Necessary Distance
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
The World Is Too Much With Us - William Wordsworth
Architects of Troubled Sleep
The start of the year can feel like three months of endless Mondays. The slowly returning daylight often marred by gloom and rain, with everything feeling like it takes an extra amount of effort.
Using the slower days and almost animal-like impulse in Winter to hibernate with less activities and early nights, I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to align a series of different thoughts and ideas, primarily around our relationship to one another, the ‘world’ and how this world/s is mediated to us via social media, the internet and ongoing news-cycle of ever-increasing catastrophes.
For a few months I’ve had a sort of subdued, internal churn that feels beyond language and outside of my fingertips, something that I just can’t quite grasp - like the heady humidity of an overcast day, tension with no release. Fundamentally I feel that how we live currently is insane, perhaps never more so. The way in which we understand ‘events’, how we relate to one another as people, how we relate to our sense of place and time.
I didn’t expect to find myself at the age of 41 living in an perpetually upended world of geo-politics that represents that of Metal Gear Solid 2, yet here we are. ‘Memetic Psychological Warfare’ is the kind of phrasing that sounds like it would be an excellent opening track on an early 2000’s Crust record, but this isn’t a conceptual framework with just the right amount of well-read punk snark; this IS reality.
Earlier in the year I’d been glibly saying that we now live in a ‘Robocop Future’ but I do also think Paul Verhoeven was astonishingly prescient in his satire in both Robocop and Starship Troopers, so much so that I think in 2026 we find our age as one that could be described as Verhoeven-ian, one bearing the following characteristics:
The gawdy and salacious poverty of synthetic media
The sycophantic glee of a whole swathe of pathetic, emotionally-castrated men getting to act out their Fascist action-movie fantasies
The sneering disdain at empathy and the common good
The biggest losers in the world deciding that the rules no longer apply to them
Eternal War as profit-incentive for condos and seaside resorts on the mass graves of dead children
The schism between the channelled online realm of feeds and our own material world around us has never felt so stark and schizophrenic. I also think this schism cannot be fully explained just by geo-politics, economics or journalism but something on a less defined, less rational, philosophical level.
Sovereign Self
A phrase that has presented itself to me as I’ve been picking apart these thread of ideas is ‘Necessary Distance’ - the feeling that a sense of distance or space has been lost in the perpetual on-ness of the world.
The world felt more exciting when it seemed like a patchwork of different threads of experiences and discoveries interconnecting, literal ups and downs; rather than a flatlined, unending horizon with no peaks or troughs. The space and time to have surprising, confusing, upsetting, illuminating encounters and challenges, to learn new things, to be bewildered and humbled. Unsurprisingly, this really first came into focus for me in the context of my own life with the discovery of DIY Punk Culture and Zines, ‘Another world is possible’, etc.
As time went on the internet also used to provide a realm of mystery and have a presence of somewhere else, a truly other world/series of worlds which felt delightful to stumble upon - message boards, strange websites, blogs and so on.
The early era of Instagram also felt like this - by focusing just on images and little snapshots of life there was a chance for a more creative means of connection, something ineffable and alluring, but also separate, and was a welcome relief after The Facebook Status Update Era became overbearing, over-worthy and wearying in equal measure.
Compare this to how broken Instagram is currently, in essence a very bad marketing platform with so many ‘talking to camera’ videos on it that I think it’s provoking a form of empathy fatigue that feels draining and dispiriting. I miss when it was just pictures!
It is now the real world that provides an actual sense of mystery and magic, yet also utterly, starkly brutal eruptions as well. I have the sense of emerging from a long and distracting fever dream - like the world has been through something dreadful and we’re only now just starting to realise that perhaps consensus reality shattered sometime in November/December 2024 and that we are now wading through the wreckage and try to rebuild a sense of ‘world’ that is both personal and communal, one free from the instant synaptic assaults of a perpetual global event cycle.
This is where Necessary Distance has sort of emerged from, an ongoing series of ideas and thoughts that are still fermenting but feel like they’re gesturing towards a new way of living, one that has a better understanding of what this sense of flatlined horizon does to us as humans, and what we can do to regain our sense of presence.
It’s possible that living in a system that is hardwired towards the attrition of convenience that we are some of the first generations who have to now actively make our lives less convenient, taking a slower and more patience approach with things, delaying gratification and trying to perceive the actual length of time, space and distance of our world and collective experience.
With the ongoing affects of the current conflict in Iran/The Middle East still not being resolved, nor the actual weight and cost of disruption yet landing (let’s see what it’s like in a few weeks, buckle up?), there’s perhaps also never been a better time to start undertaking this kind of work. Let me know if you’ve had any similar thoughts or ideas!
To Live In Discontent
Whilst dwelling on these ideas I’ve gone back and read quite a few interviews with Adam Curtis across the years and have selected two for you to explore further, should you so wish. One is more recently from The Idler in 2021 and the other is from part 1 of an e-flux interview in 2012 (which is 14 years ago but sort of feels like a weird-era of un-time).
As ever there’s hit-and-miss elements to his work but I always enjoy re-engaging with it, if only for seeing which ideas now seem very prescient in our current context and which do not. There’s also something that feels quite old-school and fun about hunting down these old interviews and snippets, taking a bit of time with longform reading and reflection in a way that harkens back to the early 2000’s of online culture - something that was a far more text-based means of expression than the visual content we now consume.
