Roy Christopher's Blog, page 3

Mitch Hedberg: Different Ingredients

Twenty years ago today, we lost one of the funniest voices and best visionaries humanity has ever given us. The odd-angled comedy of Mitch Hedberg remains unparalleled.

There’s no way to do him justice, but years ago I attempted to pay tribute to the man. The piece below originally appeared on Vulture in 2013.

Read on—and stick around after for the news!

Different Ingredients

Deep in the desert of Death Valley, there sits a sleepy little resort called Panamint Springs. The cottages and modest restaurant there are a part of no town, connected to no power grid. For several years, the normally quiet cacti and climes were invaded once a year in the peak of heat for four days by a loose band of comedians and their friends. In the summer of 2005, there were seventy-three of us.

Mitch Hedberg, 1968-2005

On June 5th, the Sunday night of this four-day party, comedian Emery Emery read a newspaper article about Pope John Paul II, but instead of the Pope’s name, he inserted fellow comedian Mitch Hedberg’s, both of whom had died only months before.

People wept and knelt on cobblestones as the news of his death spread across the square, bowing their heads to a man whose long and down-to-earth comedy was the only one that many young and middle-aged fans around the world remembered. For more than ten minutes, not long after his death was announced, the crowd simply applauded him...

“The world has lost a champion of human freedom and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home,” President Bush said at the White House. “Mitch Hedberg was himself an inspiration to millions of Americans and to so many more throughout the world.”

When Emery finished, he said that it’s sad that people know so much about people like the Pope and not enough about people like Mitch. To which fellow comedian and party-organizer Doug Stanhope replied, “But then we wouldn’t need Mitch.”

Then the power went out.

Then everyone there started chanting, “Mitch! Mitch! Mitch!...” and scattered throughout the darkness of the desert.

Among the roster of beloved, recently deceased comedians—Patrice O’Neal, Mike DeStefano, and Greg Geraldo come immediately to mind—no one haunts us like Mitch Hedberg. He was a superstar in stand-up comedy when he died in late March of 2005. His widow, Lynn Shawcroft, was in attendance at the party in the desert shortly thereafter. Quoting one of his unused notebook pages, she asked me several times that week, “Do you believe in Gosh?”—a joke that later became the name of Mitch’s one posthumous CD. Mitch’s laidback, sometimes self-conscious delivery and brain-backwards observations, as well as his propensity for constantly breaking character and the fourth wall of theatre, connected him to his audiences more directly than many other comedians of his time. He often reacted to his own jokes as if he were in the audience and commented on the audience’s reactions, stating that a joke was funnier than they acted, or that one joke was the same as another with “different ingredients.” Many of his shows were similar to those of a touring arena-rock band, where the audience sings along. His fans would wait for jokes that they were familiar with and yell out the punch lines as Mitch said them. Though his style was reminiscent of comedian Steven Wright, his humble and humane presence made him beloved by everyone who saw him.

Mitch’s former tour manager and friend Greg Chaille described a dream he had after Mitch’s death:

I dipped into a very deep sleep early this morning. I had a dream that I was riding in the back of a pickup with Mitch. I don’t remember who was driving but we were moving pretty good on a clear and sunny day. He was sitting on the driver’s side facing forward, and I was on the back wheel hump on the passenger side.

I just kept looking over at him thinking, “I knew he was still around.” He would just look over at me and smile a knowing smile, like “I know what I’m doing, it’s all okay. Everything is alright.”

I was so happy that Mitch was sitting across from me I started to cry. I reached over to hug him, and then I woke up.

I was at a bar in Seattle called Lynda’s with Chaille and several other comedians on the two-year anniversary of Mitch’s passing, and we all went around the table telling our favorite Mitch jokes.

“Last week I helped a friend stay put,” started one comedian. “It’s a lot easier than helping someone move. I just went over to his house and made sure that he did not start to load shit into a truck.”

“I had my hair highlighted because I thought some strands were more important than others,” offered someone else.

“An escalator can never be broken, it can only become stairs,” I added. “Escalator temporarily stairs! Sorry for the convenience!” everyone finished in unison.

“I think Pringles original intention was to make tennis balls,” another chimed in, “but on the day the rubber was supposed to show up a truckload of potatoes came. Pringles is a laid back company, so they just said ‘fuck it, cut ‘em up!’”

During the blackout in the desert, Chaille built a bonfire in the campground across the road from the Panamint Springs resort. We all soon reconvened there, clumsily finding our way through the dark desert where Mitch’s spirit still lingered. Shortly after his death, comedians from all over the country gathered in Los Angeles to honor Mitch’s memory. “If I didn't get a chance to say hello,” friend and fellow comedian Doug Stanhope wrote on his website after the show, “it’s because it was hard to talk.”

“If you would like to hear a loud tone, press 2. If not, leave a message.”
– Mitch’s outgoing voicemail message.

When his CD Do You Believe in Gosh? was released in 2008, the “One Nation Under Gosh” shows celebrated Mitch in comedy clubs in Seattle, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, New York City, Hollywood, and Austin, proving that his spirit lives on on comedy stages nationwide.

Mitch Hedberg and Doug Stanhope, March 15, 2005.

“Nobody has asked me how Mitch lived,” Stanhope wrote of Mitch not long after his passing. “And Mitch lived like a motherfucker. More than most any of us will live. That isn’t sad or tragic. Mitch was the kind of comic that was funny even when nobody was looking. It wasn’t just for the stage, the ego, or the random congratulations. He was funny when he was alone.” Doug told me that his phone had never rang like it did when Mitch died, every caller eager to find out about Mitch’s demise.

