iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 04/10/2026

Unctuous Mixtape Day! Another 10 songs for curious ears. www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

Unctuous Mixtape #11 is here, leading off with Mexico's legendary space-age bachelor-pad composer Juan Garcia Esquivel. Has anyone used his music for a figure skating routine yet? Because it would be perfect.
Also, the Austerity Program with some white-hot Biblical noise, Rolo Tomassi's saddest song, and Cult of Luna + Julie Christmas from the legendary Mariner album; to me, one of the best metal albums in the past 10 years.
Last Crack was a Madison, WI band from the early '90s that Metal Blade pushed real hard, but never caught on. In another universe, they're selling out arenas.
Closing with Einstürzende Neubauten's legendary 15-minute noise epic "Headcleaner". When I saw them play this live, I noticed that all the high guitar parts are played on a low string, pitch-shifted up; and all the low guitar parts are played on a high string, pitch-shifted down. Pretty much the way Neubauten has always approached things.

Tracklist
#
Artist name
Track name
1
Juan Garcia Esquivel
The Breeze and I (Andalucia)
2
Goat
Goathead
3
The Austerity Program
2 Kings 25:1-7
4
Rolo Tomassi
Mutual Ruin
5
Eric Bachmann
Dreaming
6
Last Crack
Energy Mind
7
Nils Frahm
Says
8
Cult Of Luna & Julie Christmas
Chevron
9
Kathryn Calder
Song in CM
10
Einstürzende Neubauten
Headcleaner

Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 27/09/2026

Unctuous Mixtape #10 features a crime against music. I'm not sorry and I will do it again www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

10 mixtapes in, and still all bangers. Nomeansno's opening salvo here grabs me by the lapels in a way that few other songs can. Which is why !
usually wear tshirts. Anyway.
Nisi Period were a band out of Boston, another from my college days. I heard a live tape of theirs once, recorded well after this album came out, where they did this awesome tacet before the chorus, so I took the liberty of editing their recorded version to match. Earlimart checks in with one of my favorite breakup songs; in fact, its opening lines are about as devastating as any opening line to a breakup song I've heard.
Ahh, the cover of "Fratres".
• The version for violin and piano, especially the one performed by Kremer and Jarrett, is 12 minutes of heaven on
earth. This cover is one that, like the Shostakovitch cover a few mixtapes ago, was rattling in my head for years before I picked up a DAW ano started making it real. It came out better than I could have hoped. Once again, I'm sorry and you're welcome.

Tracklist
#
Artist name
Track name

Nomeansno
It's Catching Up
2
Nisi Period
Entropy Happens (Unctuous edit)
3
Zohra
Were Burning
4
The Velveteers
On And On
5
Atarimatt
Commuter
6
Black Math Horseman
Bird Of All Faiths And None/Bell From Madrone
7
Oneohtrix Point Never
Russian Mind
8
Earlimart
Happy Alone
9
The Scaramanga Six
The Towering Inferno
10
Simon O'Connor, Michelle O'Rourke
From the water (Song of Muriel)
11
Arvo Pärt
Fratres (Unctuous cover)

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 26/09/2026

Not just the obvious application of Betteridge's law, but the fact that peer review is actually a critical part of the scientific process means that you can throw any article that mentions that its sensationalist claim "has not been peer reviewed" into the trash.

Headline from the misleadingly-named "Science Magazine": "Can an AI feel pain? It can at least act like it does" Subhed: "Study reignites debate over what, if anything, machines can feel"

Accompanying post: "Can the new cutting-edge AI models feel pain? The at least behave as if they do, according to a recent study. The work, which has not been peer reviewed, has divided AI researchers."

Note the ratio - 193 replies, 204 boosts (including quotes), 21 favs

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 24/09/2026

Got a vintage game out on the table. Primordial Soup, from 1997, originally released in German as Ursuppe. It's a strange game, very fiddly by today's standards and runs a bit long, but the gameplay is otherwise solid.

A typcally horrendus photo from yours truly of the game Primordial Soup in action, with adoraly cartoony amoeba bits.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 23/09/2026

It's from cleaning up all that ferret poop. These two fine gentlemen have me cleaning up after them all day

Freddie and Mojo, Prime Ministers of poop

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 22/09/2026

The "controversial" announcement was announcing @erikaishii.bsky.social in the cast. The typical chuds got performatively pissed. I keep saying: sports broadcasts cut away from streakers and people running onto the field to deprive them of the attention. It's long past time journalism did this too.

