Plutonic Rainbows

This limited edition fragrance is now thankfully back for good. I am very pleased. When I first wrote about Superleggera in October 2024, I could not understand how they could create what is maybe the best sport allure in the line and discontinue it so quickly.

I have noticed something unsettling about certain memories and objects. They no longer feel like parts of my past. They feel like presences — autonomous things that exist on their own terms, untethered from the timeline that should contain them. A particular room from childhood. A voice I cannot place. An object that carries weight I cannot explain. These fragments persist, but they have lost their coordinates. They no longer answer the question of when or why. They simply are.

For years I assumed this was a personal quirk, some failure of my own memory system. However, I have come to understand that this experience reflects something fundamental about how memory and meaning actually work. Time, it turns out, does not organise experience as reliably as I once believed. When the links between when, what, and why begin to weaken, memories detach from their original context and start to feel like independent entities rather than points on a timeline.

The first thing I had to accept is that memory does not function as an archive. Every recollection is a reconstruction assembled from fragments — sensory traces, emotional states, narrative expectations, present concerns. When I recall something repeatedly, its temporal anchor degrades faster than its emotional or symbolic content. The when fades while the what remains. As a result, a memory can lose its precise date or sequence while retaining extraordinary vividness. It becomes untethered from time, and that is the first step toward autonomy.

Physical objects compound this effect. Objects persist; contexts do not. I own things that have outlived every situation that once gave them meaning. They remain materially unchanged, carrying residual associations, but the social and emotional framework that originally fixed their significance has disappeared entirely. The object becomes a free-floating signifier — present, but no longer explained by its origin. This is why certain possessions feel haunted rather than merely old. They carry weight without carrying explanation.

Emotion makes this worse. Strong emotional encoding preserves intensity and atmosphere but does not reliably preserve sequence. I have memories that feel immediate rather than past, concurrent with the present, resistant to being placed in any particular year or period. When this happens, the memory is no longer something that happened. It becomes something that exists. The distinction matters enormously. A memory that happened belongs to the past and can be filed away accordingly. A memory that exists refuses that categorisation. It remains active, present, unfinished.

I normally domesticate memory through narrative. I tell myself that this happened, then this, therefore that. Narrative provides explanatory scaffolding that keeps fragments in their proper places. However, narrative coherence weakens over time — through loss, through trauma, through long temporal distance, or simply through the accumulation of years. When the scaffolding fails, what remains are isolated fragments: a room, a voice, a smell, an object. Without narrative containment, these fragments assert themselves independently. They no longer wait to be summoned. They arrive unbidden, carrying their own atmosphere.

Additionally, every act of remembering is also an act of reinterpretation. As my present self changes, old memories acquire new meanings. Objects get re-read symbolically. Past moments are recruited to explain current preoccupations. At that point, the memory is no longer about the past at all. It becomes active material in present thought, which reinforces its sense of autonomy. The memory is not sitting in storage waiting to be retrieved. It is doing work, shaping how I understand myself right now.

Cultural acceleration worsens all of this. Environments disappear quickly. Media formats vanish. Social rhythms change at speeds that would have been incomprehensible to previous generations. This leaves behind what I can only call orphaned memories — experiences tied to worlds that no longer exist. Without a living context to anchor them, these memories cannot reattach themselves to time. They persist instead as atmospheric residues, hanging in consciousness without coordinates.

I should be clear: memories and objects are not actually autonomous. They feel that way because temporal markers have eroded, causal explanations are gone, and emotional charge remains intact. The mind interprets persistence without explanation as independence. This is a perception, not a literal property. However, the perception has real effects. It shapes how I experience my own past and how I relate to objects that have survived their contexts.

What I am describing comes down to a simple principle: when time fails to organise experience, meaning reorganises itself. And meaning does not require chronology to survive. A memory can lose its date and retain its significance. An object can outlive its purpose and gain symbolic weight it never had when it was merely useful. The emotional and symbolic dimensions of experience are more durable than the temporal ones. They persist after the scaffolding collapses.

This troubles me because autonomous memories and objects refuse closure. They resist categorisation. They undermine the linear identity I try to maintain — the story where I was one person, then became another, progressing through time in an orderly sequence. These fragments suggest something else: that the past is not finished, that time is not a clean arrow but a loose arrangement of survivals. Some things refuse to stay where I put them. They keep arriving in the present, carrying atmospheres I cannot explain and weights I cannot discharge.

I do not know how to resolve this. I suspect resolution is not available. The conditions that produce autonomous memories — the reconstructive nature of recall, the persistence of objects beyond their contexts, the durability of emotion over chronology — are not bugs in the system. They are how memory and meaning actually work. I can acknowledge this without being able to change it.

