#Residue Testing Market

[123567-9qaaq9]

Minimal Residual Testing is a sophisticated diagnostic technique used primarily in oncology to detect and quantify residual cancer cells that may remain in the body during or after treatment. 

The Global Minimal Residual Testing Market  is a rapidly growing segment in the healthcare industry, driven by the increasing demand for accurate and sensitive methods to monitor and manage cancer patients. 

The MRD Testing  market was valued at $1.67 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $6.67 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 14.81% between 2023 and 2033. 

[deepak28]

Herbicides Residue Testing Market Size Research Report | 2024 - 2031

The "Herbicides Residue Testing Market" is a dynamic and rapidly evolving sector, with significant advancements and growth anticipated by 2031. Comprehensive market research reveals a detailed analysis of market size, share, and trends, providing valuable insights into its expansion. This report delves into segmentation and definition, offering a clear understanding of market components and drivers. Employing SWOT and PESTEL analyses, the study evaluates the market's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, alongside political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal factors. Expert opinions and recent developments highlight the geographical distribution and forecast the market's trajectory, ensuring a robust foundation for strategic planning and investment.

What is the projected market size & growth rate of the Herbicides Residue Testing Market?

Market Analysis and Insights :

Global Herbicides Residue Testing Market

Herbicides residue testing market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 7.20% over the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. The heightened consumer awareness concerning the safety aspects of food products is the factor for the herbicides residue testing market in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028.

The herbicides residue testing market is likely to gain growth, due to the increasing food demand because of the growing population. Also the rapid advancements in testing technologies across the world are expected to drive the market for herbicides residue testing over the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. As the agriculture industry has been witnessing an increase in the demand for herbicides residue testing to supply proper nutrition to the food crops, thus escalating their yield. Moreover factors such execution of stringent food safety regulations as well as the international trade of food materials as well as the increasing number of adulteration cases, food borne disease outbreaks and toxicity have all the time more manifested the threat to food safety and are the key determinants fueling the growth of the target market.

However, lack of food control infrastructure and resources in emerging countries as well as the dearth of awareness regarding safety regulations among food manufacturers will curb the growth of the herbicides residue testing market in the above mentioned forecast period. Likewise, with a rising level of the population all over the world, sustainable food production needs an efficient residue testing methods which will also enhance the herbicides residue testing market growth trends over the forecast period. Also the herbicides residue testing is gaining footing across the world because of the increasing contamination levels in food products. Furthermore, the global movement of organic revolution and increasing international trade of food materials are also projected to thrust the use of herbicides residue testing in the forecast period.

In addition, the rising consumers’ demand for food safety will accelerate various growth opportunities that will enhance the growth of the herbicides residue testing market in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. But, the lacks of standardization of food safety regulations and inappropriate standard of sample collection have the potential to challenge the growth of the herbicides residue testing market.

This herbicides residue testing market report provides details of new recent developments, trade regulations, import export analysis, production analysis, value chain optimization, market share, impact of domestic and localized market players, analyses opportunities in terms of emerging revenue pockets, changes in market regulations, strategic market growth analysis, market size, category market growths, application niches and dominance, product approvals, product launches, geographic expansions, technological innovations in the market. To gain more info on herbicides residue testing market contact Data Bridge Market Research for an Analyst Brief, our team will help you take an informed market decision to achieve market growth.

Browse Detailed TOC, Tables and Figures with Charts which is spread across 350 Pages that provides exclusive data, information, vital statistics, trends, and competitive landscape details in this niche sector.

This research report is the result of an extensive primary and secondary research effort into the Herbicides Residue Testing market. It provides a thorough overview of the market's current and future objectives, along with a competitive analysis of the industry, broken down by application, type and regional trends. It also provides a dashboard overview of the past and present performance of leading companies. A variety of methodologies and analyses are used in the research to ensure accurate and comprehensive information about the Herbicides Residue Testing Market.

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Which are the driving factors of the Herbicides Residue Testing market?

The driving factors of the Herbicides Residue Testing market include technological advancements that enhance product efficiency and user experience, increasing consumer demand driven by changing lifestyle preferences, and favorable government regulations and policies that support market growth. Additionally, rising investment in research and development and the expanding application scope of Herbicides Residue Testing across various industries further propel market expansion.

Herbicides Residue Testing Market - Competitive and Segmentation Analysis:

Global  Herbicides Residue Testing Market, By Technology (LC-MS/GC-MS, High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Gas Chromatography, Others), Food Tested (Meat and Poultry, Dairy Products, Processes Food, Fruits and Vegetables, Cereals, Grains and Pulses, Others), Class (Organochlorines, Organophosphates, Organonitrogens and Carbamates, Others),  Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherland, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Rest of South America, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2031.

How do you determine the list of the key players included in the report?

With the aim of clearly revealing the competitive situation of the industry, we concretely analyze not only the leading enterprises that have a voice on a global scale, but also the regional small and medium-sized companies that play key roles and have plenty of potential growth.

Which are the top companies operating in the Herbicides Residue Testing market?

The major players covered in the herbicides residue testing market report are Eurofins Scientific, Bureau Veritas, SGS SA, Merck KGaA, Mérieux NutriSciences, Intertek Group plc, ALS Limited, AsureQuality, Shimadzu Corporation, Arbro Pharmaceuticals Private Limited & Auriga Research Private Limited, Scientific Certification Systems, Inc., Agrifood, General Mills Inc., A&L Canada Laboratories Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Fera Science Limited, IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group, TÜV SÜD, Microbac Laboratories, Inc. and Symbio Laboratories among other domestic and global players.

Short Description About Herbicides Residue Testing Market:

The Global Herbicides Residue Testing market is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate during the forecast period, between 2024 and 2031. In 2023, the market is growing at a steady rate and with the rising adoption of strategies by key players, the market is expected to rise over the projected horizon.

North America, especially The United States, will still play an important role which can not be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of Herbicides Residue Testing. The market in North America is expected to grow considerably during the forecast period. The high adoption of advanced technology and the presence of large players in this region are likely to create ample growth opportunities for the market.

Europe also play important roles in global market, with a magnificent growth in CAGR During the Forecast period 2024-2031.

Herbicides Residue Testing Market size is projected to reach Multimillion USD by 2031, In comparison to 2024, at unexpected CAGR during 2024-2031.

Despite the presence of intense competition, due to the global recovery trend is clear, investors are still optimistic about this area, and it will still be more new investments entering the field in the future.

This report focuses on the Herbicides Residue Testing in global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.

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What are your main data sources?

Both Primary and Secondary data sources are being used while compiling the report. Primary sources include extensive interviews of key opinion leaders and industry experts (such as experienced front-line staff, directors, CEOs, and marketing executives), downstream distributors, as well as end-users. Secondary sources include the research of the annual and financial reports of the top companies, public files, new journals, etc. We also cooperate with some third-party databases.

Geographically, the detailed analysis of consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate, historical data and forecast (2024-2031) of the following regions are covered in Chapters

What are the key regions in the global Herbicides Residue Testing market?

North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)

Europe (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia and Turkey etc.)

Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam)

South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)

Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)

This Herbicides Residue Testing Market Research/Analysis Report Contains Answers to your following Questions

What are the global trends in the Herbicides Residue Testing market?

Would the market witness an increase or decline in the demand in the coming years?

What is the estimated demand for different types of products in Herbicides Residue Testing?

What are the upcoming industry applications and trends for Herbicides Residue Testing market?

What Are Projections of Global Herbicides Residue Testing Industry Considering Capacity, Production and Production Value? What Will Be the Estimation of Cost and Profit? What Will Be Market Share, Supply and Consumption? What about Import and Export?

Where will the strategic developments take the industry in the mid to long-term?

What are the factors contributing to the final price of Herbicides Residue Testing?

What are the raw materials used for Herbicides Residue Testing manufacturing?

How big is the opportunity for the Herbicides Residue Testing market?

How will the increasing adoption of Herbicides Residue Testing for mining impact the growth rate of the overall market?

How much is the global Herbicides Residue Testing market worth? What was the value of the market In 2020?

Who are the major players operating in the Herbicides Residue Testing market? Which companies are the front runners?

Which are the recent industry trends that can be implemented to generate additional revenue streams?

What Should Be Entry Strategies, Countermeasures to Economic Impact, and Marketing Channels for Herbicides Residue Testing Industry?

Customization of the Report

Can I modify the scope of the report and customize it to suit my requirements? Yes. Customized requirements of multi-dimensional, deep-level and high-quality can help our customers precisely grasp market opportunities, effortlessly confront market challenges, properly formulate market strategies and act promptly, thus to win them sufficient time and space for market competition.

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Detailed TOC of Global Herbicides Residue Testing Market Insights and Forecast to 2031

Introduction

Market Segmentation

Executive Summary

Premium Insights

Market Overview

Herbicides Residue Testing Market By Type

Herbicides Residue Testing Market By Function

Herbicides Residue Testing Market By Material

Herbicides Residue Testing Market By End User

Herbicides Residue Testing Market By Region

Herbicides Residue Testing Market: Company Landscape

SWOT Analysis

Company Profiles

Continued...

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[digimarketresearch]

Residue Testing Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth Opportunities and Competitive Outlook

"Global Residue Testing Market document focuses on the efforts toward professional marketers, providing much-needed market research methodologies to the overall marketing processes. This market research report endows with all the crucial information regarding the market which helps to give guidance to a new user to grasp the market intensely. By keeping end users at the centre point, a team of researchers, forecasters, analysts and industry experts work exhaustively to formulate Residue Testing market research report. It is the most appropriate, rational and admirable market research report provided with a devotion and comprehension of business needs.

The analysis of market trends and dynamics is based on several factors in the credible Residue Testing report. These factors can be listed as; supply and demand, current trends/opportunities/challenges, market segments and sub-segments, technological breakthroughs, market size, value chain and stakeholder analysis, competitive landscape. The research and analysis performed in this industry report assists clients to forecast investment in an emerging market, expansion of market share or success of a new product. Global Residue Testing market research report provides a comprehensive study on production capacity, consumption, import and export for all major regions across the world.

Access Full 350 Pages PDF Report @

Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the residue testing market to be grow at a CAGR of 7.02% in the forecast period of 2022-2029.

Residue testing is commonly used to ensure that product quality meets both national and international market access and safety criteria. Pesticides, food allergies, poisons, heavy metals, and other contaminants are detected using a variety of ways. They're commonly found in processed foods, fruits and vegetables, grains, dairy products, meat and poultry, and other goods.

Countries Studied:

North America (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, United States, Rest of Americas)

Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Rest of Europe)

Middle-East and Africa (Egypt, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Rest of MEA)

Asia-Pacific (Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, Rest of Asia-Pacific)

Objectives of the Report

To carefully analyze and forecast the size of the Residue Testing market by value and volume.

To estimate the market shares of major segments of the Residue Testing

To showcase the development of the Residue Testing market in different parts of the world.

To analyze and study micro-markets in terms of their contributions to the Residue Testing market, their prospects, and individual growth trends.

To offer precise and useful details about factors affecting the growth of the Residue Testing

To provide a meticulous assessment of crucial business strategies used by leading companies operating in the Residue Testing market, which include research and development, collaborations, agreements, partnerships, acquisitions, mergers, new developments, and product launches.

Key questions answered

How feasible is Residue Testing Market for long-term investment?

What are influencing factors driving the demand for Residue Testing near future?

What is the impact analysis of various factors in the Global Residue Testing market growth?

What are the recent trends in the regional market and how successful they are?

Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America

Some of the major players operating in the residue testing market are SCS Global Services, Eurofins Scientific, Bureau Veritas, SGS SA, Intertek Group plc, ALS Limited, AB SCIEX, LLC, Scicorp Laboratories PTY Ltd., Microbac Laboratories, Inc., Symbio Laboratories, SIMA LABS, NSF International., Arbro Pharmaceuticals Private Limited, Fera Science Limited, AGQ Labs USA, METH LAB CLEANUP COMPANY, NEOGEN Corporation, QTS Analytical, Waters Agricultural Laboratories, Inc., and TRILOGY ANALYTICAL LABORATORIES, among others.

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[reasonsforhope]

"A 9th grader from Snellville, Georgia, has won the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, after inventing a handheld device designed to detect pesticide residues on produce.

Sirish Subash set himself apart with his AI-based sensor to win the grand prize of $25,000 cash and the prestigious title of “America’s Top Young Scientist.”

Like most inventors, Sirish was intrigued with curiosity and a simple question. His mother always insisted that he wash the fruit before eating it, and the boy wondered if the preventative action actually did any good.

He learned that 70% of produce items contain pesticide residues that are linked to possible health problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s—and washing only removes part of the contamination.

“If we could detect them, we could avoid consuming them, and reduce the risk of those health issues.”

His device, called PestiSCAND, employs spectrophotometry, which involves measuring the light that is reflected off the surface of fruits and vegetables. In his experiments he tested over 12,000 samples of apples, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes. Different materials reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light, and PestiSCAND can look for the specific wavelengths related to the pesticide residues.

After scanning the food, PestiSCAND uses an AI machine learning model to analyze the lightwaves to determine the presence of pesticides. With its sensor and processor, the prototype achieved a detection accuracy rate of greater than 85%, meeting the project’s objectives for effectiveness and speed.

Sirish plans to continue working on the prototype with a price-point goal of just $20 per device, and hopes to get it to market by the time he starts college." [Note: That's in 4 years.]

-via Good News Network, October 27, 2024

[mallowsweetmiri]

Bestfriend!Marauders with no boundaries accidentally make you sick and take care of you

some comfort fluff marauders content because the election is actually giving me existential dread and anxiety lol.

⋆ ˚｡ ⋆୨♡୧⋆ ˚｡ ⋆

There was nothing worse than getting sick. Actually, there was something worse. There was your best friends testing out an experimental prank, which resulted in a magical fungus puffing you with its spores, that led to you developing a serious cold. And the worst part is, they begged you not to go to the hospital wing.

"We're so sorry Y/N," James frowned, covering his face with his shirt and brushing the specks off of your hair.

"Please, forgive us," Sirius pleaded, also covering his mouth from the spores. "But you can't tell Madam Pomfrey. She'll give us another month of detention and we have something big planned next month." You coughed through the dissipating cloud and sneezed before glaring daggers at Sirius.

"Why can't I just tell her I ran into this thing outside? I won't mention you dreadful lot," you grumbled, pushing James' hand away from your hair and doing it yourself. He frowned even more and stepped back with his eyes on his feet.

"Well, the thing is," Peter chuckled nervously, "there technically wouldn't be any of those around the grounds. Because, well, it's not exactly, legal, per se." Peter finished off his rambling and looked at anything but you. You whined in frustration and sneezed again. These idiots had somehow acquired an off the market plant in order to pull off god knows what kind of prank. It was only your luck that you would be walking into the room just as Peter was exiting with the plant, causing a collision that ended with spores being dispersed directly into your sinuses. Remus could see your frustration at their idiocracy and stepped forward, although he was still covering his mouth with his shirt.

"Dove, I know you're upset, and you should be. It was very irresponsible for us to have that in the dorm at all, " Remus raised his brows and looked at the three boys behind him. They all nodded their heads in shame. "And you're being such an angel by not going to the hospital wing," He looked back at them again and the three boys nodded fervently, mumbling praises and compliments to you. "So let us take care of you, Y/N. I promise we'll make it up to you." You could almost see his charming smile through his shirt and you rolled your eyes in defeat. James' smile spread all the way to his eyes as he enthusiastically stepped forward.

"Yes, just let us take care of you," he grinned, grabbing your elbow with his free hand and guiding to you the door. "First order of business, airing out this room so we don't all get sick. Let's go get some fresh air while Pete and Sirius clean things up in here." There were sounds of protest but James was already leading you down the stairs, continuing to dust any residue off of your hair and shirt. Remus followed behind, fanning out the trail of dust James was leaving. Once the three of you finally reached the common room, James sat you down on a couch and promptly removed his "mask" beginning to feel your forehead and cheeks.

"Okay, okay," you chuckled, gently moving his doting hands off your face. "I'm not that sick. I've only got a little cough and sniffles." James looked back at Remus with deep concern, which Remus returned. Your eyebrows furrowed together.

"Well, dove. Peter actually said that the spore would make the victim extremely ill. Fever, congestion, and a terrible cough," Remus said compassionately, giving you a look of pity as he rested his hand on your leg to break the news. You looked at him with exasperation as you let out a cry which subsequently made you cough. James let out a huff of sadness as he moved to embrace you into his lap, swaying you as you groaned at your circumstances.

"We're so sorry, Y/N," James whispered, petting your hair with his hand. He then looked up to Remus and added, "I hope it's not contagious."

Within the next twenty minutes of waiting for Sirius and Peter, you got significantly worse. At first it was the sneezing, but soon your body fell into terrible chills. Remus got you water and helped you drink while James had taken off his sweatshirt and promptly placed it over you, the material swallowing your frame. By the time Sirius bounded down the stairs to tell you the room was clean, you had snot blocking your airways. James didn't say a word as he scooped you up and carried you up the stairs.

"Is she doing okay?" Sirius asked, his voice dripping in concern as he peeked over James shoulder to catch a glimpse of you. Remus shook his head and pat Sirius on the back as they followed you to the dorm. James placed you in his bed, where Peter was already fluffing up the pillows and opening the covers for you to slip under.

"Oh, Y/N," Peter murmured, tucking your body under the covers and fussing with the pillows. "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have been so careless. This was a terrible, terrible idea." You shook your head and placed you hand on his arm to stop him.

