25 May, 2024, Summit of Kazdağları, 1770 meters. 

On a windy day when the clouds embraced me, recording this sound at the summit of Kazdağları is personally very significant to me. It is a mountain that offers me different gifts each time I visit. A mountain that allows me to pause and reflect on my existence, one that matures me. 

I think it's a mountain I will never tire of visiting for the rest of my life.

Birds: Black Redstart

Heavy Mountain Wind, Summit Of Kazdağları, 1770m

Untitled (September Sky)

Lava Love

Banha da Cobra -  Machango (from Lava Love, CREP110, 2025)

cheesy clouds
rusty rain
wonky winds
distorted degrees

artwork: photograph of clouds in the sky.

Soma News Weather Report

About Starlight
Julius Smack engages in a dialogue with a fictional AI assistant to create an album using the prompt, “Make an album that tells the story about the origins of Julius Smack.” Starlight emerges as the imagined response, envisioning a world where beauty and violence intertwine, and memories and dreams are excavated to craft stories.

In a near-future Earth, where artists are among the planet’s last inhabitants, a symbiotic relationship has formed between humans and AI—each relying on the other for nourishment and healing. At the sight of a shooting star, artists mine their memories and dreams with generative AI to produce art, which sustains them but generates toxins that must be expelled upon the next shooting star by creating more art.

To compose Starlight, Julius Smack drew inspiration from all facets of life, with the album’s “dataset” serving as a kind of diary. It weaves together old demos, bookmarked TikTok clips of AI-generated content (such as a deepfake of Biden and Trump singing in Mandarin alongside Kamala Harris’ laughter), 2000s dance music, and ‘90s cyberpunk anime, including Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Everyday experiences also became part of the dataset: learning Yaqui in online classes with fellow diasporic Yaquis, riding the train, walking the dog, and dreaming. These disparate threads coalesce to question AI’s role in creative and labor economies, forming a counterfactual narrative where everything—and nothing—is art.

In 2025, Julius Smack will perform iterations of Starlight across the US, Europe, and Asia. Blending dance, music, theater, and video, the shows center around a painted toilet that acts as an intermediary between ingestion and expulsion.

About Julius Smack
Julius Smack is the musical alias of Peter Hernandez, a Los Angeles-based musician, performer, and director of Practical Records. His work explores intuitive and imaginative landscapes, envisioning new modes of perception and existence. Drawing inspiration from vogue, postmodern dance, Japanese environmental music, and contemporary dance music, he synthesizes these influences into a singular artistic vision rooted in queer and indigenous heritage. With releases on labels such as Leaving Records, Noumenal Loom, Practical Records, and now Constellation Tatsu, Julius Smack’s music resonates across diverse audiences. He has performed at prestigious venues including MOCA Geffen and The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Stavanger Kunsthall in Norway, and Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco.

Credits
Written, produced, and mixed by Julius Smack between Los Angeles and New York, 2024. Additional vocals on “Waiting For The Daylight” and “Green River Water” by Josephine Shetty. AI assistant vocal performance by Anna Luisa Petrisko on “Waiting For The Daylight” and “Starlight”. Mastered by Salz Mastering. Artwork by Danny Espinoza. Layout by Peter Hernandez.

Julius Smack - Green River Water

framea arc - clay council / never there / rules of participation / tarp room

This track was done live with the Volca Sample exclusively. I've opened with this in recent livesets, as well as made it the background music on my website (https://greystarmusic.com)

Waking up to see the world. Works well looped.

It's also up on soundcloud & streaming, as well as released on the X4 Records🥚 compilation: https://x4records.bandcamp.com/album/--6

This track may be later included on an EP.

Wake Up

furies - instrumental

DRYYYY

Ambient soundscapes inspired by the Blade Runner universe. Relax, chillout and enjoy.

NEXUS - THE GRID

Vegetal Negatives is a game of sonic mutations, mimicry, inversions, and association inspired by a text called "On pataphotograms", by the French writer René Daumal – a quasi-metaphysical essay that toys with breaking the conceived separateness of natural forms through poetic imagination. 

The four electroacoustic compositions on the album combine and arrange field recordings, electronic feedback, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, bowl gong and harmonium, textures of detailed acoustic sound, and sustained tones with gentle microtonal beating into a precise musical narrative. She juxtaposes recordings of rooms and empty vessels, natural and artificial climates, spontaneous and staged events. Ahti draws upon Annea Lockwood's ideas about associative movements between sounds based on shared characteristics and sonic energy. Her approach to field recordings is neither diaristic, documentaristic, nor purely acousmatic, but rather it starts out from somewhere in between these notions: the sounds hover between abstraction and the deeply familiar, moving into a realm of poetic metaphor where they are set in relation to each other, fleetingly mirroring or shadow-dancing. Acoustic environments mutate into synthetically derived shadow forms. 

The opening track, "Coastal Inversion”, moves from a seemingly familiar seascape into an ocean of wavelike synthetic staccato patterns, turning itself inside-out on the shore, before diving back into a sea of resonance. ”Rooftop gardens” arranges a series of largely unprocessed field recordings into a dream-logic sequence of upward movement towards the clouds. On the other side, ”Symbiogenesis” brews a slow evolution of wet, airy and earthy sounds and resonant friction. The closing track, ”Chora”, imagines a meditative space of breath: filter resonance posing as organ pipes against a backdrop of breezy industrial hoovers merges halfway with a harmonium improvisation that foregrounds the frictions of the wooden instrument itself, just before filtering out into resonant harmony. 

Releases March 29, 2019 via Hallow Ground 

Marja Ahti: composition, production, field recording, Buchla 200 and ARP 2600 
Recorded at EMS, Stockholm, WORM, Rotterdam, and on locations in Greece, Alaska, Finland and Sweden. 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi 
Designed by Ruth Stofer

Vegetal Negatives

Coastal Inversion

Our aim is to deconstruct, distort and re-assemble the lore of (un)popular music. 

Discrepant: inconsistent; conflicting; at variance [from Latin discrepāns, from discrepāre to differ in sound, from dis-1 + crepāre to be noisy]
Visit us at www.discrepant.net  for more music, releases, video and general discrepancies...