Screenshot of Polygon post with link to article with headline: "Double Fine's New Game Project Raises Half a Million Before Hitting Controversy." Subhed: "Amnesia Fortnight burned through stretch goals before a controversial announcement."

Check out the ratio: 3 reposts, 184 quotes, 20 likes, 6 saves.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 20/09/2026

My weekly dose of music is here. Happy Unctuous Mixtape Day! www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

Of all the mixtapes I've made so far, there's something about this one I really love. The journey it goes on is really fun, and especially winding. I heard the Ministry song in this mix before I saw _The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly_, so when I finally got to the end of the film, I was pretty much the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.

We close with a Nine Inch Nails song. Trent Reznor is a musical hero of mine. He's incredible at evocative sounds, sad major chords, and making broken things sound perfect. Someday I'll tell the story of how the opening of "Closer" made me a better musician and sound engineer. No, not the opening drums. Before that.

Anyway, this song's closing, broken loop is a thing of perfection. If Dilla has taught us anything, it's that rhythm has so much more to it than just keeping a beat.

Track listing:

#
Artist name
Track name
1
AK/DK
Feeds
2
Pulp
Seconds
3
Local H
California Songs
4
The Jesus Lizard
Mouth Breather
5
Frankie and the Witch Fingers
Futurephobic
6
Cathal Coughlan
Black River Falls
7
Ministry
You Know What You Are
8
Sarah Kirkland Snider
The River
9
Slung
Ten Points Of Light
10
Microcorps
ZONA ft REGIS
11
Sandy Denny
John The Gun
12
Vines
King of swords
13
Nine Inch Nails
The Background World

020

Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 17/09/2026

omg @rollplusfun.bsky.social @amabel.bsky.social someone made a Sykes-Picot version of this comic back in 2018!

A modified version of the "When the Glove" comic. A cartoon of a cartoonist waking up at 5 am, saying "Just had such a good idea, gotta write this down", except the UK and French flags are overlaid over their face, representing the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, who dispassionately and carelessly carved up the Middle East into arbitrary borders during World War I, and came into effect at the end of the war.

THE NEXT MORNING

The cartoonist sees what they have written down on the paper: the flags of Iraq and Syria. The cartoonist, with the French/UK flags, stares at the paper.

Note the Syrian flag is not the most recent version, but that has more to do with the fact that this meme was made in 2018, and it was the current flag then.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 17/09/2026

Any opportunity to re-post "When the Glove"

Web cartoon of the cartoonist waking up at 5 am, still half-asleep, saying "Just had such a good idea, gotta write it down", and is writing it on a piece of paper.

THE NEXT MORNING

The paper says "When the glove"

The cartoonist stares at the paper.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 13/09/2026

A post-NHRL Unctuous Mixtape! www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

Mixtape #8 is dominated by a couple of longer songs, Katie Gately's epic "Pipes" and my favorite Julius Eastman piece.

A bit about Eastman, if you are (understandably) taken aback by its title. He was a contemporary of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, also working out of NYC. But he was militantly black and gay at that time. As hard as it is now to be either of those things, it was even harder back then, especially for someone like Eastman who wielded his identity publicly, with pride. So the names he gave his pieces tended to be confrontational, and this piece especially so.

Eastman died alone and broke with his music repossessed. I hope that his music can be appreciated by more people. This piece in particular is extraordinary.

Tracklist

#
Artist name
Track name
1
Yvette
Attrition
2
Seun Kuti & Egypt 80
Corporate Public Control Department (C.P.C.D.)
3
Bad Religion
The Handshake
4
Katie Gately
Pipes
5
Hadley Roe
Destination Unknown
6
Julius Eastman
Evil N*****
7
Death Grips
I've Seen Footage
8
Dead Milkmen
Anderson, Walkman, Buttholes and How!

031

Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 12/09/2026

I'm still in disbelief that this is my life now

The NHRL setup in Terminal 5, in full swing. There is a big cage and a small cage. The action is in the small cage here, with the flamethrower bot Clyde lighting things up.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 10/09/2026

At least the requisite Tall People Standing In Front Of Me are dressed appropriately

3 people standing in front of me, 2 in distinctive AdP polka dots. Nothing against them; the venue is too small and general admission policies are dumb

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 08/09/2026

Checking in on the college football which seems to be going great you guys

Skycam footage of the SMU vs. Florida State college football game. The camera angle is at a significant tilt. Where there should be a clock graphic on the screen, we instead see "CLOCK OUTAGE - OFFICIAL TIME ON FIELD". Lots of players, coaches, etc. standing around on the field waiting. It's been like this for a while now.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 07/09/2026

Late posting this because I've been on the road, but today is Unctuous Mixtape day! This one came out really well. www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

Mixtape #7 is a really wild one, contrasting Coil's 12-minute synth masterpiece with hot noise rock from Six Finger Satellite and Laddio Bolocko,XTC's most emotional ballad, and whatever it is that Mr. Bungle does.