Therefore, I have stopped trying to force these fragments back into their proper places on the timeline. I let them exist as what they are: presences without explanation, survivals from contexts that no longer exist. The room from childhood remains vivid. The voice remains unplaceable. The objects continue to carry weight. They are not history. They are something else — something that persists after time has done its work and failed to organise what remains.

Half-remembered, her face drifts through the mind like something glimpsed between sleep and waking — beautiful, indistinct, and unsettling in its refusal to settle into certainty. The light is low and ambered with age, a theatre stage suspended in shadow, where silence feels heavier than sound. The place itself no longer exists: it faded, decayed, and was finally erased, yet it persists intact within memory, anchored to a winter in 1990. What remains is not a story but an atmosphere — a quiet, lingering sense that something once lived there briefly and then vanished, leaving only its echo.

Photographed by Fabrizio Ferri for Elle Italia, 1989.

I remember the house I grew up in with startling clarity — the olive green carpet in the living room, the way afternoon light fell through the kitchen window, the particular creak of the third stair. These details feel precise and trustworthy. However, when I try to verify them against photographs or conversations with family members, contradictions emerge. The carpet was brown. The kitchen window faced east, not west. There was no third stair that creaked; the house had only two floors connected by a single landing.

Memory, I have come to understand, is not a recording device. It is an architectural practice. Every time I recall an event, I do not retrieve a stored file — I rebuild the structure from fragments, filling gaps with plausible material drawn from expectation, emotion, and subsequent experience. The brain treats memory as a construction project rather than an archive retrieval. As a result, the house I remember is not the house that existed. It is a house my mind has built and rebuilt thousands of times, each iteration subtly different, each version confident in its own accuracy.

This reconstructive process operates below conscious awareness. When I picture a childhood birthday party, I experience the memory as continuous and complete. I see the cake, the guests, the wrapping paper scattered across the floor. Yet research in cognitive psychology demonstrates that such scenes are composites — fragments of actual perception stitched together with generic knowledge about how birthday parties typically unfold. The mind hates gaps. It finds them aesthetically intolerable and fills them automatically, without informing me that any filling has occurred. I experience the result as authentic recollection rather than creative interpolation.

The implications extend far beyond personal nostalgia. Eyewitness testimony, long considered reliable evidence in legal proceedings, rests on the assumption that memory records events faithfully. Decades of experimental work have demonstrated otherwise. Witnesses confidently identify suspects they never actually saw. They recall details — weapons, clothing, sequences of events — that did not occur as described or did not occur at all. The confidence of the witness bears little relationship to the accuracy of the memory. The mind fills gaps with conviction, not with truth.

I find this troubling and fascinating in equal measure. My own past, the narrative I use to understand who I am and how I arrived at this moment, rests on foundations I cannot verify. The conversations I remember having, the decisions I recall making, the people I believe influenced me — all of these exist only as reconstructions, subject to the same gap-filling processes that turned brown carpet into olive green. I do not have direct access to my own history. I have only stories, perpetually revised, confidently false in ways I cannot detect.

Additionally, the social dimension compounds these individual distortions. Memory is not purely private. I construct my recollections in conversation with others, absorbing their versions of events, incorporating details they mention into my own reconstructions. A sibling's story about a family vacation becomes, over time, indistinguishable from my own memory of that vacation — even if I was not present, even if the event occurred before I was born. Collective memory operates through the same gap-filling mechanisms, building shared narratives that feel like recovered history but function more like collaborative fiction.

This is not a design flaw. Evolutionary pressures did not select for archival accuracy. They selected for adaptive response. A memory system that helps me navigate the present — predicting dangers, recognizing opportunities, making rapid decisions — serves survival better than one that faithfully preserves every sensory detail from the past. The reconstructive nature of memory allows flexibility, pattern recognition, and generalisation. I can apply lessons from one context to another precisely because my memories are not locked into specific instances. They are malleable structures, capable of informing novel situations.

Therefore, the question is not whether my memories are accurate — they are not, and they cannot be. The question is what relationship I should have with these unreliable constructions. I can treat them with suspicion, constantly doubting my own narrative, interrogating every recollection for signs of confabulation. This approach has its uses, particularly in contexts where accuracy matters: legal testimony, historical research, medical diagnosis. However, applied universally, it corrodes the ordinary trust in experience that makes daily life possible. I cannot function if I second-guess every memory of where I left my keys or what I had for breakfast.

A more sustainable approach involves acknowledging the constructed nature of memory without abandoning the practical reliance on it. I know that my recollection of the olive green carpet is probably wrong. I also know that this memory, accurate or not, shapes my emotional relationship to that house and that period of my life. The memory serves a function even when it fails as a record. It locates me in time, connects me to people and places, provides continuity between the person I was and the person I am now. These functions do not require literal accuracy. They require coherence, emotional resonance, and a sense of narrative progression.

