@@ gets paid the moment you buy his music on Catalog.
Who’s making who dance: human or machine?
Dodging Slack notifications like they’re oncoming traffic, @@ searches for techno’s Afrofuturist essence amidst the brain rot on his latest project, Techno Pessimist. He ridicules the psychic death grip of digital stimulus while trying to wriggle free. Whereas many likeminded efforts skew toward mutant, formless landscapes or synthwork that leaves puncture wounds, @@ converts the everything-is-fine, everyday dissonance into a club record as addictive as its subject. It's about, I think, dancing through it, unwelcome interruptions, and the politics of distraction; culture can heal, inspire, or neutralize.
If there’s one true economic moniker for this age we’re all spiraling through — ‘attention economy,’ ‘ownership economy,’ ‘creator economy,' yada yada yada — it'd have to be one of (self)deception. The search engines are powering weapons systems. The memes are powered by bot farms. Each Apple appliance, every Huawei device, all but implanted in our palms, offers the sheen of progress while hiding their true cost. Techno Pessimist channels Ease and Efficiency with an altogether lush, soothing listen, but @@ fractures his siren songs, and the underbelly leaks onto the CDJs.
Keep scr*lling for the full Techno Pessimist interview with @@. Thank you for reading, watching, listening, and supporting. Stay safe out there.
Siber: Happy throw-your-phone-in-a-lake season... Did an Apple appliance really get hammered in the making of Techno Pessimist?
@@: That was my old iPhone 12 mini. It was already cracked. I just had to smash a real one.
Siber: This album is introduced explicitly as a piece of criticism, in addition to an @@ project you can dance to. Do you subscribe to the Great Filter Theory, Dark Forest Theory, Roko’s Basilisk, or any other techno-pessimist internet / celestial schools of thought?
@@: Wow, while I love diving into those schools of thought, they are definitely intense. My true attitude is not as defeatist as some of those theories, but more reactionary.
My real beef is the narrative posed by tech thought leaders in SF who promise unparalleled levels of self-optimization and efficiency with technology. We don’t need a tech-fix for every problem in our lives. I face a very personal, ongoing battle with technology consumption — like many, I'm sure. There are so many ways it makes my life significantly worse rather than more efficient. I find myself getting extremely distracted and irritable.
The literature or argument I subscribe to most is painted by Cal Newport in his book Minimal Digitalism (track five’s namesake). Cal speaks to how technology is neither good nor bad, but rather what's important is to make sure you have the focus to live out your goals.
Siber: In the very first song, the Slack notification hits and my skin crawled, true to your promise of a horror story. What other stimulus easter eggs did you weave in?
@@: The Slack ones felt very necessary because the sound is so universally horrific. I kept it in its original form. Adding some glitch delay or pitch modulation didn’t hit the same. I got the idea for "Hypnagogia" after repeatedly being awoken to notification ringing in my ears — I’d go to sleep with my phone right underneath my pillow. There’s an iPhone alarm at the start of the track, message notifications, Slack stuff... the most negative stimuli in my life right now. Throughout the rest of the album, I tried to mimic a day in the life (a callback to all the TikTok and YouTube vlogs around that theme) in our contemporary post-Fordist work environment. I sampled my shower for the track "Shower" and took sounds of bikers speeding by in "Peloton." Compared to other critiques of tech that feature many 'robotic' or 'futuristic' sounds, I wanted to showcase a more honest and organic portrayal, mixing together real life sounds like an espresso machine, cars driving by, honks in Mumbai, the ocean, and yes, even Slack notifications. This is to place the listener into their own reality instead of a 'beep-boop' matrix.
Siber: On the second song, we hear the vocal line, “They wanna know why I’m a techno pessimist.” Of all the things, be it strange or funny or sheer terror, what bugs you most?
