Diplotomodon

get a bit of hope, you get

a cute birb photo

After five years' silence, Seeming is releasing a new album today, simply called The World. Lit up with violins, trumpets, and cellos, it's a striking LP of heavy darkwave, equal parts disillusionment and hope, defiance and hunger.

Our previous collections have made best-of lists at Bandcamp and Synthpop Fanatic, and were awarded Album of the Year by IDieYouDie and A Model of Control. We think this new LP is a worthy followup.

Get the download (or a CD & t-shirt):

You can stream it too on your favorite sites.

The album is released on Artoffact Records, with cover art by the remarkable Serbian painter Dragan Bibin. (And today is Bandcamp Friday, when 100% of goes directly to the artists. If you’ve been meaning to support Seeming's work—including the previous albums—now's the day to do it.)

We've already released a few singles: A Failure of Imagination, Grindshow, Zebra Tramples Horse Trainer, Assassin's Lovesong. Our personal favorites on the album are album tracks: Heart of Hunger, Shackleton, and Winterlight. Check them out—they remind us of Madness & Extinction and maybe even ThouShaltNot’s The White Beyond. (Yes, Aaron is still playing drums on this record too.)

And hey, if you’ve made it this far, thank you. However you found our music, we’re so grateful for your support. It means more than you know. (If you want even more of a connection, sign up for Alex’s Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/salexanderreed, where you’ll find 800 posts, including a ton of unreleased songs, fiction, poetry, mixtapes, journalism, and outtake scholarship from his books on industrial music and Laurie Anderson.)

The world is wild, and it’s time for us to get loud together.

I could talk at length about the Extremely Good paper (with a few nitpicks, as ever), or how we almost never got to see these fossils were it not for the help of the Friends of the NCMNS organization, or how this single fallen domino accidentally topples several decades' worth of research on the way down. Yet somehow even more interesting than the science is the discourse that's surrounded it for close to forty years now. Being so T. rex-adjacent certainly didn't help, and after getting thrust into the center of the massive and painful academic vs. commercial paleontology debate...idk, it's difficult to even articulate. I turned down a job opportunity this summer explicitly because I didn't want to deal with the baggage of that debate coming back to haunt me down the line. It's big and weird and messy and there is still plenty that we, as a field of study, have to reflect on and come to terms with.

But for now we can close the book on a big one. I just wanted to attach my thoughts to the latest candidate for "Best Photograph Ever Fucking Taken."

When I was a kid, this video made such an impression on me - for many reasons, but one was the process of paleontological science, demonstrated by Mark.

May his memory be a blessing

As it has aged, however, the Universe became less magical.

This is a consequence of the Dirac Large Numbers Theorem.

The laws of the universe are not fixed with regard to time.

In General, we've seen things become LESS magical, through various mechanisms.

Astrology became increasingly less reliable due to the Precession of the Equinoxes.

The powers of the follwers of Pythia (later the Sisterhood of Karn) were dimished by Rassilon's Anchoring of the Thread at the temple of Atropos.

The mystical ElectroWeak force split into the more mundane electromagnetism and weak nuclear interactions as temperatures dropped below the unification threshold; diminishing all thaumatic rituals and spells connected to ElectroWeak power.

It's notable that we can't say for certain that this process is irreversible. already, we may have passed "peak rationality". The world may be returning to an age of wonder and superstition; indeed, generative AI makes strict materialist epistemology far less practical.