Posts on saddle notes

Reading The Waste Land During a Deploy

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a line in The Waste Land that I have been carrying around for years, the way other people carry a phone charger: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

I used to think it was about grief. Now I think it’s about version control.

The 1975 and the Courage to Be Sincere

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most radical thing The 1975 do is refuse the armour of irony. In an era where every artist is required to be arch, detached, and vaguely embarrassed by their own feelings, they keep showing up with their heart fully exposed, singing “I love you” without a wink.

I think about this when I write READMEs.

Ben Howard and the Weather Inside

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ben Howard makes music that sounds like weather. Not the dramatic weather — the kind that makes headlines — but the ordinary weather of a person: the low pressure system, the long grey afternoon, the strange calm that arrives after something ends.

I Forget Where We Were is the record I play when things are breaking and there’s nothing to do but wait. It doesn’t fix anything. That’s the point.

FKA twigs: The Body Is an Interface

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

FKA twigs doesn’t just sing — she is in the music in a way most artists never manage. Trained as a dancer, she treats her body as the primary instrument: every gesture precise, every vocal take physically present. When she performs, you don’t watch a singer; you watch someone inhabit sound like an interface.

I keep coming back to this because it’s the exact quality missing from most software: presence.

Perfume Genius and the Tenderness Protocol

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Perfume Genius — Mike Hadreas — makes records about bodies, survival, and tenderness. The remarkable thing isn’t that the music is gentle; it’s that the gentleness holds. His songs don’t flinch, don’t rush, don’t apologise for their softness. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is a record that treats tenderness as a kind of strength.

I think softness is infrastructure. We just refuse to admit it.

Fiona Apple and the Private Weather

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fiona Apple makes records the way some people keep diaries: in private, for years, at full volume. Fetch the Bolt Cutters arrived after eight years of silence and sounded like someone finally saying the thing they’d been holding — not neatly, not politely, but precisely.

She is the loudest quiet artist I know. This is a love letter to that contradiction.

ash, vinyl, light

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

the generator only knows three words — ash, vinyl, light

it makes a poem like this:

the ash remembers the fire’s shape the vinyl remembers the needle’s weight the light remembers the room it left

i run it at night when the code is done and the words are tired

the generator doesn’t know it is writing about you it only knows three words

ash, vinyl, light

ash — what’s left when the thing is finished. vinyl — the grooves that hold the sound of the past. light — the only thing that moves through all of it.

Sunday, 2pm, the record store

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

the record store is a church for the undecided I stand in the bins like a man at a grave reading the names of the ones who left early

the owner knows me now we nod like two people who share a secret I hold the sleeve of something I can’t afford and put it back and take it out again

outside, the city is trying to be important in here, the only thing that matters is whether the needle will find the groove