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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 224! Creativity’s First Foot...
Good Morning reflective and future making becomings,
This week is a week where the team at Emergent Futures Lab really slows down. It’s the last week of the Gregorian year.
It’s been a special week where, in some places, Santa has been quite creative.
Now, we – and hopefully you as well – can put our feet up, let our hair down, shake our rears, raise our glasses, hang with friends, family, and strangers – and put our foot into the new year (as they do in Glasgow).
We are ready for the rain, fog, snow, wind, and storms outside. And welcoming the warmth of sweaters, fires, longjohns, and whomever shows up indoors. This week, our creative experiments are mainly in cooking and conversation (until the new year arrives – then it is a moment for the banging of pots and pans door to door!)
It is also a chance to read into the pile of books that has grown over the year, listen to music closely, experiment with tools, enjoy the football, and perhaps watch a few films.
This week, as we wander into these terrains of music, tools, and movies ourselves, we are offering some fun, unique, and interesting suggestions for you to fold into your end of the Gregorian Year.
Each of us is contributing one suggestion:
Afrobeat is a West African musical genre the Nigerian Fela Kuti co-created: a dense fusion of Nigerian and Ghanaian highlife, Yoruba rhythms, jazz, funk, soul, and Afro-Cuban influences. It’s built on long, hypnotic grooves: intersecting polyrhythms in the drums and guitars, big horn sections, call-and-response vocals, and songs that often stretch 20-30 minutes.
You hear it, you dance.
What made Afrobeat radically innovative wasn’t just the co-merging of genres, it was the way it re-imagined what a song could be and what it was for. Harmonically, the music leans into tightly interlocking riffs instead of verse–chorus hooks, creating a continuous field where rhythm and textures shift. Lyrically, Fela used these extended frameworks as platforms for blistering, often satirical political critique of Nigerian military rule, corruption, and everyday injustices, turning the dance floor into a site of collective analysis and resistance.
Fela was a practitioner of blocking. He refused the basic conventions of the music industry. Where radio demanded three-minute, hook-driven songs, he wrote long epics: tracks that open with a slow-build instrumental environment before the vocals ever arrive. He sets you up slowly, then hits you hard.
Too long, too political, and too structurally unconventional for standard airplay.
Often, he refused to even perform songs live once he’d recorded them, constantly introducing new material instead of touring the hits. He had no interest in a fixed catalogue. He systematically said no to the ready-made formats, radio length, and greatest-hits repetition, in order to open a space of potential where different musical and political practices could emerge.
Afrobeat emerges from this beautiful, diverse, dense transversal thicket: Yoruba rhythms braided with American jazz, funk, soul, and Afro-Cuban currents that take him from Lagos to London, then Los Angeles, and finally back to Lagos. The podcast series Fela Kuti: Fear No Man traces how this assemblage comes into being, not as an idea in his head, but as a long, uneven process of making, doing, encountering, and being re-shaped by new worlds he encounters.
This podcast is less about Fela the man, and more about the ecosystem that co-shaped a music.
He starts in Lagos in the 1950s, inside highlife bands and street sounds; then London, where he studies classical music at Trinity College, sneaking out to Jazz clubs for late-night jam sessions, absorbing Miles Davis, Coltrane, and the grammar of improvisation. In 1969 he lands in Los Angeles, stumbles into James Brown’s funk, and, crucially, into the orbit of Black Power activists like Sandra Izsadore, who hands him Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Fanon, and a new political vocabulary.
By the time something called Afrobeat appears, it’s not Fela expressing a spontaneous creation, it’s the movement across the thicket of Lagos–London–Los Angeles; highlife–classical–jazz–funk; Yoruba drumming; cheap amplifiers; long night jams; comrades, lovers, and organizers; military repression and collective resistance—all sedimented into a new sonic and political practice.