“I don’t know how Mitch died,” Stanhope concludes. “I know how Mitch lived, and he lived brilliantly and by his own rules. The number of years next to his name is trivia. The contents of those years is inspiration.” Here’s hoping his spirit continues to inspire, haunting our hearts and heads with laughter.

Dead Precedents and Dead Channel Sky

In a recent Flood Magazine article, clipping break down the non-musical influences of their new record, Dead Channel Sky. My book Dead Precedents gets a mention:

Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher:
We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.

Still pinching myself…

Here’s the press release I wrote on the Sub Pop site. Cop your copy!

Preorder The Medium Picture!

My post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture, is now available for preorder from all of your favorite places: UGA Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon! Preorders mean more than you think. They’re very important for the life and success of the book. If you know you’re going to buy it, please consider snagging a copy early.

Preorders serve as an early indicator of a book’s potential success. They signal to publishers and retailers that there is interest in the book, which can lead to increased marketing efforts and larger print runs. For authors, preorders can be crucial in boosting their book’s visibility on platforms like Amazon. This can improve their sales rankings and increase exposure. On Amazon, preorders can affect the sales ranking before release, which might influence the platform’s promotional efforts. If you’re not sure, read on! Thank you!

Of all of my books, this is the one I’ve worked on longest and hardest. It’s the closest to my heart.

Here’s what other people are saying about it:

“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson

“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff

“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu

The Medium Picture comes out on October 15th: 10/15/2025!

Get yours now!

Sharable Images!

If you’re so inclined, you can post one these on the social medium of your liking. Link ‘em to your favorite online book outlet or just to http://www.themediumpicture.com

Thank you!

Thanks for reading, preordering, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Six Years of Dead Precedents

Today marks the six-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release and some information on a related project you may have heard about.

Read on!

We launched Dead Precedents properly at Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago with readings by me, Krista Franklin, and Ytasha L. Womack.

Krista Franklin, me, and Ytasha L. Womack. [Photo by Lily Brewer.]

Ytasha and I went on to do a talk at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park, and I spoke at SXSW again, this time specifically about the ideas in Dead Precedents.

Talkin’ beaks and rhymes at SXSW. [Photo by Matt Stephenson.] As Pecos B. Jett called it, “Biz Marquee!“

A couple of months later, I ventured to my adopted home in the Pacific Northwest. I got to speak at Powell’s City of Books in Portland with Pecos B. Jett, who called the sign outside, “Biz Marquee!” I was even on TV!

Next up was a fun chat at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle with my friend Charles Mudede.

Me and Charles Mudede yuckin’ it up at Elliott Bay. [Photo by Lily Brewer.]

I was also on my favorite hip-hop podcast, Call Out Culture with my mans Alaska, Zilla Rocca, and Curly Castro.

I know Amazon is wack, but Dead Precedents was also a #1 New Release in both their Rap Music and Music History & Criticism categories.

Take that, Beastie Boys Book!

Dan Hancox reviewed Dead Precedents for The Guardian, writing that it is, "written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic."

Dead Precedents in The Guardian. Review by Dan Hancox.

Mark Reynolds at PopMatters wrote, "In Christopher’s construction, hip-hop is is not merely party music for black and brown Gen-Xers and millennials, but the first salvo in a radical, transformative way of understanding and making culture in the technological era — the beginning, in essence, of the world we’re living in now."

My photographer friend Tim Saccenti, who has several photos in the book, sent me a picture of it with the hands from Run the Jewels’ RTJ3, the cover of which he also shot.

Dead Precedents with the hands from Run the Jewels' RTJ3. [Photo by Tim Saccenti.]

Many thanks to all the people who bought the book, said nice things about it, came out to hear me talk about it, gave me rides, put me up at your home, or spread the word.

Companion Compendia

In the meantime, my friends and I put together a companion: Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor Press). Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.

“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Dead Precedents is sharp and accelerated. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Get yours!

Thank you for reading, supporting, and such,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

May the Hand of God Be With You

I’ve been teaching college off and on since 2002. Every semester in every class, I open with the same joke: “Hi, my name is Roy Christopher, but you can call me Roy, or if you’re slightly more daring, ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’.” This is an adaptation of the opening lines of Mr. Keating, played famously by Robin Williams, in his English class at Wellton Academy in the 1989 Peter Weir movie Dead Poets Society. Over the years I have noticed how differently this line has landed. Some semesters the movie would be replaying on some cable channel, and I’d get a bigger laugh. Other semesters, not so much. Getting the joke requires connecting the line to the movie. It requires a familiarity with the film or at least the scene. What’s more, Keating’s borrowed joke is an allusion itself! It’s a line from a poem by Walt Whitman. Though it has happened a few times, I am not actually asking my students to call me Captain. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

There’s an odd Star Wars allusion in Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune, the fifth book of his Dune series of novels:

“He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances. Even when the supremely rich were forced to employ one of the distressful three P-Os, they disguised it where possible.”

Heretics of Dune was released in 1984, well after the original Star Wars trilogy had taken over the imaginations of everyone in the galaxy. “Three P-O” is a not-so-subtle dig at George Lucas’s C-3PO, the golden if persnickety protocol droid who serves the main characters of Star Wars. Herbert goes quite a distance to set up the gag, clumsily describing a rare and expensive wood used exclusively by the “supremely rich,” whereas lower-class families use the synthetic materials “polastine, polaz, and pormabat.” “Three P-O” was the pejorative reserved for such people.