"No," you croaked, pausing to clear your throat, "It's okay Peter. What's done is done. Could you maybe bring me some tea and biscuits, please?" You gave him puppy eyes, but you hardly think you needed them. Peter was already halfway out the door and on his way to the kitchens. Remus went to the bathroom to dampen a washcloth, and both Sirius and James took seats on the edge of the bed. James lightly massaged your temples, causing you to sigh in relief. You could feel Sirius pouting and he looked severely distraught, almost to the point of tears.

"Siri," you sniffled, reaching out for his hand. He grabbed it gently and let out a choked sob.

"I'm sorry, Y/N," he whimpered. You shushed him and squeeze his hand.

"Siri, it's okay. You don't have to apologize for anything. It was an accident," you reassured him. He nodded but looked away from you. You were certain he was crying, and you knew it had to do with his remaining guilt of the prank™. Before you could sit up to comfort him further, his form shifted to Padfoot, and he quietly nuzzled his way into your lap, rubbing his snout gently into your chest. You huffed out a smile and relaxed into the bed, looking up at James who had a light smile on his face. Remus came back and placed the damp washcloth on your head.

"Hey, Pads," Remus whispered as he pat the dog on his head. Padfoot huffed but remained with his head on your chest, your hand stroking him rhythmically. James did the same but to your cheek, his eyes glued to your face as he watched with concern for any signs of discomfort. After a while, Remus had settled in his bed next to yours, reading a book quietly as Sirius and James stayed on your bed, both in an attempt to comfort you. It was quite working, and after a few minutes, you were dozing off to sleep. It was unfortunate that your body jolted awake after choking on a wet cough. You startled Padfoot as your body jolted up, followed by a honking cough that cut through your throat. You groaned as you head pounded with pressure.

"Water," you croaked, scrambling to sit up. Sirius jumped off the bed and transformed quickly, coming forward to help you sit up.

"Oh, darling," Sirius cooed, using his hands to shift your body into a sitting position. He took the water from Remus and brought it your mouth slowly. You cautiously took a sip and let out a sigh of relief. You went in for a second sip but your lungs had other plans, sputtering up a cough as you tried to sip. This caused all three boys to instantly take the water away and begin doting over you, patting your back and wiping the water off your chin. Peter entered the room to the chaotic scene.

"Oh merlin," Peter said hurriedly, setting his tray down on the bedside table. You waved your hands as you went through your fit of coughing.

"I'm fine," you swallowed, laying back against the headboard. You heard sighs as the boys bodies slouched in relief. "Biscuits?" you smiled sheepishly, only mildly embarrassed of the disgusting noises you had been making. Peter grinned and brought them over to you.

"M'lady," he held the tray out for you to take one. As you reached for one to bring to your mouth, Remus tutted.

"Slowly," he said with a warning brow raised. You rolled your eyes and brought the cookie to your open mouth at a comedically slow speed, causing Sirius and James to sputter down a laugh. Remus rolled his eyes right back but smiled when you finally bit into the cookie. Not a single boy left your side as they continued to feed you tea and cookies until the plate was empty. You let out a yawn and had James instantly at his trunk.

"I'm going to wrap you up now," James said, matter of factly as he brought a blanket towards you. "Time for sleep." You tried to protest but your body betrayed you as another yawn met your lips. James hummed as he wrapped the blanket around you, using his sheer strength to lift you body and place you back into a laying position as if you were a doll. At some point, Padfoot had gone back to dog form and was once again nuzzle his way next to your body. You gladly patted his ears as he settled down, and closed your eyes as James leant down to kiss your forehead. Remus began to close the bed shades as Peter took the now finished food tray away.

"Sleep well, Y/N," Remus whispered, stroking your cheek with his thumb.

"Just tap Padfoot if you need something," James smiled, closing the curtains on his side. "Merlin, that is the cutest thing I've ever seen."

"Thanks boys," you murmured as darkness swept over the bed. You let out a sigh of content as you gently pet Padfoot. Maybe being sick wasn't the worst thing in the world after all.

[ersatz-ostrich]

See You Again

Chapter 2: Polestar

Jason Todd x f!reader

You and the Red Hood escape the laboratory.

[A/N]: This is the second of the two chapters I had already written. I just started writing the third chapter and putting down my thoughts for the rest of the story...oops...

read here on ao3

<< previous || next >>

masterlist

STAR Laboratories Los Angeles

9:52:03 PM PT

The Coffin

“Well, that can’t be good.” You mutter to yourself, yanking out the syringe with a hiss. When your soldier had yielded, you thought you could slip away from him. But his sudden fake-out had shifted both of your positions, creating a window for the Bat to shoot him. The bullet had come so close to your face, you had thought you could feel it brush past you and embed itself in the soldier’s exposed neck. 

The bullet could have just as easily grazed you, even killed you, had you been just an inch too close. 

You shifted your gaze to the figure in the red helmet. You hadn’t gotten the chance to examine them up close—they were tall and heavily built, even with armor on, and sported a weathered brown leather jacket that covered the huge red bat symbol emblazoned on their chest plate. “You’re Red Hood, right?” 

“That’s me.”

“What are you doing in LA? Aren’t you supposed to be from Gotham?” The Red Hood let out a modulated chuckle. You thought this would go down as your weirdest day on the job, making one of Gotham’s most ruthless crime fighters chuckle.

“I wanted to check out the warm weather here in Cali.” Something in Red Hood’s tone and posture shifted. “Now, what’s going on with that syringe?”

“Ah. Well, this was supposed to be a dose of a certain virus for the lab animals we’re testing on,” you explained.

“And this virus, it’s…”

“The Polestar virus,” you sighed. “Unearthed from somewhere deep in the Arctic, inside some early human mummies who carried the virus.” You let out a weak chuckle. “We knew it had the potential to be sold on the black market as a bioweapon should it fall into the wrong hands, but we weren’t aware that the risks were so high. And now, the virus is in my system.” 

“Are you feeling anything right now? What are the virus’s symptoms? What’s its incubation period?” His modulated voice was surprisingly soft, yet urgent.

“This virus is bad news. We found that it’s pretty fast acting, and…” You spared another glance at the syringe in your hand. “...the symptoms aren’t pretty.” 

“How fast?”

“This dose is meant for a test subject that’s a fraction of my body mass. I’ll be dead in two or three hours, give or take.”

“And the symptoms?” 

“Necrosis. A new kind that we haven’t named yet. The virus consumes soft tissue and leaves behind a metallic residue. We believe it’s because the virus leaches metals and minerals from the body and aggregates it, beginning with the extremities.” The Red Hood reached forward cautiously, as if he was afraid of startling you. He gently pulled back the fabric of your coveralls that the soldier had so unceremoniously ripped open and ghosted his gloved fingers over where the needle had once been. The blood vessels around the wound had already become blackened and distended.

“We have to get you to a hospital.” You shook your head.

“We can’t. This research isn’t public knowledge.” You hoisted yourself up, tucked in your coveralls, and adjusted your respirator like nothing had happened. “I’m already a target as it is.” You stepped over the black-clad form of one of the soldiers Red Hood felled.

“Are there any treatments?” You picked your way through the Coffin to the freezers.

“They’re still in development, but the vaccine should slow it down.” You punched some numbers into the keypad and put your index finger to the scanner on the door and the freezer doors eased open automatically. You strode over to the shelf where you had hurriedly stashed the vials and syringes, the glass and metal clouded from the cold. The vaccine was crystal pink, you realized, like the color of the phenolphthalein titration you had done back in high school. You had handled both the buret and the Erlenmeyer flask because Jason couldn’t get it right, and in return, he had done all of the calculations for the lab report. Turning over the vials in your hand, you wondered why you were reminiscing about Jason during this time. The thought made your heart squeeze a little bit. 

Jason Todd had been gone for so long. The hollowness that Jason’s absence had carved out of you seemed to sigh achingly. Years on, that hollowness was still there, not as hungry as it had been at first but smaller, still present. It still gnawed on your consciousness from time to time, on his birthday or on the day the Joker took him from you.

When you returned from the freezer, Red Hood was preparing a large metal-lined briefcase that he had taken from the incapacitated—dead?—men on the ground. He had already filled it partially with devices and weapons he had taken off of the soldiers.

“Are those the virus samples?” He inquired.

“Yeah,” you replied. “Vaccines, too. They’re labeled as such, and the vaccines are pink while the virus suspension is cl—”

“Pack them up. We have to get out of here before the police come.” His request startled you.

“Are you serious? This is property of STAR Labs and the CDC—”

“That’s been compromised. Neither you nor the samples are safe here. The police will be of no help, and they’re gonna keep sending people after you and those syringes unless we get you somewhere safe.” He gestured at the tray in your hands. “You need treatment, too. Somewhere they can’t find you.” You sighed heavily, setting the tray on a countertop.

“You’re right. I’m carrying the virus right now, and I’m dangerous. STAR Labs is probably gonna terminate me and the CDC will whisk me away or something. People come after me. But I can’t compromise the Polestar program.”

“It’s already been compromised. Now pack that shit up and let’s get out of here.” You flitted around the Coffin in search of something to store the samples in. You were scooping ice into a Styrofoam case when your comms unit fizzled to life again.

“This is the LAPD, we’ve been alerted of a break-in at STAR Labs. We request that all STAR Labs employees still in the building evacuate immediately. That is an order. Repeat, that is an order.” 

“Shit, we gotta go,” Red Hood muttered. You grabbed your comms and tucked the Styrofoam case awkwardly under your arm and followed him out of the Coffin and into the ruins of decon and aseptics—you had been in the Coffin for hours, and the sight of the wreckage and your coworkers in aseptics now slumped over their devices made your stomach drop. “No time for sightseeing. Hurry up.” You pushed yourself into a full sprint, stumbling in your PPE along the concrete and corrugated steel of the basement. You followed the Red Hood into the emergency stairwell. Peering through the glass of the door to the ground floor, you saw SWAT officers milling about.

“SWAT team, start sweeping the second floor.”

“Shit—” You and Red Hood hurried up the stairs, the contents in your arms rattling in its Styrofoam case.

“Guess we aren’t leaving that way. Know any other escape routes in this building?”

The top floor—your floor. The Polestar program’s home.

You didn’t want to know what kind of destruction the soldiers had left in their wake. 

“Top floor. Only way out would be the roof,” You answered.

“Roof it is.” After climbing some more flights of stairs and monitoring your comms unit for any more activity, you decided to wrench open the door to the sixth floor, breathing laboriously—when was the last time you had done this much cardio? You led the Red Hood over to a service elevator—not accessible without clearance, you explained to him—scanned your ID, and pulled him in. Once it reached the top floor, the elevator dinged and opened its doors, the hallway blessedly clear. You and Hood skulked down the corridor, which ended with the door to the Polestar offices. Hood opened the door and swept the room for hostiles before waving you in.

Your heart sank when you saw what had become of the Polestar lab.

“No…” you whispered. The laboratory had been completely wrecked. Glass fragments and papers were strewn on the floors. Pieces of equipment were left broken and overturned, spilling their contents among the mess.

Then you saw the bodies. 

You caught sight of Dr. Davis’s crumpled form on the floor, next to the comms he had used to warn you of the impending disaster. The comms unit looked like it had been crushed underfoot, exposing wiring and circuitry among shards of its outer plastic shell. You made a step towards Dr. Davis’s body, but froze when you saw the red stain on his back and the blood pooling onto the floor. 

“They…” You felt Hood’s gloved hand on your shoulder, gently guiding you away from the destruction. “...they killed everyone.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“This is…this is horrible. Unbelievable.” Your pulse quickened with your breath. You felt the tears begin to form, and your vision grew misty. “I can’t believe it. They killed everyone.” You thought you had known grief and death. But this was different—seeing your colleagues slaughtered, their blood drying before you, made you feel faint. And yet, you felt wholly ablaze with 

“Hey…” Shouts sounded from the stairwell. Your chest felt tight and your head was turning fuzzy. “...hey, hey. We gotta move.” The hand on your shoulder was not so gentle anymore, insistently pulling you toward the gaping hole in one of the windows. He handed—more like shoved—the briefcase he was holding into one of your hands and produced a terrifying-looking grapple gun from somewhere on his utility belt. “Don’t drop it,” was all he said before he wrapped an arm around your waist. Your arms instinctively flew around his shoulders, holding onto him, your Styrofoam box and his briefcase for dear life, and then you were airborne.

You squeezed your eyes shut as you soared over the street, which had become choked with squad cars and assault vehicles. You gasped in surprise when you felt yourself change direction as Hood gently and skillfully hoisted you over the ledge of a neighboring building’s rooftop.

“The first time is always the worst.”

“That’s implying that this isn’t the last,” You heaved out. “Holy shit. Did they see us?”

“Don’t think so. We’ll wait here, I’ll…” You didn’t hear the rest of the vigilante’s statement. The adrenaline from the jump was beginning to wane and you felt the burden of the virus and the sights you had stumbled upon while escaping the laboratory coming on again. 

“Hey." Red Hood moved to catch you as you slumped over. “Hey, can you hear me?” Illuminated by the city lights, he caught sight of your badge from where it hung on your PPE. Your name was printed in neat black font next to an unmistakable portrait. 

Under his helmet, the Red Hood’s breath caught in his chest.

“...Y/N?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[A/N]: That's all I've got for now. Hope you enjoyed! x

[nyarlathotep-thecrawlingchaos]

I'm kinda sad, guys. Completely off-topic super-long rant incoming, feel free/encouraged to disregard.

So basically, I managed to get in on a paid month-long trial of an eczema face cream in exchange for feedback. Honestly didn't even care about being paid, I was just in desperation for my face to not feel all scaley and shit anymore (seborrheic dermatitis is a fcking bitch, and it's even worse in a humid climate and GUESS WHAT THE CLIMATE IS LIKE HERE FOR MOST OF THE YEAR HAHAHA) and have been willing to try literally anything for some time.

Well, anything except steroid creams. I refuse. I did it once, it made it worse, never ever again. And I stfg that's ALL that dermatologists want to hand out for this type of eczema, despite glaring evidence that even if it works temporarily, it creates even worse problems down the line.

Sebhorric dermatitis presents with similar symptoms to psoriasis, and tends to present its symptoms around the face, neck, ears, and scalp. Liken it to really terrible dandruff that can cover your entire face. Scrubbing it off just leaves redness and itchy/painful open wounds. It's impossible to cover with make-up. It's at its worst in the humid summer months. I have to consistently use more than five products twice a day in the spring/summer/fall just to keep it under control enough to not be noticeable to anyone but me. And I'm already really bad at being consistent when it comes to self-care.

Enter this stupid fucking trial cream. This shit with its lack of labeling and mysterious code.

I had to agree to stop using all other products except my regular facial cleanser to make sure my feedback was accurate to this one product, okay. No other lotions or toners or face masks or anything. Use this stuff twice a day to once every other day, give weekly feedback for the duration of a month. ALL I know about it, is it isn't steroid based. I was in the middle of a very bad breakout when it arrived in the mail. I had scales of dry skin on my fucking eyelids. It literally hurt to blink. It was awful.

I'm almost two weeks in and my skin has not felt or looked this amazing since before I hit fucking puberty. I noticed a difference literally the first time I put the shit on. The dry flakes essentially just melted off and didn't come back. I actually cried a little out of pure shock and happiness.

I'm almost halfway through the month and absolutely no sign of any negative side effects. No acne, no oiliness, no rashes, no dryness, no inflammation, nothing. It doesn't have any weird smell or leave any weird residue, absorbs in less than a minute. Just...genuinely clear skin with no issues at all for the first time since I was a literal child. I've still got a little redness around my cheeks, chin, and nose (which I've had since the eczema first started to flare up in my late teens), but even that's beginning to fade.

Aaaaaand since it's a trial, I don't know the product name. Which means once it's gone, it's gone.

I'm hoping taking part in the trial means I'll have the opportunity to find out about it and purchase it in the future, but I have this horrible sinking feeling it's going to be far beyond my price range. You know, test it out on the normies to make sure it works, then slap an astronomical price tag on it to market it to the rich and influential. I just know that's where this is going and I hate it.

It is nice having good skin for the first time since I was like...twelve. And even nicer only having to use a tiny bit of this one single face cream once every other day, and not having to worry about my skin screaming in protest if I happen to forget/skip a day or two (which I have done, again I suck at consistent self-care).

But the knowledge that it's probably only going to last for as long as this tiny little magical unlabeled bottle lasts...makes me so so very sad.

[123567-9qaaq9]

Minimal Residual Testing are a sophisticated diagnostic technique used primarily in oncology to detect and quantify residual cancer cells that may remain in the body during or after treatment. 

[darkmaga-returns]

An explosive new study conducted within the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) own laboratory has revealed excessively high levels of DNA contamination in Pfizer’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine.

Tests conducted at the FDA’s White Oak Campus in Maryland found that residual DNA levels exceeded regulatory safety limits by 6 to 470 times.

The study was undertaken by student researchers under the supervision of FDA scientists. The vaccine vials were sourced from BEI Resources, a trusted supplier affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), previously headed by Anthony Fauci.

Recently published in the Journal of High School Science, the peer-reviewed study challenges years of dismissals by regulatory authorities, who had previously labelled concerns about excessive DNA contamination as baseless.

The FDA is expected to comment on the findings this week. However, the agency has yet to issue a public alert, recall the affected batches, or explain how vials exceeding safety standards were allowed to reach the market.

[kentuckycaverats]

NOLA by Night

Session 2: AMAB (All Mages Are Bastards)

Session 1

The coterie takes an unofficial, self-guided tour of Biograde Technologies in search of Maxence.

It's 2am. 4 hours to sunrise.

Ira is adamant that Max is wherever Silas came from, and therefore connected to the Masquerade breach at the radio station. Silas said that he'd been in some kind of lab; Klay wonders if it might have been hunters who had him, messed with him, turned him loose, and hijacked the station to draw attention to it.

