Wind Send by LSZ

"Wind Send" was originally published by the talented Matt Atkins at his Minimal Resource Manipulation imprint in England, on 7th December 2022. It was offered as a digital download and a limited edition CD-R, both of which regretfully included a cover image that was created with so-called artificial intelligence, which has since been revealed to be a massive mistake due to the incredibly problematic nature of these systems.

Initially, as the true damage of these systems became apparent, in their blatant bypassing of consent and theft of any artist's work that has the misfortune of being collected in a search engine's data set, as well as their needless ecological occupations, I felt it would serve some kind of positive purpose, to keep the conversation open, in leaving my small handful of releases that used these designs available. To make no secret of the fact that myself and several other artists I know all flirted with these systems when they were new, not realizing their true nature until, unfortunately, music had been published using them.

After some time passed, however, it became increasingly apparent to me that this idea was untenable - that I no longer wanted to be associated with these images in any way, did not wish for anyone interacting with these albums without my commentary attached to think that I was endorsing these systems - and I myself could no longer listen to or enjoy these recordings without having the experience polluted by their associations with these images. In this way, the reissue of "Wind Send" that you see before you has now at least partially become a protest piece against things like Open AI and all of its clones, and people like Sam Altman and all of his clones.

For its position in this, "Wind Send" sonically remains ambivalent. I built it out of experimenting with two different field recordings of storms that I recorded with a Zoom H1 microphone sitting in the window of my workshop, routing the sound through the complex veins of my modular system, shaping things with all sorts of arcane modulations and signal processors, all very much influenced by Stockhausen - particularly "Gesang der Jünglinge," which had a profound affect on me when I first discovered it.

In the end of the 2024 year, as the publishing anniversary for "Wind Send" approached, I was working on another similarly approached piece of music, "A Chamber for Sifting Vital Nutrients," which itself is one of several extended variations of a shorter piece called "Peeling" that will appear on an anti-fascism compilation at Humanhood Recordings. With both pieces in mind, the decision was made to finally sit down and re-design the album art for "Wind Send," doing it "the old fashioned way" in order to unequivocally refute and disown the mistake I had previously made with the first cover image.

This new image visually resembles the shape of the Stanley R. Mickelson Safeguard Complex in North Dakota - a structure that ought to be familiar to listeners by now for its undeniable influence on all Ziggurat visuals, textures, themes and recording sessions. This structure and its distinct shape have both become an unexpected logo for the Limestone Ziggurat project, and considering the purpose of the building's design, as well as its current occupied state after being abandoned by the American government, it feels appropriate to LSZ's outlook for several different reasons. And so I built this symbol using photographed sections of the hardwood floor in my studio, the room where so much of the Ziggurat canon is recorded, and placed it in a surrealistic landscape of reduced bits, essentially recalling the original intent of the first edition's cover image, but this time building it with the human elements completely restored.

Other revisions have followed this - a Limestone Ziggurat album and a Milieu album issued at Machine Tribe in New York have both been given proper redesigns, as have a small number of albums published here digitally. It has been the right moment to move on from Altman's deceit for a very long time.

While this is all very symbolic as a gesture, I do think it is useful to show and explain, in order to further reinforce the point that I feel is so necessary to make in 2025 - that for my part in the creative conversation, it is more important than perhaps ever before for me to make things "the hard way," using my hands, forcing my brain to learn new processes, programs and machines to more effectively push the boundaries of where my work can possibly exist. In the months and years to come, it will continue to remain crucial to both ask the question and provide the answer, and the progressively increasing time and energy it takes to perform both of those functions will rely entirely on a desire to build things, and not a desire to have the things we wish to imagine in our lives built for us by others.

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