While Star Wars predates Heretics of Dune, the original Dune novel and two of its sequels were released before the first Star Wars movie. The original novel came out over a decade prior, and the similarities are undeniable. Dune’s hero, Paul Atreides, comes to power on Arrakis, a desert planet also known as “Dune.” There’s a barren area of the wasteland on Tatooine called “the Dune Sea,” a vast desert that was once a large inland sea. This inhospitable area suffers from extreme temperature variations and a lack of water, like the southern hemisphere of Arrakis. The hero of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, is from the desert planet Tatooine. Paul has a very close spiritual relationship with his sister, Princess Alia. Luke’s sister, with whom he also quite close, is Princess Leia. Paul battles the Imperium. Luke battles the Empire. Paul finds out his sworn enemy, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is his grandfather. Luke finds out his enemy, Darth Vader, is his father. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood of Dune use the Voice of the Weirding Way to manipulate others. The Jedi use the Force to do the same. And what is the eel-like, saber-toothed Sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon on Tatooine if not a giant, buried sandworm?

The Daily News, Port Townsend, Washington, August 19,1977.

Not long after the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1977, in a newspaper article from his hometown of Port Townsend, Washington, titled “Is ‘Star Wars’ a ‘Dune’ spin-off?” Herbert said he’d “try very hard not to sue.” Though he has never been shy about his liberal borrowing from existing stories, Lucas claims the only similarity that Star Wars shares with Dune is that “they both have deserts.” Speaking of stories that have deserts, some have compared Dune to 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, which tells the story of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the first World War. So, even Herbert may have borrowed a bit.

As the film historian Peter Biskind puts it, “We are the children of Lucas, not Coppola.” Or Herbert, for that matter.

The Grand Allusion

The above is another excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Grand Allusion. More on that as it develops!

harbanger: Attack of the Hyperturntablists!!

My friend Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin, will be presenting a colloquium tomorrow, Wednesday, March 12, at noon EST at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center. harbanger is the turntablist septet formed by Harry Allen at MIT in 2020. He is currently working with them as his research project at the Hutchins Center. During the colloquium, He will discuss how the idea for harbanger came together, why he did it, his challenges, his objectives, and his vision of the future. In addition, he will play some videos they’ve shot and some music they’ve made. The whole lecture will last about 90 minutes, including a Q&A session.

Join us!

Thank you for reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Thoughts That Count

You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.

Forty-Seven

I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.

Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,

Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?

Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.

David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”

Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.

Let’s look at another one.

Forty-Three

It started as an amount of change.

Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.

BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.

Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.

Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.

By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.

Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.

“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, Being John Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”

Forty-Two

Everybody knows the meaning of life is 42.

Thank you for reading and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

There are a few versions of this story. I dramatized the simplest one.

Dead Channel Sky

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called clipping. “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.

In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.

Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.

Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? Afterall, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.

On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.

clipping. are very story oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since their conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes both compose film scores, and Daveed Diggs is an actor, writer, and producer. As clipping., they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists (e.g., Pedestrian Deposit, Michael Esposito, Jeff Parker, et al.) as they have fellow rappers (e.g., Ed Balloon, King Tee, Gangsta Boo, Benny the Butcher, et al.). Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” and the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior,” among others.

Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Knocking in the Back,” they employ Pulsar Generator, a 1990s-era sound-particle software program developed by Alberto de Campo and Curtis Roads; on “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose the classic Dutch track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.

Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Listen up! Everything is very important!

The Medium Picture Cover Reveal!

My book The Medium Picture is finally coming out this fall from the University of Georgia Press. The cover, designed by Erin Kirk, features an object I made in homage to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 Pulitzer-prize winning masterpieces, Gödel, Escher, Bach. I put together a photo essay showing how it came together.

It’s been a long path to publication for this one, so I’m especially excited about it. No less than William Gibson says, “Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

More on this in the meantime.

Clipping’s Dead Channel Sky drops March 14th from Sub Pop Records.

Thanks for reading, responding, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Not a Day Goes By

To celebrate Groundhog Day (and six more weeks of winter), here is a time-loop short story called “Not a Day Goes By” that I wrote in the spirit of the best one of these by the genius that was Harold Ramis. I remember I was rewatching Happy Death Day (2017), and I was thinking how the stages of the recurring day as depicted in movies are similar to the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, only to find out that Ramis and his co-writer Danny Rubin had those in mind when they wrote Groundhog Day. I kept that in mind when I wrote this story, but I added an extra layer on top. I hope you dig it.

The video of me reading the story is from a series that The Sager Group did during the Covid-19 lockdown. You can skip that and read it yourself — or read along with me — below. You can also read it in my short-story collection, Different Waves, Different Depths (available from Impeller Press) along with eight other stories (see below).

Read on!

Not a Day Goes By

I adjusted for the wind and everything. The kite veered way too far off the southwest corner of the building anyway. The more I tried to get it out of the flight path, the more adamant it seemed on staying there, a Jolly Roger taunting me from the no-fly zone.

Its black plastic flapping was overtaken by blades chopping air. The sky is quiet from seventeen stories up, and you can hear a helicopter coming from a long way off. No matter, my pirate prey remained in harm’s way.

I cut the line at the last possible second and watched as black blades and black plastic met in a violent twisting tryst. Running for the stairs as the helicopter sat down, I heard yelling as I hit the second landing. With my hood up, I knew they couldn’t identify me later. I stopped a few floors down, shoved the hoodie in my backpack, put on a hat, and headed for the elevators.