Klay spends a point of Resources for a contact at a medical supply warehouse and asks if there have been any unusual requests lately. Nothing out of the ordinary, but the contact reads off some of the item descriptions and a shipment of microchips catches Klay's interest. He asks for the address for that delivery: it belongs to one Biograde Technologies, located in the biomedical district. Klay knows that name--the Hecata primogen, Sergio Giovanni, works for Biograde.

Klay explains microchips to Ira, who realizes Silas may very well be chipped. Florian is sent to rendezvous with Silas and Cameron to warn them while the coterie pays Biograde a visit.

Klay asks wraith Charles to knock out the external cameras that Ira and Walter identify. Ira notices several more inside. The office is closed but the lobby lights are still on, populated by 1 receptionist and 2 security guards--all mortal. Jules and Klay easily disarm them with an Awe + Cloud Memory combo and the coterie is in.

Jules finds a building map on the wall:

5: Employee Lounge

4: Data Lab

3: HR, Marketing, Legal

2: (You Are Here) Storage, Supplies, Labs

1: [unlabeled]

Unlabeled basement is weird. The water table in NOLA doesn't really allow for building underground. The coterie pokes around on Floor 2 (sure enough, mostly medical supplies and empty labs) and Klay liberates some bleach, some sedatives, and 3 syringes. Just in case. Then they head into the basement.

It's a large concrete room and it's completely empty. No furniture, no decor, no equipment, nothing. Klay detects no wraiths in the vicinity. Jules sings to test the acoustics of the room but detects no abnormalities. Even with Heightened Senses, Ira can't hear anyone else in the building; nor can he hear the vibrations or beeping of any fancy machines. There's nothing here. Just a big, empty slab of cement.

Walter can tell by scent that there was something here recently, though. A number of mammals, and they were here no more than 48 hours ago. He and Klay also notice something sticking out a bit from the floor--what seems to be a pressure plate.

Ira intentionally triggers Premonition and notices a faint swirling residue, almost like an afterimage, of some sort of magical...energy? signature?

Walter steps on the pressure plate. The basement door autolocks behind the coterie and the room starts to fill with water. Sewage water, by the smell of it. Coterie isn't too bothered on account of not breathing air and Klay sends Charles to open the door from the outside. Charles warns them to watch their step on the way out; as they come through the doorway the coterie sees a long cable suspended from the ceiling and snaking under the doorway. The end is frayed and sparking.

Ira sees that same afterimage on the wall; fresher and more distinct here. He commits it to memory so he can paint it later.

Ira and Walter each know a bit about mages; enough to know that mages tend to specialize in certain fields, and that Space is one such specialization. Maybe that's how they're moving their test subjects undetected...

Ira is starting to unravel. He's convinced that Max was here, and that whoever has him moved him tonight, maybe mere hours before the coterie arrived. He tells the coterie he met some mages at Cafe du Monde shortly after waking from torpor; an older woman who called herself Nana and a young redheaded girl called Lily. They'd said they had a message from Ira's sire, Mary, but that in order to hear it Ira would have to allow them to temporarily sever his connection to the Cobweb. He refused, suspicious of both the mages' intentions and Mary's. Mary notoriously loathes mages, a bias she instilled in Ira as well; the idea of her cooperating with mages is unheard of. And on the off chance that it really is her, well, maybe she shouldn't have stuck Ira in torpor for 80 years if she wanted him to return her calls.

Ira doesn't know how to get back in touch with Nana and Lily, though, only that they play chess together every Sunday at the cafe. That's still two nights away. He isn't sure they're even related to Max's plight, but they're the only true mages he knows.

Jules, Klay, and Walter convince Ira to let them poke around upstairs to see if they can find some more tangible leads. Florian calls Walter and tells him they did find a microchip in Silas, and that the coterie should probably come meet them on Basin Street as soon as they can. That's where everyone's gone missing.

The coterie raids the employee lounge (Klay steals some top shelf tequila for his ghoul Missy and Jules loads up on Biscoff cookies for her touchstone Eden) but no one is good enough with computers to hack the desktops there. Walter steals hard drives from 2 of them instead, and a couple from the data lab desktops for good measure. Some of his clanmates will be able to sort through those.

Jules and Klay hit another Awe + Cloud Memory combo on the receptionist and security guards, and the coterie leaves Biograde without issue to go meet up with Florian and the lupines.

Silas is more lucid now that he's had a few hours for the sedatives to wear off. There are still gaps in his memory, but he remembers being out here near Basin St, smelling blood, talking to a sad brunette girl with a long braid down her back, feeling a weird tingling in his feet, and suddenly being in a big cage. After that he was out for awhile--he doesn't know how long--and when he came to a dashing French dude with a magnificent beard was cutting him loose and demanding that Silas go find a rabbit monster. He bit Silas, who frenzied, and next thing Silas knew his paws were tingling and he was outside again.

Only an hour till sunrise. There's nothing more that can be done tonight. Klay offers for Ira to stay at the shop with him so he isn't alone overnight, but Ira declines. He needs to go home and paint. He needs to. Florian will go with him for emotional support.

The coterie plans to meet up the following night to strategize and debrief. Walter will have some intel on the hard drives by then, Florian on the sedative and microchip, and the lupines will try to wrangle up some muscle.

And hey, Klay suggests...maybe the coterie ought to start thinking about securing a shared haven.

[kaonarvna]

Work and health have had me tied up, but here's another little treat!

"Chapter" Name: Maintenance and Testing — Sector Zero, Midgar 199X

Summary: Late at night, beyond office hours, Zack checks on the forty-ninth floor's combat simulator to see if any of the FIRSTs are still in the building. He finds Genesis and Sephiroth using the training suite, although not for its intended purposes.

Tags: Slice of Life, Emotional Hurt/No Comfort(?), Implied Sexual Content, Implied Bottom Sephiroth??

Potential TWs: Enforcement of systemic homophobia in the workplace.

WC: ~3000 (8-16 minute read)

Short sample below the cut!

Maintenance and Testing — Sector Zero, Midgar 199X

The final half-dozen grains of rice pick up onto the bottom of Zack’s fork as he presses the plastic prongs down into them. He eats every grain. Only the tiniest slivers of meat gristle and smears of oily residue sit on top of the disposable container’s surface. Most of the stools in the sixty-forth floor’s canteen area have been flipped upside down onto their tables. The swish of caretaker sweeper mops and the quiet hum of the dimmed florescent lights are the only company left. Except for Sector Eight and market down below, Midgar has gone dark for the night.

Zack squints at one of the clocks behind a food counter. One of the hands points to nine, another to ten—he can’t tell which is which from this far. He checks his PHS just to double check. It’s ten to ten.

“Angeal’s still out…” he mumbles to himself, checking through his text messages with his mentor.

Zack’s rereads them in his head.

FAIR, Zack: how long u out for?? need feedback on sim session results pls

ANGEAL (WORK): Hello, I’m away from my PHS right now. I will be out of town until Friday evening. I will try to respond to my messages the day after I return. If you are getting in touch about an urgent work concern, please contact another first or the director for support. (automated reply delivered courtesy of SEPC Telecom Services)

“Is it urgent?” he asks himself, leaning back on the stool and staring up at the ceiling. He balances on the back legs, holding onto the tall table with one hand, his PHS in the other. “Everyone’s gonna be at home, but I’m not going to remember tomorrow, and…”

Scrolling through the PHS messages with Angeal, he stops and re-reads:

ANGEAL (WORK): Sometimes we do stay late. We (Sephiroth and Genesis, let’s be honest) can only really spar when no one else is on the floor. It is part of their risk assessments. If you ever see the sims booked out late for “maintenance and testing” it’s probably us, haha. Stay clear if you are still inside. Use other combat sims if you need them.

FAIR, Zack: lol ik sephiroth can WRECK outside, surprised hes allowed to fight indoors!! :)

ANGEAL (WORK): He is not supposed to operate inside Midgar unless there is an emergency for that reason, haha.

Genesis too.

“Ten at night…I mean, I could check…” he tap-taps through to his emails, checking the simulator timetable sent out earlier in the week. He zooms in and out of the spreadsheet, mumbling to himself about how much better it looks on the computer. Then he finds it at the bottom of the document: Simulator closed for maintenance and testing 21:00 Wednesday 29th – 02:00 Thursday 30th.

His eyes go wide. Zack double checks the date, before stuffing his PHS back into his pocket. Snatching his empty food container off the table, he briskly walks to the nearest bin, throws it out, then takes himself to the elevators. He presses the down button once, and then twice, and again, until he can hear the mechanisms inside moving.

...

Read the full piece on Ao3!

[marutiagrifoods]

How to Choose the Best Quality Garlic Paste for Your Kitchen

Garlic paste is a staple in kitchens around the world, cherished for its rich aroma and bold flavour that adds depth to countless dishes.  From curries and marinades to soups and sauces, a spoonful of garlic paste can elevate any recipe.  However, with the growing number of garlic paste brands in the market, it can be overwhelming to choose the best one for your kitchen.  In this blog, we shall guide you through the key factors to consider when selecting top-quality garlic paste and explain why sourcing from reputed manufacturers and exporters matters.

Whether you are a home cook or a commercial buyer, making an informed choice ensures that your dishes retain authentic flavour, freshness, and hygiene.  Let us dive into the essentials of choosing the best garlic paste and take a closer look at the companies making waves in the food product industry in Vadodara and across India.

1.  Check the Ingredient List

When choosing garlic paste, simplicity is key.  High-quality garlic paste should contain minimal ingredients—ideally just fresh garlic and a natural preservative like vinegar or citric acid.  Avoid products with artificial colours, flavour, or thickening agents.

As a reputed garlic paste manufacturer in India, MFP Food Products ensures all its condiments, including garlic paste, are made with fresh, locally sourced ingredients and processed using hygienic, state-of-the-art methods.

2.  Look for Authentic flavour and Aroma

The hallmark of good garlic paste is its pungent, sharp aroma and taste.  Poor-quality products often lose flavour due to over-processing or the use of low-grade garlic.  Choose garlic paste from a condiments manufacturer in India that prioritizes flavor preservation through cold processing and careful packaging.

Our products retain the raw intensity of fresh garlic, making them a preferred choice among chefs and food lovers alike.

3.  Evaluate the Texture and Consistency

Good garlic paste should be smooth and uniform, without lumps or fibrous residues.  It should blend easily into recipes without leaving behind gritty particles.  Consistency also impacts shelf life—homogeneous paste lasts longer and stores better.

As one of the private label food manufacturers in Vadodara, MFP Food Products produces garlic paste in customizable textures to suit diverse culinary applications—from thick pastes ideal for pickles to smooth versions perfect for sauces.

4.  Choose Trusted Manufacturers and Exporters

When purchasing garlic paste, especially in bulk, it is essential to buy from a reputed garlic paste exporter or food exporter company in Vadodara.  Export-quality garlic paste undergoes rigorous testing and adheres to international food safety standards.

At MFP Food Products, we serve clients across the globe with premium-quality food items.  As a trusted food exporter company in Vadodara, we ensure our garlic paste meets global standards while retaining traditional flavours.

5.  Certifications and Compliance

Always check if the garlic paste is produced by certified food processing companies in India.  Certifications like FSSAI, ISO, and HACCP ensure the product meets hygiene and safety regulations.  Compliance also shows that the company maintains transparency in production and packaging.

We are proud to be among the top food manufacturing companies with industry certifications, ensuring our customers get nothing but the best.

6.  Private Labelling Opportunities

If you are a business owner or a retailer looking to create your own brand, partnering with companies offering private labelling services in India or private labelling services in Gujarat can be a smart move.  Private label garlic paste allows you to customize packaging, branding, and product variants to cater to your audience.

MFP Food Products offers flexible private labelling options for clients worldwide.  As leading private label food manufacturers in Vadodara, we help businesses create custom garlic paste brands that resonate with their target market.

7.  Packaging and Shelf Life

Proper packaging plays a vital role in retaining the freshness of garlic paste.  Opt for brands that use vacuum-sealed pouches, glass jars, or food-grade plastic containers with air-tight seals.  Always check the expiration date to ensure longer usability.

As part of the food product industry in Vadodara, MFP Food Products utilizes advanced packaging technology that extends shelf life without compromising flavour or quality.

8.  Sourcing and Sustainability

Modern consumers are becoming more conscious of the sourcing and sustainability of food products.  Opt for a food product company in India that sources garlic from responsible farmers and follows sustainable practices in manufacturing.

At MFP, we work closely with local farmers to procure high-grade garlic while supporting eco-friendly and ethical production processes.

9.  Complementary Products for Culinary Use

While garlic paste is a kitchen essential, it pairs well with other condiments like ginger paste, green chilli paste, and white vinegar.  Buying from a multi-product food companies in Gujarat can help you get all your cooking essentials under one roof.

Did you know MFP Food Products is also a reputed white vinegar manufacturer in India?  Our complementary range of condiments is crafted to meet diverse culinary requirements—from home kitchens to commercial food outlets.

10.  Reputation in the Food Industry

When selecting a garlic paste brand, the company’s market reputation speaks volumes.  Choose a supplier that is known within the list of food industries in Vadodara for consistent quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction.

Being recognized as one of the best food product company in Vadodara, MFP Food Products is trusted by households and food businesses across India and abroad.  Our commitment to excellence sets us apart in the competitive landscape of food companies in Gujarat.

Why MFP Food Products?

At MFP Food Products, our garlic paste is more than just a condiment—it is a promise of purity, taste, and trust.  Here is why you should choose us:

Exporter Quality:  We are a certified garlic paste exporter, delivering quality products to international markets.

Private Label Solutions:  As one of the top private label food manufacturers in Vadodara, we help businesses launch custom garlic paste brands.

Advanced Manufacturing:  We are a leading garlic paste manufacturer in India with modern production facilities and a skilled workforce.

Certified and Compliant:  As a part of the reputed food processing companies in India, our processes meet all safety and hygiene norms.

Complete Product Range:  From garlic paste to vinegar and sauces, we are a one-stop food product company in India catering to a wide clientele.

Final Thoughts

Garlic paste is a must-have in every kitchen, and choosing the right product makes all the difference in your cooking experience.  Whether you are shopping for home use, stocking a restaurant, or planning to launch a private label, ensure you source from a reputable manufacturer known for quality and authenticity.

With MFP Food Products, you are choosing more than just garlic paste—you are choosing a legacy of flavour, consistency, and trust built over years of experience in the food product industry in Vadodara.

Explore our range, taste the difference, and bring the essence of authentic Indian flavours to your table.

For bulk inquiries, export orders, or private labelling collaborations, reach out to MFP Food Products—your trusted partner in flavour.

[henglihong]

Green and Eco-Friendly Blasting Media: Current Development, Trends, and Future Challenges

——An In-Depth Industry Analysis for Manufacturing Managers and Environmental Engineers

Introduction: The Revolution of Blasting Technology in the Era of Environmental Transformation

As global environmental regulations tighten (e.g., EU REACH, U.S. EPA standards) and the ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) concept gains traction, the manufacturing industry is increasingly demanding sustainable surface treatment technologies. Traditional blasting media, such as silica sand and steel grit, are under scrutiny due to dust pollution, high energy consumption, and health risks. In contrast, green and eco-friendly blasting media are emerging as a core breakthrough for industry transformation. This article combines the latest market data and technological trends to analyze the current development and future challenges in this field, providing strategic insights for decision-makers.

I. Market Status: Policy-Driven Growth and Technological Advancements

1. Market Size and Growth Potential

According to Grand View Research, the global blasting media market reached $5.2 billion in 2023, with the share of eco-friendly media rising from 12% in 2018 to 28% in 2023, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.7%. By 2030, the market share of green media is expected to exceed 45%, with the Asia-Pacific region (especially China and India) becoming a growth engine due to manufacturing upgrade demands.

2. Mainstream Eco-Friendly Media Types

Plant-Based Materials (walnut shells, corn cobs): Biodegradable, low dust emission (70% less than silica sand), suitable for precision parts.

Synthetic Ceramic Particles (alumina, silicon carbide): High hardness, reusable 5-8 times, reducing long-term costs.

Ice/Dry Ice: Zero-residue technology, with over 40% penetration in the aerospace sector.

Recycled Glass Beads: Made from waste glass, reducing carbon emissions by 65% compared to traditional processes.

3. Policy and Industry Standards Driving Adoption

The EU Circular Economy Action Plan aims to increase industrial waste recycling to 70% by 2030.

China’s 14th Five-Year Plan tightens blasting dust emission limits to 10mg/m³ (previously 20mg/m³).

Automotive giants (e.g., Toyota, Volkswagen) have incorporated "green blasting certification" into supply chain standards.

II. Technological Advantages and Business Value: Why Choose Green Media?

1. Environmental Benefits

Dust Control: Plant-based media reduce dust concentration to <2mg/m³ (compared to 15-20mg/m³ for silica sand), lowering the risk of silicosis.

Carbon Reduction: Each ton of recycled glass beads reduces CO₂ emissions by 1.2 tons compared to new steel grit.

Waste Management: 95% of synthetic ceramic media can be recycled, reducing landfill costs.

2. Economic Breakthroughs

Lower Lifecycle Costs: In the automotive industry, switching to ice media reduced annual maintenance costs by 18% per production line (source: Frost & Sullivan).

Improved Efficiency: High-precision ceramic particles increase blasting speed by 30% and reduce rework rates.

III. Future Challenges: Technological Bottlenecks and Industry Collaboration

1. Technical Pain Points

Material Limitations: Plant-based media have low hardness (Mohs 2-3), making them unsuitable for hard substrates like high-strength steel.

Cost Barriers: Green media prices remain 20-50% higher than traditional materials, hindering adoption by SMEs.

