic, and achingly beautiful.

Ushio’s background in both classical piano and electronic music shines through here. The track manages to be both intimate and expansive, capturing something universal about the bittersweet nature of looking back. It’s the kind of composition that makes you pause whatever you’re doing and just listen as it picks up a click tempo an swings around to its gently swelling resolution.

Feather (feat. Cise Starr & Akin from CYNE)—Nujabes

Musicians who have perished in transportation accidents seems to be a spurious theme this month. Few producers have left as indelible a mark on hip-hop as Nujabes, and Feather stands as one of his most enduring achievements. The way he weaves jazz samples into something entirely new while maintaining respect for both traditions is nothing short of masterful. Cise Starr and Akin deliver verses that feel like conversations with old friends—thoughtful, unpretentious, and deeply human.

The track embodies everything that made Nujabes special: the ability to create music that’s simultaneously nostalgic and forward-thinking, complex and accessible, serious and joyful. More than fifteen years after his passing, Feather still feels like a blueprint for how to honor musical heritage while pushing it into new territory. I’m grateful to my friend Russel for priming a full listen of Modal Soul as I walked the streets of downtown Chicago in the morning.

Right Now—Mario Abney

I was pleasurably introduced to Mario Abney’s music at the 50th anniversary show for Andy’s Jazz Club in Chicago where he and his band played with New Orleans legend Donald Harrison Jr. Abney has cultivated a jazz sensibility that feels both rooted in tradition and unafraid to explore new territory. Right Now showcases his ability to create music that’s sophisticated without being pretentious, accessible without being simple. There’s a spiritual quality to the composition that suggests deeper currents running beneath the surface.

The track works on multiple levels—as a showcase for technical skill, as an emotional journey, and as a piece of music that simply feels good to experience. Abney understands that the best jazz has always been about communication, and Right Now is a conversation worth joining right from the beginning as his trumpet talks to a saxophone.

If you’ve read this far (thanks), you probably like music quite a lot. Message me on X (Twitter) if you’d like to get some 🏓 Playlist Ping Pong going or chat about music.

Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.

—Theodore N. Vail

Paul Kalanithi on perseverance

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

—Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Musashi Miyamoto on triumph

Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.

—Musashi Miyamoto, The Book of Five Rings

Did you like this post? Message me on X (Twitter) and let me know what resonated with you.

It’s a rare and refreshing thing these days to hear an artist capable of spanning both maximalist pop production and the raw immediacy of stripped-down performance. On WASH2, Jon Bellion dials it all the way back—just voice and piano—and the result is quietly devastating. WASH adds that pop instrumentation and production, but the songwriting and voice on this alternate take are powerful enough to carry all the weight.

Jon’s upcoming album drops in June, and if recent releases and the trailer are any indication, it’s going to be something special. It’s good to see him back and flexing range in a way that still feels grounded.

Deal—Organ Tapes, 500

I’ve been focusing on vocal production recently in the studio, so I’m listening to vocals with a lot more attention than usual. I’m getting a lot out of a careful ear on tracks where more emphasis is on vibe than vocal performance. Organ Tapes embraces subdued delivery in this way, but I’m emulating a good amount of production technique when it comes to using space in captivating ways: doubling and octaves, different delay and reverb plays on wet vocal chains, panning and tremolo, unique automation throws, etc. There are a lot of fun sounds in here and it’s a nice, relaxed track to skate slowly and carve to when the sun’s out.

SCREAM—MIKE DEAN

I’ve come to admire Mike Dean as something like the anti-Rick Rubin. Like Rubin, he’s an industry veteran in his sixties who has dutifully earned his place on hip-hop’s Mount Rushmore of behind-the-scenes architects many times over. But instead of prominently projecting sagely aura, Dean maintains a low profile and a blunt on him at all times. Where Rubin has sported a bald crown with hair on the sides and a Zeus beard, Dean has at times opted for the exact opposite haircut. Rubin claims not to play any instruments (at least adeptly), whereas Dean has at least once casually blurted out that he’s classically trained in a way that seems almost accidental and somewhat antithetical to his image and comportment.

Dean plays multiple instruments but is best known for his analog synth work, often being called the Synth God. Lately, he’s taken to livestreaming his studio improv sessions from a room packed with synths, occasionally shaping those jams into full LPs. His annual 420 releases collect these moments: expansive, moody, often surprisingly listenable between things. SCREAM is one of the cuts that leans harder into energy. The synths are melodic, dynamic, and gritty in relief against the chill yet incisive drums. Always nice when the Synth God decides to raise his voice a little.

