J Simpson
Verified- Music Journalist and Critical Theorist, Freelance
- Music Journalist and Critical Theorist, Spectrum Culture
Portland
As seen in:
Spectrum Culture,
Medium,
DEV Community,
Letterboxd,
NewsBreak,
PopMatters,
Journal of Food Protection,
Nordic APIs,
Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice & Research,
NightTide,
startmenu
Covers:
critical theory, horror literature, witch house, horror cinema, techno, album reviews, music news, literature, philosophy, hip hop, experimental music, occult, 20th century art history, hauntology, noise, mixtapes, musique concrete
writing about:
🎵🎥📚 @spectrumculture @freqzine @popmatters
💻: @nordicapis
💘💘💘/ @TheMysticWood
open for collaboration
j.forestpunk@gmail.com
Articles by J Simpson
Review | Orbitals - Short, Sweet and Built for Two — startmenu
Orbitals is an absolute visual treat. That’s the main thing I keep thinking about in the days since playing through it in one sitting. There is some kind of magic happening here, with the game perfectly capturing the feeling of an old anime that you’d randomly catch an episode or two of while staying up too late. The first time I moved my character after the opening cutscene, I couldn’t stop smiling because watching the way everything moves and animates is just such a joy.
Concert Review: Acid Mothers Temple
Polaris Hall, Portland, OR 10/6/2026 Hindsight has flattened psychedelic rock into a caricature of either “incense and peppermints”-style sunshine pop schmaltz or the loose, noodly amalgam of Americana favored by jam bands like the Grateful Dead.
The Story of Your Life: by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
“Most of us are accustomed to the notion that social platforms are built for the maximization of profit, and that our idle moments of scrolling are ruled by algorithms that serve this market,” writes Kathryn Jezer-Morton in “Born to Post,” the chapter discussing her own fraught history with social media that kicks off The Story of Your Life.
Guide to the OWASP LLM Top 10
Large language models (LLMs) have become mainstream. Recent estimates suggest there are over 1.1 billion ChatGPT users. LLMs and AI agents have become a part of every aspect of our lives, from writing emails to coding and everything in between. Yet, this scenario is a cybersecurity incident waiting to happen. Many developers aren’t used to treating LLMs as part of their official stack, so they fall outside official cybersecurity systems.
Various Artists: A Strange Light from the East – Eastern Influenced Western Music 1965-72
Starting in the mid-’60s, Western music – particularly music from England and the United States – adopted a new kind of Orientalism, turning their collective faces to the East in search of wisdom, understanding and new musical kicks.
Toyah: Revelations: B-Sides & Rarities
Revelations: B-Sides & Rarities is more than just a curiosity for Toyah Wilcox obsessives. It’s also a time-lapsed capsule, offering listeners not lucky enough to be tuned into artful, gothy, late ’70s weirdness a chance to hear the underappreciated British singer/songwriter’s evolution from glam rocker to post-punk prophetess to art-pop visionary over the course of the first half of the 1980s.
Planetary Assault Systems: Planetary People
Techno albums tend to fall into two main camps. The first is albums that are as conceptual as any latter-day Beatles or Pink Floyd record. The second is simply a bag of bangers. Whichever you prefer will depend on the intent of its use. Headphone warriors and living room levitationists tend to get off on the conceptual bits, letting the immersive worldbuilding and immaculate sound design carry them away into imaginary landscapes.
6 Ways Traditional API Design Has Changed Forever
For over two decades, API design and architecture remained remarkably consistent. Perhaps it’s the outsized influence of Roy Fielding’s RESTful dissertation, but API designers have stuck to the principles of stateless architecture, resource-based endpoints, and HTTP commands to an impressive degree. That’s all starting to change, now that we’ve radically recontextualized the way we use APIs. This doesn’t mean traditional API design is obsolete.