I woke up in the night just enough to see her lying across from me. We had collided into each other avoiding a messenger while crossing at Denny Way. I was running down Olive. I’d just stolen coffee from Coffee Messiah as I do every evening. Mr. Turner and most of his employees hate me, but they’ll never know who I am. On any other night, I would’ve ducked into the alley behind Dino’s to drink my coffee and figure out what to do with the rest of my night. That night I decided to cross the street.

It was November 15, 1997. I know because the clock resets at 11:59pm every night, as it has every day since my 23rd birthday. As far as I know, everyone else moves on through the calendar. When I wake up, it’s November 15, 1997 again, and I am wherever I was at midnight the night before. In the 1,207 November 15ths since 1997, I’ve met other prisoners of the day. One was so obsessed with fixing the problem, she wasted the day over and over again. Another was so bent on revenge that she spent every day getting back at everyone who’d wronged her up to that day. Another just couldn’t take it and killed herself over and over. I couldn’t be around any of them for very long. I was pretty sure this girl was one of us, but I needed more time.

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When I crossed Denny, I didn’t see her until she almost knocked me down and nearly fell herself. I caught her and we swung out of the path of the speeding bicycle. I spilled my coffee all over both of us.

On November 15, 1997, the Leonid meteor storm was gathering force. The moon was nearly full, waning from its full phase the night before. Bill Clinton gave his weekly Presidential Radio Address. Crime was way down. It was the Day of the Imprisoned Writer. It was the 319th day of 1997. It was also a Saturday and the first America Recycles Day.

I don’t know what information is relevant, but I know the day well. Call it a time loop, a flat circle, the eternal return, recurrence, or repetition, or just Groundhog Day, it had been all the same for 24 hours over 1,200 times. Then she showed up.

I mentally retraced my steps. Had I done something wildly different today? See, the irony of the loop is that though I’m stuck in the same day, the day itself is the same for everyone except me. I can cause changes, but they all reset by midnight. Most things stay the same. All of that to say that I should’ve known she was coming across the street unless I did something earlier in the day to cause her to change her course this time. Where had I been all day?

I got up that morning and got my usual First Church breakfast. I took a 43 bus downtown and walked to the Vashon Island ferry. I wanted to go to the bookstore and have lunch at this burger place on Vashon Highway. I got caught trying to skip the ferry toll and had to sneak on with the cars. Maybe she was in one of them.

I lifted a new hardback copy of Great Apes by Will Self from the bookstore and walked to Perry’s Vashon Burgers. There I ordered a garden burger, a small order of fries, and a vanilla shake. I started the book, which is about a man who wakes up in a world of apes and thinks he’s the only human, but I was distracted by the marquee on the Vashon Theatre across the street. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was playing. One of those brief waves of déjà vu hit me, like several coincidences piling up together in the same moment. I shook it off as my food arrived.

When I got back to downtown Seattle, I walked most of the way back up the Hill and made my coffee run. I was crossing the street to go to Twice Sold Tales. That’s when I ran into her.

“I’m so sorry,” I said as we twirled back onto the sidewalk.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked.

“I was going to trade in this book,” I pulled my copy of Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector out of my backpack.

“Oh, that’s a good one! Why are you trading it in?”

“Good question. I thought about this earlier. When I trade this in, I’ll likely get $3. That will cover this evening’s coffee.”

“Right,” she seemed more interested than I’d expected.

“But if I saw this book for sale, for twice that, which is what they’ll put it out for, I’d probably buy it.”

“Me too.”

“So, what does that say about my relationship with this book? Shouldn’t I just keep it?”

“Maybe, but it’s like you don’t want to have it, you really just want to buy it again,” she said satisfied.

“Insightful,” I agreed, nodding, “but what does that say about me? That’s the part I’ve been trying to figure out.”

“It seems like you’re stuck. You’re hung up on the beginning, that feeling of newness.”

“Wow...”

“I can relate,” she responded quickly, as if trying to hinder an uncomfortable pause. “You can’t get it back though. It’s the entropy of experience. I want to buy the first Bad Flag record every time I see it. I know it will never give me the same feeling again, but I can’t help myself.” She looked at the book again, “Mind if I tag along?”

“So, what stage are you in?” she asked, petting a grey tabby at Twice Sold Tales. I didn’t look up from the book in my hand, “What do you mean?”

“I know your situation, and I know the stages, so which one are you in?” She insisted. I still didn’t answer. “There are five emotional stages of dealing with time-loops. Which one are you in?”

“What?” I finally acknowledged, looking at her.

“You’re in a funk. Which Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist are you?”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m Frusciante, for sure.”

“Acceptance,” she said, as if analyzing me and jotting down my answers.

“What are the others? What is Hillel Slovak, for example?”

“Slovak is Depression. Dave Navarro is Anger, obviously.”

“And the others?”

“Well, Jack Sherman, Arik Marshall, DeWayne McKnight, and Jesse Tobias are collectively Denial.”

“If they’re all taken as one, that leaves one more. Who’s the other? Who is Bargaining?”

“Josh Klinghoffer,” she said finally.

“I don’t know that one,” I said.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Whoa there, hipster lady! I know more about music I hate than you do about music you like.”

“Is that right?” She put her hands on her hips.

“Yep.”

“Well, let’s just say I’m ahead of you on this one.” Her expression suddenly turned serious as we got ready to leave, “I saw the kite.”

“What kite?” My immediate reaction.

“Well, I saw the story first. That’s how I know your situation.”

