A Tasting Menu for La Digestion (or Love Songs for Alice Waters)

Saying Grace:

"We need faces and voices to speak for people again. We need to cherish the gift of communication as the deepest truth of humanity, to which all technological innovation should also be oriented," said Pope Leo XIV in his Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications.

The following text presents a plurality of voices. It is not a conversation so much as a montage of speech acts, set into courses like a meal at Chez Panisse, from texts gathered in a manner that is akin to the farm-to-table ethos pioneered in this region. The text precedes a performance and bears a relation to a composition to come, which will seek to resequence a recording of the performance in the same way that this text combinatorially reworks three discrete voices.

Bon Appetit.



The First Course:

I’m always particularly skeptical of a “return” to some traditional system of composition. What’s worse it feels like I’ll return to what was once the offerings of a vibrant culture to find them coddled and spoiled. But from this perspective I wonder what utility and lessons can be gleaned from past experiments? Were these experiments successful at their time? Yes, but is it still edible?

As a singer I've lived with a voice that's failed me more than it's been of use. Years of gargling salt water—shots of apple cider vinegar—honey—all remedies to soothe a system inside of me that I'll never see. When you sing in a band, the convention is that you stand right in the center of the group. You are in a position towards which the most attention is directed, and you are set up as well for the largest potential of embarrassment. After graduating high school I spent a year touring with a band and in that band I played bass and I sang. The consistency of shows, the quantity of performances naturally allowed for more opportunities for my voice to fail. Many nights my voice gave out. Observations I had were that if I pushed the air out with more force, I could sustain my singing, but the moment the volume of my singing slipped below a certain threshold, the voice would sputter and crack like a broken whistle. The frustration of losing my voice in the middle of performing was unbearable and destroyed my mood. I would refrain from dairy, coffee, cigarettes—all things said to weaken the flexibility and strength of vocal cords. I would remain silent for entire days, avoiding conversations and signaling to people that I couldn't participate.

The voice offers a set of problems for timbre. It is the hardest to reproduce of any acoustic instrument—it is perhaps also the most metonymic of the human subject in its historical moment. It is arguable that the human voice can more easily imitate the sounds of both natural and synthetic sources than the other way around—even the amount of processing that AI has to muster to approximate it still struggles to emulate its melodic applications.

The human voice—its straddle between abstraction and the figure, its straddle between communication and song, text and performance—models the tensions between music and raw sonic information.



The Second Course:

The voice is a screen—both in that, as listeners, it invites the most visual or imaginary projection in imagining its character—the similitude of the human subject that the voice conveys, in effect interpreting a human conveyed through musical material—and also that it obfuscates the reality of the very person who produces it.

What I would like to achieve is an echo. A simple goal, etymologically: "sound repeated by reflection", with Greco-Roman origins, Sanskrit as well. Following this definition, it would make sense that the more reflection (which bears a relation to Place), the larger the sound, the larger the echo. I would like my echo to be as large as possible, and as beautiful and intelligent as possible. The legibility of the echo: that old conversation of readers and the books one has read. Blue bloom is on the gore-pinnacled hair – a quotation from James Joyce’s Ulysses changing in meaning after reading Hugh Kenner’s modernist critical work The Pound Era, understanding the reference to Ezra Pound’s Cathay, the poem The Beautiful Toilet, and illustrating this process of identification and recognition.

Naturally, a thought follows: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as echoes, sounds repeated by reflection, works making songs of The World. And a strain of narcissism: Joyce the tenor, and I the DJ, the producer, the musician. Of course, we return to the Greek: Echo and Narcissus. A circle for my own sake; a preference for closing loops.

What I would like to achieve is achievement — what is gained, or expressed, from such statements? And this idea of gain, central to achievement of course. Easy to get lost in circularity. And of course, I know what I want to achieve, I have been thinking it, rolling the idea around, yet dancing around it in the production of this text. The logic of capitalism: the accumulation of accumulation.