Thinking Like A Naturalist: An Interview with Claire Barrett
Ahead of Nordic APIs Summit 2026, we catch up with speaker Claire Barrett on the mindset shift needed for adopting AI-enabled strategies. “Imagine driving around an old town,” responds Claire Barrett when asked to describe what it means to be AI-ready from an integration perspective. “Imagine a European city that’s been inhabited for thousands of years, and they’ve built roads and sewers and buildings all on top of each other. Parts of it are suitable for pedestrians to go up and down steps.
The Fall: Cerebral Caustic (2026 Expanded Edition)
Cherry Red’s Fall boxsets tend to be rather divisive, but this new 5CD deluxe boxset of 1995’s Cerebral Caustic is more divisive than most. At their best, they give casual listeners a chance to check out a significant album from Salford’s finest, plus all the associated rarities and extras, for a reasonable price. Considering the cost and the sound quality, why wouldn’t you buy the version that gives you the Peel Sessions AND a sweet concert?
Discography: Sonic Youth: NYC Ghosts & Flowers
In 2011, German artist Edgar Leciejewski debuted “nyc ghosts and flowers,” a series of found photographs collected from Google Street View during a six-month stay in New York in 2010, which were then blurred and distorted, transforming their subjects into something between a suspect on Cops and a department store mannequin. It’s a clear-eyed, blurry-faced picture of the Big Apple a city meant to serve real estate, not people.
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri: Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun
With its album cover featuring a shiny sky blue vase acting as a cerulean remix of the terra cotta sculpture of their first collaboration, it feels impossible to not consider the second collaboration between ambient titans Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri as a commentary on 2024’s Impossibly distant, impossibly close.
Jean-Claude Eloy: Gaku-No-Michi
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” While this is always true, it’s especially true for Jean-Claude Eloy’s monumental Gaku-No-Michi, a staggering electroacoustic work designed to be different every time it’s performed.
10 Tips for Preparing APIs for Agentic Access
In May 2026, Cloudflare released a new tool called isitagentready.com. It analyzes a URL for everything an agentic AI would need to interact with a site and then returns a score out of 100. Even better still, it breaks down its assessment by category, letting you know how your site performs for discoverability, accessibility from agents, authentication, and so on.
Rudimentary Peni: The E.P.’s of R.P.
Rudimentary Peni are to punk rock what early Metallica are to thrash, lacing the electricity and primal aggression of hard, fast, loud rock ‘n’ roll with a pall of menace, madness and cosmic horror.
Fila Brazillia: Old Codes New Chaos
Fila Brazillia’s first album is very much a product of its time. Released in 1994, it exists in the intersection of chill-out room and rave, delivering a sprawling tapestry of rolling beats and bounce-house pianos, all stitched together with some consciousness-expanding vocal samples.
How Fuzz Testing for APIs Is Evolving
Ahead of Nordic APIs Summit 2026, we check in with speaker Andrea Arcuri on how fuzz testing for APIs is evolving. “You cannot really check security properties if all your HTTP calls fail with a 4xx because your techniques can’t generate the right test data to pass the first layer of input validation,” answers Andrea Arcuri when asked where he sees fuzz testing going in the next year.
10 DIRECTORS WHO WOULD MAKE THIS NEW A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET MOVIE COOL
By Sharai Bohannon Wes Craven was my first favorite director and is probably at least partially to blame for why I think horror is that girl. As a Craven kid, I was watching Petty Freddy on the TV back when I was still in daycare. Which is why I believe we should leave Elm Street alone, and I want Hollywood to stop circling this IP. We’ve seen a lot of bad things happen to this franchise, and Uncle Wes isn’t here to reset it again as he did with New Nightmare.
BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE: GIFTS AND DEALS WITH THE DEVIL
By Emma Cole The Gift (2000) dir. Sam Raimi/Lakeshore Entertainment and Alphaville Films I think if you ask a lot of people about their favorite horror films from the late 1990s/early 2000s, you’ll probably get a mix of slasher fans who love Scream and the like, and people who are into the bombastic monster action movies like Blade or Deep Blue Sea. But the movies I have gone back to recently from that time period are predecessors to the elevated horror that permeates the genre now.
