Hello! This month, I finished some drawings and wrote a short sci-fi story inspired by AI slop listicles.
"Heather's desk", 8x12", marker, gel pen, and glitter paint pen on paper, Feb. 2026
Sometime in 2023, I came across an article titled "Who’s at Your Door? Check with These Tips to Stay Safe". It reads like the paranoid ramblings of a Philip K. Dick character who has recieved a court-mandated lobotomy. Solidarity Project, "a nexus of knowledge and understanding," was one of the first obviously AI-generated listicle sites I'd come across. I was captivated by works like this mysterious guide to gambling, ass, and TJ Maxx. It feels quaint to remember a time when this garbage was a novelty and not an unavoidable plague preventing almost all meaningful internet research.
"The End Of Time Will Bring Beautiful Meat-Red Sunsets", 8.5x11", ballpoint pen and colored pencil on pink cardstock, Feb. 2026
I just started learning to use Linux MultiMedia Studio to sequence samples for the music I'm working on. LMMS isn't a very widely known DAW, and I keep finding AI-generated guides that reference menus and buttons that don't exist in the program. I'm assuming they're an aggregate of information gathered from guides to more popular DAWs like Ableton and Logic.
This gave me the idea to write a story about a fictional music software called AugmentedHymns that allows the user to create music telepathically, a concept I daydreamed about a lot as a kid. I structured the story in the format of a shitty AI-generated tutorial for the program and imagined what kind of horrible Faustian bargain a person would have to make to access this technology under capitalism.
By DJ Pronoun Subaru
AugmentedHymns™ for Total Certainty
Some people claim that there is nowhere left for pop music to go. These people do not listen to asmr hyperplugg, bitcrushed dogwave, or post-doxx wikipediacore.
- 🪞 Are your loved ones imprisoned in mirrored rooms, made cannibal by their own nostalgia?
- ❓ Do you work scrubbing cryptic dream glyphs from incomprehensible files created by and for machines?
- 👨💼 Do the people around you speak wistfully of the old days when all the ads were made by humans?
- 🎸 When you go to see a coworker's hardcore band play, do you feel like you're awkwardly watching someone attach a defibrillator to a rotting corpse?
Follow this guide to create a beat that keeps its thumb on the pulse of a dying monster using AugmentedHymns™.
The format is obviously satire, but the idea of generating forbidden, unthinkable sounds is genuinely exciting to me. A couple weeks ago, I went to an underground rave with my neighbor that ended up being the best live music event I've ever got to experience. I see a lot of creativity in music production right now I'm feeling really optimistic about the direction experimental pop is going. While I would not consent to AugmentedHymns' privacy policy, it's fun to imagine what a song created in the program might sound like.
1. "Daydre4m $$$ Prod By Salem" - Black Kray
2. "Flat Of The Blade (feat. Guy Garvey)" - Massive Attack
3. "Mental Clarity Is A Luxury I Can't Afford" - Suicide Boys
4. "Flying (A. G. Cook Remix)" - A. G. Cook / Wiley (link)
5. "Why They Mad" - Sasha Go Hard
6. "The Cockfighter" - Scott Walker
7. "Beautiful" - Bladee
8. "Kate Moss (feat. Treez Lowkey)" - Ski Mask the Slump God
9. "Makes Me Wanna Die" - Tricky
10. "Your Only Friend" - Phuture
11. "Small Mercies" - Lemon Kittens
12. "Tommy" - Nettspend
13. "Blow The Speaker" - fakemink
14. "Butterfly Net" - Caroline Polachek
15. "Steroids (feat. Uffie)" - Mr. Oizo
16. "I Am the Hellraiser" - Lil B
Comments? Questions? Ideas? Song/movie recommendations? What are you working on? What have you been thinking about? Contact me at max@maxwickstrom.com, I'd love to hear from you!
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