@@: In the line that follows, I say, “I make the machine make me dance”, which is a direct quote from McKenzie Wark’s Raving. They described how they were programming a 303 to generate an acid baseline to make them dance. I wanted to draw a parallel to my own phone use, which I was directly inputting into a system that has made me more distracted and confused (I made the machine make me dance).
The motivation for the music came from a place of raw emotion in how I felt after using these technologies. I would go from comparing myself online to other DJs and artists for unhealthy amounts of time, feeling frustrated. I’d take that energy straight into the studio and jam out an aggressive, five-minute “fuck you” hardware track. Then I'd go back on Instagram and it would fuck my concentration. I wanted to capture how that really made me feel in the studio.
Thinking further about the role of techno as a key genre in the Afrofuturist movement, it has this history as a tool for sonic worldbuilding for better, alternative futures for Black people, for all of us. The struggles of 2025 look very different, and trans people need liberation now. I wanted to channel those origins in hopes of having a healthy, democratic relationship with technology. A reminder for myself of what could be possible. I had to look inward to imagine that new electric agora. The back half of the album aims to sonically paint this picture.
Siber: Everything is different — the surveillance, the scale — and yet the root cases, the narratives, are the same. What's a moment on Techno Pessimist you’re most proud of? New tools, tricks, lessons...
@@: I've been heading in the direction of making music through hardware exclusively, and I recently got some new gear: the OG Electribe EMX-1 and a Moog Labyrinth. The biggest challenge for me was my own personal workflow. I needed a system to record what was improvisational, free-form jams into a structured, editable song. It's a balance of technique and feeling, but mostly process. I’m excited that most of the tracks on the album were usually made within a day featuring a focused hardware recording session, with little edits afterwards. Aside from that, I was excited to collab with Elias, a really talented ambient artist and saxophone player. He showed me some unconventional recording techniques by using a Raspberry Pi pedal running a program through a field recorder to add some crazy, interesting live tape looping effects you hear on "Ocean Floor" and "Shower."
Siber: You’ve described your music as “true-blooded American music,” and I wanted to ask for your thoughts on that: whether it was tongue-in-cheek, sincere, or both, and what you make of this catch-22 across culture, of wanting to claim space and correct or just steamroll through whitewashed music narratives while reckoning with the underbelly of American anything?
@@: I think it's a bit of both. Techno music, while originating in the US by Black people has now become bastardized and been taken over by Europeans (white people). But going further, it's an ode to American-made techno, especially from someone who doesn’t look like your typical “American" as a first-gen Indian-American, a brown man.
Siber: Can you share more about your role in the real / fake tech company New Nostalgia and its signature product (so far), the Holodome? I just love how your org is "solving the meaning crisis" and that a core value of the firm is "all hands on deck."
@@: New Nostalgia is truly just my best friends and I building things we think are cool. It’s our creative outlet and expression. We lean into an irreverent, satirical tone and often shapeshift our image and aesthetic. We share many of the same opinions about the world around us, and want to create conceptual art that both criticizes Silicon Valley ideology and feels new, exciting, and inspirational to us.
Our first project was AiBeacon, which was a series of parties that featured a laser as a ‘beacon of light’ for the creative class. We cosplayed as a fake tech company building “AI that connects humanity” to poke fun at the overzealous messaging in the space right now.
Our recent installation, Holodome, is a sensory manipulation dome that leverages the Ganzfield Effect. Similar to the inspiration behind Techno Pessimist, we felt people needed a shared, grounded experience to feel present since our overwhelming media consumption has fried us.
I’m really excited for the direction we’re heading with New Nostalgia. I think the combination of club culture, stage design, and conceptual art can lead to some meaningful experiences, and I think it’s especially important to build this in SF. Our hope is those that are attending our events actual have agency in deciding how these technologies work. We’re just scratching the surface with these concepts.
Siber: If I’m not mistaken, you’ve opted to keep releases off of major streaming platforms; did you experience a specific last straw with DSPs? What’s a better music internet look like for you?
