Laonikos - shakuhachi

Laonikos dressed in a Japanese light-blue and white "haru" coat, playing the shakuhachi on the Hyper Japan stage in Manchester Central Expo.

Starting the new year, I'm very grateful to have had some great opportunities to share shakuhachi music - here's a still from Hyper Japan 2025 in Manchester last November where I got to play some min'yo, honkyoku and a couple of tunes from Naruto.

As we are preparing for the hottest day of the year so far, it is worth remembering it will be the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. Heatwaves in the future will be hotter, longer, drier, start earlier in the year and finish later in the autumn.

Genuinely convinced that half the hype about AI software is the "AI" branding. Like, if someone said "hey come and see this photo I generated with my Mass Pattern Recombination software" we'd be far less hyped, like yeah man, i have a mass pattern recombination app too.

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is sharing an enhanced ELF OpenGo model and related research, including a unique archive analyzing 87,000 professional Go games over 300 years. Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is sharing an enhanced ELF OpenGo model and related research, including a unique archive analyzing 87,000 professional Go games over 300 years.

Absolutely bonkers that 200 years ago, the best Go players chose moves that were ~50% of the time in alignment with the moves that superhuman AIs today would choose in the se situations.

ai.meta.com/blog/open-so...

VAN #393:

@laonikos.bsky.social on how AI might impact listening habits • Hannah Edgar on the Black Orchestral Network's attempts to level the playing field in American orchestral hiring practices • Ron Carter on Bach, Monk and manipulating time, with @gtra1n.bsky.social

van-magazine.com

The Sampler @ Resonance FM #125 An hour of eclectic new music, brought to you by Sound and Music. As heard on Resonance FM on Friday 7 March 2025 at noon and a repeat listen on Monday 10 March 2025 at 2pm, hosted by Laonikos. If you...

I also curated a Sampler Mixtape to accompany the article, going live tomorrow on Resonance FM at noon

www.mixcloud.com/samplernews/...

AI’s Post-Playlist Future If AI is the final boss of the commodification of music, Laonikos Psimikakis Chalkokondylis asks if this might make us celebrate music as a process.

Very excited to write an article for @vanmusicmag.bsky.social exploring how AI and generative music might impact listener habits and experimental music.

Massive thanks to Neil Luck for very stimulating conversation(s) that led to much of the thinking behind it.

van-magazine.com/mag/ai-exper...

Very disappointed to read that Skype is replaced by Microsoft Teams (free) and not Microsoft Teams New (new)

THIS IS HUGE! A cancer vaccine developed by Yale University and DFCI shows MAJOR promise. Results of an early-phase trial reveal ALL patients with ADVANCED stage kidney cancer had successful anti-cancer immune responses AND have remained CANCER-FREE approximately THREE years after treatment. 🧪🧵⬇️

I never thought that after intervening to destabilise other governments across the world, the US govt would finally do it to itself.

the only solid response to this kind of discourse

I don't think anyone can blame the US, after exporting coups they are finally opening the neoliberal floodgates straight at home.

The most British use of AI.

The year is 2056. London. You buy a pack of pasta, the packaging says in a nanoLED screen "AI easy open, peel again". You press the button, the nantes attempt to open the packaging but it cuts across diagonally, pasta spilling everywhere. You sigh and grab a rubber band from your "2000s things" box.

Food shipping, esp. long shelf life fruit like bananas, is a small proportion of global emissions, but we still talk about it like it's going to solve the problem.

If I had to pay a subscription to use my power tools or kitchen knives I would be pretty pissed off.

We’re thrilled to announce that @fabermusic.bsky.social has renewed its significant annual support for our young artist development programme, In the Making, for another three years ✨

📰 Read the full press release here: bit.ly/FaberMusicPa...

🎵 We’re delighted to reveal the 11 outstanding recipients of the first-ever round of the Essentials Fund!

🎹 They each represent the immense talent, diversity, and creativity within the UK’s music-making community.

🌟 Meet the winners and learn more: bit.ly/EssentialsFu...

lady of sophistication @janky_jane Props to anyone who tries to be fashionable in ireland i wore a red beret once in waterford and someone called me super mario Andrew Beatty V @AndrewBeatty Replying to @janky_jane I once ordered a taxi in Belfast for a night out. The driver pulls up to my house and just says "yer not going out like that. Go back in and change, I'll turn off the metre." | swear I was wearing normal jeans and a normal jacket.

