Seth Cooke | Every Contact Leaves a Trace

I'm the opening act at Cafe Oto tonight, playing in support of Haptic + Mark Wastell.

I'll be bringing copies of Method of Loci #4, 'Fracture Patterns', which I'll hand out for free to anyone who wants one. Save your money to buy Haptic & Wastell merch.

Haptic in Bristol

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

^^^ This. It's not just a case of checking facts, it's about checking context, interpretation, nuance. It could cite real findings in a real author's real paper and still misrepresent all three. LLMs generate superficially well-formed text, appearing to understand is an unstable emergent property.

"The Depeche Mode of Arhythmic Musics": Haptic Interviewed | The Quietus Founded in Chicago in 2005, experimentalists Haptic are preparing to play a series of five concerts in the UK to mark their 20th anniversary. Each night, the trio will perform Late Work, a modular com...

Here's this week's interview with Haptic in the Quietus:

thequietus.com/news/haptic-...

Haptic, Kathy Hinde, An unnecessarily justified with at The Cube Haptic Kathy Hinde An unnecessarily justified with Every Contact Leaves a Trace Anniversary Event a free publication for everyone in attendance The Cube Cinema, Bristol 7pm, Monday 6th October 2025 ...

Final post about this one - Haptic, tonight, at the Cube.

with Kathy Hinde

and An unnecessarily justified with

Free copies of my latest work in the Method of Loci series - Fracture Patterns - for everyone who attends.

My eldest daughter is old enough to watch it now, so we may begin again this week. She will never have seen anything even approaching End of Evangelion - although to be fair, there's nothing else like it at all, really. I mean, it took even David Lynch a couple of decades before he did S03E08...

Forgot to warn new viewers about the penguin though...

It felt good to write. Cathartic.

Funnily enough I wasn't going to put myself on the bill for this one. I was as surprised as anyone when I found out I would be joining Haptic for their performance. I hope to honour their vision without fucking their shit up.

Tomorrow at the Cube - Haptic's first ever Bristol show, supported by Kathy Hinde and An unnecessarily justified with.

There will also be a free publication for everyone who attends.

Realised I'd blown up a bunch of these. Had a look around the house and I have (lol) 11 in working order.

I'll give away 9 FCFS at the Oto show on Tues. Feedback should be as free and easy as singing and clapping your hands. Don't let anyone convince you that you need to be a clever sound artist.

I really wish Labour would strategise from decent principles and stop leaving the bloody goal wide open. I can't see them getting wise or strong fast enough, they just don't seem to grasp the world they've landed in.

Performative marketing and destabilisation seeking to distance his UK branch from the activities of the US branch while striking at a Labour weakness. Nothing to do with anyone's actual stance on ID cards or their democratic basis, you can think whatever you like about ID without falling for this.

That last mirage quote reads like satire.

Flamboyant contempt for the customer.

YouTube video by Seth Cooke | Every Contact Leaves a Trace Acid Horse - Seth Cooke

Here's me performing with four of them at Acid Horse earlier this year.

youtu.be/54aYtD6ZxSA?...

Michael Pisaro - Was was and is - YouTube Was was and is for one musician Find one sound. Play that sound for the duration of the concert. Many performances. May-June, 2000 Evanston Performed by Seth...

Here's a playlist of me performing 'Was was and is' by Michael Pisaro-Liu from 11 years ago, using one of these.

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Realised I'd blown up a bunch of these. Had a look around the house and I have (lol) 11 in working order.

I'll give away 9 FCFS at the Oto show on Tues. Feedback should be as free and easy as singing and clapping your hands. Don't let anyone convince you that you need to be a clever sound artist.

I'm sorry that I didn't prepare you for the penguin.

what an amazing thread, well and lovingly crafted

I don't really watch anime, like I'll watch a movie, sure, I just don't make time to seek it out and keep up with shows regularly - but I've watched through evangelion like 5 times or something, it's just that good

An ongoing thread with some of the most exquisite screenshot choices I ever did see

YouTube video by Roland Cloud Academy Roland TR-1000 Rhythm Creator Deep Dive

LOL the "deep dive" video is three and a half hours long.

youtu.be/BnW4jgnBOc0?...

Or as someone says in the comments, "This is not a deep dive, this is a dive straight into the Earth's core."

Need closure? Here's a ton of competing closures. Didn't like it? We can rip it up and start again, or give you something much worse. Need a definitive reading? Tough luck, take the Cruel Angel's Thesis. Threaten Anno at your peril. None of us can deal with Eva, because Eva can't deal with itself.

But it's naive to say that Eva has anything as simple as "final moments". It is aware of itself as animation, even as low budget animation. As cinema, in End of Evangelion, it is aware of itself as cinema. It never breaks the fourth wall, but it utterly breaks the medium. It is complicit in itself.

Umbilicals, amniotic fluid, menstruation, the womb, the primal scene, Oedipus/Electra. Eva's scaffolding is a Lovecraftian, Freudian, Jungian abomination. It trashes those traps, and in its final moments finds a glimmer of hope in tentative embrace of the body, a homeopathic trace of Wilhelm Reich.

YouTube video by Blue Tapes The Blue Tapes House Band - vol. 3.5: Blue Metal

youtu.be/9fo8k1cijOU?...

^^^ amazing

Jesus, Eva is hard to watch. A friend commented that it makes you wait for action scenes, and when they arrive they are almost always rape scenes. Anno sets up the tropes, then smashes them apart with moral fury. Everything is a violation. This is not an easy show. It is awful in several senses.

Hands up if you can literally hear the images in this post. Jesus, Eva did a number on us.