Plutonic Rainbows

Waswaas and The Dullard Sage have constructed something genuinely strange with Und Ewig Ist — an album that feels less composed than discovered. The eight tracks unfold as what the artists call "low frequency field recording excursions," and that description captures the essential character of the work. This is music that moves through environments rather than describing them.

The collaboration spans territory that defies easy categorisation. Tags on Bandcamp list Sufi, cosmic black metal, drone, and modern classical as reference points. However, none of these labels fully accounts for what happens across tracks like "Disorders of Consciousness" or "Datacombs." The low end dominates — rumbling bass frequencies that seem to emanate from the earth itself — while field recordings add texture and occasional brightness to the murky depths.

The dedication to Maryanne Amacher feels particularly apt. Amacher spent decades exploring how sound interacts with physical space and the listening body. Waswaas and The Dullard Sage pursue a similar investigation, creating music that rewards deep listening and physical presence. The cassette edition sold out quickly, though digital versions remain available with bonus tracks.

Sources:

• Und Ewig Ist - Bandcamp

• The Maryanne Amacher Foundation - Blank Forms

Sultan Pasha's decision to reformulate Thebes as an alcohol-based Extrait de Parfum marks a significant departure from the oil-based attar tradition that established his reputation. The original Thebes Grade 1 arrived in 2016 as an homage to Guerlain's discontinued Djedi — a fragrance so evocative that Sultan Pasha described it as the only perfume that had brought him close to tears. After months of painstaking recreation, he captured that spectral atmosphere in oil form, creating what became his signature composition.

Nearly a decade later, the 2025 release transforms that intimate, skin-hugging attar into something altogether different. Working alongside Christian Carbonnel under the new Sultan Pasha Perfumes label, the reformulation explores what happens when you translate oil's density and warmth into alcohol's volatility and projection. The result maintains the core narrative — an ancient Egyptian tomb, the boundary between life and death — while fundamentally altering how that story unfolds in space and time.

The composition itself reads like an exercise in controlled opposition. Bright aldehydes and a white floral bouquet of jasmine, muguet, and rose sit against somber, earthy vetiver and the distinctive chalk-like texture of genuine orris butter. Reviewers consistently note this tension: the fragrance is simultaneously luminous and gloomy, uplifting and ritualistic. One detailed review describes waves of heady florals alternating with leather and salty ambergris, creating an animalic, fatty quality that feels deliberately unsettling.

This approach differs markedly from the attar version's intimate revelation. Alcohol-based perfumes diffuse outward, creating a more public presence that transforms the wearer's relationship to the scent. Where the oil version whispered ancient secrets directly to the skin, the Extrait broadcasts them into the surrounding air. The projection reportedly remains strong for the first two hours before settling closer to the body, with longevity hovering around five hours — a relatively modest performance for an Extrait concentration, suggesting the formula prioritizes complexity over sheer endurance.

The move to alcohol represents more than technical reformulation. Sultan Pasha built his reputation through traditional attar craftsmanship, a method that demands patience and precision but limits commercial reach. Attars require direct application, careful storage, and an understanding that comes through experience. By creating alcohol-based versions of his most celebrated works, he opens a door to audiences who might find oil-based perfumes too unfamiliar or demanding.

However, this accessibility comes with artistic risks. The attar community values the medium's contemplative nature — its quiet intensity, its refusal to announce itself beyond the wearer's personal space. Translating that aesthetic into alcohol requires careful calibration to avoid losing what made the original compelling. Based on early responses, Thebes manages this balance by maintaining its strange, funereal atmosphere even as it reaches farther from the skin. The reformulation amplifies certain aspects — particularly the aldehydic brightness and floral lift — while preserving the dusty, ritualistic core that defines the concept.

Sample sets became available for preorder through January 2026, a deliberate strategy that allows serious enthusiasts to experience the full lineup before committing to full bottles. This approach respects the considered, exploratory mindset that characterizes niche perfume appreciation. These are not fragrances designed for casual purchase; they demand time, attention, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. The animalic qualities alone ensure this remains far from mainstream tastes.