Matthew @MrWeir Replying to @janky jane I once wore a silver jacket to college, turned up late for class, said 'sorry I'm late', lecturer said, 'that's ok' then waited til I was halfway across the front of the full class before following up with 'trouble with the spaceship again was it?'. Replying to @janky _jane My sister was in France sporting a new trench coat, thought was so stylish, but went into an Irish bar and got called Inspector Gadget by the first guy that saw her 15:53 • 8/16/21 • Twitter Web App

was wearing my super-fashionable short trench coat. My friend took one look at me wearing the jacket and said, "Where are we off to now. Columbo?" Eoin O Neill @eoinjoneill Replying to @janky_jane Was wearing a vintage nike jacket in a very long que for drinks at a boxing match when a Belfast lad goes "furk me this is taking forever, your man has been here since the 80's"

Loic Wright @dufflest Replying to @janky jane I wore a suit with a matching tie and pocket square to my first day of work at an advertising company (I thought I was going to be in Mad Men I guess) and the staff sent around and signed a communion card for me with a fiver in it. Eóin O Coileáin @L20_MTN Replying to @janky_jane I wore a white, wool turtle-neck jumper to the match once and a fella in the pub said 'Where have you parked the U-boat?'.

nobody does more brutal fashion reviews than the irish

Absolutely reprehensible reporting by the BBC for an important ruling which was made against significant pressure from both the Israeli and US govts.

Letter from Bill Dixon to John Cage, June 7, 1969, challenging Cage on the exclusion of Black musician-composers from Cage’s Notations book.

“ We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the composers of the American Declaration of Independence wrote, “ that all men are created equal, that they are endowed bv their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (i.e. wealth). Yet, when the framers of the Declaration of Independence wrote that “ all men are created equal,” they meant quite literally “ men,” since women certainly did not enjoy these rights in the new republic. However, they did not mean literally “ all men" since black slavery continued after both the American and the French revolutions. Despite the universal and transcendental terms in which the manifestos of the revolutionary bourgeois were framed, the societies that were being built were much more restricted. What was required was equality of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and tax farmers with the formerly privileged nobility', not the equality of all persons. The freedom needed was the freedom to invest, to buy and sell both goods and labor, to set up shop in any place and at any time without the hindrance of feudal restrictions on commerce and labor, and to possess women as reproductive labor. What was not needed was the freedom of all human beings to pursue happiness. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, all were equal, but some more equal than others.

The problem in creating an ideological justification is that the principle may prove rather more sweeping than the practice demands. The founders of liberal democracy needed an ideology to justify and legitimate the victory of the bourgeoisie over the entrenched aristocracy, of one class over another, rather than an ideology that would eliminate classes and patriarchy. Yet they also needed the support of the menu peuple, the yeoman farmers, and the peasants, in their struggle. One can hardly imagine making a revolution with the battle cry “ Liberty and justice for some!” So the ideology outstrips the reality. The pamphleteers of the bourgeois revolution created, by necessity and no doubt in part by conviction, a set of philosophical principles in contradiction with the social reality they intended to build.

The final victory of the bourgeoisie over the old order meant that the ideas of freedom and equality that had been the subversive weapons of a revolutionary class now became the legitimating ideology of the class in power. The problem was and still is that the society created by the Revolution was in obvious contrast with the ideology from which it drew its claims of right. Slavery continued in French St. Dominique until the successful slave revolt of 1801 and in Martinique for a further lift}' years. It was abolished only in 1833 in British dominions and not until 1863 in the United States. Suffrage, even among the free, was greatly restricted. After the Reform Bill of 1832 in Britain still only about 10 percent of the adult population was enfranchised, and not until 1918 was universal manhood suffrage established. Woman suffrage waited until 1920 in the United States. 1928 in Britain, 1946 in Belgium, and 1981 in Switzerland. The rights of women to own property and to enter any job they choose on a par with men was and still remains a battleground.

More fundamentally, economic and social power remain extremely unequally distributed and show no sign of being effectively redistributed. Despite the idea of equality, some people have power over their own lives and the lives of others, while most do not. There remain rich people and poor people, employer? who own and control the means of production and employees who do not even control the conditions of their own labor. By and large, men are more powerful than women and whites more powerful than blacks. The income distribution in the United States and Britain is clearly unequal, with about 20 percent of the income accruing to the highest 5 percent of the families and only 5 percent accruing to the lowest-paid 20 percent. The distribution of wealth is much more skewed. The richest 5 percent own 50 percent of all the wealth in the United States, and if one discounts the houses people live in, the cars they drive, and the clothes they wear, then nearly all wealth belongs to the richest 5 percent

I know this is fairly standard Marxist social analysis with a bit more explicit focus on biological determinism, but damn the first few chapters of Not in Our Genes just hit for me

This is particularly gratifying.

A lot of fun to join @chrisgpackham.bsky.social at a wonderful celebration of LUSH UK having given *£100 million* to activists & campaigners all around the world! Restoring nature, upholding human rights, championing animal protection. Standing up for what they believe in - so inspiring 🙂👏🌟

our ancestors accomplished more, with less, against worse. stay locked in.

Is Starmer bringing us to the brink of nuclear annihilation so that we can be grateful for a shit economy?

I guess I’m using alt text . What does this do ?

Andrew Lloyd-Webber braced the cold weather to tell us that he farms "just under 5,000 acres" himself. But he is not here on behalf of inheritance tax avoiding millionnairee, he is here on behalf of small farmers 😇

"What a chart"

Save for a couple of exceptions, this list is not much more diverse than the Dulux white colour palette book.