Lack of Recycling Systems: Only 35% of global companies have media recycling equipment, relying on third-party processing.

2. Industry Collaboration Challenges

Lack of Standardization: Differing definitions of "eco-friendly media" across countries create barriers to cross-border procurement.

Insufficient R&D Investment: SMEs lack funding for new material testing (single certification costs exceed $50,000).

IV. Solutions: Innovation and Ecosystem Building

1. Technological Breakthrough Paths

Composite Material Development: For example, "bio-resin + ceramic" hybrid media balancing hardness and biodegradability.

Smart Blasting Equipment: AI algorithms optimize media usage, reducing waste.

Cryogenic Plasma Technology: A zero-media alternative to physical blasting (currently in the lab stage).

2. Industry Ecosystem Recommendations

Policy Subsidies: Governments should offer tax credits for green media procurement (e.g., U.S. IRA Act).

Industry Alliances: Establish cross-company recycling networks to share regeneration facilities.

Customer Education: Use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reports to quantify long-term benefits and boost decision-maker confidence.

V. Conclusion: Green Blasting—A Must for Sustainable Manufacturing

Eco-friendly blasting media are not just a compliance requirement but a strategic choice for cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and brand value enhancement. To overcome the dual challenges of technological evolution and market education, innovation, policy coordination, and industry collaboration are essential to transition this field from an "optional solution" to an "industry standard."

Keywords: Green blasting media, eco-friendly surface treatment, sustainable manufacturing, blasting technology trends, industrial carbon neutrality, ESG compliance

Data Sources: Grand View Research, Frost & Sullivan, European Environment Agency, China Ministry of Ecology and Environment. Further Reading:

2024 Global Surface Treatment Technology White Paper

Pathways to Carbon Neutrality in Manufacturing: Starting with Blasting Processes

[caltropspress]

The Ill Communication within Armand Hammer's We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

[ on_ telephones_ paradox_ repetition_ thresholds_ accessibility_ &_ death_.]

############################################

Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming…. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at its height.

—Herbert N. Casson, from The History of the Telephone (1910)

…a paranormal scrambling of phones…

—Aesop Rock, “All the Smartest People” (2021)

The children’s game of “telephone” depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.

—Eula Biss, “Time and Distance Overcome” (2008) 

The doors gaped on the gloom within. He paused on the threshold. “Do you know the code?” she asked. 

—W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet” (1920)

A call to lighten up and eavesdrop on the eavesdrop to stop the reoccurrence.

—Sonic Sum, “Window Seat” (2000)

#.

We were prompted by postcards. We made calls to 1-877-ARM-N-HMR. We heard deceptive noises. We were duped by familiar sounds. We hung up. We dialed again, carefully this time. We heard abrasive percussive sounds. We heard crackly foreign languages processed through a bandpass filter. We heard this was a promotional campaign. Some of us, likely the loneliest or most curious of our lot, left messages after the tone, after the beep. We left messages for who knows who. A chosen few of those messages were transmitted over social media channels, eliciting further calls to the hotline. We were suckers, or we were onto something, or we were part of something.

#.

I used to have numbers memorized in my head. I used to call 1-800-COLLECT when I needed to be picked up from somewhere. The operator would say, Will you accept a collect call from…? And I would shout into the receiver at my mother, Pickmeup, pickmeup, pickmeup! I used to check the coin returns on every payphone I passed. Sometimes I’d even find change. I used to dial 555 followed by the last four digits listed on the payphone, hang up three times, and listen to the phone ring on its own, forever and ever and ever, amen. Payphones used to dot the city landscape. Now they don’t, but signs that offer to buy your home, your junk car, your diabetic test strips do.

#.

ALEXANDER RICHTER: 

[woods] must have told me about the project some time last year—played me some early records and told me the idea for the album title. From there, we discussed ideas for documenting these signs in the streets in context to using them for album cover [and] packaging. I went out on two missions to take the photos. The first was in Brooklyn on Atlantic Ave. and some of the surrounding blocks, and the second was along Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. The goal was to put together an album package that hopefully conveyed the connection to the album name and additional photos that would support the strange guerrilla style marketing that can happen in the street.

#.

Armand Hammer has cracked the alchemical formulae for wheatpaste and solvent acrylic packaging tape. We’ve now seen them plastered in public squares from New York to London. There’s no telephone to heaven, word to Michelle Cliff, but ELUCID’s been trying to get to heaven yet refusing to sit down. “The rep grows bigger,” he said on “As the Crow Flies,” and look where it’s gotten him—on a billboard along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Graffiti writers stare skyward, tempted to bomb the heavens. You read right: an album with guerrilla communication at its core on a label that has purchased prime advertising space, thereby opening itself up to culture jamming jokesters.

How long will the billboards endure? Ghost signs in Brooklyn persist, denying erasure. Always a residue, a palimpsest of what was and continues to be. Faulkner guffawing in his grave. The past is never dead. It’s not even past, homie. Look at A. Richter’s lamppost photograph in the album art. The thoroughly papered pole—edges frayed and flickering—like tendons torn from bone. Those many messages never leave; they linger, never fully removed, never fully vanished. The FLAC files are lossless. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is a litter-ary text.

How far will their message reach? ATTENTION, ATTENTION: CALLING ALL MOTHERFUCKERS…, Pink Siifu shouts at the start of “Trauma Mic,” the first single from We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the first Armand Hammer album to be released on a label other than Backwoodz Studioz. Fat Possum, presumably, offers wide distribution and vast promotional resources. From El Segundo to Cape Town, Armand Hammer is available to listeners, but is the message welcomed? How many people will accept the collect call? Is the message being received as intended? Does it matter?

#.  I GOT AN ANSWERING MACHINE THAT CAN TALK TO YOU

In the 1990s, woods’s “vision board was uncluttered” (“Don’t Lose Your Job”), but now he’s fending off brothers who drop “a project every month [and] got the nerve to ask if [he’s] peeped it.” He feels like Posdnuos on “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey),” dealing with every Harry, Dick, and Tom with a demo in his palm. Armand Hammer’s popularity has been steadily growing over the past decade, exponentially of late, and like the children’s game of “telephone,” their message, the transmission, runs the risk of competing with noisy interference and distortion. They open themselves up to “misrepresenting the rhymes and all that,” as woods raps on “Empire BLVD.” “Imagine Jesus reading the Gospels,” he suggests, only to bring it back to his own experience: “SMH Rap Genius improbable readings.” More listeners—do the wrath of the math—means more misreadings. Armand Hammer’s ascent has culminated with coverage in the prestigious pages of places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The comments section on the latter does what comments sections do. The majority of this “discourse” misreads Armand Hammer, rap music, and America. Commenter “observer25” claims to have listened to WBDTS. Their conclusion? “I tried—in vain—to hear talent, something pleasant to the ear…[but] I heard random noises and sounds devoid of any rhythm and accompanied by silly juvenile phrases.” That’s gloryhallastoopid, as ELUCID says, echoplexing Parliament. Such are the pitfalls of popularity. woods feels him on that. Forget being forthright; the line is fuzzy. On “Landlines,” the “voice-to-text [is] fucking up,” but woods “still sent it to capture the sentiment.” On “Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die,” he describes how he “mumble[s] through the brain fog, / [With] tinnitus like a chainsaw.” ELUCID, on “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory,” complains of a “headful of lightning, the signal in the noise.” Distortion wins the day.

How does it feel? ELUCID asks, again and again, on “When It Doesn’t Start With a Kiss,” and, frankly, we as the audience don’t know. We’re peanut gallery hecklers, at best. On May 17, 1966 in Manchester, England, a disgruntled fan screamed “JUDAS!” in between Bob Dylan’s raucous electric set. Dylan’s rejoinder, muttered into his lonely microphone from the dark stage in the cavernous hall, was “I don’t believe you. You’re a LIAR!” He turned to his band and said, Play fucking loud! They demolitioned into “Like A Rolling Stone,” whose chorus infamously asks, How does it feel…to be a complete unknown? On “Spellling,” ELUCID spoke of “Iscariots litter[ing] the valley,” prophesying what was to come. 

Armand Hammer—billy woods and ELUCID—are now both known and unknown; they appear in press aplenty but remain enigmatic, still camo’ed. The comments section on the WaPo article had casual reader-ignoramuses assuming the duo is wealthy, living large off capitalist critiques. Fans know better. But Armand Hammer are unknown to listeners, too. Can we ever really know their intent, even on the rare occasions when they divulge something? woods will sometimes spill details and insights in interviews, but ELUCID is as buttoned-up as a straitjacket, not even printing his lyrics, as if that would dispel their magick. Which is interesting when we consider the images they present to the public, to the camera lens: woods strives for facelessness while ELUCID smiles like MIKE when he can, when he’s feeling all in the sun. With WBDTS, woods and ELUCID loiter at the threshold between known and unknown, nondescript citizens[1] and recognizable celebrities.

#.  BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME

Mega Desu from the Secret House Against podcast noted Co Flow as “the new pop sensation” in the Bizarro World referenced on “Legends,” and surely Armand Hammer isn’t going to be receiving heavy Hot 97 rotation. They will, though, embrace De La Soul’s buhloone mindstate, insofar as they might blow up, but they won’t go pop, and—knowing these guys—“blow up” will mean vertiginous versifying that alludes to Julio Cortázar, Michelangelo Antonioni, and take-your-pick of historical leftist cadres that dabbled with incendiary devices. The ceiling is the roof for woods and ELUCID, and it seems well within their power and agency to tear da roof off this sucker, be it by Busta Rhymes or Parliament designs.

ELUCID credits and quotes Tricky verbatim from Pre-Millennium Tension (1996): “Everybody want to be naked and famous.” The sentiment rings out, seeing as how we’re always feeling a pre-millennium tension—early onset, late blooming. “Echoes and reflections,” in ELUCID’s words. As the rep grows bigger, the fans cop from Backwoodz and, like a habit-forming first hit, they become addicted. The songs on WBDTS induce dependency (“rather be co-dependents,” remember). Cavalier speaks to the chronic compulsion on “I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket”: “I once copped from woods—ain’t been the same since.” A “gateway drug” without the bad faith or scare tactics.

#.

Any upward trajectory Armand Hammer may experience appears to remain grounded by a firm grasp on reality. “Climb the mountain together, but the descent [is] riddled with crevasses,” woods raps on “The Key is Under the Mat,” shouting back to ELUCID who earlier announces them as “the only Blacks in the rock climb.” Decked out in harnesses and carabiners, they’re enlightened enough to recognize the paradoxes of their path, a knowledge that comes from having “been in a hole at the bottom” but attentively studying “pretty clouds.” Like The Snow Leopard (1978), Peter Mathiessen’s account of his trek across the Himalayas after his wife’s death from cancer, woods and ELUCID are searching, suddenly seeing that “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” Have they reached New Agey nirvana? Maybe. If they have, they’ve gone to tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Grand verbalizing and sermonizing from the mount. 

It can be lonely on the mountaintop. Like MLK’s last speech, they speak words prophetic and perturbed: Well, I don’t know what will happen now…. We’ve got some difficult days ahead…longevity has its place…I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land…. I’m not worried about anything…. More accurate might be Baldwin’s description from “Stranger in the Village” (1953): “The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach.” Think Kiliii Yuyan’s photograph for the Terror Management album cover.

#.

William Woods to the white courtesy phone.

—“Kanun” (2013)

In her essay “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss gives a condensed history of the telephone, but—more specifically—telephone poles. She documents early reactions to the sudden appearance of poles lining the streets. Newspaper editorials described the poles as “an urban blight.” “The poles carried a wire for each telephone,” she writes, “sometimes hundreds of wires…. The sky was filled with wires.” She attributes this “War on Telephone Poles” to “that terribly American concern for private property and a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility.” In light of this, we might read the excessive flyer and advertisement eyesores stapled to poles as symbolic resistance—a reclamation of ground ceded to government. But, Biss points out, there was also “a fierce sense of aesthetics” to consider, “an obsession with purity, a dislike for the way the poles and wires marred a landscape.” I can’t help but hear echoes of that Washington Post commenter dismissing Armand Hammer’s music as nothing more than “random noises and sounds devoid of any rhythm.” The commenter’s opinion bred, ostensibly, by ignorance and hatred.

#.

Six years ago, ELUCID began Armand Hammer’s “Microdose” with a caustic-ass quotable: “I was born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching— / My question is: Who stopped recording?” In her essay, Biss includes a litany of lynchings perpetrated through the exploitation of telephone poles for that malevolent purpose: 

In Pittsburg, Kansas, a black man’s throat was slit and his dead body was strung up on a telephone pole. Two black men were hanged from a telephone pole in Lewisburg, West Virginia…. In Greenville, Mississippi a black man accused of attacking a white telephone operator was hanged from a telephone pole…. A black man was hanged from a telephone pole in Belleville, Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man was cut down half-alive, covered in coal oil, and burned…

The telephone poles, Biss explains, were “convenient as gallows” due to their “tall and straight” structure, their “crossbar,” and fixed location in “public places.” It was only a “coincidence,” she says, that a pole might “resemble a crucifix.”

#.  DUNN, I’LL HIT YOU RIGHT BACK, ’CAUSE THE STATIC IS THICK

In the introduction (the “User’s Manual”) of Avital Ronell’s[2] The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989), she writes: 

Dealing with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabilization of the addressee. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to read with your ears. In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated reserves of random indeterminateness—in a word, you are expected to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these lines. 

“We shall constantly be interrupted by the static of internal explosions and syncopation,” Ronell continues, “—the historical beep tones disruptively crackling on a line of thought.” So on “Landlines,” ELUCID acclimates us with onomatopoeic omnipresence: “Leave a message at the beep-beep.” “Don’t play on my phone ’less you Badu,” woods warns, though if I put in a call to Tyrone, or André 3000, or Common, they might advise otherwise.[3] The telephone, Proust writes in The Guermantes Way (1920), is “a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought.” On “I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket,” Cavalier “yell[s] in speakerphones while [he’s] walking brisk” as he DialsA’Freaq on his Cel U Lar Device, his “handheld obelisk.” The phone becomes something monolithic. Mesmerized by the mirror. But also desensitized to our devices—appendages, really. I put in a call to Walter Mosley, and he confirms that Jane Barbe or Ma Bell is the true “devil in the blue dress” that woods refers to on “Niggardly (Blocked Call).”

#.  GET YOUR PHONE PHREAK ON

We got ya phone tapped—what you gon’ do? ’Cause, sooner or later, we’ll have your whole crew, All we need now is the right word or two…

—The Firm, “Phone Tap” (1997)

Escobar tells Sosa at the end of “Phone Tap”: “Don’t even use the phone—just come to my crib.” But frequently that frequency eludes us—we can’t simply avail ourselves of that level of immediacy and intimacy. We are so often siloed, satellite states of our own making. Most of our messages come from the beyond, the before, and the hereafter. I hope it’s nothing but hoes in paradise, in different area codes. 

We can call it the call-back. The return-of-the. ELUCID and woods are ceaselessly placing calls to their past selves—relentless as robocalls, tireless as telemarketers. ELUCID calls back to “Old Magic,” establishing a “double portion and protection.” You don’t work, you don’t eat calls back not only to “No Days Off,” but way back—to the Soviets, to Saint Paul. “I read the paper even though they tell me not to,” woods raps, and all three of these allusions to their own body of work appear on “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory,” though it seems their sense of time & memory might be more intact than they think. Ten years of Armand Hammer, and woods reads the paper (if you go back and look) on the cover of Race Music, their 2013 debut.

On “Total Recall” [re-call], ELUCID calls back to woods on “Marlow” from Terror Management: “Earth getting warmer; we going the other…” Like a call to repent (as Cavalier says on “I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket”—a chorus which calls to a magic mirror we know from “Snow White,” courtesy of the Brothers Grimm), mourning our Anthropocene epoch—what a time we chose to be born.[4]

#.

CHILD ACTOR:

I made [“The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory” beat] very intuitively without any hard knowledge of where they might take it. I did add in some glitchy talking samples that I think [woods and ELUCID] both picked up on in their own ways. One either seems to say “when” or “where” depending how you hear it, which I imagine may have had something to do with the mystical title. I guess, now that I think about it, I definitely liked the way the “when” sample went with the unmoored timing of the beat and lent it an uncanny feeling, which I guess qualifies as some kind of message! I dropped in another talking sample (someone saying “...a lousy…”) that I altered, which ended up sort of sounding like they were saying “Allah.” I don’t think I noticed that much at the time and just thought of it as garbled language, but woods clearly heard it that way and now of course there’s no other way to hear it after what he did with it. It’s rare to be asked to specifically custom-make a beat for a particular artist; normally I just send packs upon request and I imagine that’s the norm for other producers too. But secondly, it was quite a challenge to have to make the beat from one specific sample source considering I can often go through multiple records before settling on just the right sample to make a beat from. On top of all that, since I was sampling this session with Shabaka [Hutchings] and Adi [Meyerson] that I had really good memories of, I had a desire in the back of my mind to make a very substantial use of the session so their playing could come through in some way despite the way I flipped it. That’s also why I included a snippet of the session as the outro. This particular session was a pure improvisation among the three of us and owes its character substantially to the bassline that Adi locked into a couple minutes into the original source recording. I was really laying out and trying to give Shabaka’s beautiful melodic playing space while fleshing out the harmonic possibilities implied in Adi’s bassline. Though they sent me stems, I elected to make the beat by sampling the full rough mix since, again, that’s the way I’d normally approach making a beat that I sample from a record. That also forces me to make entirely different decisions than what I’d do if I was working with each individual sample, plus again is a way to maintain the true ensemble feeling of the source.