Fela also understood that words are tools for making new meaning and shifting configurations. He deliberately sings in Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba, inventing and popularizing charged neologisms—Zombie, Yellow Fever, Arrangee, Ajebutter, Ajepako. In the song Zombie he takes a B-movie figure, a mindless animated body, and turns it into a cutting metaphor for soldiers trained to obey without thought, a single word that compresses a whole critique of militarized, mechanical life. With Beast of No Nation, he lifts and twists the racist language used by apartheid leaders and other elites, flipping “beast” and “no nation” back onto the global network of dictators, generals, and their enablers; the title itself becomes a small machine that exposes inhumanity.
This is why Fela’s story, and the larger story of Afrobeat music, matters. It makes visible how creativity lives in transversal thickets: dynamic movements of people, tools, geographies, and practices. Throughout the podcast, one can sense how Fela is not a singular musical genius, he is one part of a larger relational field that he helps co-create.
Warning: spontaneous dancing will occur.
Most sound apps promise solutions. Better focus. Deeper sleep. Reduced anxiety. They ask what problem you're facing, then deliver scientifically calibrated frequencies designed to optimize your brain state.
Apps like Endel and Brain.fm understand the science--sound frequencies (measured in hertz) influence brainwave patterns, nervous systems, cellular processes. But they're sterile. Disconnected from the world of sound. They reduce listening to neurological intervention. Sound as a tool for individual productivity enhancement.
MyNoise offers something different. Not background noise designed to optimize your brain, but a world of sound that fills your being. The MyNoise platform models what we mean by creative ecosystems--each element has its own agency and trajectory. Collaborators contribute to and evolve the system. The listener isn't consuming but participating. Constraint (the sliders, the blocking, the animation parameters) enables listeners rather than restricts possibilities.
Each soundscape has 10 adjustable parameters affording the opportunity to block a windchime or follow a waterfall. MyNoise is a world of sound whose matter of sound is co-emergent--a sonic world calibrated to your ongoing becoming.
I came to understand this through constraint. For years, I listened to Beethoven's Complete Symphonies while working--all nine, conducted by Josef Krips and the London Symphony Orchestra. Then I discovered Brian Eno's Reflections. The album is made up of one song that runs for 65 minutes. He turned this song into an app that regenerated itself based on the season. Each version slightly different. Playing on an infinite loop. The album never ended--it was always becoming. And I was becoming with it.
Then came the bell.
Somewhere in Reflections, there's a bell tone. My good friend and colleague (whose name I won't mention but begins with an I and ends with an N) would play Terry Reily’s In C with bell chimes as his classes would form. That bell sound is now forever lodged in my listening. The bell in Reflections became prominent. Insistent. Unavoidable (as all bells everywhere have).
I could no longer hear the album.
What had been an endless ambient field collapsed into a single recurring element that pulled me out of concentration rather than supporting it.
This constraint--this bell I could not unhear--disclosed something I hadn't recognized: I needed agency over the soundscape itself. Not control, exactly. But the capacity to participate in shaping what emerged. MyNoise offered me this.
Each soundscape comes with ten sliders. In the Japanese Garden, I could block the windchime entirely while following the waterfall and bamboo leaves. The bell in Eno's Reflections had shown me that what I needed wasn't a perfect composition--it was a sound ecosystem I could co-emerge with. Adjusting and attuning as my own patterns shifted.
What makes MyNoise ecological rather than problem-solving is how it's built.
The platform is curated by Stéphane Pigeon, a sound engineer with a Ph.D. in applied sciences. But he's not architecting solutions from an office--he's out in the world. Recording waterfalls, haunted houses, and cicadas. Creatures and calls. Winds and waves. Whispers and chants. Footsteps and instruments. And much, much more.
He's doing. Making. Experimenting. Testing with sound.
He's a component in a larger ecosystem of sound creators, field recordings, technologies, speeds, community-generated soundscapes, and listeners who save and share their own custom MyNoise combinations on his website. This is distributed authorship. Collaborative worldmaking--not lone genius sound design.
Each soundscape on MyNoise presents ten sliders. Each one a different element. The Japanese Garden includes: waterfall, wind, bamboo leaves, garden tone, birds, uguisu bird, water stream, shishi-odoshi (the traditional bamboo water feature), cicadas, and windchime.
You can block any element entirely or amplify it.