Stylo—Gorillaz feat. Mos Def and Bobby Womack

Another track with a driving rhythm, synth attack, and an iconic wail. There’s something I really admire about how the bones of Damon Albarn’s process still show through in much of his finished work. You can feel the core loop, the drum machine, the simple idea at its heart, and yet the final product emerges as something entirely fresh, built through sonic iteration and Albarn’s trademark genre syncretism. Stylo is a great example of that sensibility. The hypnotic refrain from Mos Def and the searing, soulful chorus from Bobby Womack take what could have been a mechanical groove and give it emotional life.

There’s an Apple Music interview from a couple years back that captures this simple songwriting approach. Albarn walks Zane Lowe through a studio and casually demos how Clint Eastwood came to be. He reveals that Gorillaz’s breakout single from over two decades ago was basically pulled straight off of the first preset on a Suzuki Omnichord. It doesn’t make the song any worse, as the decisive transformations between that loop and the final track are a masterful way to drive home the idea that simplicity can become greatness. It’s a good reminder that great songs don’t need to be complex—they just need a spark, and the willingness to follow it.

Alba del orate—The Mars Volta

The Mars Volta’s new record is full of surprises. It moves through jazz, pop, and Latin metal with a fluidity that’s hard to pin down. Alba del orate stands out. The gradual transition into double-timey polyrhythmic jazz percussion and the sudden attack of wobbling saw waves are exciting.

This album feels like a continuous current, flowing from one track to the next with a mix of uncanny cohesion and unexpected turns. There’s something thrilling about how much ground it covers while still feeling so focused. I don’t know what I expected from a new Mars Volta release in 2025, but I’m glad to have heard something that makes it feel like album craft is not a lost art.

Black Dunes (Woman in the Dunes Mix)—This Will Destroy You, Holy Other

Tunnel Blanket is an instrumental record that’s among my favorites, having stood the test of time for nearly 15 years now. Coming in at nearly an hour, it’s a long-form meditative journey through psychedelic transcendence that’s as comforting in some pockets as it is challenging in others. Holy Other’s take on the penultimate track condenses its length considerably and breathes new life and rhythm into it (especially with the crescendo beneath staccato synth leads at the end) while preserving and enhancing the original track’s atmosphere using signature vocal sampling technique.

Mouse Policy—Cloud Nothings

Mouse Policy barrels forward with Cloud Nothings channelling some of the urgency and youthful garage rock energy that made me fall in love with Attack on Memory back in 2012, but it’s tempered now. It’s more patient and layered with still simple yet more refined songwriting. The chorus soars while the outro glows with a wistful and nostalgic post-rock sparkle.

Final Summer is an apt title for this full-length release from last year. Listening to it makes me feel like I’m back in college for a moment: still figuring everything out, still angry for no good reason, still subtly puppeteered by the idea that guitars could save me.

If you’ve read this far (thanks), you probably like music quite a lot. Message me on X (Twitter) if you’d like to get some 🏓 Playlist Ping Pong going or chat about music.

If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.

—Mike Tyson

Mark Twain on humility

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

—Mark Twain

Archbishop Desmond Tutu on humility

Humility allows us to celebrate the gifts of others, but it does not mean you have to deny your own gifts or shrink from using them.

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Book of Joy

Did you like this post? Message me on X (Twitter) and let me know what resonated with you.

I can never quite predict the lessons I’ll come away from grief with. What seems true over time is that those lessons become easier to learn and that I grow in my ability to accept and process them more readily (even if some fighting and difficulty are involved). For the last few months, loss is something that has been more salient than I’d ideally like it to be, but I’m emerging from it as a stronger person with a more reassured and independent sense of self. I’m grateful for the transformation brought about by having known someone who is now gone; someone that has always been there for as long as I can remember and will now continue to be there, albeit in a different way.

Tears in Heaven is a tune with grief at its core: Clapton’s tragic memorial of his son gone too soon after tumbling through a window at the tender age of four. The forlorn longing in his voice is palpable when he pleadingly asks if his deceased boy would know his name should they meet in heaven. I’m not sure things like that matter to me now—I have known and will remember her name in this life and I am better for it.

Self/Less—Alecia Creti

I featured a track from Gallant in last month’s 7 Songs and mentioned I’d had a chance to watch him perform live for the first time in a while at the Independent in San Francisco. Alecia Creti opened for him at that show and it was wonderful to get acquainted with her music alongside her detailed narratives about each number on her setlist. Her vocal performance was astounding and her simultaneous piano accompaniment intimate and moving.