#.  EUPHORIA BOOMERANG SIDE-EFFECT

The more popular you get, the less you’re understood. Can’t it be all so simple? Basic comprehension skills fail, go fuzzy (I can feel it). Signals get crossed; a paradox is a crossed signal. What’s supposed to be communicated is killed before it can be; what’s not meant to be communicated is. woods might “think in cursive,” but he “spit[s] jagged fragments”—curvatures gone crooked—and, ultimately, “every word out [his] mouth drag[s] [his] people backwards,” as he says on “Niggardly (Blocked Call).” Progress becomes its antithesis, and ain’t that a bitch?

Words spoken are misheard or misinterpreted. I’ve seen music journalists self-censor the writing of “Niggardly (Blocked Call).” The text speaks, apparently. Its tongue splits and twists. Maybe I’m the one mistaken. In Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), Coleman Silk loses his job as a college professor when he refers to two students who’ve yet to appear in his class as “spooks.” What seems to be an issue of absenteeism becomes a racism scandal when it’s revealed that the two truants are Black. Complicating matters further, Silk has spent the majority of his life passing as a white Jew, though he’s actually a Black, Howard University dropout from East Orange, New Jersey. 

Our world is paradox; Armand Hammer load lines like cargo crates onto the Ship of Theseus. woods: “I walked out of Denny’s like it was Ruth’s Chris” (“Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here). ELUCID: “Fed till nothing’s left and feeding on myself” (“The Key is Under the Mat”). woods: “Every answer I gave in the form of a question” (“Landlines”). We live with contradictions. woods gives thought to “people [he] lost to COVID-19, but it ain’t do a thing to the fiends.” By invoking all that was—and, in some cases, remains—uncertain and unanswerable about the coronavirus, woods sings a post-pandemic[5] blues. We couldn’t find reliable stats on susceptibility, transmission, or infection. Skepticism had us Lysol-wiping groceries, rocking latex gloves, and chugging bleach. Where did public health end and propaganda begin? How to sort through data and disinformation when inundated by both?

Entertain the temptation to destroy everything. On “Don’t Lose Your Job,” woods dons a “bomb vest but nothing happened when [he] pressed the button,” which is only a slightly altered ending to Pastor Ernst Toller’s fate in Paul Shrader’s First Reformed (2017)[6]. ELUCID acknowledges the absurdity, side-steps the suicide solutions of woods and Camus, only to be left feeling like he’s gonna “buy life insurance and just….” The title says “Don’t Lose Your Job,” but Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poem “Wave at the People Walking Upside Down” says

you are going to want to lose that job before the revolution hit 

Are you the one waving, or are you the person walking upside-down?

#.

Rappers tired—inertia the only thing keep ’em moving.

—“Aubergine” (2021)

K.I.M. turns to stasis. Repetition is the enemy of Armand Hammer. “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory” introduces a galaxy of surrealistic surveillance state moments that repeat, repeat, repeat—as if we’re standing still, as if the screen froze. Passwords stay the same and the identity thieves grow savvier. ELUCID shuffles past “fake trees in the Apple Store,” brick-and-mortar built on an ethereal web address. “I feel a way about proving my identity to robots,” he says, and who doesn’t? Silicon Valley fuckboys gonna captcha bad one. I’ll click a checkbox for no man or machine. I authenticate my own experience. Refusal to “update another version” like ELUCID mentions on “Switchboard.”

When ELUCID says he “wore the same thing yesterday—all white; more dingy,” he admits to the residue of repetition. He’s also “sweating through silk,” tainting and staining the textile. Edges are frayed; no clear or clean lines.[7] That silk—that Bombyx mori, if we’re dropping the precisest science—shimmers prismatically from every fiber of his being, each angle refracting. Should I play it again? he asks, knowing the answer ahead of time. Embracing “many multiplicities,” ELUCID is “living every mystery.” ELUCID, as any head nadda would know, is indebted to Édouard Glissant who says “multiplicity comes from those somewhat secret, somewhat unknown places.”

Addicted, but not addled by, the pleasures of ad infinitum, ELUCID “would run it back again.” I would run it back again. I would run it back again…. He’s not fretful of going explosive. On “When It Doesn’t Start With a Kiss,” his big-bang [re]birth, that “new light: exploded back from the womb-pit, / New myths, new names,” is reinvention. Repetition such as this springs somethin’-somethin’ anew. Fuck the forceps; he’s gonna “scream [his] way out.”

He discovers himself “back in places, cycles, residual loops.” No unwitting cog-in-the-machine—ELUCID is cognizant. Knows his place/meant, to borrow a Baraka neologism. Folks. This here is the story of ELUCID as Ishmael Reed’s Loop Garoo Kid. A neohoodooist so bad [not bad meaning “bad” but bad meaning “good”] he made “a working posse of spells phone in sick.” That’s right—you read correct: spells…and phone. woods isn’t oblivious either. He got the memorandum that reads “hindsight before it happens” on “The Key is Under the Mat.” And on “Switchboard,” ELUCID employs a kind of tricolonic puzzle about his mental processes: “Forgetting; I remember; I forget again.”

CHILD ACTOR:

I understand “loop” doesn’t literally need to mean loop, but, to be clear, I didn’t loop anything. I made this [beat] the way I make pretty much all of my other beats, which is mainly playing the chopped-up samples live—not to a click track or grid—without going back and editing much. It was actually especially important to me to try to make this one like my other beats in some distinct ways since the sample source material and other specifics were so unusual. I was worried it would end up sounding like a different producer if I got carried away, and I always like to have some kind of identifiable sound to what I do. 

On “Don’t Lose Your Job,” we watch as woods “break[s] up weed on one phone; FaceTime[s] on the other.” Moving beyond facile observations about multitasking, Henri Bergson writes of “other worlds…existing in the same place and the same time” like “twenty different broadcasting stations throw[ing] out simultaneously twenty different concerts which coexist without any of them intermingling its sounds with the music of another.” Now apply that same metaphor to telephones. On “FaceTime,” remember, woods saw the simultaneity of his personal experience within the chaotic and electric world around him: “I’m just waiting for my phone to ping, / I’m thinking about you when I’m supposed to be thinking about other things.” We accept the inertia of our doomscrolling into the state of a sedentary living moment, sadly.

#.

To escape rote existence—to unstick oneself from the time lag, drag, or stag[nancy]—you need to expose portals and cross through thresholds. woods is no stranger to the crossover. He’s playing “pick-up ball, half-court, four-on-four” on “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory.” Crossover like Rafer Alston, Rod Strickland, God Shammgod, etc. Crosses the River Jordan to the Promised Land while Iverson sings that old Negro spiritual, Roll, Jordan’s ankles, roll. We must accept this: Armand Hammer has crossover appeal. Their frequencies cross over into other genres that they bend circuitously, curiously, with alligator clips, transistors, and toggle switches. Not limited to rivers (older than the flow of human blood in human veins), they cross the mainstream, potentially—insofar as a mainstream exists in our entropic and stochastic world. On WBDTS, Armand Hammer crossover from the afterlife to this reality and back, and often—a simultaneity of subway stops. Listen for the crosstalk, the noise. Feel for the “bad energy” woods swears he won’t give us on the chorus of “Niggardly (Blocked Call).” Take heed of the transference.

#.

CHILD ACTOR:

I had heard the first couple JPEGMafia beats for “Landlines” and “Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die” (we were actually supposed to play along with those beats, and I had sort of prepared something to what became “Landlines,” but we ran out of time). I found them really thrilling and made a conscious effort to make some decisions that would make the track fit in with that sound without biting the style. That definitely inspired a lot of the sound design I did. To me, the sound design evokes strange chunky metal doors opening to other realities/paths or violently slamming shut. I was pretty pleased that it ended up coming right after those same two beats in the tracklist, especially since those guys are notoriously meticulous with tracklists. It felt like the best possible confirmation to me that I had accomplished the mission. After the fact, I noticed this [beat] has a lot of inadvertent similarities to “Charms”—same instrumentation of flute/keys/bass/hand percussion though presented entirely differently as well as a general mystical theme in the lyrics. “Charms” the light and “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory” the shadow. Also both track 3!

#.  TRANSBLUESENCY

Tryin’ to separate me from the blood is disrespect like you coming in my home and not wiping your feet on the rug.

—Big Gipp, “Cell Therapy” (1995)

How we go about crossing over matters. woods stands in the genkan as he mentions “house shoes on tatami floors,” and ELUCID doesn’t mince words when he evaluates how you welcome him: “Don’t invite me to your house, ask me to remove my shoes, and your floors ain’t clean” (“I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket”). He’s not a huckster at your door, he’s a Huxley adherent; he kicks in your Doors of Perception, wavin’ the Fourth Vision. 

The threshold is a place/meant where police sketches are left half-drawn (Inshallah). The threshold is crowded with charlatans, grifters, and wolves in sheep’s clothing. The choice was—and is—yours: “Kevin Samuels or Dr. Umar,” though neither choice is appealing. A real Scylla or Charybdis dilemma. And Dres knows, like woods, that “Jimmy Baldwin[’s] not coming through that door.” Sense left a long time ago, leaving only non-.

Navigating through the threshold is easier said than done, and half-steppin’ won’t guarantee passage. On “Supermooned,” woods seeks help from a reluctant specter of a woman, but “she slipped away in the garden maze amidst the twists and turns.” The woman teases woods, leading him on, leading him into a more complex tangle: “She called for me with a laugh—from where, I couldn’t discern.” He’s been in situations like this before, like on “Stonefruit,” where the mystery woman hides “back behind bougainvillea.” She slipped away with a slipstream strangeness—unquestionably some syncretic moon deity making mischief.

#.

woods’ moon goddess “called for [him],” but it wasn’t sufficient enough to guide him through the threshold completely. Call me when you’re outside, as Steel Tipped Dove’s 2021 album title says, a reference to the means by which artists make buzzer-less entry into his apartment studio space. On “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here,” Moneynicca literally calls out to Dove by name. The title “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here” prods, too—woods shooing a crackhead from his stoop on “No Hard Feelings.” Moves that fiend who keeps a pipe with him down the block. Can’t be clogging up the entranceway. Not when you’re close, but not close enough—not through and through. The sidewalks are packed with “white women with pepper spray in they purse interpolating Beyoncé,” thinking they’re falling into line, but only failing forward, god-willing, into an illegal formation.

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The walls are thin, permeable. On “The Rent is Too Damn High,” ELUCID and woods heard and felt a “wet cough” come through. “I can hear my neighbors fucking,” woods complained, confessed. Kafka knew the struggle of porous apartment life and the mania it materializes. In the short piece “My Neighbor” (1931), the narrator laments the “woefully thin walls” of his office. In the competing office across the hall, one belonging to a certain “Harras,” a new tenant, an “active man,” appears to be mimicking his work habits. “Like the tail of a rat,” Kafka writes, Harras “has slipped in.” Worse, the narrator’s telephone is located on a wall he shares with the neighbor. As such, he has “given up mentioning the names of clients on the phone.” He begins to speak in convoluted tongue twisters, “danc[ing] around, the receiver to [his] ear, spurred on by anxiety, on [his] tip-toes,” and yet he still inadvertently divulges his business secrets. WBDTS is largely about defining who is allowed in and who is denied entry—and that is decided, in part, by questioning one’s motivation for listening in the first place. Harras, the narrator is convinced, is eavesdropping to acquire intel. “Harras doesn’t need a telephone,” the narrator realizes, “he uses mine.” Harras doesn’t have to cross any threshold; he gains access by virtue of how handsomely and conveniently sound carries. He listens in, exploiting his neighbor, not “even wait[ing] until the end of the conversation.” The narrator acquiesces: “[Harras] scurries through the city…and before I have hung up the receiver, he’s already working against me.” woods used to skulk and skeme similarly. He used to “watch through peepholes on the humble like [he had] points on the bundle.”

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I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right, I live a life of privilege in New York, Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. Say that again? I have a rule— I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

—Frederick Seidel, “Widening Income Inequality” (2016)

That’s not a lot of money, fam—that’s a couple Gs.

—woods, “Touch & Agree” (2014)

woods, ever the cosmopolitan, might rock four-hundred dollar Japanese jeans and indulge in gourmet meals, but he still sips New York City tapwater out of a paper cup. He’s Frederick Seidel on a Ducati Superleggera V4, but he’s actually not. While another whiny Washington Post commenter speculates that ELUCID and woods “live the American dream with 4-inch wallets,” woods lets us know on “Landlines” that a “duffle bag hold[s] [his] pension.” With arbitrary definitions of success and even less secure sources of income, the struggle to accumulate wealth is all fits and starts, stunting and setbacks, repos and windfalls. It’s touch and go. Touch and agree? Sure, Armand Hammer has achieved a level of success in their 40s, but shit stays precarious, so they’ll forgo the “playboy rap.” If it’s Cheesecake Factory Fridays with your co-parent, you don’t gotta lie.

For every dollar the duo has gained access to, instability, contrarily, increases. “I still feel poor,” woods raps, and so, accordingly: “I put money in the floor, / I put money in the wall, / I put money towards getting the door reinforced.” This is nothing new. On “Touch & Agree,” he cowered behind “steel doors reinforced in a world full of sore losers and bad sports.” The murmuring Bigger Thomas that lives in his skull awakens:

I slept on the floor, thin blankets, coarse, Self-pity always stows away inside remorse, Gun-butt the teeth out of every gift horse.

woods has gone from “SpongeBob to Poseidon—[he’s] got the operation tightened.” These aren’t the hovel days of Hiding Places. These aren’t the dark times of “five dollar phone cards from the corner store.” From Johnny Nash to Jimmy Cliff, he can see clearly now. The overseas connection’s not so choppy. His Africall to Zimbabwe doesn’t have to compete with Death lurking like baseheads in the bodega. No haunting robot voice telling him how much money he’s got left on his account.

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You can’t wait for an invitation; sometimes, you need to impose. “I walk through doors,” ELUCID sang on “Stonefruit,” “—my name’s on no list.” We’re talkin’ access and inaccessibility. When he intones—on “The Gods Must Be Crazy”—your money’s no good here, our galaxy brains imagine a post-scarcity, Afro-anarcho utopia. Or maybe it’s just the phrase you hear uttered on the block when a community gets busy wishing away gentrifiers. The key is under the mat, but careful who you tell it to.

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It’s off the hook this year, Gettin’ mad money off the books this year.

—The Beatnuts, “Off the Books” (1997)

The central motif of the diabetic test strips signs is particularly rich. We can entertain them as communiqués, hidden messages wildstyled across inner cityscapes. Evidence of a shadow economy, tenebrous enough to make your blood glucose boil. Not since Martin Shkreli has there been such a meeting of hip-hop and the medical-industrial complex. Shkreli, the loathsome conman popularly known as “Pharma Bro,” charged patients $750 for a single Daraprim pill. Later, he won a Paddle8 auction with a $2 mil bid on Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Culturally and ethically, humanity lost. Communication connects, but it also unavoidably fails, breaks down, and frustrates our sense of access and even reality. David Simon was “asked by law enforcement not to reveal certain vulnerabilities” in regard to police surveillance in his plotlines for The Wire. Simon complied, and the show continued to be lauded for its realism, the audience and the corner boys of Baltimore none the wiser.

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As I write these words, ELUCID steps to me and asks, Fuck you know? What the fuck you know? And I can’t ignore woods telling me, “Don’t try to add on.” They speak for themselves, and yet, here I type. On “Trauma Mic,” ELUCID tells it like this: “Neo-folk: trauma mic: echo chamber: deepfake: / Fake deep: talking wound: say it to my face, nigga!” He tells me that, and I—provoked—tell something back. The lines represent a flourish of mostly di- and trisyllabic metrical feet; anapests pummeling us into submission (“neo-FOLK”; “trauma MIC”; “talking WOUND”). The bars hinge on the rollicking good antimetabole of deepfake/fake deep. “Say it to my face” then begs the questions: Which [generative] face exactly? How does the facial recognition software sort through the twill of the mask? “Deep fake” sounds promising, a potential for something empowering. But it’s uncertainty all the way down—a mis- and dis- communication.

“Neo-folk” invokes “the blackest metal,” which ELUCID identified as on “Betamax.” “This a dead church,” he said, labeling his bodily temple, I presume. The Norwegian black metal faithful will recognize the “deathlike silence” of Euronymous’s record label—the deathlike silence of an ear-to-the-receiver hang-up. ELUCID, in appropriating the language of a Nazi-sympathetic muzakkk, excavates the Helvete cellar. He spirals on his square, forcing himself to burrow, burial-style, beneath the concrete basement foundation. ELUCID’s not “fake deep” like so many other MCs; ELUCID is devastatingly sonorous with delphic complexity. Equal parts arcane and A.R. Kane; altered states incorporating incorporeal feels—a Timbs-gaze or dubby gauze: his “echo chamber.”

One senses ELUCID writes these rhymes in runes, reckoning with esoteric sigils and Nazi insignias all at once: a soundclash. The message made manifest in DJ Haram’s pruh-duk-shun. Sonically, “Trauma Mic” is Steve Albini’s spinal column snapping. Pink Siifu wailing as if through an Interfax Harmonic Percolator. Check the Nietzsche neck-snap by way of Damon Young on “Don’t Lose Your Job”: What doesn’t kill you makes you blacker. (Armand Hammer fully realized and revealed as the actual Big Black.) Willie Green dangles the Sennheiser in front of the Orange amp and crushes the vocals to gravel. Filter through: like the “heavy metal speaker” in the Toyota Cressida that woods mentions on “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” ELUCID notes the underpinnings of all nations and undoes your revisionist fuck’ry: No slave, no world; no slave, no world. 