I had been conditioned by genres of music defined by performances of contemporary male suffering—emo and screamo and metalcore. Often these bands had two singers—one who sings in a mezzo-soprano range, whose vocals sound like whining, like a tantrum and yet melodically delivered in a rigid, considered fashion—and then one who is the 'screamer,' the one who bellows indiscernibly, whose guttural screams sound like burping, like digestion. The abjection of this form and its representation of a split personality or mood fascinated me. At my grandparents' house on the Puget Sound in Washington during the summer, I would find empty stretches of beach and practice screaming at the kelp and flotsam of the Sound. I could never seem to reproduce the right kind of digitally-compressed vocal fry I was after. It was a kind of singing that had to be rehearsed in privacy because it enacts an extremity of pain and disorder. The way a voice is utilized for singing in a folk context—by this I mean outside of sealed-off concert halls—is determined by what it must sing over or against. Much extreme music that involves screaming in one form or another artificially produces conditions that necessitate screams by having guitars and cymbals eat up the higher and mid registers of the sonic field—for a voice to break through it has to eat its way through this chaotic spectral inhabitation of noise, and so the singer must produce a vocal effect that can scrape holes into the fabric of this noise rather than sit alongside it.

Increasingly we hear the voice, “speech” move away from its recognizable and appealing qualities. Regionality, cadence, etc where it is to be digested and integrated through interpretation, now moves towards a scattering of the voice into discrete frequency bands, isolating the elemental strata that together constitute the whole, their constituent parts then repeatedly cycle through a computational method of projection which estimates and emulates these sounds, cadence, volume synthetically through digital synthesis and projects them back into physical space as a numerical distribution inserted over the pressure-time plane.



The Third Course:

Robert Ashley said of composition that it is “the process of constantly making a decision about when you're going to update what you've just done.” He writes in his composition, “Yes, but is it edible?” on how the notational or harmonic systems employed in music produces a certain kind of music, the limitations of which are built into the music to be heard, and the system will not produce any other kind of music. The more precise a system the more limited the more the limited the relationship between notation, harmony and instrument becomes. Situating here composition as a way outside of notational integration as a means of making tools for continuous recalibration, where an iterative system blocks certain paths while pointing toward others, making more clear that the productive conditions surrounding these compositions are ultimately an artifact of physical parameters, forces under constraint, in our case pressure. Typically these conditions of notational and harmonic systems provide dictation for how music will be heard, digested and these systems cannot produce any other kind of music.

As machines replaced mathematicians in the analysis of trajectories, so too did the interpretive work of mystics and theologians transition into the domain of technician-specialists, trained in deterministic and bayesian methods and increasingly reliant on iterative measurement machines. These systems have enabled an exponential expansion in micro-mechanistic quantification while significantly disempowering any individual’s capacity to understand and traverse the objects they describe. The voice, sampled and resampled, has changed position. It is no longer the subject that brings forth speech but an inscription surface transformed through a calculated disassembly of the signal so that it can be discreetly and efficiently stored.

Singing involves precise modulations of air—there is a particular physiology to producing any given note. But the voice that someone cultivates and is recognized by is more defined by the negation of physical rules than by adherence to them. I wondered if it was a mistake that I had wandered into a genre and a lineage of singing in the indie-rock tradition, if that's even what it can be called. Perhaps my voice was more equipped for some kind of more elongated singing or something with more academic control like opera or showtunes.

The voice someone sings with is often very different to the perception than the voice someone speaks with. In college I would spend hours in a basement underneath my dorm building and record myself singing. I would write songs, record them, and record myself performing the vocals in at least twenty different ways—trying to direct air through different parts of my diaphragm, my head, my face. It occurred to me that a voice is used like a paint swatch, a color, a skin—it designs something—more than it is always already a fact of anatomy. It is a site of active identity construction.



The Fourth Course:

It's remarkable how the lean gut is normalized and/or positioned as a status symbol. Lucki. Big Yaya. Glo Gang. In actuality, it's a belly full of feces. Here, Health does not equate to Wealth, explicating an Anti-Emersonian state of being that operates in opposition to American Values, perhaps an obvious state of being given the trans-Atlantic nature that underscores contemporary rap music. Opiate use intertwining with black music is nothing new. Miles Davis. Charlie Parker. Ray Charles. Lists that are easy to start and continue. The lean gut differentiates itself from heroin in its stark opposition of visibility from the gauntness of smack. The rush of sugars mixes with opiate constipation, the slowing of the digestive system. What appears is novel, an invention whose visibility can be attached to imaging and dissemination technologies of the 21st century. "Wockhardt give me the runs", says Lil Durk on Off White VLONE.

Let’s think about these actions and states of the body as Writing – here considered not just as linear or alphabetic text, but in the context of inscription: an action that leaves a mark, thus expanding the field to include image and music in addition to text.

