In the Gap
It's been a staring into the void kind of week. Worms of the Senses for August 3.
If you haven’t read my presentation for Sobinfluencia Edições of Temporada de conspiração, please do. Also, don’t forget to subscribe…
Blue Sky Black Death, A Heap of Broken Images (2006). Blue Sky Black Death were always among the more unique beatsmith teams out there. Not because they were particularly experimental – though they were not above tinkering with the forms of instrumental hip-hop – but because of how cinematic and expansive their soundscapes ended up being. It hits its pinnacle with 2011’s Noir, but even here, in their debut full-length, you can hear how strong the blueprint already is.
It doesn’t reach the same heights, but there’s a distinct feeling of opening up here – the opening track is appropriately titled “Skies Open” – of encounter with fractured memory taking on life of its own. This is of course intentional. The album’s title is taken from T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.”
That kind of thematic coherence and exploration also made BSBD stick out. It still feels like they’re trying to reconcile two split halves here, and that they haven’t quite found where they fit. That’s emphasized by the fact that it’s two discs: one primarily instrumental and sampling, the second collabs with MCs from Wise Intelligent to Mike Ladd to Gang Starr’s Guru. But even on the entirely instrumental half, there’s an not-fully bridged division: the cathartic reach to transcend on one hand (“Days are Years,” “They Came Around”), the ruthless rap swagger on the other (“Rap Creature Land,” “Heroin For God”). The closest they get to successfully merging these is on “From Sun’s Angle.” Urgent, rending, like revisiting a moment that you can only bear confronting if you can bend into something else.
It’s an engaging, and often immersive listen, even if it doesn’t reach what later releases do. There’s a 20th anniversary vinyl release imminent for A Heap of Broken Images. Probably worth getting our hands on.
“Fanon & Anders: On Revolution” an Acid Horizon Research Commons Public Panel Discussion, featuring Nicolas de Warren and Tyrique Mack-Georges (2026). Acid Horizon have done a service to radical weird misfits and acid communists by initiating the Research Commons. I haven’t been able to take advantage of their full classes yet. The public panels I’ve attended have been seriously thought provoking though, opening up new and experimental, unorthodox avenues of inquiry the way radical research should. Case in point: an encounter between Frantz Fanon ands Günther Anders.
I’ve listened to the respective Acid Horizon episodes with Tyrique and Nicolas already. Tyrique’s work in Fanon resonates with me more simply because I’m already so familiar with him through the rubric of anticolonial and existentialist Marxism. Nicolas’ episode was fascinating, however, and not only because I hadn’t previously engaged with the work of Günther Anders. It’s fair to say that Anders’ writing on technology, Prometheanism, and “the obsolescence of the human” (great phrase) has turned out stunningly relevant. To write about the degradation of human subjectivity by the machine in the 1950s was already prescient in the age of the atomic bomb. The age of AI? His writings fit the moment to an uncanny degree.
The focus of discussion at the AHRC panel was how Fanon’s concept of “the new man,” the subject able to fully realize themselves as they throw off their chains, interacts with Anders’ prognosis. The question I therefore have is how Anders’ thought in particular can be integrated into a communist framework. I attempted to ask Nicolas a question that could tease some of this out. He seemed pretty steadfast in accurately rendering Anders’ work, that Anders didn’t see the fundamental divide in society as one of work but of education. Fair enough. But if the affinity is there then, frankly, it seems that it has to integrate. There’s a caesura that still has to be filled. The conversation is just at its start.
“Existentialism In a Capitalist World,” by Kalika Padte (New York Journal of Philosophy, 2026). Another fantastic intervention. Another caesura. This was an excellent essay. Padte goes a long way toward successfully arguing the continuing relevance of existentialism as a meaningful and oppositionality under late-late capitalism. She joins together Sartre (of course) with Foucault, and sketches out all the myriad ways that contemporary capitalism keeps us from ourselves. It also helps that she’s an excellent writer. Observe:
A capitalistic slave is not born; it is self-made, stretched along the borders of excruciating labour, dedicating precious time to advocate for needs that were embellished onto them through soft power. And they carry these needs as though they make a genuine difference to their existence. It is rightly said that only a slave quantifies existence through productivity, but the more insidious truth is that the slave eventually internalises this quantification so thoroughly that productivity ceases to feel like a demand and begins to feel like identity.
As I wrote in my comment on the piece, my only quibble would be in its final words: “To practice existentialism in a capitalist world is not to escape the system; that is neither possible nor the point. It is to remain conscious within it, to keep authoring yourself even when everything around you insists the story has already been written.”
When I say “quibble,” I can’t even really say disagreement. Consciousness is unavoidable. To be out of step with a world that expects us to march in line is by its nature to be aware. Preserving a modicum of sanity demands it. Our psyches can’t take it otherwise.
Consciousness is not the only demand, however. Far from it. To the existentialist, the point is to transcend capitalism. It must be. A fully authentic life is, as Padte vividly illustrates, ultimately impossible within the strictures of a system that regimentizes life and experience. It’s for this reason that Sartre spent the latter decades of his life as a communist, and some of his best work attempts to sketch a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism.
To be clear, I am not trying to put Foucauldian thought in opposition to Marxism here (plenty of Marxists famously find a lot of use and insight in Foucault and integrate his thought into their framework). But maintaining and growing this consciousness of oppositionality necessitates a collective negation of some sort. It is both a prerequisite and an element of dialectical interplay. The consciousness is expanded by collective praxis as much as collective praxis is predicated on a consciousness of organic opposition. That doesn’t appear to be anything Padte disagrees with, and it wasn’t her intention to say that existentialism is an individualist endeavor. Why bring it up? Because it seems to me we’re long past the point where we can neglect the collective valence.
Header image is a detail from Blue Sky Black Death’s A Heap of Broken Images (2006).