Good afternoon, beloved -
So I’ve done the thing. I bought an electric guitar — this one, in point of fact — and have spent the last week practicing, half an hour or so each day. My fretting fingers have the particular hot soreness that comes with repeatedly pressing thin, buzzing metal coils into the fleshy pads at their tips, and the different soreness at the webs between them, from all the stretching exercises I’m doing. It is completely glorious.
You know I have no musical intelligence to speak of. Even the most basic concepts in play sit uneasily with me. I don’t know what it means to play a piece of music “in the key of” whatever. I can’t hear anything in my head when I encounter a sentence like “pluck the open A string.” All that may eventually resolve for me, as I need to draw on these concepts to make sounds emerge from the instrument as I want them to, or it may not. Can’t tell yet, don’t much care. It hasn’t, so far, been any impediment to my enjoyment.
The weather’s turned sharply colder over the past week here, and is otherwise exactly as leaden and gloomy as you’d expect from a London November. We’ve had a run of crappy news, there’s emergency repair work being done in the house, and I’m feeling not-great about the two books I’m theoretically in the process of writing. I’ve been knocked off my gyros so far as both diet and exercise are concerned. I haven’t been able to lay down the miles I need to in order to prepare adequately for the ultra I’m still planning on running toward the end of March, my first. The world situation hasn’t suddenly become gentler or more clement. I’m just a little suffused with glee, though. The guitar practice takes me out of my thoughts even more than a hard hour of cardio does, maybe even more than meditation. And it turns out that being lifted out of my thoughts is just what I need.
§ If there was a single moment of decision that led me here, it occurred somewhere during the latter half of “The End of Forgetting,” the as-yet unreleased song with which Swans kicked off the last gig of a towering three-night stand at Electric Brixton week before last. (This full-length video is from the night before we saw them, and in any event cannot remotely convey the bodily experience of being there, but it’ll give you the slightest taste.) And for all the total shattering majesty of the music, it may not have happened at all but for the fact that I’ve been reading Deleuze & Guattari really closely these past few weeks. We tend to treat theory as a matter of the head, but D&G’s emphasis on affect has made me really closely attentive to intensities traversing the body, and so that was what I was concentrating on as the sound built and built and kept on building.
This is what felt like: like I was being pulled feet-first, falling endlessly into a spinning black hole, with scales and plaques of time sheeting off my hands like diamond dust. When I opened my mouth, gravity waves sounded through my entire alimentary tube. I was reduced to an abject resonator, a helpless, shimmering, unselfed surface of genus 1. I wanted to eat God. And I trembled and wept, for the sheer perfect joy of it.
I knew the feeling had to end, and in fact wanted it to end, before the point at which it became meaningless through repetition and habituation. But I also knew I’d want to find it again — and this time not as a vessel or spectator or passive recipient, but because I’d generated it myself.
Tall order, yeah? It’s not like Swans arrived at their sound overnight. They emerged from the downtown No Wave scene of the Eighties, a highly situated and particular matrix of creativity that nurtured the likes of Thurston Moore, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca. There’s organic talent involved, and on top of that a literal four decades of experience, and probably a few thousand bucks worth of specialized equipment. But for all that, there was something in the performance that authorized me to think I might someday wield that kind of total sound for myself, which was the age of every last body on stage.
At 50, bassist Christopher Pravdica is the baby of the band. Dana Schechter is a comparatively young 56. At 62, though, Phil Puleo is five years older than me. Kristof Hahn is 66. Norman Westberg is 67 (and in his white goatee, crisply white collared shirt and blue cardigan, looks exactly like what you imagine a 67-year-old named “Norman Westberg” would look like). Michael Gira is 71, and playing close-on-three-hour sets with an outfit as heavy as any I’ve ever seen. What each of these musicians offered me from the stage in Brixton, individually and all together, was a concrete model of possibility: object proof that bodies with a good six or seven decades in them can yet create that kind of unremitting sonic condition, and endure what they’ve created. There might be some other valid reason why someone in my shoes might shy from the attempt to do so, sure. But age itself is no barrier and no excuse.
I staggered home from the gig, thinking “all other bands are amateurs,” and ordered the guitar the next day. I’m under no illusion, mind you, that I’ll ever be able to use it to make the kind of sound I need to feel, let alone any time soon. But I’ve been increasingly been inclined to let myself be moved by instinct and intuition — and here, deep in my sixth decade on Earth, just as strongly inclined not to waste any further time in asking for what I really want from life. I’ll let you know how it goes.
§ Right now I'm (re-)reading Watts’s sequel to Blindsight, Echopraxia, as well as this essay on the meaning and purpose of personal websites from Laurel Schwulst of the intriguing ultralight.school project; listening to Marc Urselli’s extraordinary Steppendoom, a project that introduces the legends of indigenous Mongolian, Tuvan and even Inuit throat singing to some of the greatest names in doom metal; and, thanks to a tip from Matt Jones, watching a Moebiusesque animated series (!!) called Scavengers Reign, which lavishes unusual attention on depicting the flora (?), fungi (?) and fauna (?) of a truly alien ecology. And speaking of alien ecologies: London heads, do not sleep on “The Word for World,” Sarah Shin’s gorgeous show of maps from the worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, at the AA Gallery through December 6th.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 151 of Sunday, 23 November 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