Today, almost everyone (in developed countries) writes in this manner. Creating and inscribing image, sound, and text. Emails, text messages, phone calls. FaceTimes, Instagram Stories, X posts. Metadata inscribes another layer on top: location, time, behavior. Yet hierarchies still exist as far as why inscriptions matter: on social media: an algorithm, dictated by likes and other forms of engagement. In literature and art, gatekeepers: publishers, agents, gallerists, dealers, critics. Music, popular and non-popular, exists in a sort of middle ground, privy to both the obliquely mechanized systems governing the art and literature worlds – especially when academicized or lumped into an 'experimental' strain of framework – as well as the algorithmic loops that dictate our conceptions of Pop today.

Thus, the responsibility of the writer today lies not just in the production of said [image, music, and text], but the design of systems of production, such that the ways in which one's writing is received, whether this feedback is delivered as financial capital, social capital, algorithmic clout, in turn affect both the quality and the production of writing such that value continually grows.

A case study I am fond of is that of Lil Uzi Vert. Early hits like "Money Longer" (2016) engage with this influx of capital (social, financial, sexual). Lyrics like: "Yeah, Chris Brown said these hoes ain't loyal, yeah None of these hoes got no morals, yeah". In her 2025 Artist Space reading, Simone White asks the question "What does Chris Brown teach?" – the lessons of writing and the text’s relation to capital emerges as the easiest answer. But the Uzi arc continues. XO TOUR Llif3 (2017) as an explication as the problems of budding stardom, the conditions being a touring artist, and after years of label problems, Eternal Atake as the reckoning of this elevation in stature — money, fame, clout, respect — in relation to the [semi-]psychotic state that accompanies it. Explorations of fame, media exposure, and in turn systems of image transmission – Fakemink provides an update on these same themes on his recently released debut, Terrified; Warhol pioneered it, a sprawling body of work whose redistribution of iconography via Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn Monroe is most well known, but perhaps finds its most resonance in the detritus that takes shape in Shadows and Skulls.

In Vertov’s Enthusiasm, opening on a factory floor, conveyor belts the length of the room. At the center, a man lifting a serpentine, red-hot rod from one belt to the next. The room darkens. The figure becomes the ground. Out of that ground emerges a choreography of line, shape, and light birthed out of the site of industrial manufacturing. This highlights an early instance that provides some evidence for the development of technical images as intricately interwoven not only within the history of modernist progress and industrialization, but also, within the production of subjectivity.

When I put the microphone into the mouth I have simultaneously five sounds: the air and the liquid in the mouth, the respiration in the nose, the air between each tooth and the respiration in the lungs ... In 1974 I put into my stomach a very small microphone and it was a discovery – the body is always like a factory! It never stops – there’s no silence!
[Henri Chopin, unpublished interview, ABC Television, Sydney 1992]

Basic rules of insertions and deletions function as a framework in order to most optimally pack these sounds together, taking lead from circle packing approaches in geometry applied to sound materials where spectral components seek admissible forms within constrained integration: “A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. If he fails to "relieve himself" of an experience, this kind of indigestion is quite as much physiological as the other indigestion—and indeed, in more ways than one, simply one of the results of the other. You can adopt such a theory, and yet entre nous be nevertheless the strongest opponent of all materialism” – Nietzsche, Genealogy of morals

We can continue with the centralization of the feedback loop as the dominant condition of cultural production in our time. When viewing the self as a body for machinic production, there are a set of inputs and outputs. What one reads, what one writes, how the public (or the lack thereof) engages, how one's community responds, so on and so forth. And then the digestive elements, the accoutrements, the drugs: media itself, functioning as narcotic, but also the lean, the speed, the dissociatives, the psychedelics — the things imbibed that construct, deconstruct, reinforce, and decay the order of the external, the reality which the machine feeds off of.

It becomes difficult to construct a machine around such a thing; ergo let's consider the conditions of production not in relation to machines but in relation to states. States are like machines in the sense that both are technologies, technologies with relation to the West, although it is much easier to say that the conception of the nation-state has ties to Western Enlightenment, than it is to say that [machines/technologies] are inherently Western. Nonetheless, we've been conditioned by Western technologies [systems of chronology, the printing press, chemical photography, the Internet] which function as dominant forces on a global scale, in a way that significantly differs from a subaltern technology like geophagia, befuddling to the Westerners who first encountered it in Sub-Saharan Africa, but absolutely essential to survive in such a harsh, hostile climate.