@@: That was the plan for the first month of the release. By the time you’re reading this, it’s likely out everywhere. I love the community and direct-to-fan approach of platforms like Bandcamp and Catalog. Releasing music on those platforms was my intentional way of prioritizing those communities first as opposed to DSPs. It allowed me to focus more on the concept of the album rather than the algo-gaming scheme of playlist pitching, release timing, and more. But ultimately, I want to get paid. Paid for all the time, effort, and energy I put into making my music. Sales from Bandcamp and Catalog alone are usually 200x of what I make on any DSP. Platforms like that are truly the future of a healthy, supported music ecosystem. We’re not quite at the scale on the demand side to separate from DSPs entirely. I want my music to be accessible and unfortunately DSPs will be an unavoidable medium in the meantime.
Siber: If my IG reconnaissance is right, you moved to SF in 2019, a year before COVID lockdowns, and before the long-running hollowing-out of the city accelerated. What have you witnessed during your time there that corroborates the SF-is-dead comments, and what contradicts them?
@@: I definitely witnessed the hollowing out of SF, and in my opinion, it was a bit of good riddance. Keith Rabois took his VC crypto army to Miami, a bunch of new tech workers fled to New York. SF, for the first time in 20 years, became a more affordable place to live than the previous year. The building I was living in vacated completely, then got filled by more artistic, bohemian types and local business owners who were priced out originally. The post-pandemic club scene has been a very supportive, tight-knit community across promoters, DJs, and venues. It’s all people that chose to stay in SF through the mass-exodus. Since then, we've almost fully reverted back, but it was an important transition to witness in my early years here.
SF is beautiful and I feel lucky to live here. It’s crazy to me, all the hate it gets. It’s certainly small in size, small in population, but very loud in its influence on the electronic music scene in the world. As I was writing this response, I was reminded of my track “Meet Me in Miami” which pokes fun at a certain South Beach lifestyle. It doubled as a 'grass is always greener' critique for those that think SF is lame, leaving for Florida. I displayed this text at Mothership during the "Meet Me in Miami" release party: “SF is dead I’m moving to Miami. Miami is dead I’m moving to SF.”
Siber: You (half?) jokingly said once that your mom packed you off to Mumbai to strengthen your roots, which made me wonder what your family thinks of your music.
@@: My family is very musical and artistic, so a lot of that interest is thanks to them. They're the reason I know how to play piano, guitar, drums and produce. My older brother is leagues above me in music theory, analysis, and composition. He has perfect pitch, can sing, and can play just as many (if not more) instruments, so I'm not even the most musical family member. I might be the third. My family traditionally listens to Bollywood, Hindustani classical, ghazals and Indo-western fusion, which features Indian scales and time signatures. There’s been no history of any electronic music, though, so while they’re supportive, my direction is still new and confusing for them
Siber: You’ve performed at some really special events like Lifesavers here in New York. What's the biggest distinction for you between DJing out here versus in the Bay?
@@: NY is cool — I always love the energy there. To me the biggest difference (excluding the scale of the scene) is the use of fog. The clubs in NY are foggy as hell and I love it. Established SF venues need to lean into fog wayy more. It’s the best way to lose yourself in the moment. People in NY are super neurotic so it makes sense why escapism is a big motif there.
Siber: Last but not least, what are you optimistic about?
@@: I’m excited to create more for the sake of creating without any expectations. I’m also excited to keep building things with my friends. Aside from New Nostalgia, I started a label called Capp Street Project out of our Mission Street studio space, which releases a series of collaborative projects. Every track has to be made with another person, inside our space, so the end result is completely shared. Compared to where music has been heading, the lack of identity, brand, and ego with Capp Street Project has been refreshing. I hate the idea of 'creative genius.' I’ve found my personal coping mechanism is output. Creating things, whether it be music, art, or throwing parties, is my meditative practice in dealing with our increasingly confusing and weird world.
@@ gets paid the moment you buy his music on Catalog.
