Notes from the forest #10

Two Hungry Ghosts is back

I'm thrilled that Dave Sector has decided to relaunch the blog and its archives, wich feature great interviews (Friske, Fanu, Jem One), a new dubplate project and the charts recommendations section. The euphoric reactions on Dog's On Acid to the blog's return speak for themselves.

A nomad does not play for the gallery

The recent portrait of dBridge in the Ransome Note resonates with me.

The thrill of the unknown has been a big motivation: “I like the sense of adventure when people ask what I’m gonna play and I say I don’t know.”

He realised that there was a common theme in his work, and that this would surely apply to his DJ and live sets, too. The tension that pervades his music is 'aggressively beautiful'. So well said.

This reminds me of Fracture, who described the development of artists in light of fan expectations:

"People get quite protective over the music they like. And they then put their own sort of projections of what they think an artist should be doing. And what's important to always remember is that, that an artist should be doing what they feel is the right thing to do."

I have learned not to expect things from an artist as a fan, but to let them grow by doing what they feel they need to do. That hasn't always been the case.

Anna's Archive backed up Spotify lol

Observation of the year:

"I've come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we're paying for music when we're actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away."

The open source search engine for shadow libraries seem to have had a similar thought but came to a different solution.

"A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation."

Anna's Archive started working statistically through the body of data as well.

Go get a blog

Joan 'Thinking Out Loud' Westenberg makes the case for blogging (in the ruins). And I'm with her.

"We've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability."

It's a harsh observation since I'm not sure about the 'private profitabitlity' because sometimes it feels an awful lot like helplessness in regards to everything that happens in the world right now.

She focuses on an aspect every artist and creative mind should hold on to - how to build permanence:

"If you're trying to build a body of work, or to create something that will outlast the platform of the moment, a blog is simply a better tool."

She has useful context and tipps on how to start as well.

Cold Storage

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an allegory about capitalism without the Dickensian aspect in mind. Bettina Fairchild explained the phrase very well:

"It exposes a bias people have towards individual anecdotes rather than the big picture, and grand drama over complicated reality."

I can still relate to the personal story of Jeff especially because that shitty storage company survived while his absolute phenomenal A Book Apart did not.

Personal note

2025 was a tough year; I stopped posting notes due to personal circumstances. Meanwhile I saved interviews that I did in the early 2000s from a blog that is only partial online. In 2026, I plan to republish these interviews with jungle drum and bass artists and hopefully add some new ones. My interview with the great Spirit is now online.

🌱 The title of the weekly notes refers to Erin Kissane's dark forest metaphor for a resilient and non-gamified human network on the web.