Let us consider the self as a state, a territory, an entity to be governed. Said state has natural resources, though access requires means of extraction. Once extracted, the state must decide if the material (which can range from raw to refined, depending on the conditions of extraction) should be exported to the global, now-algorithmic, marketplace, or remain as a local, domestic good (gatekeeping). The value of the extracted good can vary: consider Jamaican dancehall, existing in largely localized contexts, a domestic product, that extended to the Jamaican diasporas of Western metropoles (New York, Toronto, London), functioning as the bedrock for monumental forms of capital such as Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, a global hit that bears the signatures of slavery and colonialism with an erasure that exists, not as an attempt of refusal of origins, but as an impossibility of adequate citation. A more slippery situation is Drake’s relation and appropriation to Caribbean music, with dancehall underscoring hits like "One Dance," "Controlla," and "Passionfruit", and an assumption of patois coming into the fold as well. The recent Maid of Honour release puts this on full display, though there exist countless iterations of this phenomenon, tracing back from rap into rock into jazz, ultimately an inherent condition of Trans-Atlantic culture.



The Final Course:

A meal with a number of concerns. Vocal concerns, bodily concerns, mechanical concerns, sovereign concerns, ecological concerns, systemic concerns. These are broader concerns; let us focus on some specific artist practices in the 2010s, in relation to the dominant technologies of the period, in relation to the popular systems of production and consumption.

Dean Blunt’s World Music label and Drain Gang, offshoots of the Hippos In Tanks ecosystem, illustrate a sort of archipelagic governance akin to that of Ecuador's stewardship of the Galapagos Islands, only with Coronavirus and lockdown’s rerouting of internet usage patterns, coupled with the steady intertwining of algorithms and internet platforms, leading to a massive influx of media exposure and growth, significantly transforming the works of both entities, as well as their methodologies for distribution.

For the case of examining these ecosystems, it becomes easiest to focus on the works of Blunt and Bladee, forefronts of their respective milieus. Both have systems of recommendation, maps that attempt to bring sense to the territory – see the Bladee flowchart circa 2018 and 2024 and the various guides to Dean Blunt’s sprawling body of work across numerous names. Beyond the works themselves, archive and fan accounts: a sort of “Auto-lore" mechanism emerges — where any new speech act becomes canonized, utilized by Blunt and his now-deleted Denna Frances Glass Youtube channel to post and subsequently delete new releases, knowing that a fan would download and reupload the video in due time. The same sort of logic was embedded in show-exclusive Bar Italia CD-R releases in 2023 that were immediately ripped and reuploaded onto r/deanblunt.

A similar phenomenon can be mapped onto Bladee and Drain Gang, only they lack the distance from the media ecosystems that Blunt has maintained via the deletion of all social media accounts, an abstinence from interviews, very few live shows, and a scrutinous approach to collaboration. Instead, the biome has suffered, in part because of the aforementioned exposure but also because the work bore a parasitic relation to larger cultural products, Drain Gang itself an obvious homage to Chief Keef’s Glo Gang, the irreverent playful posting style of Bladee and others bearing a strong relation to the way in which rappers like Chief Keef, Lil B, Soulja Boy, and Gucci Mane pioneered the use of social media, and certain tracks like 2018’s Inside Out being an obvious remake of Keef’s 2011 hit “Save That Shit” through the lens of Whitearmor’s Scandinavian production.

The ecologies of the internet, specifically the speed of transmission in the pre-algorithmic 2010s, made it possible for such things to exist. Now the landscape is a mad game of combinatorial logic. The cultural conditions lead to canonization via Iceberg Memes and a sort of universal cradle death – where things are over by the time they become things.

So rather than thinking through how we construct the machine, perhaps the better question is how do we govern states? Agricultural metaphors can be apt: crop rotation, seed banks, the production of fertilizers. The extraction of oil is apt too, given that we consume both culture and fuel in addictive states, constantly needing more Newness. The goal in oil extraction is the same as drug dealing is the same as cultural production – how can we accumulate as much as possible without disaster? The oil spill, the overdose, the death of the star. How much do we import and export; how do we allow outsiders access; how do we construct conditions for this culture to flourish without letting the feedback loops take hold?

From the moment of creation, God wanted man and woman to be his interlocutors, and, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa explained, he imprinted on our faces a reflection of divine love, so that we may fully live our humanity through love. Preserving human faces and voices, therefore, means preserving this mark, this indelible reflection of God's love. We are not a species composed of predefined biochemical formulas. Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others. – Pope Leo XIV

We must consider not just the voice, but the systems that govern the voice, just as we consider not just our meal, its courses, its ingredients but the ecologies that lead to this nourishment.