Don't want windchimes? Slide it to zero. Want the waterfall prominent with just occasional bird calls? Adjust accordingly.
Each component has agency--the bird doesn't disappear when blocked; it remains as potential. Ready to return when you follow it back up the slider scale.
The MyNoise world provides the conditions for attunement. The platform calibrates to your hearing. You can adjust according to your environment. Your unfolding needs in real-time. You can save any combination of sliders you create. You can select various animation settings which afford an ever-changing soundscape--each keeps difference alive without overwhelming.
The "Feeling Lucky" randomizer surrenders control entirely. Letting the system surprise you with combinations you wouldn't choose. An emergent property. One can follow what the constraint discloses rather than imposing predetermined solutions.
Each soundscape comes with preset "scenes"--invitations rather than prescriptions.
The Japanese Garden offers Shishi-Odoshi (waterfall prominent), Bamboo Garden (wind privileged), Distant Waterfall, Japanese Summer (featuring birds and cicadas), Quietude (occasional windchime behind running water), Lonely Bird, Wildlife.
These aren't prescriptive solutions but starting points for your own experimentation. Click through them. Notice what each configuration affords. Then adjust. The sliders are continuous variables, not on/off binaries--you're working with degrees and intensities, not fixed states.
Every soundscape includes a write-up explaining the elements used--how they're helpful, the motivation behind creating them, what they're good for: sleep, focus, meditation, relaxation, noise blocking, tinnitus, and more. Stéphane describes what propensities each sound might afford without prescribing what you should do with them.
The platform operates on donations--$20 for the app on iPhone or Android. As little as $10 donation for the website access (there are vast free options there too) gives you lifetime access to everything: all curated soundscapes, internet radio streams, magic generators, community-created sounds. No subscriptions. No premium tiers. No algorithmic upselling.
This is commons-based making, not extractive capitalism.
Stéphane funds field recording expeditions through patron support. Traveling to capture local environments--specificity of place matters. As he captures waterfalls, gardens, forests, buildings, et al. The sounds carry the particularity of their emergence. The platform description notes: "Sampling sessions abroad are only possible thanks to the generosity of patrons like you."
This isn't a transaction--it's participation in an ongoing practice of worldmaking of which listeners and donors contribute.
The animation feature is an exemplary model of what we mean by keeping difference alive. When you set a soundscape to animate, the sliders move dynamically--bringing forward or sending backward any of the ten variables as you listen. The animations range from Zen (slow, light changes) to Subtle (fast enough to notice dynamics rising and falling) to Moderate (pronounced changes) to Allegro (each slider moving at different speeds) to Wobbler (approaching chaos).
I prefer Zen because the others dynamically change the sounds to the point where I'm focusing on the sound rather than what I'm doing. But this preference itself is contextual--sometimes you want the Wobbler's chaos. Sometimes you need Zen's gentle unfolding.
The platform includes Magic Generators that let you mix and shape sounds between Brown noise (low frequencies) and Pink noise (balanced frequencies) and White noise (high frequencies)--but these technical descriptions matter less than what emerges when you experiment. Brown to Pink isn't the science behind the sounds; it's the range of possibilities the constraint enables.
You're not optimizing frequency distributions for cognitive performance--you're following what each configuration affords in relation to your current state, your environment, your unfolding practice. I made a short video demonstrating how the sliders, presets, and animation features work in practice--watch here.
Since March 2018, MyNoise has lived on my phone's home screen. It remains there not because it optimizes my productivity, but because it offers a portal into creative engagement with sound. An ecosystem where blocking creates space for following. Where constraint enables emergence. Where difference stays alive through ongoing attunement rather than predetermined design.
Sound apps are ubiquitous. But MyNoise isn't solving the problem of focus--it's offering participation in a world of sounds. The sliders aren't preference settings--they're enabling constraints that let you co-emerge with sound rather than consume it. The animations aren't ambient variations--they're temporal processes that keep novelty alive. The community-created soundscapes aren't user-generated content--they're distributed worldmaking. The donation model isn't pricing strategy--it's commons-based practice.