WILLIE GREEN:

I think the balance between clear and unclear is essential! That kind of contrast is the basis of my technique. You need the murky to understand how clear other things are and vice versa. Same with clean/distorted, bright/dark etc. Manipulating the contrast between things leads your listeners to understanding without having to be too direct. That said, the anchor to that is always the vocal, especially with artists like this where the lyrics are already so dense. I have to give people a fighting chance to understand. [The practice of running the vocals through guitar amps] is as much about the process as the final result. I’ve got lots of distortion plugins and boxes, but sometimes an amp moving air in a room with a mic just feels different. And I can get close more easily with other stuff and no one would question, but I enjoy the process of it. As long as it’s still serving the record, I do some things just to entertain myself, too. It connects me to the music more than just “use this preset and crank songs out.”

Armand Hammer gives to us; we give back to them. Wrong and right don’t follow through; it’s the flow, the pass of the mic, the pass of the pen—the voice-to-text, if you will. Study these dialectics. A unity of opposites co-existing. Coaxial cables wherein forever the twain shall meet. Feel how your “fingers numb, tryna work the light.” Desensitized from gripping that trauma mic. woods equips us with a chainsaw (“Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die”) and a bandsaw (“The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory”) to cut through the noise, the aux cord, the copper speaker wires. We cut through the brain fog—together. Rewiring your brain is a prerequisite. A Philip K. Dick-styled “tele-transmitter wired within your skull.”

There are, and always have been, microphones within the casing of your telephone, of course. That’s the trauma mic: a traumatized mic. A mic that receives everything; a mic that transmits all. Not simply the fiendish pleasures Rakim expounded years ago—microphone as lethal weapon, or as phallus, or as master of ceremony means—but an oath, a debt owed, a magisterial instrument built of slave labor electronics and barbarism. 

When Alexander Graham Bell completed the first call from New York to San Francisco, Eula Biss notes, it required 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles. That’s a lot of gallows and rope, if we fixate on the figurative. You can see woods and ELUCID winding the scrap copper in the Henry and Tim Blake Nelson-directed “Trauma Mic” music video. Coils are connections, are conductivity. When “Jim,” the protagonist of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (much more on this story momentarily), returns to his place of employment—a bank—he finds it in ruins: “Great, dark coils of wire came up from the earth and down from the sun and entered this low lair of witchery.” ELUCID and woods are a twisted pair of the occultish double consciousness. I find it difficult not to think of Coil, the British post-industrial band. Surely, ELUCID and woods have determined to adopt a similar ethos as John Balance and Peter Christopherson as they worship the glitch on WBDTS. Coil’s “Who’ll Fall” contains a nightmarescape of telephone sonics and an answering machine message telling of a friend’s grisly suicide. The person leaving the message struggles to make sense of the death—it doesn’t compute. He’s reaching out: We don’t really…connect.

Armand Hammer want to unravel the coil as much as they want to gather it. As ELUCID puts it, “[WBDTS] is sprawling and fits into the idea of a secret network, [a] secret economy—so the songs have a winding kind of feel.” On “The Outernet” from 1997’s Overcast! EP, Slug explored a similar terrain. Let’s network, let’s all work, he rapped—one track of his vocals, appropriately, delivered with a whisper—so we can build the overall network. ELUCID and woods have been networking with seldom a hiatus for the better part of two decades. It was Uncommon Nasa’s annual Yule Prog event that initially brought ELUCID and woods together, and Nasa’s 2014 album New York Telephone featured them both. On the titular song, Nasa rhymes beside Yeshua, splicing wires together with the pre-millennial New York underground. “Hang up that payphone or you might get struck by lightning,” Nasa cautions, and Yesh’s verse is even more vigilant: “They’re saying it bakes our brains, radio waves, / And the way we’re all slaves to a monkey plan, I’ll be damned.” Paranoia or perception? (as another song on the album puts it)—but Messiah Muzik’s phone interludes on the album help pull us past panic and learn to love the drone. As the old New York Telephone TV ads said: We’re all connected… 

And it’s all coming together. ¿Tu tienes WiFi? CONNECTIVITY. Reaching out to build what’s within. Whether it’s a call to Shabaka Hutchings, or Adi Meyerson, or Jane Boxall, or Abdul Hakim Bilal, or Hisham Bharoocha—the lines are open. “If it’s up to me, we’d mend the fences,” woods says—in Frostian fashion—on “Landlines.” He rather be codependents—he wants to compose, not oppose. Where ELUCID previously linked to Daniel Dumile as he preached a so-called “gospel of doom” on “Betamax” (another piece of antiquated tech, by the way), the connection transmits clearer on “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here,” a beg-borrow-steal’d phrase from “Rhymes Like Dimes.” You know what it is: a call-and-response. On “NYNEX,” from Aethiopes, woods, ELUCID, and perennial collaborators Denmark Vessey and Quelle Chris, seemed to sing in chorus, as if affirming one another: Said he had a system…. The system, inarguably, is a system of communication.

In Blues People (1963), Baraka writes of the “long, long fantastically rhythmical sermons of the early Negro Baptist and Methodist preachers [who] sang with such passion and belief, as well as skill, that the congregation had to be moved.” The traditional African call-and-response song “shaped the form” of this worship. “The minister would begin slowly and softly, then build his sermon to an unbelievable frenzy with the staccato punctuation of his congregation’s answers.” He may as well be talking about ELUCID’s liturgical flow.

Thomas Edison once said (as Granville T. Woods turns over in his grave) that the telephone “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.” In light of that, we can understand the collaborative spirit of WBDTS. To quote ELUCID again: “This sort of reverse engineering of talented players who met for the first time in the studio jamming to pre-recorded beats before splintering off into new directions. Being in the room quietly watching four people fumble around each other’s sonic worlds before finally locking into a solid groove was a clear and obvious magical moment.”

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JANE BOXALL:

Communication is distance—the components of a drumkit (cymbals, snare drum, toms/kick) have roots on three continents. Percussion instruments point to places, communicating with the past and the mileage between points. Drums are a pretty durable form of long-distance communication. Sounds with deep, lost archives and antecedents. Communication is signaling. I’m currently finishing medic school, and the more I learn about the organ systems of the body (and their ways of failure), the more I appreciate and fear their interconnection. Drums and percussion are organ systems, too. Marimba is probably the guts of the operation, winding through its wooden octaves, buried under the instruments that sit at the surface of the sound. Vibraphone’s the skin swelling and softening; tank drum the elbows and knees—clanky, good for only a few maneuvers. Even if the collaborator is a beat, there can be a telepathic level of communication, reciprocity, a squaring of the individual powers. The low end of the marimba is wide as my wingspan, the bars paper-thin. The high end is hand-width targets, thick and stub-sounding. These extremes of register can communicate, counterpoint, obfuscate, or bolster one another. The marimba’s basso-profundo is fundament, the vibraphone’s skittering high register is firmament. Marimba, in particular, is stealthy—in most recorded contexts, it’s felt, not heard. I’ve recorded marimba on entire albums where you wouldn’t know it’s there unless you went looking—it’s the insulation in the walls. Marimba is only exposed for a moment on WBDTS, but it runs through much of the subsequent track. And yes, I’ve heard that direct communication is allegedly better than passive-aggression. But I still love how marimba can slither semi-anonymously around behind the bolder sounds, saying something via insinuation.

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How do you say you’re okay to an answering machine? 

—The Replacements, “Answering Machine” (1984)

On “Niggardly (Blocked Call),” we find ELUCID gutted by a relationship in collapse. “What ever happened to not caring?” he asks. He frets about “30 missed calls” and a “blocked call” and a “voicemail that still hit[s]” where it hurts worst. Channels of communication seem to assert themselves, but he appears to want none, nil, nought. It “shouldn’t be this hard,” he says, “we’re not splitting atoms.” ELUCID retreats, plays Main Source’s Breaking Atoms in his earbuds as an escapist way-of-dealing, all while Looking at the Front Door. [T H R E S H O L D]. On “Irreversible, Devil” from King Vision Ultra’s SHOOK WORLD earlier this year, ELUCID [en]chanted: A beginning doesn’t need an ending, only a portal. In Christopher Harris’s 2000 film still/here, we become witnesses to the devastated landscape of postindustrial St. Louis. At one point, the camera settles on a gash-like opening—a portal—in a brick wall: the result of crumbling mortar. Throughout Harris’s film, a telephone rings hauntologically, chronically, diegetically—no one’s answering. 

On the chorus, woods is “admittedly niggardly”—said with a smirk—as he declines to even communicate “bad energy” to his opps (harshing that vibe, bruv). He’s been influenced by ELUCID’s concurrent embrace and dismissal of the language of the occult, be it witchcraft, Crowley tracts, or Tarot card readings. woods, like Durkheim, dismisses charismatic magicians as conmen, cultivators of clientele. He alone might be responsible for casting off the customer base at Catland, gentrified Brooklyn’s “favorite little witch shop,” which closed at the end of this summer as scores of calls were pouring into the WBDTS hotline. woods eats knowing he’s “starving [his] enemies,” claiming to take “no pleasure” in it as he sips his bittersweet apéritif.[8] Forget cold-hearted, woods’s “heart pump[s] ketamine” as he k-holes down Flushing Avenue. He walks through the necropolis, hellucinating, having become a numb and distorted Perceptionist. (“Admittedly niggardly” is Black Dialogue scratched and warped as if by Fakts One). 

woods keeps walking, but now he’s got purpose. He’s delivering a package, navigating to his destination. “All I had was an address in Maspeth,” he raps before conceding, “I know that’s not really the address.” The subtext, though, is that he does know the location. Once the drop is complete, he can return to the safety of his home, the domestic bliss we were allowed access to on “As the Crow Flies” from Maps. “I write when my baby’s asleep,” he reveals, “I sit in the room in the dark.” He meticulously rattles off every intimate detail:

I listen to him breathe, I walk him to school, then the park— hold they little hands when we cross the street.   I think about my brothers that’s long gone and this was all they ever dreamed.[9] 

Though he’s set adrift on memory bliss, woods compares what he’s got to what others don’t. He sees a fiend—an inexplicable survivor of COVID-19—who’s almost analogous to himself, a familiar if we want to be Macbethian about it. But woods is decidedly not the fiend. He revels, almost sadistically, in his good fortune: “I have to admit I enjoy watching you wander the wilderness, / You betrayed your brother, burnt every bridge, / When your end come, you’ll be alone.” woods looks upon his Cain-like brother, but it’s only a “peep”—a quick glance. He’ll sleep soundly, peacefully, “knowing these niggas is dead to [him].” When the phone rings in the night, he’ll “actually answer…just to drink your pain.”

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In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed’s Field Marshall Theda character is startled as a page barges into his room: “Hey fuck-face Doompussy, whatever your name is.” Theda is aghast: “Why I never. Who gave you this address? I told them to never give out this number—why this is one of the few luxuries I have in this life…”

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ELUCID wears a “camouflage vest” to cross boundaries undetected on “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” to allow for liminal wanderings and trespasses. He utilizes his “third and [his] fourth eye” to “spin out in every which way,” omniscient. Wormhole wayfarer. For every threshold, for every portal, ELUCID has “been through” and “been inside.” His mind, as woods suggests, is “cracked open, seeing all the patterns.” We’re where “anything can happen if you tryna make it happen.” Wyclef’s carnival, maybe. Say what, say what, anything can happen when the history of civilization is an amphetamine-fueled warehouse rave with a fog machine thrown into overdrive. A carnivalesque, where under each tiny leaf this forest of dreams, the fruit which the future will harvest lies hidden. This entire album is a golden bough. (That’s me masquerading as Bakhtin, if you must know.) As if a projection on a screen in the Museum of Natural History (with your eyes glassy from the pain pills), woods drags us past “oracles and seers,” “madmen squatting in caves,” Bushmen “watch[ing] the world come off balance,” “hunter-gatherers watching black giants walk out the jungle,” and “aliens in spaceships.” We watch the ancestors watching the next civilization be born. We’re “invited to the christening,” just so long as we too understand our existence as “men pregnant with death.” Wyclef told you! When you got the skully to your face, anything can happen. “A face behind this mask behind this face,” ELUCID repeats as a round on “Switchboard,” as a gyre widening. He represents (represent, represent!) “so many people at the same time.” He puts the M-to-the-A-to-the-S-to-the-K ’pon his face just to make the next day. “The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, [and] the violation of natural boundaries,” Bakhtin writes. “It contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristics of the most ancient rituals and spectacles.”

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On “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here,” ELUCID chants What kinda world? as he revises Nas’s “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” into a more communistic vision, something more utopian. Where Nas offers “black diamonds and pearls” via Lauryn Hill, ELUCID proclaims “the mangoes were free.” While Nas speculates what it might be like “if coke was cooked without the garbage,” ELUCID celebrates the fact that the drugs in his paradise “was clean.” Nas wants to “turn trife life to lavish,” but ELUCID prefers to implement a world built on comfort and contentment rather than extravagance. He agrees that “the first shall be last,” but Matthew 20:16 probably didn’t foresee such excesses as Nas’s street dreams of “dime sexes and Benz stretches.” ELUCID calls for “no tax for the rest of natural Black life,” hoping to reduce the economic burden on a race of citizens who are disadvantaged at every turn by the tax code, property laws[10], right on down to neighborhood price gouging and payday loans. In ELUCID’s kind of world, people aren’t data points on a misery index. The mental toll is mitigated with free psychotherapy, which Nas also acknowledges, albeit briefly. It’s the “many years of depression [that] make [him] vision / The better living—type of place to raise kids in.” Nas’s vision, though, isn’t as incisive as ELUCID’s. ELUCID penetrates with what media studies scholar Jayna Brown calls “the force of black speculative vision.” Such a Visionary that you think he’d have Rhettmatic on the cuts.

Nas’s song—a song that mines the riches of Kurtis Blow’s “If I Ruled the World” (1985) and the Delfonics’ “Walk Right Up to the Sun” (1972)—is one of triumphant, if not naive, hope. Jayna Brown, though, doesn’t see utility in hope. “Hope yearns for a future,” she writes. “Instead, we dream in place, in situ, in medias res, in layers, in dimensional frequencies.” Count ELUCID as one such dreamer.

Though he uses the past tense in his verse, intimating that this utopian vision might already be behind us (which would be a tragedy of cosmic proportions), ELUCID is, perhaps, simply looking backward, as Edward Bellamy might say. Tense, as a grammatical structure of time, might be meaningless. ELUCID’s utopia is always-already happening. “Here and now, the past been fucking with me,” he raps on “Empire BLVD.” Jayna Brown feels the same way. Like Nina Simone, Brown is anti-postponement; she opposes the then and there.[11] “I argue for a spatial/temporal fold within the here and now,” she writes. Brown looks to “versions of utopia” that “radically disrupt the very idea of the future.” Or, in woods’ words on “Empire BLVD,” “retrofitted the futures.”

Brown asks that we “tune into an alter-frequency,” one suitable to a time and setting that is—to quote June Tyson—after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?

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STEEL TIPPED DOVE:  

I engineered the vocal recording for a majority of woods’ parts, maybe two or three of ELUCID’s. I think the first one I did was “Landlines.” woods brought that beat through to my spot, recorded over it, and let me in on his plans with Chaz to make the album. [He] slowly but surely would come over with different beats and lay tracks down. Early on I heard of the studio recordings with the instrumentalists and thought that was such a dope idea, but by that point I was already submitting pre-made beats. Eventually woods let me know that not only was Chaz fucking with one of the beats I made but so was Junglepussy, and that had me hyped because she’s an incredible rapper. My beat was samples from Conexion’s “Hello My Friend.” It’s basically the first time I’ve had a sample cleared. Once that beat was chosen, I think woods wrote his part first. Then him and ELUCID came by my spot with Junglepussy. She laid down her part, and then Chaz did his at home or with Green maybe. Then to top it all off, eventually Pierce [Jordan] from Soul Glo got on the song and rounded out the end piece. Oh, and also, Fatboi Sharif has some vocal yells in the part between Junglepussy and ELUCID.

FATBOI SHARIF: 

Me and ELUCID was in Dove’s studio and he just asked me to lay […] a backing vocal. He already had the idea of exactly how he wanted it to sound. I yelled “by the blood.”

MESSIAH MUSIK:

My contribution was pretty minimal having done the last 45-seconds on “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here.” I wish I’d have thrown a few more things against the wall in retrospect. woods and ELUCID hit me with the files from the live sessions, and I made some attempts, but, more than anything, I [was] blown away by the creativity of the other producers and what they were able to bring out. But I was going through files and I think a lot of the stuff I made from the live recordings is better than I thought at the time, probably should’ve shared more just in case.

#.  “THE END” IS A SIX-LETTER STORY

Then he started up the street,—looking, peering, telephoning, ringing alarms; silent, silent all. Was nobody—nobody—he dared not think the thought and hurried on.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet”

Jim, the protagonist of Du Bois’s short story “The Comet,” is a lowly bank messenger. The bank president asks that he “go down into the lower vaults” to organize volumes of old records, a menial task reserved for a Black worker. Dutifully, Jim moves “down to the dark basement beneath; down into the blackness and silence beneath the lowest cavern…he grope[s] in the bowels of the earth, under the world.” As he crosses the threshold from above to below, it’s easy to construe Jim’s journey to the center of the earth as an allegory of underground survival. The subterranean bank vaults are a dingy refuge. As Jim approaches, “the whole black wall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond.” Ironically, as he “step[s] into the fetid slime within,” he saves himself from the apocalyptic comet.