A Digestif, A Coda, A Toast:

The sound of “speech” alone offers this unreal polyphony of dynamics: its variety of pitch, inflection, dynamic range, information rate, and everything else. “Note, too, that in speech you think in the language of music (e.g., you are conscious of, for instance, “dialect,” or how the sounds differ from what you expected). There are so many examples that every choice is a truism. The kid on the street corner with the box is listening to something that he obviously really appreciates (he dances, smiles, and sings along—every sign of a real and deep musical experience) and you can’t understand a word. But the music is nice. You talk to somebody from another dialect and you can’t keep your mind away from the pure musicality. A madman on the street rants to himself and you experience music. Finally, you start hearing yourself. Like the person who must figure out what he/she looks like in motion in order to become a dancer, you have become a musician. – Robert Ashley

I have been telling myself, and I have been telling others, that after the performance in San Francisco I will not have any commitments or obligations to make work for any venues but myself. There is truth to this. And it has been some time, well over a year, since this has been the case. What would I like this performance to achieve? That is the question on my mind.

My mind forks: thoughts about this word, achieve, and its relation to work, and also to 'this performance', the expansiveness of it, not just what will be played and recorded on June 5th in San Francisco, but the text that will come before, now the idea of writing and constructing this text as a performance. What it is that I am performing right now. My voice spoken through my fingers, into prosthesis, the same digits that will manipulate the voices of others in the time to come.

Right now, the ideas for my set centralize the Bay Area and the rap music that's been produced there over the last 30-40 years. Through sampling, reconstructing, and juxtaposing works from this body against other regional strains of American rap, I'm developing an oblique cartography that suggests relations in location — or, I'm constructing an architecture of sound that never existed in material form — 'never existed', loaded as it is, suggests something like the forces of production never produced this. A simple idea, really

Why am I doing this? Perhaps I'm interested in an echo? Thinking about Burial in London as London disappears. What happens to a sound that exists in relation to a disappearing landscape? A sound that changes from a reflection of present realities into a body that collects memories. In Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri writes of the echo: Why is an echo - as we have already established, an act of love, of listening and of restoring - so threatening? Why does that sound, which is in fact our own sound, recast by means of another, undermine and even threaten to annihilate our sense of who we are?

Tonight the club felt like an echo, as did our actions. Continuing what had been done before, only we were among the last, wandering through a graveyard. My friend was talking to me about Pyramid Club, pulling up videos, then we moved onto Limelight. I talked about the bar I went to with Laszlo, where the Stavros Niarchos II brawl happened. I explained the parties involved, their allegiances, the tabloid reportage, the Vanity Fair story, as best as I could amid the din. I remember when I walked in I told multiple people on separate occasions that it felt like a club and not the simulation of a club.

This echo cannot be made visible — can it be made tangible? In any case, tonight we lived like the past in spite of the present and the future collapsing upon it. The club closed at 4, there were not many of us, we walked to a building on Avenue B, bought beers en route, then hung out the building's roof. It was cold, but not too cold. It was raining, but only a little. After some time, the sky began to get lighter. We drank, took pictures, took drugs. Time passed, some left, then it was time to go, so some of us went elsewhere together, this time in a car, we went to a bedroom, and we continued: we drank, we talked, we took pictures, took drugs, and there was music.

I have tried to write endings before and failed. The recurrence of perform in relation to achieve, but also the entrance of 'gain', and there is gain at stake, gain that I force myself to negate as to minimize how it may shape the work. The design of the writing machine. The stewardship of the environment. The governance of the sovereign. And so, it seems what I would like to achieve is achievement, inherent in the work, the performance, the texts to come, linear, aural, and physical.

Closing loops and writing endings. Stopping and stopping. Though this moment carries achievement: an identification of the task at hand, the course to chart. The conceptualization of the echo, the etymology of the echo, the design of the echo. Then, the development of the echo, the construction of the echo. Perhaps the extraction of the echo. Getting all together such that the echo will form, beautifully, intelligently, that its sounds will build upon each other, carrying and amplifying the source material to realize the most resonant idea of the echo itself.

Dawn has ceased, blurred into the afternoon's gray. I could not have answered this question this way in any other place or time.

What I have already given for this Echo that is yet to be.