What strikes me most about this release is its timing. The niche perfume market has become increasingly crowded, with countless brands claiming artisanal credentials while churning out derivative compositions. Sultan Pasha's move to alcohol could be read as capitulation to commercial pressure, but the execution suggests otherwise. By maintaining Extrait concentration and preserving the challenging, unconventional character of the original work, he signals that accessibility need not mean simplification.

The question now becomes whether this model succeeds — whether audiences accustomed to attars will embrace the reformulations, and whether those new to Sultan Pasha's work will appreciate what makes these fragrances distinctive. Thebes tests that proposition directly, offering a scent that refuses conventional pleasantness in favor of atmospheric depth. It remains to be seen whether the broader market rewards that uncompromising vision or whether the commercial realities of alcohol-based production eventually push toward safer ground.

For now, Thebes in Extrait form exists as a fascinating experiment in translation, asking how much of an attar's soul survives the journey from oil to alcohol. The early evidence suggests more than you might expect, though undoubtedly something irretrievable remains bound to the original medium. What emerges is neither superior nor inferior, but genuinely different — a parallel interpretation that extends the concept rather than simply reproducing it in another format.

Sources:

• Thebes Sultan Pasha Perfumes - Fragrantica

• Sultan Pasha Perfumes Thebes: Read the Full Review - Perfumeaholic

• Thebes Grade 1 by Sultan Pasha Attars - Fragrantica

• Sultan Pasha Presents Four New Extrait de Parfum - Fragrantica

Philip Johnson's Glass House served as more than a venue for Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's 2016 improvisation — it became the instrument itself. Contact microphones placed on the glass walls captured vibrations, transforming the structure into a resonant body. The resulting album, released in 2018, documents a single 37-minute performance where architectural space and electronic processing merge.

The collaboration marked their first live work together since Sakamoto's cancer diagnosis in 2014. Both artists approached the session with minimal rehearsal, spending only one day preparing before the recording. Sakamoto brought a keyboard and glass singing bowls, while Nicolai contributed his characteristic digital processing. However, the true voice emerged from the building itself.

Yayoi Kusama's installation — Dots Obsession: Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope — occupied the space during the performance. Sakamoto described looking through the glass walls at the landscape while surrounded by Kusama's dots as "a strange mixture of natural, nature, and artificial things, art." That tension between organic and synthetic pervades the recording. Nicolai's glitches and static rest against Sakamoto's melodic fragments, neither dominating.

The Glass House's transparent walls offered ideal conditions for an experiment in architectural acoustics. Therefore, what emerged was not merely electronic music performed in a space, but music generated from the space itself — a document of place as much as performance.

Sources:

• Glass - Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - NOTON

• Glass (composition) - Wikipedia - Wikipedia

• Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Glass album review - Louder Sound

I've been watching Anthropic's release cadence closely over the past year, and something has changed. The company that brought us Claude Opus 4.5 in November 2025 has gone conspicuously quiet. No leaks, no benchmarks teased on Twitter, no cryptic blog posts hinting at breakthrough capabilities. Just silence. That silence, however, tells me more about their next model than any press release could.

The industry has trained us to expect a particular rhythm. OpenAI drops a new model every few months, each one incrementally better than the last. Google races to catch up. The smaller labs scramble to carve out niches. We've come to expect this treadmill of marginal improvements, each accompanied by breathless claims of revolutionary progress. Anthropic participated in this race for a while, but I believe they're stepping off it deliberately.

Consider what we know about their philosophy. The company was founded explicitly on the principle that AI safety cannot be an afterthought. Their Constitutional AI approach isn't marketing — it's baked into their training methodology. They've published papers on interpretability that most companies wouldn't touch because they reveal uncomfortable truths about what we don't understand. This isn't a company optimizing for Twitter engagement or shareholder updates.