Emerging from the depths, Jim steps into a world that appears to be a world no more. Like KRS-One, we realize Jim “appear[s] everywhere and nowhere at once.” Everywhere, in the sense that thresholds abound. Nowhere, in the sense that he’s an invisible man. Jim is a stranger in a metropolitan village—as he’s always been—but the doors that were once closed to him by virtue of law are now obstructed by corpses: “In the great stone doorway a hundred men and women and children lay crushed and twisted and jammed, forced into the great, gaping doorway like refuse in a can.” Extricating himself from the dead, Jim finds himself, once again, “outside the world—‘nothing!’”

As he runs into a building on 72nd Street, following the “sharp cry” of someone “leaning wildly out an upper window,” Jim’s strange experience grows stranger as he encounters a white woman. He’s crossed another threshold: “At last the heavy door swung back. They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white.” As their lives overlap, a Venn diagram of segregation and integration, Jim considers how this post-apocalyptic world diverges from the catastrophe he was living prior to the comet’s impact. “He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet,” he thinks. Like ELUCID said earlier, Jim is sweating through silk as the white woman “stared at him.” Her silken feet—diaphanous and thin, a mere membrane between above & below, white & black, before & after—evoke the ga[u]ze of their shared, surreal experience. The white woman “had been shut up in [her] darkroom developing pictures of the comet,” sparing her life, and that eerie location where colors transform and images appear out of nowhere through the application of ectoplasmic chemicals—hydroquinone, acetic acid, phenidone—feels more than appropriate. The flexible unreliability of time & memory, indeed.

Together, Jim and the white woman venture out into the earth-grave. “In and out among the dead they slipped and quivered,” Du Bois writes, and with such slipstream strangeness, the sky might as well be styling a supermoon.

#. 

The production on WBDTS emits a “weird radiance that suffuse[s] the darkening world and [makes] almost a minor music,” to return to Du Bois once more. The cadre of accomplished sonic engineers, led by the spectral efforts of JPEGMafia, create an organized noize like an infinite TR-808 clang-a-langing, shaking dungeon walls. I’m left feeling doped up, woozy and brain-numb on narkidrine, the drug used during Quail’s procedure. Willie Green plugs and patches like Johnny Greenwood on the modular synth circa 2000—filenames like Kid A, Kid B, Kid C, etc. and an array of amnesiacs—configuring cyborg brain-stems and plant stems in a merciless hybrid of technology and ecology. Voices “echoed and re-echoed weirdly,” like Jim’s shouts within the bank vaults.

#.  

AUGUST FANON:

There is a kind of duality that comes with intently trying to create a certain mood or feeling as a sample-based hip-hop producer in that you are constantly at the mercy of the sample (for better, or for worse). Of course once you learn records, hone in on your sound(s), and sharpen your ear, you can begin to craft beats with a certain mood more readily. I think more aptly I search out for different moods and feelings with intent, but at the same time I’m mindful of staying open to be inspired by a wide sonic range, if for nothing else than the records, mp3s, video, etc. I’m going through will vary wildly from day to day. I'm constantly sending woods and ELUCID beats with the intent that they will make a song out of it, whether for a specific album in mind or not. Over the years, as various projects of theirs individually or as a group have come up, they might prompt me (email/text) like “August, I’m working on a new solo album, it’s called XYZ.” So I then know that whatever I’m sending over might end up on the record. But since 2017 I’ve been sending them music non-stop. At first, I used to highly curate what I sent over. Then I remember for a spell over the pandemic I was just sending them everything coming out of my machine. But I’d say the last two years I’ve been back to just sending woods and ELUCID very specific beats. They never specify what they're looking for. I think I saw a tweet from ELUCID one time before I Told Bessie came out and he was saying something about how his next album was going to be “loud.” So in my head I was like, “Okay! LOUD. Boom.” But really, in my head I have a clear conception of what woods, ELUCID, or Armand Hammer sound like as a group and what I can do as a producer to help bring that out.

#.

MESSIAH MUSIK:

I don’t think I typically approach the creative process with an intent to evoke a particular emotion, but a lot of my beats are melancholic. Sometimes I will challenge myself to do things more uptempo or aggressive sounding. I know that my best ones are very emotive whether there was intention behind that or not. As far as communication, there is a lot of trust there. [Armand Hammer and I] have been working long enough that I can’t help but hear their voices in most of what I create. I have like 200 potential Armand Hammer beats on my hard drive ready to go at all times and I’m not shy to send them unsolicited.

#.  PUSH BUTTON OBJECTS

As a Black man, ELUCID—like Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1967)—announces himself as in “total fusion with the world.” Total. Furthermore, his Blackness is not a curse but a result of the fact his “skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia.” In Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), Jayna Brown explains that Sun Ra offers an “alternative ontology,” and ELUCID has inherited the schematics. On “Total Recall,” ELUCID serenades: If you push that button, yo’ ass gotta go. He lifts-off from terra firma by lifting the line from Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” (1984). ELUCID arkestrates his own exodus. He presses all the right buttons, but he walks the “left-hand path, / Rocking haint block blue.” ELUCID distinguishes himself from Aleister Crowley, though. He’s more of a celestial Sun Ra descendent than a dour Crowley acolyte. More of a golden disk than a Golden Dawn. More sequined purple stars on a lamé-evoking fabric than a leopard pelt.[12] Buttons are constantly pressed, jammed, or smashed on WBDTS. Pressed buttons don’t always achieve desired results, though.

#. 

“Giz wetwa wum-wum wamp,” the phone mumbled. 

Total Recall, the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi film from 1990, is based on the Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (which has a clear We Buy Diabetic Test Strips ring to it). It’s a story about convincing yourself something happened even if it didn’t, or did. Douglas Quail wants to visit Mars. He approaches “REKAL, INCORPORATED” and “walk[s] through the dazzling polychromatic shimmer of the doorway.” He tells the receptionist he’s there “to see about a Rekal course.” She corrects his pronunciation: “Not ‘rekal’ but recall.”[13] McClane, the senior Rekal doctor, accepts Quail’s money and “press[es] a button on his desk.” McClane and company proceed to program an artificial memory—an “extra-factual memory”—on Quail’s behalf. Rekal, Inc provides Quail with “[o]dd bits which made no intrinsic sense” but could be “woven into the warp and woof of [his] imaginary trip” to Mars, including a “wire tapping coil.” Forget shuffling, the mortal and copper coil keeps coiling. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” gets close to what Mark Twain explored in “Mental Telegraphy” (1891), namely, the “phrenophone.” Twain’s mind-phone wasn’t intended to connect individuals to experiences they desired through manufactured memory but rather to establish the “rapport between two minds.” Twain believed “the telegraph and telephone [were] going to become too slow and wordy for our needs.” He saw the limits of telecommunications and speculated where we might move next—“a finer and subtler form of electricity,” the type of galvanic musical breakthroughs the WBDTS players experienced in their sessions.

#.

KENNY SEGAL:

Since WBDTS was being made as we were finishing up Maps, I was actually talking to woods almost every day at the time. [woods and ELUCID] gave me one of the live sessions and said to sample that. I made three beats with it, two of which appear on “Total Recall.” They chose the main beat to write a song too, but then I was like, “This [other beat] sounds dope as an intro.” I definitely try to communicate a vibe or emotion with a beat. Sometimes it’s very intentional, but other times it’s totally intuitive. Depends on my mindstate at the time, I guess.

#.  TELEPHONOPHOBIA

Respond as you would to the telephone, for the call of the telephone is incessant and unremitting. When you hang up, it does not disappear but goes into remission.

—Ronell’s “User’s Manual”

Jim and Julia (the white woman) run around the city looking for signs of life. Jim suggests they try the central telephone exchange. Desperation overcomes Julia: “[She] leaped to the door and tore at it, with bleeding fingers, until it swung wide.” She settles at the apparatus before her in all its erotic grandeur:

The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in cryptic, sphinxlike immobility. She seated herself on a stool and donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves.

It’s difficult not to view the switchboard as some kind of miscegenation machine, what with its personified qualities (the mouthpiece, metallic face, pimpled) and death mask visage.

Julia calls out hello in “low tones”: “She was calling to the world. The world must answer. Would the world answer?” She gets no response. “At indicated times,” Ronell writes, “schizophrenia lights up, jamming the switchboard, fracturing a latent semantics with multiple calls. You will become sensitive to the switching on and off of interjected voices.” For Jim and Julia, though, only their voices are heard, echoing back. “What was that whirring?” Julia asks. “Surely—no—was it the click of a receiver?”:

She bent close, she moved the pegs in the holes, and called and called, until her voice rose almost to a shriek, and her heart hammered. It was as if she had heard the last flicker of creation, and the evil was silence. Her voice dropped to a sob. She sat stupidly staring into the black and sarcastic mouthpiece, and the thought came again. Hope lay dead within her.

No one responds. Their message goes unreceived. The phone keeps on ringing. Death, the leveler!, Jim mutters. And the revealer, Julia whispers.

#.

It’s strange to be calling yourself.

—Betty Elms, Mulholland Drive (2001)

The switchboard should usher in hope for communication, for connectivity—but it doesn’t. For Jim and Julia, the switchboard proves a terminus, as it does for woods on “Switchboard.” “I can’t see it yet,” he says, opacity wherever his eyes settle, “but something’s coming.” wøods is full of fear and trembling, his stomach in dredknotz. Seeking comfort, he “slept buried in her shoulder blades [with] one hand on her stomach.” Buried keeps us on the other side of those cemetery gates but contrasts with the pregnancy implied by resting his “hand on her stomach.” woods makes mention of men “pregnant with death” on “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” and the paradoxical phrase works perfect for someone feeling their mortality tested postpartum. I watch him grow, wondering how long I got to live. 

The threshold between drowsy sleep and stirring to wake seems to be where more than a few woods verses writhe and wiggle of late. On “Switchboard,” he “wake[s] running” with a “scream wedged in [his] windpipe.” Let him clear his throat as he meanders somewhere between Oedipal arousal and he Ed Lover dance in GIF form, endlessly looping to DJ Mark the 45 King’s “The 900 Number.” His mind’s not right. He “fell asleep trying to write and woke to the beat bludgeoned.” Violence in the sheets—shoulder blades, bludgeoned beats—tossing and turning in the graveyard grass. He feels the noise of the beat “in [his] teeth like electric current circuits circling”—the harsh c’s, r’s, and t’s hurting, grating on the nerves repeatedly, seeing as how circ- means “around,” forming a “ring”: ring, ring ring (ha ha hey). As such, woods brings it back around with “circling buzzards,” which rasp like buzzers—a network crash, an interference—as they plunge beak and talons into carcasses. It’s awful, offal.

woods looks at his phone and sees “missed calls from [his] own number”—we’ve slipped again. Sleeping woods smothers his face in a surrealistic pillow and embarks on an embryonic journey. Logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. The men on the chessboard on the cover of Liquid Swords get up and tell him where to go: “ a long hallway” and into “the room where you identify your mother.” woods shifts to the second-person now, because there is a second person: you. We’re with him in the dream, the nightmare, the morgue with the mother-corpse. You dispel her naked and expired image by supplanting it with your partner; you “go back home to your lover.” Hysterical in the truest sense—a womb-suffering (maybe this is what ELUCID meant by womb-pit)—ranting and repeating: How many times can you tell her that you love her? Questions don’t have answers. “Why the cellar door open when it wasn’t?” Well, nothing’s happening as it should. Thresholds open and close at random. Gusts of wind and ghosts. Dog at the front door barking at the air. The phonaesthetic pleasures of cellar door don’t sooth but scare. It’s probably a trap.

woods returns to nature to find peace. He “rake[s] leaves in the evening [and] smoke[s] a little weed in the back of the trees where they can’t see in.” They being whoever has infected his brain with devils. He obstructs their vision, but he’s seeing his own “breath leaving.” His “fingers freezing” in this cold spot. If only he had a ululometer![14] woods tries to be practical, sensical, attributing the temperature to climate change (I swear there used to be different seasons), but then he hears a chuckling voice say, You’re pretending to be grieving. The stability and serenity he seeks outside is disrupted just as it was on “Landlines.” There he fantasized of buying a home where he could “sit on the stoop” and listen to the “night breeze catch the trees.” Struggling to articulate it, “feeling some type of way,” he envisioned his “family under one roof” but heads back inside when he “hear[s] ’em start to shoot.” Tragedy’s never far off.

#.  YOU GOTS TO CHILL

From a timeworn copy of Death Rituals and DIY Burials, a zine cut-and-pasted together by one “India” in July 2000, I know of “The Wheel of Death,” an inked image coupled with a quotation from Chuang-tzu: Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. In Toni Morrison’s foreward to The Harlem Book of the Dead, a collection of funeral portraits by renowned Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, we learn that funeral rituals in early 20th-century Harlem were “parallel[ed] with those of the ancient necropolis of Egypt. They are in the continuum of those on the Nile of four thousand years ago.” The gods of today (jeez, they must be crazy), Morrison explains, “have replaced Osiris” (the style wild bastardized). She continues:

Death is the moment called quittin’ time, when we freeze in place like tomb figures or ancient wall paintings or photographs on a mantelpiece in Harlem. Family and friends witness the moment when the preacher sings out the life of the deceased, hoping to distract Satan or Anubis, with his great scale, from weighing the bad deeds against the goods.

“Laid a feather on a scale and ripped my heart out—weigh it up,” ELUCID spits on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”. woods’ “Switchboard” verse is as disquieting as these Van Der Zee funeral portraits. Ectoplasmic visions aren’t a prerequisite, though; we can get the chills from a disembodied voice. woods is chillin’; Chaz is chillin’—what more can I say?

#.  STONE TAPE THEORY

...telepathy, and even clairvoyance, are not inconceivable in this day of the wireless telephone, the proved existence of those mysterious rapid vibrations of the ether of which, as yet, we know tantalizingly little… 

—Fremont Rider, Are the Dead Alive? (1909)

The quartz crystals in your iPhone attract ghastly presences, so of course woods was ready on “FaceTime”: “My evil eye ward off hex, though—FaceTime declined.” Listening to WBDTS (and I do assume you’re listening closely) is, in large part, like listening to EVP (electronic voice phenomena). As amateur paranormal investigators, we lend ears to any unorthodox frequency or outré fragment—glitches in the matrix. On “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory,” ELUCID calls back to “Old Magic”[15] to activate a “double portion of protection”—a Blackness guarded by Pan-Africanist parades and black-mirrored screens encased in OtterBoxes. Diasporic problems and dial-toned. What doesn’t kill you makes you Blacker.

“Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die” is a system update for Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959). “One can’t be cut off perpetually,” Dame Lettie Colston says in Spark’s novel. “One must be on the phone. But I confess, I’m feeling the strain…. I never know if one is going to hear that distressing sentence.” The sentence that’s communicated to Dame Lettie through the receiver? Remember you must die. The message is delivered by a sort of voice of God—not so much a telephone (though the timbre of God’s voice does seem to travel from a great distance) as a theo-phone.

We normalize phone usage until our technology turns on us. A telephone rings and we used to come running. Before the advent of caller ID, we had no idea whose voice would be on the other end. Techno-spiritualism would have us believe voices from the dead screech and squeal through. Fallen copper wires drape over tombstones and our cobwebbed ears hear them sizzle. woods’ verse on “Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die” feels mediumistic—a knack for channeling staticky transmissions, learned from ELUCID. He links “fresh wounds and old scars” and works a graveyard shift.

#.

“You can’t stop the prophet,” ELUCID raps on “The Key is Under the Mat,” echoing Jeru. Surely as the sun rises in the east, it sets in the west. But ELUCID feels “a stranger at home,” dissociated, lost. He says we “don’t know [his] name,” and when we geolocate him, he’s not at Hoyt and Schermerhorn at three on the dot, but some otherwhere—some otherground, as Open Mike Eagle says—a stranger in the village. Jimmy Baldwin comes through that door, and speaks of the antipathy experienced by a Black wanderer, of being called “le sale negre,” accused “of stealing wood.” ELUCID “snatch[es] embers to hold in [his] pocket, / Soot on [his] fingers.” He feels the hostile eyes on him, as if he snatched a purse—what Baldwin called eyes with “paranoiac malevolence.” ELUCID’s European vacation…

In a manner we’ve grown accustomed to as listeners, woods travels through time and space in the span of a single verse. In a matter of measures, he teleports from the Valley of Death where he walks “in the shadow,” to sailing on the seas of antiquity where he hears a “passionate siren song,” to the mountaintop with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in his headphones, to the far reaches of our solar system, to “gaseous planets [and] ice giants,” and it all culminates in a crash-landing “back to Earth.” He’s ostensibly everywhere but always in-between—Jerusalem and Jericho, Italy and Sicily, exosphere and outer space. He achieves this because he knows “the key is under the mat,” granting him access, and offering it to us as well. From the humble confines of an apartment rental—a fleeting habitation in one’s life, as ephemeral as “that security deposit [that] ain’t comin’ back”—opens its door, widens its threshold, to harbor “excavated artifacts” housed in a humble “hall closet, boxed and stacked.” The scope moves from incommodious to quantum and back again. It’s a liminal slinking where both better angels and “demons lurk”—it’s strait gangsta.

#.