“What story?”

“The Post-Intelligencer story about the guy supposedly stuck in the same day.”

“’Supposedly’? I guess they didn’t believe me. I never got to see the story, for obvious reasons.”

“Here, I brought it back with me,” she opened her backpack and pulled out a crumpled print-out of the Sunday edition of the Post-Intelligencer from November 16, 1997. “At first we thought it was another false fire, but then we saw the kite.”

“‘His case has baffled and intrigued doctors who examined the 23-year-old’,” I read aloud, “‘who first experienced the sensation, shortly after he started at the University of Washington, because he does not exhibit any of the other neurological conditions usually associated with those who suffer from déjà vu. UW psychology professor Dr. Christina Kopinski thinks that anxiety is causing the appearance of repetition in his brain—anxiety that may have been exacerbated by the man dropping out of school. “The general theory is that there's a misfiring of neurons in the temporal lobes, which deal with recollection and familiarity. That misfiring during the process of recollection means we interpret a moment in time as something that has already been experienced,” says Kopinski.’... For over three straight years?”

“They didn’t believe you, but I do. It’s called déjà vécu, ‘already lived through’.”

“I don’t care what you call it! I want out!”

“Shhhh!” the guy behind the counter urged as we reached the door.

“A little too Navarro there,” she added.

“We don’t completely understand it yet,” she started as we walked outside, “but it usually has to do with trauma. It’s a never-ending meal. It ends up on your plate, and you have to eat it, over and over, every day. It’s a loop that won’t close. It doesn’t feel like it has happened. It feels like it’s still happening.”

“So, which is it? I want the same feeling again or I don’t?”

“You’re an extreme case. They seem to be the same thing with you.”

“How is that?”

“You’re both abortively resigned to your day and pregnant with retaliation for it,” she said solemnly. “We’ve never seen such extreme poles in one case.”

“How do I get out?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

When I finally woke up for good the next morning, she was gone, but it really was the next morning. November 16, 1997. I know I’ll never get that feeling again, but not a day goes by that I don’t wake up and wish she were still here.

I checked my watch. There was probably time to spill more coffee on my pants. Maybe even time to drink some.

Different Waves, Different Depths

This and eight other stories are included in my collection, Different Waves, Different Depths from Impeller Press, including my time-travel love story, “Fender the Fall.”

Aside from the time loops and time travel, there’s reality television and big data, consultants who can make anyone a winner, a newspaper that’s just gone online-only, a band that never existed but is all too real, mistaken identities, roadtrips, drugs, guns, murder, and a love story or three.

Dive in deep, ease in the shallows, or just let the tide lap at your toes. Different waves await.

Roy Christopher is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks to Mike Sager for inviting me to read the story, and to you for reading it, too.

Oh, happy birthday wishes go out to my friend John Mohr today!

More soon,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

David Lynch and the Forest of Symbols

Today would’ve been David Lynch’s 79th birthday, and there’s just no way to say what his work and spirit meant to me and so many others.

His children have invited us all to honor him today. “David Lynch, our beloved dad, was a guiding light of creativity, love, and peace,” they write. Lynch was an advocate of Transcendental Meditation and practiced it for 20 minutes every day from 1979 until his passing last week. Their statement continues: “On Monday, January 20th—what would have been his 79th birthday—we invite you all to join us in a worldwide group meditation at 12:00 NOON PST for 10 minutes.” Join in!

I’m sending you this brief bit I wrote about one of his many masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday. Rest easy, sir.

David Lynch. Portrait by Chris Mars.

How in the hell Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was ever a hit is one of its many mysteries. The show invaded the living rooms of America just as the Zeitgeist was shaking off the awkward, neon discomfort of the 1980s. I first watched it on appropriately scratchy old VHS tapes, recorded straight off the television. The world was “wild at heart and weird on top,” in the words of Barry Gifford, and even if everyone knew it, no one was saying it. We let Frost and Lynch make our unease explicit. Collective pre-millennium tension notwithstanding, our anxiety never really relented.

Setting the screen for shows such as Picket Fences (1992-1996), The X-Files (1994-2003), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), The Killing (2011-2013), and games like Alan Wake (2010), Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was easily the oddest hit show in television history. Set among the trees and mountains of my once adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, the show hosted themes of dangerous dreams, reckless teens, and the paranormal, parallel, and perpendicular.

Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I rather say cherry pie, the dessert choice of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks? Leland Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it’s more than appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. — Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols

Roy Christopher is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ritual abounds in Twin Peaks. Its liminality, the “between and betwixt” of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, is evident in Laura Palmer’s double life, “none-more-purposeful” (as Daniel Neofetou describes him) Special Agent Dale Cooper’s limbo while investigating her death, the transubstantiation of BOB, and his toggling of Leland Palmer’s consciousness. The ephemeral existence of the Black Lodge is itself a flickering signifier of ritual. The coffee and doughnuts, the family dinner, even the recording and sending of messages are imbued with the gestures of ceremony.

The time of Twin Peaks wasn’t run by social media and cellphones. Secrets traveled via letters and landlines, diaries and cassette tapes. The latter of these played very important roles in the show and helped define the drama surrounding the two main characters. Laura Palmer’s secret diary and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s microcassettes respectively recorded the weaving mysteries of Laura’s short life and their postmortem unraveling. Both have been published as companions to the show. In addition, Frost and Lynch collaborated with Richard Saul Wurman to put together an Access Guide to the town of Twin Peaks. More than mere merchandising, these books prefigured the internet-enabled transmedia narrative of many 21st-century television shows.

The book Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue (Intellect Books, 2013), expands the between and betwixt of Twin Peaks-inspired writings by fans and critics alike. It’s the first such collection aimed at fans rather than academics. For instance, In his Fan Phenomena essay, Andrew Howe catalogs the cultural artifacts of the series: posters, coffee cups, dolls, sculptures, and so on, while David Griffith confronts the show’s misogynist aspects with waves of feminism, what Diana Hume George (1995) facetiously calls a “double-breasted approach.” Fran Pheasant-Kelly explores the physical spaces of Twin Peaks, and there are three Fan Appreciation interludes in between the essays.

Of course since Fan Phenomena came out, there's been a whole other season of Twin Peaks, and Mark Frost has written and compiled two more books of dossiers, documents, and backstories. Subtitled The Return, season three is just that, a return to the world of Twin Peaks, though it takes half of its 18 episodes to start feeling that way. The turning point is one of the best hours of television ever produced. Part 8, known colloquially as “Gotta Light?,” is a post-atomic fever dream. Where his co-writers, Mark Frost in this case, seem to ground him in some semblance of structure, Part 8 is Lynch at his unhinged best.

After the extant mythology is thoroughly explored and comes to a (mushroom) head, the second half of the season cleaves more closely to the drama of the original show. New characters mix with old and for the most part, it's not in that especially 21st-century way where the latter drags down the pace with the nostalgic weight of the past (cf. Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Scream, etc.). For one thing, the last episode of season two set this one up by predicting a reunion 25 years later, so the place was already holding. It has its missteps, but it'll do In lieu of a full-on cinematic feature from Lynch.

Bibliography:

Frost, Scott. (1991). The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Pocket Books.

George, Diana Hume. (1995). Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks. In, David Lavery (Ed.), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp 109-119.

Lynch, David, Frost, Mark, & Wurman, Richard Saul. (1991). Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books/Twin Peaks Prod./Access Press.

Lynch, Jennifer. (1990). The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Pocket Books.

Neofetou, Daniel. (2012). Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, p. 77.

Shaviro, Steven. (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, p. 147.

Turner, Victor. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

von Gennep, Arnold. (1961). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

We never got that full-on cinematic return, but, as Lynch always said,

“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole.”

Rest in peace.

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Mars Kumari: Grit and Grief

When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the lingering Marxism of late-Capitalist society as hauntological, mashing together the words “haunting” and “ontology,” he couldn’t have imagined what the era might sound like. Bay Area beat maestra Mars Kumari captures the grit and grief of loss we all feel now, haunted as we are by what was here and is now missing.

I met Mars Kumari at Oblivion Access in Austin in the summer of 2023, where she gave me a demo CD of her record, I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023). I already had her record for deadverse, Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021), so I was stoked for the preview. She’s moved on and on since then with collaborations in the works with legends like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dose One and a new solo record for Handsmade Collective.

Mars Kumari. Illustration by Eleanor Purcell.

Roy Christopher: How’d you get into making music in the first place?

Mars Kumari: I first started learning music theory through piano lessons from age 6 onward, but didn't start making my own music until around age 15/16 when my older brother gave me a pirated copy of Ableton. It was on version 8 at the time but 10 years later it’s still my weapon of choice. It took a lot of trial and error to learn (also YouTube tutorials). Throughout that period of time I'd absorb the music my brother listened to via these mix CDs he’d make, which is how I discovered MF DOOM, Del the Funky Homosapien, Crystal Castles, Flying Lotus, Nujabes, and Earl Sweatshirt, among so many others that ended up being core influences of mine.

I spent a year or so making beats by myself until I met my lifelong friends Keyvon and Shishan around 2015, and we all learned to produce and rap alongside one another. In 2019 and early 2020 when I was in university I performed alongside my good friends Nina Spheres and Parish as part of a dark ambient drone trio (collectively titled Nina Spheres). I learned much of what I know about sound design, layering and harmonics from that experience.

RC: More than any era of hip-hop, I hear the second wave of industrial acts (e.g, Scorn, Skinny Puppy, Justin Broadrick, Kevin Martin, the more ambient moments of Meat Beat Manifesto, Wax Trax Records output, et al.) in your work. Is that me just superimposing my own listening history, or do you find kindred sounds in there?

MK: I’ve been getting into the work of Justin Broadrick (specifically JK Flesh) since I saw him at Oblivion Access! I’m familiar with Skinny Puppy and Meat Beat Manifesto, but I need to get into their catalogs more. There are too many artists that influence me to name in one sentence, but Boards of Canada, dälek, Clams Casino, and Burial are some big ones for sure.

RC: What do you call it?

MK: My music?

RC: Yeah.

MK: I usually just say I make beats, even if that’s sort of oversimplifying it. My foundations have always been in industrial hip-hop, drone and shoegaze, but over the last 3 years that I’ve been performing for raves and nightclubs in the Bay, I’ve been listening to a lot more jungle, hard techno, dubstep, digital hardcore, things like that. I had listened to these kinds of music before but being around so much of it the last few years has had a major influence on my sound.

The context and emotions I associate with these kinds of music are consistently integral to the concepts behind my albums. For example, a lot of what I incorporated into Daybreak reminds me of some of my favorite memories of being surrounded by other trans people I love at parties and raves (places I’d be hearing the sort of music that inspired this) coupled with the comparative isolation of waking up the following morning alone in a world that hates people like us. It’s both of those feelings in equal measure behind the sound.