MUBI FEST CHICAGO WAS THE LAST STOP FOR THIS LEG OF SLEEPAWAY CAMP: THE MIDNIGHT MASS EXPERIENCE’S TOUR
By Sharai Bohannon Mubi Fest Chicago brought some familiar icons to the Music Box Theater on opening night when Sleepaway Camp: The Midnight Mass Experience rolled into town for a late-night engagement. The tour brought together Midnight Mass podcast hosts Peaches Christ and Michael Varrati with the star of Sleepaway Camp, Felissa Rose. The late-night event served as the final stop on this leg of the tour, and the Chicago audience gave them a very Chicago welcome.
Discography: Sonic Youth: SYR1: Anagrama/ SYR2: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom/ SYR3: Invitio Al Cielo
It could be argued that no artist has done more to popularize the avant-garde than Sonic Youth, and not just because they championed Nirvana. They cut their teeth in Glenn Branca’s 100 electric guitar noise orchestras, for one thing, emerging from the No Wave to somehow, inexplicably become genuine pop stars. They got their start touring with uncompromising, non-commercial artists like Swans before going on to namecheck Madonna and cover Robert Palmer, as Ciccone Youth, and open for Neil Young.
Various Artists: Armagideon Time: When Punk Went Dub 1978 – 1984
“Dub and punk were, on the surface, an unlikely pairing,” writes Jah Wobble, the bass architect of John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols art terrorists Public Image Ltd, in the liner notes to Armagideon Time. “One was rooted in the Jamaican sound system tradition, steeped in bass weight and spiritual space, the other was a howl of urban rage, three chords and a sneer.
THE BACKROOMS AND THE MALIGNANT ARCHITECTURE OF MODERNITY REVISION
By J. Simpson Kane Parson’’s Backrooms functions as a layered critique of late modernity, which is perhaps one of the reasons for its mass crossover appeal. On its surface, the backrooms function like any other labyrinth, in horror or otherwise, complete with its own minotaur.
Various Artists: Digging Your Scene: New Pop and All That Jazz 1982 – 1987
The greasy ’80s pop of Scritti Politti’s “Rock-a-Boy Blue,” a slinky lite-reggae number toward the top of Digging Your Scene doesn’t sound much like what we think of as jazz in 2026. Of course, Everything but the Girl’s “Night and Day,” which channels Billie Holiday by way of Astrud Gilberto, doesn’t sound much like contemporary pop, either.
Rediscover: Nurse with Wound: Soliloquy For Lilith
Soliloquy For Lilith (1988) is an anomaly even in a discography as eclectic and unpredictable as Nurse with Wound. Sonically, the album’s mesmerizing, hypnotic longform drones couldn’t sound further removed from the brutalist bricolage of Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), with its hard, fast and loose cut-and-paste aesthetic.
The Owl Service: Always We Are Destroyed
It’s hard to understand the concept of “wyrd” in our increasingly secular and materialist world, one of rugged individualism and absolute freedom. Neoliberalism promises us that we can be anything we want, that we’ll be free from the consequences as long as our bottom line supports it. Our way of looking at the world is subtly colored by this chaotic, unstable untruth, creating post-hoc generalizations to justify our reasoning and let ourselves off the hook.
5 Signs That Authenticated API Traffic Is Actually Malicious
A recent report from Salt Security published a truly alarming statistic. According to the report, 95% of API attacks come from authenticated sources. This should raise alarms for anyone who knows anything about cybersecurity, as it means API attacks are seemingly real transactions. These attacks won’t even be noticed by average cybersecurity systems, as, for all intents and purposes, it’s legitimate traffic. Luckily, all hope is not lost.
Grateful Dead: Fillmore Auditorium, July 3, 1966, San Francisco, CA
The first full Grateful Dead concert recording shows a band in transition. In many respects, this is the Dead just starting out. They’d only been playing under their name for a few months after transitioning away from the witchy The Warlocks.
Resequence: Dead Can Dance: Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Even without “The Host of Seraphim” being used as the soundtrack for cosmic doom and unfathomable grief in Frank Darabont’s The Mist, irrevocably tying their music to iconic film moments of shock and awe, Dead Can Dance could be described as “cinematic.” A penchant for ancient musics and traditional instruments — often from outside the Western tradition — makes Dead Can Dance sound like they’re scoring some classical epic, which singer and composer Lisa Gerrard would later do on Ridley...
Concert Review: Have A Nice Life
Wonder Ballroom, Portland, ORJ 7/10/2026 Those who only know Have a Nice Life by reputation might think that their live shows are miserabilist affairs, with the crowd doing their best Death of Marat impression, scrawling haikus in their own blood while low-key headbanging to dismal beats.
Guide to the OWASP MCP Top 10
With over 10,000 active servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads, Model Context Protocol (MCP) is by far the most popular agentic protocol currently on the market. While this is good news for developers who don’t want to write custom integrations for tools and third-party apps in their stack, MCP’s widespread adoption should be a cause for slight alarm for cybersecurity teams. Many cybersecurity teams still aren’t in the habit of thinking of their agents as part of their systems.
Assa’d Khoury: Electronic Touches Belly Dance
Assa’d Khoury’s second and final record has an almost mythical status among Arabic record collectors. Originally copies of the 1978 landmark LP are scarce, making the Syrian musician’s unique blend of microtonal Farfisa, fuzz guitars and Middle Eastern percussion a holy grail for crate diggers and psych hounds for decades.
Quicksilver Messenger Service: Who Do You Love? The Recordings 1967-1972
Listening to Who Do You Love? The Recordings 1967-1972 — a mammoth new compilation of virtually every recording made by Quicksilver Messenger Service between the years of 1967 and 1972 — is a bit like watching a slow motion video of Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.
Discography: Sonic Youth: Sister/Master-Dik EP
Dense, hyper-literate and cacophonous, Sister is hardly what you’d expect from a crossover, breakout record. In the context of Sonic Youth’s discography, it’s downright accessible, though, forming a bridge between the itchy, introverted No Wave pigfuck of their first three proper LPs and 1989’s Daydream Nation, the band’s first true noise-pop masterpiece.
The 5 Most Disastrous API Vulnerabilities
We tend to hear a lot about API vulnerabilities, between the OWASP Top 10 API Security Vulnerabilities and CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog. 42Crunch also recently published research on the most common API vulnerabilities, highlighting broken authentication, broken authorization, and misconfigurations as widespread issues.
6 Tips For Managing Multiple APIs
The number of APIs has been increasing year-over-year, as they’re the infrastructure that makes the majority of modern digital architecture possible. Given that everything from AI to SaaS involves APIs at their core, it’s not the greatest shock that 78% of organizations don’t even know how many APIs they manage. A report from F5 finds that large companies manage an average of 1,400 APIs, with some having as many as 10,000. Even smaller companies can have as many as 200.
Poppy Ackroyd: Liminal
A lot of life can happen when nothing’s going on. As the years tick by, landmarks become less regular. Highs become less vaulted. Lows become less abyssal. There’s a reason that posting to social media is mostly a younger person’s game. It’s not that less becomes less exciting or moving, it’s just less flashy.
Russell Haswell: Let It Go
From its very start, electronic dance music has ordered chaos into structure, transmuting the bricolage and raw materials of modernity into pummeling, shuddering, levitating sculptures of foundry beats and breadboard melodies like some sort of sorcerer’s apprentice in the scrap heap of history.
Bergsonist: Depths
On last year’s ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ on BizaarBazaar, Selwa Abd — the Moroccan-born mastermind behind Bergsonist — employed a mixture of Moroccan field recordings, mechanical beats and primitive synths to create an immersive, kaleidoscopic sound to connect with her roots among the Amazigh people, an indigenous North African tribe.
Holy Hell! Harmony in Ultraviolet Turns 20
Harmony in Ultraviolet is hardly background listening. Despite Pitchfork naming Tim Hecker’s fourth LP the ninth best Ambient album of all time, it’s not meant as aural wallpaper intended for self-optimizing for the demands of late-stage capitalism.
MCP vs. CLI: Which Is Better for Agentic AI?
In February 2026, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, told Lex Fridman that the best tool for agentic AI has been on their desktop for 50 years. According to him, the simple command line interface (CLI) is the ideal tool for working with today’s non-deterministic technologies. The modular architecture of AI, LLMs, and agents require thinking outside of the monolith.
Crucible: by John Sayles
How does a novel tell the story of a city during a particular era, especially one with larger-than-life figures like Henry Ford, Joe Louis and Diego Rivera during two of the most tumultuous decades in recorded history? How do you connect the dots between headlines offering birds’ eye views of major historical events with the day-to-day life of ordinary people, especially when they live in a city as complicated as Detroit, Michigan?
Why Token Handling Must Evolve for AI Agents
Between August 9 and August 17, 2025, malicious actors were able to export data from over 700 organizations. To make matters worse, the breach, referred to as UNC6395, was caused by insecure tokens leaked by a third-party app called Salesloft. As a representative from Google put it in a statement, “After the data was exfiltrated, the actor searched through the data to look for secrets that could be potentially used to compromise victim environments.
Anatomy of a Tracklist: DJ Shadow: Endtroducing
Structured like a DJ mix, with one track flowing into one another like rivers into the ocean, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine Endtroducing in any order other than the one Mo’ Wax etched into vinyl in 1996. It’s also one of the most famous, influential instrumental hip-hop albums of all time, meaning its rhythms and structures are carved deep into the bones of headnodders and cratediggers.
6 Ways to Give AI Agents Deterministic API Context
At PayPalDevDay 2025, PayPal’s Nathaniel Olson discussed a familiar problem. When he asked an AI coding assistant to build a product involving APIs, it was far too common for the AI to use outdated APIs rather than the most current iterations. It’s not that the official documentation or SDKs weren’t up-to-date, it’s the fact that the AI agent never checked them in the first place. Despite all appearances to the contrary, AI isn’t really a reasoning machine.
10 Tips for Securing Your API Keys From AI
In February 2026, nearly 3,000 Google API keys were accidentally exposed. Data breaches are always damaging, but a data breach due to an authenticated, active API key can be catastrophic. An active API key allows actors to access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account, as noted by cybersecurity researcher Joe Leon.
A Guide to 5 Agent Payment Protocols
Analysts are predicting that the digital economy is growing at three times the rate of national GDPs, driven largely by AI in various ways. Some speculators think AI-enhanced workplaces could generate nearly USD $4.91 trillion by 2026. With that kind of money involved, it’s no surprise that a whole new financial ecosystem is emerging around AI.
Variant: The Setting Sun
Ambient techno comes in two forms. The first features steady, propulsive kick drums and mechanical disco hi-hats that are slathered in surface noise and field recordings. The second leans into the ambient, sounding more like one of those Environments CDs you’d listen to at a kiosk if you’re old enough to remember when malls existed; the sound of crashing waves or hissing cicadas occasionally interrupted by the steady thumpthumpthump heartbeat of a subtle beat.
JSON-RPC vs. REST: When Should API Developers Use Each?
In 2020, software engineer Ivan Velichko published an article titled “API Developers Never REST,” detailing the rise of alternate design strategies that have emerged since Roy Fielding published his dissertation in 2000. Yes, the title is a jokey hook designed to snag eyeballs and attention, but like all good humor, there’s a kernel of truth to it. Much has changed since Fielding first recommended creating a series of static assets that can be modified using a handful of verbs.
The Fall: Fall Heads Roll (2026 Expanded Edition)
On their 11th deluxe box set of The Fall reissues, Cherry Red Records – in partnership with Narnack – may have finally released an absolutely essential Fall box set. Don’t get us wrong: every single lavishly-annotated, thoughtfully-curated multi-disc extravaganza has been an absolute blast, especially for those already hooked on Prestwich’s finest.
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