I’m happy to announce the release of a new EP: First You’re Tickling the Dragon’s Tail, Next You’re Eating Its Ass, the second installment in what I’m now formally calling the PROMPT CRITICAL series.

This project extends themes I first explored in 2017 with What Time Does the Shock Arrive at the Top of the Pipe? That EP drew on Dr. Robert Brownlee’s accounts of post-Manhattan Project research, and the original song “Melt Glass” explored matter fused during nuclear detonations.

For this release, I recomposed two existing songs — “Underground” by El Guapo and “Kinky Afro” by Happy Mondays — alongside an original composition addressing nuclear accidents and criticality events. Since 2017, the “demon core” and Louis Slotin’s “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail” experiments have become internet phenomena through YouTube and TikTok coverage, which motivated putting this collection together during the winter Omicron surge in New York.

I intend to continue the PROMPT CRITICAL series. I’m quite proud of this one.

PROMPT CRITICAL album artwork generated with CLIP

The artwork was generated using OpenAI’s CLIP model.