In the Barkmarket track, that dropping guitar note after the first chorus isn't a whammy bar. David Sardy actually detunes his guitar right there in the middle of the song and performs the rest of the song in drop-D. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.

The closing track is my favorite alt-pop artist, and I'm not just saying that because I'm friends with them and occasionally pet-sit for their cat Eugene, coolest cat in the world. Listen to how Sarah somehow steps out of the song at its close and sings the final chorus like it's an out-of-
body experience.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 04/09/2026

A great thing about having hipster-level musical taste is going to a show for just the opening band. I was tired, hungry, and there's a lot of work on my plate for next week, so I dipped after that first act. But Earth Tongue, you Kiwi beauts, you were fantastic.

The New Zealand sludge-metal duo Earth Tongue. A woman in a white one-piece playing guitar and singing, with a drummer in a black t-shirt and baseball cap who is also singing.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 02/09/2026

Poor Mojo struggled after we lost her. We got Freddie because we wanted someone young who could match his energy level. It took a few months for Mojo to come out of his shell, but they're thick as thieves now.

Mojo (l) and Freddie, sitting on a sweater, looking cute.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 02/09/2026

Yep, Mojo's family is Marshall, he was born in the lab though. We adopted him a couple of years ago from a shelter with Dottie, who was either his mother or his aunt. Sadly, we lost her to lymphoma last year. Because they're labbies, they looked almost identical. Mojo's the big one on the right.

Dottie (l) and Mojo, lounging with each other on a canvas bag on the floor.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 01/09/2026

And anyway, I've already lived through one "edgy Scrooge" movie, why do I need another

The movie poster for the 1988 film "Scrooged", starring Bill Murray. He's dressed in a tux with a bowtie, manic expression in his face, holding a cigar. A skeleton hand is lighting the cigar with a match. Film tagline: "The spirits will move you in odd and hysterical ways."

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 30/08/2026

Another Unctuous Mixtape! If you like loud music, soft music, loud versions of soft music, music that gets soft and then loud and then soft and loud again, etc etc etc, this is a good thing to put in your ears for an hour. www.mixcloud.com/unctuous_mix...

Mixtape #6 opens with my own rearrangement of Shostakovich's 8th string quartet, 2nd movement, which was bona fide speed metal from
'6Os-era Soviet Union. So why not make it literal? I had it bonking around in my head for like a decade before I realized that I could make it real with virtualized instruments in Logic. As with all my Unctuous adaptations, I'm sorry and you're welcome.

Also featuring Concrete Blonde, who should be more celebrated than they are, especially with Johnette Napolitano's emotionally-raw lyrics and vocals. Liturgy getting more mileage out of 2 chords than most bands get out of 8. For neo-shoegaze fans looking to '90s bands for inspiration, may I present Loop, whose "A Gilded Eternity" is a nearly perfect album.

Yes, that is a Pink Floyd track in there too, because it's my mixtape and I make the rules. And "Sheep" is a fantastically-intense track, with this
amazing studio trick of Roger Waters' wail morphing into Richard Wright's keyboard warble.

020

Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 29/08/2026

I'm not a big fan of cutting to drunk cheering fans, "tarps off", etc. Too much testosterone. But I'll never say no to a good surrender cobra.

A fan of a losing team in the "surrender cobra" pose; hands on top of head, elbows out, face in shock.

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 25/08/2026

As crash-outs go, it's pretty spectacular. Getting big-time Grimes vibes here.

Post from Bluesky coder and AI booster hailey: "what, that I think you shouldn't use that word because its a word that has been very widely been going around being used like the N word? yes, I 100% agree you shouldnt do that"

Post is amassing a notable ratio: 1 repost, 13 quotes, 4 likes, 2 saves

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Gil Hova @gil.hova.net · 25/08/2026

There’s something about the certainty that, in the next day or two, I will briefly feel mild but irritating pain, and that it is pretty much unavoidable