Given how important to the music the memories are, I guess I’d call it hauntology, but to me that feels more like a guiding philosophy and spirituality than a useful descriptor of the way it objectively sounds. There are many different sounds that the word hauntology describes; I think what unites them is more abstract.

Me and Mars at Oblivion Access in Austin in 2023. Selfie by Mars.

RC: What does hauntology mean to you?

MK: Mark Fisher defined it far better than I ever could, but in the context of music I would say it refers to sounds that evoke the distance between yourself and something you remember. The core memory is important, yes, but all music evokes memory on some level. Hauntology centers that temporal distance between you and your memories along with the feelings that may summon (usually nostalgia or a nonspecific feeling of loss). To me it’s more of a guiding set of principles.

However, as a broader philosophy of ghost-like things and temporal disjunction, it strongly informs my relationship to identity (especially gender identity). My own experience of transition has been one of constant tension between past and future selves. Early on, I felt as if the future I had chosen to seal away by transitioning was still haunting me; these days what I feel is more of a sense of having the past selves live on as revenants in my body alongside who I am now. Even the phrase “who I am now” feels relatively meaningless when the present self is never without past or future iterations.

RC: How would you chart the progression of your sound over your last five records?

MK: I put together my first album Anhedonic Mirages (2020) using beats I had made across the previous 5 years which I resampled and reshaped using a lot of distortion, reverb, and grain delay. It serves twofold as an exploration of a new sound and a reflection of where I felt I existed spiritually and temporally in my transition (and by extension the way in which past and future selves behave like revenants). It’s very washed out and bathed in noise and the song structures across this project follow a sort of dream logic. The whole thing is pretty “lo-fi” so to speak; from here I’ve tried to achieve clearer and clearer mixes with each album.

Mars Kumari Type Beat (deadverse, 2021).

I released my next project Elysian Mourning (2021) the following February. This album is a bit more sparse and dreamlike; there's less percussion than in the last album and what is there is subdued. The drones were the focus here. I used my SP-404 extensively for this one; something I like about the original model is the way that electrical noise stacks and multiplies the more you resample something.

Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021) once again re-centers the drums. Some of the oldest beats I’ve ever put out are on here; as such it’s much more varied in its sonic pallet. There are alternative versions of tracks from the previous two albums, beats I started in 2015, and lots of samples from tape reels. I originally released it for Bandcamp Friday that August, and dälek took a liking to it and offered to put that out on deadverse. I'm endlessly grateful that he took a chance on me.

I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023).

My next album I Thought I Lost You (2023) took two years to complete and release. There were often field recordings and found sound in the backgrounds of previous albums but they're much more in focus here, serving as leitmotifs. For example, the ambient passage at the beginning of the final track is lifted from a cassette I found with a recording of someone’s funeral. The atmosphere of that room comes through even in the absence of the eulogy. Even when these kinds of recordings aren't so closely tied to death, the nature of them is inherently ghost-like in their detachment from any identifiable source. All you have is the recorder's voice, the room they were in, and to a subtler extent what they were feeling. All with no semblance of an idea of who this was, what they were like, or if they’re even still alive. A voice with no name or body is a ghost in my eyes.

Anyways, I Thought I Lost You is stylistically similar to Anhedonic Mirages, but much more refined, versatile, and massive. There are elements of jungle, noise, industrial hip-hop, and plunderphonics, all texturally united with a dense veil of dark ambience. I wanted to instill a sense of immersion into a new world. Conceptually, it’s grief as a dimension. This was released via Bruiser Brigade Records and mastered by Raphy.

Daybreak (Handsmade Collective, 2024).

My latest album Daybreak (2024) is my attempt at deconstructed club, fusing hard techno and drum and bass and house with industrial hip-hop and gossamer layers of ambience. I wanted to make something that felt really crystalline and pretty that would sound great on a live soundsystem. Most of the songs here were designed for live performances, and many times I’d audition my mixes by playing them at shows and seeing how it sounded and how people responded. I try to wear my influences on my sleeve less these days, but it is very much inspired by artists like Burial, Arca, and Eartheater. I used a lot more synths and software drums here than in earlier albums (which were mostly or entirely sample-based, it’s more of a 50/50 ratio here). I'm really proud of the mix on this one. This is my first record with Handsmade Collective.

In summary, my sound has always had industrial trip-hop and dark ambient at its core, but over time has incorporated elements of deconstructed club and IDM with an increasingly glossy finish. Improving my mixing from one project to the next has always been a priority, and the results of working toward that are showing more and more in the increased clarity and scale of the sound.

RC: What’s coming up next?

MK: A full-length album with Del the Funky Homosapien has been in the works for most of the year. It’s about halfway recorded, and I’m aiming to have it out sometime midway next year. It’s tricky for me to say how it will sound given that it’s still in the works, but in a way it unites the grit of I Thought I Lost You with the gloss of Daybreak. I just started work on an LP with Dose One as well. There are other LPs and EPs planned as well, including one with my friend Q3, one with Uboa and Hook Operator, a noise EP with Lucas Abela and another solo record. Besides that, hopefully I can get a pet rabbit soon.

Follow for Now 2.1

My good friends at Impeller Press and I are working on a new edition of my second interview collection, Follow for Now 2.1, which is scheduled for release in May. The exchange above is one of the many new interviews. Others include Ian MacKaye, Jenny Toomey, DC Pierson, Josh Feit, Danika Stegeman LeMay, and James Ward Byrkit. I’ll share more on this project as it comes together.

Also, the first one is still kicking! To wit, Andrew McLuhan recently read an excerpt from Follow for Now on his radio show on 99.3 County FM. Click on the November 3rd episode and the Follow for Now part starts at around 18 minutes. Woo!

Many thanks to Marcy for her time on this. Special shout out to Suraj!

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

A Prayer for 2025

As I do at the beginning of every year, I’m sending you my poem “A Prayer for a New Year.” I wrote this one over 15 years ago, and it still serves as a reminder of all the things I want more and less of (I am aware of the grammatical inconsistencies in this piece, but I left them in for the sake of parallel structure. Call it “poetic license.”).

Whether you dig on poetry or not, please do take a moment with this one. And if you know someone who might dig on it, feel free to share.

“Rabbit, rabbit… White rabbit.”

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

More hair, less cuts.
More ands, less buts.
More map, less menu.
More home, less venue.

More art, less work.
More heart, less hurt.
More meaning, less words.
More humans, less herds.

More verbs, less nouns.
More funny, less clowns.
More dessert, less diet.
More noise, less quiet.

More courage, less fear.
More day, less year.
More next, less last.
More now, less past.

More Poetry:

If you do dig on poetry, the poem above and many more are collected in my book Abandoned Accounts, about which Bristol Noir says, “Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. It’s a joy to read.”

Also, if you have a gift card you need to burn, I have several other recent books available! Check them out!

Happy 2025!

Thank you for your continued interest in my work and words,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Uplift Your Gifts

Whether you’re looking for last minute Christmas gifts or you have a gift card you need to burn, I have a few recommendations.

Have you been reading this newsletter, yet still wondering about one of the books I’m always yammering on about? Now’s your chance to indulge us both.

Here’s a quick run down of all of my recent books.

Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.Different Waves, Different Depths

My debut collection of short fiction, Different Waves, Different Depths, contains nine stories, varying in style from the literarily weird to the science fiction and in length from the flash to the novella. The last story in the book, “Fender the Fall,” is about Chris Bridges, a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save her life and his marriage. As you might expect, the plan doesn’t go as planned. Tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back.

“Working the borderlands between philosophy, sci-fi, and ultra-contemporary social critique, these stories illuminate our strange cusp moment in a deeply humanistic and bracing manner. A sharp, propulsive, and canny collection.”
— David Leo Rice

“Guitar-player bullshit.” Photo and photocopy by Craig Gates.discontents

My friends Patrick Barber, Craig Gates, and I put together the pilot issue of a new zine called discontents. The content covers the usual concerns: music, movies, books, and poetry. We reached out to all of our old zine-era friends, so it includes writing by Cynthia Connolly, Peter Relic, Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Fatboi Sharif, Timothy Baker, and Greg Pratt, artwork by Zak Sally and Tae Won You, as well as work by Patrick, Craig, and myself. Subjects include Ceremony, Unwound, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Crestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and others. Fifty full pages of stoke!

The first 100 folded-and-stapled copies went fast, but it’s now available in a perfect-bound print-on-demand version.

Gods of the Aftrofuture: Sun Ra and Rammellzee. Letters by Savage Pencil. Photocopy collage by Roy Christopher.Boogie Down Predictions

While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (see below), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor Press) is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.

“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

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“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne RoomEscape Philosophy

Using extreme examples from heavy metal music and science fiction and horror movies, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (punctum books) is a survey of all the ways we try to shuck off the shackles of our physical forms.

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

There’s a new edition of Escape Philosophy forthcoming from Repeater Books! The new expanded and updated edition, now called Post-Self, includes new additions to every chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, and a new Afterword by me. More on that project in the new year!

Professor Tricia Rose. Portrait by Eleanor Purcell.Follow for Now, Vol. 2

My second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 (punctum books), picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.

“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Oh, there’s an updated version of Follow for Now, Vol. 2 coming out next year from Impeller Press! More on that soon.

Abandoned Accounts

When the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects. In the months before, I’d started writing silly little poems about odd memories I had, tiny stories that didn’t fit anywhere else. I went back to those when I couldn’t think any larger. I eventually moved on to short stories and finally back to book-length writing, but not before I amassed a small pile of poems.

Abandoned Accounts (First Cut Poetry) collects those silly memories I started writing down, including reflections of walks in the woods at my parents’ house in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama, encounters with favorite bands and somewhat famous people, tales of travel and intrigue, and a few stray poems from as far back as 1990. It was an unexpected project, and I’m really proud of the results.

“Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. It’s a joy to read.” — Bristol Noir

Nature of the Threat: Ras Kass. Photo by B+.Dead Precedents

My book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books) takes in the ground-breaking work of DJs and emcees, alongside writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture. It’s a counter-cultural history of the twenty-first century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world in which we now live. It’s really dope!

“A book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”
— Samuel R. Delany

“Written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic.” — Dan Hancox, The Guardian

Follow for Now

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. It’s an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

“This book is an exotic plant with roots sucking nutrients from the skulls of the most interesting people on the planet. Prepare to be pollinated.”
— Mark Frauenfelder, bOING-bOING

More!

In addition to the two new editions mentioned above, I also have two whole new books coming out next year!

The University of Georgia Press is publishing my post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture! No less a reader than William Gibson says, “Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

Also, Repeater Books are putting out my book about allusions in media, The Grand Allusion! I’m still writing that one, but here’s a bit about it:

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So, 2025 is going to be a big year around here! I hope it’s a big one for you, too!

Thank you for your continued support!

Merry Christmas,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com