The quote below from the 2012 e-flux interview I think is really interesting, particularly in the way that we have developed a novelist’s description of our own interior lives:
“Right. I think the new sensibility is beginning to shape itself out of the limitations of just experiencing things for yourself. But that’s not going to go away, that desire. The desire of the individual is still at the center of our society at the moment. If you go into a bar tonight, and you listen to the conversations, you will hear men and women describing to each other how they feel about someone else, or how someone else they know feels about someone else. Inner feelings are everything. They’re talking like a novelist’s description. They’re saying, “well, what he felt was that she crushed him somehow. And therefore, it was sort of a terrible destructive thing that she was doing to him, because she was, like, blanking him off.” What you hear will be like that. That’s like a novelist describing someone from inside their head. That fixation on the primacy of individual experience and feeling is not going to go away. But we’re beginning to realize two things: first, that this individualism is limited, and second, that when things get tough economically, socially, and politically, and you are on your own, you feel isolated, and you feel weak. And actually, there are other collective ways of experiencing things, and thus acting, which need to be recaptured.”
Honing in on that idea of collective experience, I think a more pronounced set of creative activities around documenting life and culture offline are already starting to take shape. The return of zines, photography and longer-form writing, the documentation of scenes alongside more physical media and an ethos of creating an ongoing living archive of musical culture are feeling more prominent and exciting.
What may seem like small efforts are in fact all part of remaining curious and creating means of connection that are not just fleeting and transactional, lost in a draft of digital ephemera, but something more congruent and lasting.
In that spirit, below are some albums that I’ve been enjoying as I’ve put together this edition of The Ansible, please check them out and if you like what you hear try and get yourself a physical copy somewhere.
Dishes - Drama
Composed of experienced lifers and long-time friends of the DIY Europunk community who spend their time living, organizing, hanging out and practicing in Amsterdam, Drama is 10 tracks of driving, anthemic and wistful indie powerpoppunk. Having spent the last few years touring and honing their own particular take on a genre which feels both classic and contemporary, Dishes show that the tunes can remain timeless but lyrically they couldn’t feel more relevant or present for our current situation in 2026.
Fuelled by a zephyr of frosty and melancholic guitar leads and lyrical and sardonic vocals, they carry the torch of Scandipunk heroes Massyhsteri and Terrible Feelings, and the album carries a slight biting chill down from the North Sea across its run time.
Taking ‘the personal is political’ back from hollow online performativity and returning it to a point of connection and solidarity is no mean feat, and this really feels like a soundtrack for the strange, sad world of unending events we find ourselves in. Endlessly scrolling and watching horrors on our phones as consensus reality dissolves around us, Dishes also remind us that the only way out of this mess is with each other and that we need community, connection and organizing more than ever.
Moloch - Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl.
February saw the release of the third album by the UK’s best band, a caustic breeze block of a record that is emblematic of not only their refusal to be swayed by any trends but also of the sound of the UK’s ongoing tension and decline. Sludgey riffs of obsidian cade merge with corrosive vocals and crawling drums, all harnessed with the sensibility of a hardcore band who’ve been doing this for a long time.
It’s also undoubtedly their best record yet, having a real sense of flow and managing to capture the crushing experience of seeing them live in all it’s muted, asphalt bleakness.
Aruspex - The Death Instinct
Nine tracks of Blackened Crust from the Sierra Nevada Foothills, Arüspex are bringing this genre, alongside Malatesta and Encierro, back to the desperate fury that made it so intoxicating the first time round.
Icy, melodic riffs alongside fast d-beat is always a winner but it’s the vocals with an incandescent, aching ‘barely-can-get-the-words-out-fast-enough’ grindcore intensity that make the album really harken back to the likes of Accursed, Kontrovers and other bands on Putrid Filth Conspiracy.
Burned Up Bled Dry - NEXT STOP…DEAD STOP…
Like an edition of HeartattaCk brought kicking and screaming back to life 20 years after it’s demise, this is just a perfect distillation of rummaging through distro boxes and collecting 7inches of random hardcore bands, in their own words “…mixing crushing down tuned Mid-South heaviness and intense power violence blasting with the clarity, hooks and direct edge of 80’s hardcore punk.”
Serving as a reminder of how much work it takes to write and refine songs into a hardcore punk record that you want to listen to repeatedly, having taken 29 years to write and record this album, it feels like both a sonic time capsule and a laying down of the gauntlet.
If you are at all into the likes of Born Dead Icons, Look Back And Laugh, Diallo, Artimus Pyle, Talk Is Poison, Slap-A-Ham records, going at great lengths to describe what ‘thrashcore’ was and buying compilation cd’s that had 60+ tracks from random Euro distros at gigs you will absolutely love this.
Nondi_ - Nondi…
Switching gears away from the guitars, Nondi… is a hazy and lovely lo-fi record of washed-out electronics and footwork/2-step/UK Garage that just has a beautiful atmosphere and fluidity to it that I can’t get enough of.
KMRU - Kin
One of my fave sound artists with a longform, droning album that feels like a return to some of his more heavy material, enveloping and cascading outwards.
Oh yeah, and one of the best bands to have ever existed also dropped the surprise album of the year/decade, on a day which was basically like Christmas for bald/bearded men of a certain vintage, but that is going to be the subject of another longer piece.
Thanks again for reading x
M