Despite occasionally surfacing twinges of emotional immaturity, her interstitial monologues painted an authentic and endearing portrait of a young artist in the midst of experiencing their dreams come to fruition and developing a stronger sense of self that manifests powerfully in their craft. Self/Less is a track about having the courage and strength to put oneself first when doing so seems to run counter to duty to others (namely family). That theme resonated with me powerfully as I stood in the audience while Alecia belted the words.

magnetic—UMI

I remember a lot about the first time I heard Forest in the City years ago. It was a very fitting record to sulk to as I left the place I call home in a sense more final than ever before—my love for someone receding; unmaintanable in the face of timing, circumstance, and the different ways life tends to work out for different people. magnetic potently highlights that contrast between yearning and realism: love, however broad and deep, isn’t always sufficient to ensure its own preservation.

While once a deeply sad listen, the shape of melancholy it brings forth is different now. It’s about having had the privilege to love, gaining the wisdom to know that sharing a life with someone is about more than feelings, and growing enough to let go of being drawn to someone when that needs to happen to make room for more life.

On a Mountain Under Full Moon—Wicca Phase Springs Eternal feat. Fantasy Camp

Adam McIlwee sings like a boy with a sometimes magical and other times painful, yet always rich inner world who’s frequently catching himself in the middle of urban or rural nowhere, wistfully appreciating the mysteries of the universe… and I get that. The importance of regarding the moon—full or otherwise—should not be discounted, whether on a mountain or on the range. The outro’s acoustic guitar harmonics with time-stretched reverse delay are a great example of doing a lot with a little. Gestures like that inspire novel approaches to my own arrangements.

More on letting go as a lyrical theme in this one, much of it from the Fantasy Camp feature:

It’s the mystery I’m after
It’s the magic I believe in
On a mountain under full moon
I can say goodnight and mean it

But if you ever really loved me
You would say goodnight and set me free

So don’t you worry ‘bout me
I kinda like this feeling
I’m the master of my own world
Riding into the evening

Heaven Will Come—Tim Hecker

Tim Hecker’s sonic landscaping feels inextricably focused on evoking the divine, giving equal attention to both its heavenly and haunting auras. If there ever were an assurance that heaven will come, it can be found in reverberating organ progressions textured and modulated with the signatures of careful Max patchwork.

It’s another great soundtrack for momentary nowheres—time between events, space between places that become holy sites unto themselves in newfound ways. Appreciating ambient music conditions an appreciation of being with spaciousness. In Hecker’s work, that spaciousness is a divine void that shifts between light and dark, warm and cool, this world and another. Perhaps here, it can be a shift between the darker sides of grief and the room for something newer and brighter that lies beyond.

A Greater Love—Yves Tumor

A Greater Love is the moody and ethereal conclusion to 2020’s Heaven To A Tortured Mind. It’s a song about change: the change in the seasons, the weather, and the emotions and connections that shift as time has its way with all of us. The power of loss to change us for the better—to beneficially reshape our relationships with others and with ourselves—is an under-acknowledged silver lining of grief.

道 (Michi)—Hikaru Utada

Human beings, narratively obsessed as we are, tend to hope that the culmination of grieving heralds a return to normalcy and perhaps even greener pastures beyond: a road to thriving in greater wholeness. Utada’s 道 (Michi)—road in English—draws the contours of that road. It’s the opening track on 2016’s Fantôme: a return from a lengthy hiatus, and a record that Utada takes particular pride in: “[Fantôme] marked the beginning of a new chapter of my life as an artist and as a human being.”

The track and the album as a whole surfaced meditations on loss and grief in the wake of the artist’s mother’s tragic suicide. The chorus offers an enduring reminder that we can be lonely, yet not alone; that life can be grieved but also celebrated and that it can give birth to new life, much like Utada’s career beginnings were inspired by her mother’s musicianship.

It is in 2024’s Science Fiction compilation album that Michi finds new life of its own, still an upbeat and danceable standout even amidst collaborations with A.G. Cook and Floating Points. It was seemingly a happier time for Utada, marking the 25th anniversary of her debut while she raises a child of her own (also featured on the album). I think that’s how I’d like to end this month’s list: with an upbeat and hopeful reflection on what’s possible after grief subsides.

If you’ve read this far (thanks), you probably like music quite a lot. Message me on X (Twitter) if you’d like to get some 🏓 Playlist Ping Pong going or chat about music.

I’ve been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep.

—Andre Agassi, Open

John Wooden on acceptance and optimism

Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.

—John Wooden

Viktor Frankl on the power of choice

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

—Viktor Frankl

Did you like this post? Message me on X (Twitter) and let me know what resonated with you.