Therefore, when I look at the gap between Opus 4.5 and whatever comes next, I don't see delay. I see intentionality. I believe Anthropic is rebuilding their development process from the ground up, and the next Sonnet model will reflect that fundamental shift.

The current generation of frontier models, including Anthropic's own, share a common weakness. We can measure their performance on benchmarks, but we struggle to predict their behavior in edge cases. They excel at standard tasks while occasionally producing outputs that reveal concerning blind spots. This unpredictability isn't just an engineering challenge — it's an existential risk that scales with capability. Additionally, the compute required to train these models has grown exponentially, while the improvements have become increasingly incremental.

I suspect Anthropic recognized this pattern and decided to break it. Rather than rush out Sonnet 5 with another ten percent improvement on MMLU, they're likely pursuing something harder. They're probably working on models that can explain their reasoning not as a party trick, but as a core architectural feature. Models that know what they don't know and communicate that uncertainty clearly. Models that scale in safety as aggressively as they scale in capability.

This approach demands patience. You can't bolt interpretability onto a model after training and expect meaningful results. You can't patch constitutional principles into an architecture designed around different priorities. If Anthropic is serious about building models that remain aligned as they grow more powerful, they need to redesign the foundation. That takes time.

The economics support this theory as well. Training runs for frontier models now cost tens of millions of dollars at minimum, likely hundreds of millions for the largest experiments. Companies can sustain that spending if each model clearly surpasses its predecessor and generates corresponding revenue. However, as improvements become marginal, the calculus changes. Anthropic has substantial funding, but they're not infinite. A strategic pause to ensure the next model represents a genuine leap rather than an incremental step makes financial sense.

I also notice that Anthropic has been unusually active in publishing research on model interpretability and mechanistic understanding. These papers don't generate immediate commercial value, but they lay groundwork. They suggest a company thinking several moves ahead, building the theoretical foundation for techniques they plan to deploy at scale. When Sonnet 5 eventually arrives, I expect we'll see these research threads woven throughout its architecture.

The competitive landscape reinforces this reading. OpenAI remains the market leader in terms of mindshare, but their recent releases have felt increasingly similar to each other. Google has made impressive strides with Gemini, but they're playing the same game everyone else is playing — faster, bigger, slightly better on benchmarks. There's an opening for a company willing to compete on a different axis entirely. If Anthropic can deliver a model that's not just capable but genuinely more trustworthy and interpretable, they could define a new category of competition.

Think about what enterprises actually need from these models. They don't need another incremental improvement in code generation or mathematical reasoning. They need models they can deploy with confidence, models whose failure modes they understand, models that integrate into systems with predictable behavior. The company that solves those problems will command premium pricing and customer loyalty that benchmark performance alone cannot buy.

As a result, my prediction for Sonnet 5 is specific. I don't think we'll see a traditional release announcement with the usual fanfare. Instead, I expect Anthropic will publish a detailed technical paper explaining new approaches to alignment and interpretability, followed by a model that demonstrates those approaches in practice. The improvements on standard benchmarks might be modest — perhaps even deliberately restrained. The real advances will be in areas we currently struggle to measure: robustness, predictability, transparency.

The timeline is harder to predict, but I'd be surprised if we see anything before mid-2026. Anthropic's silence suggests they're deep in the experimental phase, not polishing a nearly-ready product. They're likely running training experiments, evaluating results, iterating on architecture. That process can't be rushed without compromising the principles that differentiate them.

This slower pace might frustrate those of us who refresh the Anthropic homepage daily hoping for news. However, I find it reassuring. We've spent the past few years in a headlong sprint toward more capable AI systems, often with safety and interpretability lagging behind. If one major lab is willing to slow down and do the harder work of building systems that scale safely, that benefits everyone.

The race to AGI continues, but perhaps we need some participants racing toward a different finish line. Anthropic appears to be positioning themselves as exactly that. When Sonnet 5 arrives, I believe it will represent not just an incremental improvement, but a statement about what frontier AI development can and should prioritize. The deliberate slowdown isn't weakness — it's the most ambitious move they could make.