When Iain's bell made Eno's Reflections unlistenable, I didn't need a better algorithm or a more scientifically optimized frequency distribution. I needed what MyNoise offered: agency distributed across an ecosystem. Constraint as creative enabler. Sound as ongoing worldmaking rather than fixed product. That's what emergence feels like when you're participating in it rather than optimizing it.
I have been engaged for quite some time with the question of how worlds meet. There is much to say about this that is critical to developing new approaches to how we can make a world in which other worlds can exist – and yet others can be possible. But that is for another time (it will be the topic of a newsletter series in the spring of 2026).
For this newsletter, I have chosen to share one of the most astonishing movies I have been fortunate enough to have seen. This is The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. It is by Zacharias Kunuk, and Norman Cohn (2006).
Zacharias Kunuk is most famous for another film, The Fast Runner. He is part of the Isuma collective whose mission is “to produce independent, community-based media aimed to preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language; to create jobs and economic development in Igloolik and Nunavut; and to tell authentic Inuit stories to Inuit and non-Inuit audiences worldwide”.
They have supported and produced many great movies, which can be found on their website – a whole brilliant alternative universe to the frustrations of the big streaming platforms. We encourage you to check out their astonishing work and also the vast range of materials that accompanies each film. A few of the many standout movies:
The film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, is set essentially one hundred years ago in what is now Nunavut.
“After completing “Atanarjuat The Fast Runner”, which was set in the mythological past – in a community whose balance of life had not changed for 4,000 years, we chose to depict a series of events that took place in 1922, when Shamanism was replaced by Christianity – and the balance of life was changed forever… I was inspired to make the film for a first audience that is Inuit: elders who are still alive and young people looking for a future beyond boredom, unemployment, and suicide. It tries to answer two questions that haunted me my whole life: Who were we? And what happened to us?”
The movie is based on the Journals of Knut Rasmussen, a Greenlandic Arctic traveller (1879-1933), who ventured across the high Arctic from Greenland to Siberia in the 1920’s in what was called The Fifth Thule Expedition. In the Journals, Rasmussen documents worlds meeting – Inuit Shamanism and Christianity with great detail and an ethnographic sense of care. But as Lee Maracle describes in an exceptional essay that accompanies the movie, the movie makes a critical inversion of who and how the stories of worlds meeting are told:
“The story was conjured for the Inuit, not for Rasmussen, and that makes it one of the most singularly powerful and important films for Indigenous people throughout the world. We need to be able to see through our own eyes what happened, and we need to chart the journey through our familial experience, so that we can see how we are to be a people again, not a trail of broken treaties, not an oppressed group of struggling nations, but a people believing in what we see and know, creating life from what we believe and building communities from our creativity. We need to know that this is possible. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is not simply a movie about Rasmussen from an Inuit perspective, but a map through the impact of a historic moment in Inuit history that is and always was an Inuit moment…”
…I don't know the men who made this film, but I can imagine them. I see them as men who come into the world loaded with their own cultural capital, free of the sense of victimization that cripples our communities into a crazy kind of paralysis. I am awed and inspired by the filmmakers who can take a very European document like Rasmussen's journals and create a specifically Inuit film from them that also serves every Indigenous community as it does. I am further awed and inspired that it shows non-Indigenous people exactly how the madness in our world came about. The next time someone asks, 'What happened, why are Aboriginal people so violent?' I will simply say,
'Watch The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.”
Well, as we come to the end of this, the last newsletter of the year – this is where we say both thank you for experimenting and sharing another year with us (we are very grateful that we have this moment together to collectively engage and make meaningful change possible) – and goodbye to the year.
Now we must turn and welcome “whatever comes next” actively and experimentally – and hope that you join us on this adventure of the next year.
We have some big creative plans for the next year (stay tuned for more in late January).
There is, as ever, a great need for our deeply collective, highly engaged, and profoundly experimental creativity. And so we wish you beautiful and noisy hogmanay – and an auspicious ciad-chuairt – till next year – be well and keep difference alive as it arrives – always radically unannounced – on all of our doorsteps
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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