I have also learned to value external documentation more highly. Photographs, journals, dated records — these provide fixed reference points that resist the drift of reconstructive memory. When I look at an old photograph and find that the carpet was brown, I do not experience this as an attack on my identity. I experience it as useful calibration. The photograph does not tell me what I felt or what the house meant to me. It tells me what colour the carpet was. Different questions require different sources.

Memory will continue to fill gaps. It will do so automatically, confidently, and invisibly. The architecture of absent details will remain my primary mode of accessing the past. However, knowing this changes my relationship to that architecture. I no longer expect it to be a faithful blueprint. I treat it as a working model — useful, necessary, and permanently provisional. The house I remember may never have existed. Nonetheless, I lived in it, and I live in its reconstruction still.

As AI systems grow more capable, the field of AI safety has shifted from theoretical concern to urgent priority. In 2025, we saw major labs adopt more rigorous evaluation frameworks, with red-teaming becoming standard practice before model releases. Governments began drafting meaningful legislation, and the EU AI Act set precedents that other jurisdictions are now studying closely. The conversation has matured: rather than debating whether safety matters, researchers are now focused on how to measure it, how to enforce it, and how to balance caution with the genuine benefits these systems can provide.

Looking toward 2026, I expect alignment research to receive significantly more funding and attention. The pace of capability advances — including OpenAI's o3 announcement — makes this urgency clear. We'll likely see the emergence of industry-wide safety standards, perhaps coordinated through bodies similar to how aviation regulates itself. Interpretability — understanding what models are actually doing internally — will move from academic curiosity to practical necessity as regulators demand explanations for high-stakes decisions. The challenge will be ensuring that safety measures keep pace with capability gains, rather than trailing behind as they have historically. The organisations that treat safety as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance burden will likely define the trajectory of the field.

The question of whether to pair an external DAC with a network player is one that comes up frequently in audio discussions. Since getting my network player a few weeks ago, I have been weighing this decision myself. On the positive side, a separate DAC allows you to upgrade your digital-to-analogue conversion independently of your streaming source, potentially achieving better sound quality through higher-end components, superior power supply isolation, and more sophisticated clock circuits. It also provides flexibility: you can swap DACs to suit your preferences or as technology improves, without replacing the entire streaming setup. Many audiophiles appreciate the ability to fine-tune their system by mixing and matching components from different manufacturers.

However, there are compelling reasons to consider an all-in-one network player with built-in conversion. Modern integrated streamers often feature excellent DAC implementations that rival standalone units at similar price points, and the shorter signal path can reduce potential sources of interference or jitter. An integrated solution also means fewer boxes, fewer cables, and a simpler setup with less clutter and fewer points of failure. For many listeners, the convenience and cost savings of a well-designed all-in-one outweigh the theoretical benefits of separates, especially when the integrated DAC is already of high quality. The right choice ultimately depends on your priorities, budget, and how much you value modularity over simplicity.

I first encountered "Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom" sometime in the early 2000s, several years after its 1999 release. I had read about The Caretaker in connection with hauntology, a term that was gaining currency in music criticism at the time, and I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about. I remember putting on headphones late one evening, pressing play, and feeling genuinely unsettled within minutes. This was not background music. This was something else entirely.

James Leyland Kirby released the album under his Caretaker alias through the V/Vm label, and it arrived with a concept already fully formed. The title references the ballroom scene in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," that disorienting moment when Jack Torrance wanders into a phantom party populated by ghosts from the Overlook Hotel's past. Kubrick scored that scene with Al Bowlly's "Midnight, the Stars and You," a 1934 dance band recording that sounds impossibly distant even when played cleanly. Kirby took this idea and ran with it, building an entire album from similarly aged source material: scratchy 78rpm records, pre-war crooners, and forgotten ballroom orchestras.

The genius of the album lies not in the samples themselves but in what Kirby does to them. He processes these old recordings through layers of reverb, distortion, and tape degradation until they sound like transmissions from another dimension. The melodies remain recognisable as melodies, and the rhythms still swing in their original tempos. However, everything arrives wrapped in fog, as if the music were playing in a room you cannot quite locate. I find myself straining to hear the original songs beneath the processing, and this act of straining becomes part of the listening experience.

The album works because it operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it functions as ambient music, suitable for late-night listening or as an atmospheric backdrop. Additionally, it rewards closer attention with details that reveal themselves only after repeated plays: a vocal phrase that emerges briefly before dissolving, a piano figure that loops with subtle variations, a burst of static that sounds almost intentional. I have listened to this record dozens of times over the years, and I still notice new elements buried in the murk.

There is something deeply melancholic about the project, though the melancholy operates differently from conventional sad music. When I listen to a singer perform a ballad about lost love, I understand the sadness intellectually and sometimes emotionally. When I listen to "Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom," I experience something closer to existential unease. The original performers on these source recordings are long dead. The audiences who danced to this music in actual ballrooms have likewise passed. The recordings themselves, physical objects made of shellac and wax, have degraded over decades. Kirby's processing makes all of this explicit. The album sounds like memory failing.

I think this is why the record connected so strongly with the hauntology movement that emerged in British music criticism during the 2000s. Writers like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term to describe art that engaged with lost futures and cultural memory, particularly British culture's relationship with its own past. The Caretaker fit this framework perfectly. Here was an artist literally exhuming the sonic dead, presenting their voices and performances as spectral remnants rather than historical documents. The music did not celebrate the past or critique it. Instead, it suggested that the past was still present, bleeding through into the current moment like a stain that would not fade.

The production techniques Kirby employed deserve closer examination. He worked primarily with vinyl and tape, adding physical degradation to recordings that were already compromised by age. The crackle and hiss became compositional elements rather than noise to be eliminated. Many electronic musicians in the late 1990s were pursuing ever-greater clarity and precision, taking advantage of digital tools to create impossibly clean productions. Kirby moved in the opposite direction. He wanted his music to sound old, damaged, and uncertain. As a result, the album occupies a strange temporal space, neither authentically vintage nor recognisably contemporary.

I should note that "Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom" was not entirely unprecedented. Artists like Philip Jeck had been working with damaged vinyl and turntable manipulation for years. William Basinski would later achieve similar effects with his "Disintegration Loops," though his process differed significantly. The Caretaker distinguished itself through conceptual rigour. The album was not simply a collection of processed samples; it was a sustained meditation on memory, nostalgia, and decay. Every creative decision reinforced the central theme.

Listening to the album now, more than twenty-five years after its release, I find that it has aged remarkably well. The lo-fi aesthetic that felt radical in 1999 has become more familiar, absorbed into countless ambient and electronic productions. However, the album retains its capacity to unsettle. The melodies still feel like half-remembered dreams. The static still suggests transmission from somewhere unreachable. I play it when I want to feel transported, not to a specific time or place, but to a state of mind where the boundaries between past and present become porous.

Kirby continued The Caretaker project for nearly two decades after this debut, releasing albums like Take Care, It's a Desert Out There and culminating in the monumental "Everywhere at the End of Time" series, which traced the progression of dementia across six albums released between 2016 and 2019. That later work received substantial attention, particularly online, where it became something of a cultural phenomenon. I understand why. The dementia concept gave listeners a narrative framework for experiencing the increasingly abstract and difficult music. Therefore, many people discovered The Caretaker through the later albums and worked backward.

I would encourage anyone who knows only "Everywhere at the End of Time" to seek out this first album. It represents the project in its purest form, before the conceptual apparatus expanded to encompass explicit narratives about cognitive decline. "Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom" makes no claims about dementia or neurology. It simply presents us with ghosts, with music that sounds like it is disappearing even as we listen. The experience is profoundly strange and profoundly moving. I return to it regularly, and each time I find something new dissolving in the static.

2025 has been a transformative year for artificial intelligence. We witnessed the emergence of reasoning models like o1 and o3, which demonstrated genuine problem-solving capabilities rather than mere pattern matching. Claude gained the ability to use computers autonomously, DeepSeek proved that frontier-level performance could be achieved on modest budgets, and AI coding assistants became genuinely useful collaborators rather than autocomplete on steroids. The rapid iteration between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and emerging players created an almost dizzying pace of advancement, with each month bringing capabilities that would have seemed implausible just a year prior.

Looking ahead to 2026, I expect AI agents to finally deliver on their long-promised potential. We'll likely see models that can reliably execute multi-step tasks over extended periods — managing projects, conducting research, and handling complex workflows with minimal human intervention. The cost of inference will continue to plummet, making sophisticated AI accessible for personal use cases that previously seemed economically absurd. More intriguingly, I suspect we'll witness the first serious applications of AI in scientific discovery: not just analysing data, but formulating hypotheses and designing experiments. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape how we work and create, but how quickly we can adapt to the new landscape it's building.

Perhaps most fascinating is how the conversation around AI has matured. The early hype cycles have given way to more nuanced discussions about capability, safety, and societal integration. We're beginning to understand that the path forward isn't about replacing human judgment but augmenting it — creating tools that extend our cognitive reach while preserving the creativity and intuition that remain distinctly human. As we enter 2026, the organisations and individuals who thrive will be those who learn to work with these systems fluidly, treating them as capable collaborators rather than either infallible oracles or mere toys.