Truth is blurry on a cracked screen when we travel through thresholds. Sources once thought reliable crackle and hiss. Authenticity looks awkward. ELUCID’s “xeroxed visas” raise concerns. The haze that hovers over “CIA scams” and “revolutionary plans” settles onto woods’ face like a ski mask. Deceivers and cheats and the “not-so-secret police visit  your home.” Escape routes re-route. “Exit door at the club from nowhere,” ELUCID explains, “way out in nowhere.” Thanks for the help. I’m “out here in the pixels” with him. Is it okay, or is it over? Julia looked at Jim and “realize[d] she was alone in the world with a stranger…a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable.” For all his efforts to save a white woman, the still-spinning world threatens to lynch him. “There’s no comfort in fact sometimes,” ELUCID says on “When It Doesn’t Start With a Kiss.” “True story,” woods says in the same song before relating an account of how he “forgot four zips in the laundry.” And, I suppose, we should believe him (he did say true story, did he not?) considering how he was “sweating” and “fearful,” so much so, apparently, that he rhymes laundry with laundry, sacrificing any razzle-dazzle rhyming in favor of veracity. Meanwhile, AZ literally launders money—ironing and clotheslining bills upon bills—in his safehouse. “I have both memory-tracks grafted inside my head,” Quail tells his wife, “one is real and one isn’t but I can’t tell which is which.” Did he go to Mars or not? Is WBDTS a companion piece to Neptune Frost—yes or no? woods “toss[es] ricin in USPS for the excitements” and the Feds intercept the package. “Name your opps without saying ‘the System,’” ELUCID tells us, because “specificity matters.” woods already told us on “Black Sunlight” that he finds our “politics absurd.” Never mind the nebulous, bumper-sticker, lawn sign resistance signaling. Translate the scrambled messages, is what I mean. (What do I mean?) “I mean, I mean…amen,” ELUCID sayeth, elusively. 

#.

Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop…. Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.

—Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (1949)

Certainty is a circle—I don’t believe you. ELUCID handles hecklers who would dare to call him Judas. A circle isn’t certainty—that’s the paradox. Nothing ends. No one gets closure. The form might more closely resemble “overlapping Venn diagrams overlapping.” The “translator[’s] unsure,” as woods said on “Venn Diagrams” from WHT LBL. Take “good fortune as an ominous sign.” Will the circle be unbroken? By and by; bye-bye. “Seasons passed,” ELUCID raps, but “cyphers never completed.”[16] This is where ELUCID dwells. Manning the “Switchboard,” he “thought [he] knew but not for certain.” The face behind the mask. “She say she saw my other face when I’m inside her,” he says, but that’s he-say, she-say, which may as well be hearsay (or even a heresy). We find ourselves in the midst of a tryst. “I looked around, wiping my saliva,” ELUCID raps, documenting every infinitesimal detail. We must’ve dialed *69 on accident. “Who’s that peeking through my eye-slit showing up unannounced?” he wonders. It’s us that wandered in. The “eye-slit” shows the breakthrough of a barrier. We’ve crossed the threshold. We’re there with him. What do we say when he splits himself and sees us? Which side are we on?

What the artists mean and what they don’t does and doesn’t matter. Yes, woods insists his “record speak[s] for itself” and we shouldn’t “try to add on,” and yet Reddit posters, YouTube commenters, and Genius annotators alike have at it, albeit haphazardly and half-assedly. As the rep grows bigger, the fan impulse to own the artist—and the artist’s meaning—increases. In a New York Times piece about his 2020 novel Telephone, Percival Everett eagerly defers responsibility to his audience: 

I’m interested not in the authority of the artist, but the authority of the reader. I certainly know that many people will not see what I saw. And many people will see different things from each other…. If somebody says, “Did you mean this something?” I always say, “Yes.”

Bodies block the threshold. Lies are repeated until taken as truth. Access is granted but then reneged. Like a game of “telephone,” meaning is misconstrued. These are the ill communications within Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. I keep calling. Did this mean something—anything?

Footnotes:

[1]  Meant also in a Claudia Rankine sense of Citizen (2014).

[2]  Ronell is an NYU professor and academic who has been scrutinized for her sexual harassment of a doctoral student—and though the university conducted a confidential investigation, leaks of emails and voice messages leave a damning trail of impropriety.

[3]  I don't like people playin’ on my phone, see also: Chappelle's Show, “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong”.

[4]  The phone works both ways, as antagonists often say, and so ELUCID credits woods, who corrects and credits Gary Grice, who cleared the sample from Lone Wolf and Cub. So ELUCID is woods is ELUCID is GZA is woods is ELUCID, if I have my equation correct, which I likely do not. The “Root Farm” is rhizomatic.

[5]  Like “post-rap,” what does “post-pandemic” even mean?

[6]  Sampled by Armand Hammer on “Robert Moses” from Haram.

[7]  Even ELUCID’s Dunks are “second-hand,” so he’s not on that white like Othello, as Frank Ocean sings. “All you want is Nikes,” sure, “but the real ones. / Just like you, just like me.” Not an imitation, a pattern repeated, reproduced into replica.

[8]  It’s strange—disorienting even—hearing “apéritif” in a rap song, a word that I came across in countless French existentialist novels I read as a young man. Now I’ll be waiting for woods to drop “pince-nez” into a verse so I can also experience the callback to all those Russian novels.

[9]  On “Total Recall,” woods shows an example of the bedtime routine gone awry: “My bedtime stories had the kids crying before they got tucked in, / But fuck it—the night dark and full of terrors, / Might fuck around and say ‘Suge Knight’ three times in the mirror.” The threshold between dreams and nightmares has never been thinner, narrower. ELUCID’s got his own bedtime struggles. “Put that baby bitch to bed,” he says, rocking the Ferber Method till the end. Both men, fathers of infants and frequent crossers of time zones, know wake and sleep as porous states of existence. So even after ELUCID “whispers [a] bedtime story [and] lullaby,” he curses the child: “You fuckin’ with my head.” He “can’t feel [his] legs,” stares over at the dresser were Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep rests, and laughs quietly.

[10]  On “Black Garlic,” ELUCID told us—repeatedly—that legalese is designed to overwhelm you. woods seems to chime in during his “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here” verse when he declares “legalese is abolished.” He’s happy (the Happiest African?) to inform us that the contracts now read “like fucking Archie comics.”

[11]  On “Switchboard,” ELUCID adds to the disorientation by saying, “This, that, and the other time.”

[12]  For other insights into ELUCID’s magick incantations, peep DOCUMENT xi, Section 31 of A Manual of Exorcism.

[13]  Not niggardly, but niggardly.

[14] A ululometer, in the words of its inventor Hereward Carrington: “an intensely sensitive coil of 3,000 finely tuned copper wires which may be set up in a room believed to be haunted, and connected by wires with a receiving apparatus in another room, where the observer listens through telephone receivers."

[15]  Yes, I’ve referenced this quote twice, intentionally. Twice the first time, let’s say, like Saul Williams.

[16]  Hip-hop orthography, please.

############################################

Images:

The Psychedelic Experience album cover, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, Broadside Records, 1966 (detail) | “1-800-COLLECT” television commercial, 1996 (screenshot) | De La Soul, “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” music video, dir. Mark Romanek, 1991 (screenshot) | Julia Cortazár, The Blow-Up and Other Stories, cover, 1968 (detail) | The Firm, “Phone Tap” music video, dir. Nick Quested, 1997 (screenshot) | WHAS-11 news report (screenshot) | We Buy Diabetic Test Strips billboard in Hollywood, CA. Photographer unknown | “Six Labyrinths,” Joe Tilson (1976) | “Trauma Mic” music video, dir. Henry Nelson & Tim Blake Nelson, 2023 (screenshot) | Uncommon Nasa, New York Telephone cassette album cover (2014) | “Various brands of glucose test strips.” New England Journal of Medicine. Appearing in The New York Times. January 14, 2019. “The Strange Marketplace for Diabetes Test Strips.” | Separation of a mixture of two harmonic oscillators and Gaussian noise. | Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney, 1972 (screenshot) | Modular synthesizer. Photographer unknown. | Mulholland Drive, dir. David Lynch, 2001 (screenshot) | "Untitled" by James Van Der Zee. From The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978) | Memento Mori, Muriel Spark, first edition book jacket (1959). | The Firm, “Phone Tap” music video, dir. Nick Quested, 1997 (screenshot) | The Psychedelic Experience album cover, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, Broadside Records, 1966 (detail)

[dweemeister]

November 15, 2023

By Jonathan Mahler, James B. Stewart, and Benjamin Mullin

(The New York Times Magazine) — It was April 2022, and David Zaslav had just closed the deal of a lifetime. From the helm of his relatively small and unglamorous cable company, Discovery, he had taken control of a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that included perhaps the most storied movie studio on the planet, Warner Brothers. The longtime New Yorker had always loved movies, and against the advice of several media peers, he had moved to Hollywood and taken over Jack Warner’s historic office, hauling the old mogul’s desk out of storage and topping it off with an old-time handset telephone. So far things were going great. He had met all the stars and players, was widely feted as the next in line to save the eternally struggling industry and was well into the process of renovating a landmark house in Beverly Hills. “You’re the dog that caught the bus,” the billionaire octogenarian cable pioneer John Malone, one of Discovery’s largest shareholders, told him. All he needed to do now was pay back the $56 billion in debt that he piled onto the new company to make the deal happen.

Money is never just lying around Hollywood, and the town was still reeling from the pandemic. But that was OK. Zaslav had set a “synergy target” — cost cuts, essentially — of $3 billion in the next two years, and now, with the clock ticking, he got to work. To help, he had brought along his chief financial officer from Discovery, an amateur pilot and former McKinsey consultant named Gunnar Wiedenfels. As spring turned to summer, they laid off hundreds of workers, shuttered or reorganized divisions and suspended or canceled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of programming. Anything we don’t think is awesome, Zaslav told executives, stop production right now. Turn the cameras off.

Cuts are the norm after a merger, but Zaslav and Wiedenfels were pushing things hard, and in sometimes unorthodox directions. By shelving several nearly completed projects — including the animated, direct-to-streaming movie “Scoob!: Holiday Haunt,” and the fourth season of the postapocalyptic TV series “Snowpiercer” — they saved millions in postproduction and marketing costs, as well as residuals down the line, and they locked in hefty tax breaks up front. Like so much of what happened in Hollywood, all this was reminiscent of a Hollywood production — in this case, the beloved 1967 Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers.” There, the producers, Max Bialystock and Leopold Bloom, realized that under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than a hit. For Zaslav and Wiedenfels, the money would come from making sure that no one would get to see the shows in the first place.

Then they came for “Batgirl.” The big-ticket streaming project had just finished filming in Scotland when Zaslav took over, and he and Wiedenfels had immediately identified it as a target — a “free ball,” as Zaslav described it to several colleagues. The audience test scores for a very early cut were not encouraging. Still, a number of executives warned him not to shelve it. “Batgirl” was a $90 million entry in a multibillion-dollar universe of movies and television shows based on DC Comics. Michael Keaton was reprising his role as Batman, and sequels were already in the works. Plenty of movies had tested poorly but still earned millions. Killing an all-but-completed movie would alienate the people Zaslav — or at least Hollywood — needed most: the people who made the movies. It was to no avail. On Aug. 2, the word came down: “Batgirl” was dead.

As predicted, the backlash was immediate and emotional. Stunned, the film’s up-and-coming directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, tried to look at their footage, but their access to the production server was denied. The head of the DC unit, Walter Hamada, who was not consulted on the decision, asked to be released from his contract and would leave before the end of the year. Courtenay Valenti, one of the most respected development executives at Warner Brothers, was equally devastated and would be gone in a matter of weeks, ending a 33-year run at the studio. The news dominated the Hollywood trades for days. Under fire, Zaslav defended the decision in an earnings call with analysts, saying he shelved “Batgirl” to protect the DC brand. More quietly, Zaslav also sought cover in the authority of Bryan Lourd, the powerful co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency and a leading arbiter of Hollywood mores. As Zaslav told it to several associates, Lourd had supported the decision, observing that it wasn’t in the interest of C.A.A. clients, like the film’s star, Leslie Grace, to be associated with a bad movie. But a C.A.A. spokeswoman denied that. “Bryan Lourd was not consulted in advance of the studio’s move to cancel ‘Batgirl,’” she said.

At Discovery, producers referred to having their budgets slashed as “getting Gunnared,” and Wiedenfels maintains a hard-boiled, McKinsey-esque attitude toward the bottom line. “It’s hard work,” he says. “You don’t make friends.” Zaslav, a born salesman who would prefer to make friends, is more reflective. “You do sometimes get bloodied,” he said in a wide-ranging interview at Warner Brothers Discovery’s corporate headquarters in New York. But business is business. “We have made unpopular decisions because they were necessary.”

That joke about selling to Saudi Arabia in the end. Just... no.

[mariacallous]

Thousands of ads on Facebook and Instagram have promoted “fuel filters” using videos demonstrating how they can be easily modified into gun silencers—a process that, without federal approval, could lead to felony charges. Despite Meta’s policies banning ads for silencers on the company’s social networks, the promotions have persisted for years, driven by a what appears to be a single network of more than 100 Facebook pages marketing “fuel filters” that can be easily turned into gun silencers, WIRED has found. The devices sell for as little as $50.

Silencers, also known as suppressors, are heavily regulated under United States federal law. Purchasing one legally requires submitting fingerprints, passing a background check, and paying a fee to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Federal law allows people to build their own suppressors, provided they register the device with the ATF. But the ads don’t mention this key stipulation, marketing silencers to buyers who may not understand the legal risks.

“You know those things that are definitely not suppressors, even though they look just like suppressors,” a man says in a video that appears in many of the ads. “Well, but they’re still not suppressors, because they don’t have a hole in the other end. So, you can legally own one without going through the paperwork to own a suppressor, because it isn’t one.”

The ads often recycle the same text, referencing “light and durable air-grade aluminum,” and use videos stitched together from a handful of YouTube clips featuring firearms influencers and enthusiasts. The original creators of these videos are likely unaware their content is being used; one tells WIRED they had deleted the footage from YouTube years ago.

One ad features a suppressor engraved with the words Black Collar Arms. A co-owner of Black Collar Arms, who goes by Jeremy McSorely, tells WIRED his company has no connection to the ad. McSorely explains that the footage was taken from a blog and YouTube video he had uploaded years ago but has since removed. “The photos you saw were screenshots taken from my video,” he says, emphasizing that the suppressor was legally manufactured and engraved with their corporate information to comply with ATF regulations.

In November 2023, the ATF warned federal firearms licensees about marketing silencers as “solvent traps,” or contraptions purportedly used to collect gun oil and residue during cleaning. The agency clarified that legality depends on functionality, not what you call a product, and stressed that even incomplete parts intended for silencers are regulated under federal law.

“The test for whether an item is a silencer is not the label a manufacturer or retailer applies. Rather, it is the way the statute written by Congress applies to the item,” the ATF wrote, referring to definitions of suppressors in the Gun Control Act and the National Firearms Act.

A WIRED analysis of more than 2,800 ads revealed they are linked to a network of hundreds of ecommerce websites. These sites often reuse code, share IP addresses, and peddle the same low-quality knockoff products alongside the “fuel filters.” At least one of the sites was flagged by Google as a likely phishing scam.

Experts believe the operation is based in China and relies on a drop-shipping scheme. “It’s likely just a reshipper selling controversial or illegal products,” says Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Silent Push who specializes in online data ecosystems.

Typically, Edwards explains, drop-shippers wait for a customer to place an order, then purchase the item from inexpensive online retailers, repackage it, and ship it to the customers. Edwards says that the operator behind the network is likely creating hundreds of websites, applying a moderate markup to the products, and spinning up Facebook pages to promote their items. “Even if some sites or ads get caught and taken down, others keep running,” Edwards says. “It’s a spray-and-pray method.”

Meta explicitly bans ads promoting weapons, silencers, and related modifications. According to Meta, ads are reviewed by an automated system with support from human moderators. However, enforcement has been inconsistent: While at least 74 of the ad campaigns in our analysis were removed for violating the platforms’ terms, the rest appeared to have run successfully.

After WIRED reached out to Meta, the company said that it removed the ads and associated advertising accounts. However, a quick search of Meta’s Ad Library revealed that nearly identical ones have since been published.

“Bad actors constantly evolve their tactics to avoid enforcement, which is why we continue to invest in tools and technology to help identify and remove prohibited content,” Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts wrote in a statement.

Roberts says that many of the ads flagged by WIRED had little to no engagement, suggesting few people ever saw this content. However, at least two ads reviewed by WIRED had thousands of comments, including accusations that it was an ATF honeypot, complaints from self-identified buyers whose products never arrived, and even testimonials from others claiming the item worked as advertised. WIRED reached out to several commenters who said they had purchased the product—none responded.

The ads have also drawn the attention of US Department of Defense officials. An internal presentation to Pentagon staff, viewed by WIRED, claims that the targeted ad for a fuel filter had been served to US military personnel on a government computer at the Pentagon. The presentation, which a source says was delivered to high-ranking general officers, including the US Army’s chief information officer, raised flags over how social media algorithms are being used to target service members.

Meta’s Ad Library provides limited transparency, leaving it unclear exactly how these ads are targeted. Researchers suggest that Meta’s powerful ad tools, which allow advertisers to find niche audiences using granular targeting options, could be exploited to reach gun enthusiasts or military personnel. While Roberts confirmed that Meta did not detect any indication that these ads were targeting the military, WIRED found that advertisers can easily target users who list their job title as “US Army” or “military” on their profiles—an audience that Meta estimates includes up to 46,134 people.

Meta’s platforms have long struggled to prevent the sale of firearms and related products. An October 2024 joint report by the Tech Transparency Project found that more than 230 ads for rifles and ghost guns had run on Facebook and Instagram in nearly three months. Many of these ads directed buyers to third-party platforms like Telegram to complete transactions. In 2024, two Los Angeles County men were charged with operating an “unlicensed firearm dealing business” that used Instagram accounts to advertise and market the sale of more than 60 firearms, which included some untraceable ghost guns and weapons with scratched-off serial numbers. Both individuals have since pleaded guilty.

Silencers are rarely used in crimes, but their use is on the rise—nearly 5 million are registered in the United States, up from 1.3 million in 2017. Last month, 26-year-old software engineer Luigi Mangione allegedly used a 3D-printed gun equipped with a silencer to fatally shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan.