#41: Time Is a Lie
This week: Talk Talk’s art of withdrawal // Mycelial music & bio-acoustic collaboration // plus what we're tracking next and signal returns from the archive.
Welcome back. This is Issue #41 of Creative R&D, and the first in a new run. After a long pause, I feel fully back inside the flux.
The ghosts have settled in and the inbox is breathing again.
This week we begin with Talk Talk — the most quietly radical band of the late 20th century. We trace how their album Spirit of Eden shattered the logic of pop and rebuilt something stranger, more spacious, and enduring. It’s an essay about silence, structure, and the refusal to optimise.
Then from this week we’re reintroducing a second essay on emerging research and creative technologies with a dive into the wyrd world of fungal music.
As always, we link out to the edges: experimental textile systems, ghost data, spatial computation, and speculative sound. Stay until the end for archival hauntings and new futures.
If this lands, send it on.
ART: Talk Talk and the Spirit of Withdrawal
There’s a moment in the recent Guy Garvey BBC 6 Music documentary on Spirit of Eden — Guy Garvey’s reverent retelling of its impossible birth — where you realise this wasn’t just a record, it was a ritual. Talk Talk didn’t just evolve — they vanished. They unmade themselves. They withdrew.
Withdrawal wasn't failure. It was the point.
In Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville introduced a character who "would prefer not to." Kafka echoed this in The Hunger Artist, where the artist's refusal to eat becomes a form of art itself. Talk Talk and lead singer Mark Hollis' own disappearance belongs to this lineage of aesthetic refusal: a commitment to an inner necessity, to work made and released without demand.
But the work itself is not silence. It's rich and tense and ritualistic.
On Spirit of Eden, tracks emerge from hiss and hum, coalescing like weather. There's blues, jazz, minimalism, sacred music. It resembles little else before - and few followers have found anything close to its broken shards of sound. Hollis recorded with candles, darkness, and long pauses. The band worked in 30-second fragments, obsessively edited. It's said they waited hours for the right moment to hit a single note.
Simon Reynolds called it post-psychedelic, "an act of rupture, breaking with the present." Pitchfork placed it at the root of post-rock. But its closest analogue might be found in the aesthetics of withdrawal: works that pull away from spectacle into slowness, from accumulation into essence.
Think of the philosophy of wu wei, non-action. Think of Morton Feldman's late piano pieces, or the durational devotion of The Clock of the Long Now. Think of the minimal architectures of Tadao Ando, or the silence of John Cage's 4'33". And think of Bartleby and the Fasting Artist, heroes who turned away from the world that made them.
Talk Talk matter because they made work that refuses the world as it is.
They matter because they changed what music could be.
And they matter here because Creative R&D isn't about novelty. It's about the future, and the futures we must build.
And sometimes to build the future, you have to disappear completely.
IDEAS: Mycelial Music & Bio-Acoustic Collaboration
What if silence isn’t empty, but full of signals too subtle for us to hear?
In Spirit of Eden, the spaces between notes hum with tension. In the work of MycoLoco, and in the wider world of mushroom researchm they’re humming for real: artists and researchers are transducing fungal voltages into ambient soundscapes—a practice called mycelium sonification. The music is slow, granular, weird. The tempos are driven by moisture content and root-to-root communication.
It’s part of a new wave of bioacoustic instrumentation, where creators like Tosca Terán wire mushrooms to modular synths and let the forest play back, bacteria-powered circuits that hum and chirp in glitchy harmony with growth patterns.
This isn’t biomimicry. It’s a new form of co-creation.
And it’s part of a wider turn we’ve seen across Creative R&D: machines listening instead of speaking (Issue #11), buildings that sense and shift (Issue #6), and rituals encoded in code (Issue #35).
Technology here isn’t a tool; it’s a tuning fork. What matters is attention.
What matters is what listens back.
📡 What We’re Tracking Next
Some projects, platforms and creators whose spirit rhymes with Talk Talk’s refusal and the emerging world of bioacoustics”
Speculative materiality: MIT's Self-Assembly Lab is building materials that respond to environmental inputs—moisture, temperature, sound. They're creating programmable matter. Explore here.
AI composition as tool not text: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst continue to reshape how artists engage with AI. Their Spawning project creates tools for training ethical datasets. Follow their work.
Sound fugitives: Read about Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner's A Demonstration, a film that turns classification systems into poetic refusal. Trailer here.
Sensorial intelligence: The Olfactory Design Studio at IFF is building smell-based computing. See their scent-based VR at IFF Scent Lab.
🔁 Signal Returns
Everything moves in cycles. Here’s what’s still resonating in the signal path:
Sound as architecture — from Underwater Dancehall’s deep dive into immersive audio ecosystems to the multisensory provocations of Refik Anadol at The Sphere, we’ve tracked how sonic experience reshapes institutional scale.
Digital ghosts — Making Darkness Visible #11 explored internet infrastructure as haunted space; Project Somnacin #16 chased dream logic through AR and AI. These were dispatches from the subconscious of the machine.
Disintegration aesthetics — whether through the algorithmic collapse of memes in Erosion Birds #9 or the psychedelic breakdown of performance in Free Your Mind #7, we’ve stayed close to where form frays.
These aren’t references — they’re unfinished conversations.
🕯 Footnote: The Disappearing Act
In 2001, when asked about his near-total disappearance from public life, Mark Hollis simply said:
“I choose for my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it differently. But not me.”
No manifesto. No exit performance. Just absence.
It’s an act we rarely honour in tech or art today — where presence is currency and noise is monetised. But Talk Talk reminds us: silence is not the absence of form. It’s a form itself.
As we continue our exploration of creative R&D at the edge of what’s possible, we’ll keep looking to artists like Hollis, Harris and Webb — who left something unfinished and refused to fill in the rest.
Thanks for reading Creative R&D. Share with the quiet ones.
See you next week.
—Chris