J Simpson

Portland

Music Journalist and Critical Theorist at Freelance

Music Journalist and Critical Theorist at Spectrum Culture

writing about: 🎵🎥📚 @spectrumculture @freqzine @popmatters 💻: @nordicapis 💘💘💘/ @TheMysticWood open for collaboration [email protected]

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Articles

Embers of the Hands: by Eleanor Barraclough

6 days ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

It’s tempting to view history as a series of grand and epic events, full of great men pulling off dashing exploits for gold and glory, all of which can be neatly laid out in neat, tidy timelines. This is particularly true of Scandinavian history, with its emphasis on seafaring, exploration, trading and sometimes conquest. These feats were usually achieved by some larger-than-life hero, embodied in the near-mythic figure of the Viking.
'Cloud Native Data Security with OAuth' Breaks Down Zero-Trust API Design

1 week ago | nordicapis.com | J Simpson

APIs are a double-edged sword in terms of cybersecurity. On one hand, APIs can strengthen cybersecurity by improving monitoring or detecting suspicious behavior, for example. At the same time, APIs are well-known as the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, occasionally enabling data breaches, offering more surface area for cybercriminals to attack, and providing access to unauthorized data and services if an API isn’t designed properly.
Various Artists: Sweet Rebels: The Golden Age of Algerian Pop-Raï

2 weeks ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

WeWantSound’s latest compilation, Sweet Rebels: The Golden Age of Algerian Pop-Rai, is a fascinating journey into a world unknown to far too many North Americans. It captures the beautiful complexity of Raï Music, often referred to simply as raï – a mixture of traditional Algerian folk music, Islamic elements and Bedouin chants at a unique moment in its history.
Inside the Black Box: The Potential of Open-Source AI

3 weeks ago | nordicapis.com | J Simpson

AI is one of the most divisive and highly-contested topics happening in tech at the moment. Tech evangelists tout the admittedly impressive abilities of AI tools like large language models (LLMs) for improving productivity and democratizing skills previously only held by highly-trained specialists. Pessimists focus more on AI’s risks to the global workforce, further consolidating rapidly accelerating income inequality.
ChatGPT vs. DeepSeek: A Side-by-Side Comparison

4 weeks ago | nordicapis.com | J Simpson

In early 2025, the tech world was thrown into a whirlwind with the announcement of DeepSeek, an AI assistant developed by a Chinese startup designed to rival ChatGPT. DeepSeek’s LLM, DeepSeek-V3, generated serious industry buzz by creating a product that can hold its own — and, according to some, even surpasses — ChatGPT at a small fraction of OpenAI’s investment in training their models.
Steve Reich: Collected Works

4 weeks ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

Nonesuch Records’ Steve Reich box set is a monumental work in every conceivable way. With 26 CDs, 1 DVD and two separate booklets, its scope is certainly massive, on the scale of a soaring skyscraper or a national monument. Its contents are every bit as epic, though, serving as a suitable testament to one of the most profound, insightful poets of the modern condition.
Rediscover: Third Eye Foundation: Ghost

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

If you were to rely only on the metadata, you might think Ghost is going to be the smoothest thing in the world. Released in 1997, categorized as both atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass and created by one of shoegaze’s hottest-burning lights, you might expect Third Eye Foundation’s second full-length to sound somewhere between drifty cosmopolitan trip-hop – in the vein of Laika, Hooverphonic or Everything But the Girl – or longform electronic epics like Goldie’s Timeless.
Discography: Brian Eno: Mixing Colours

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

If you’re a fan of Brian Eno – particularly of his ambient works – you may experience an uncanny sense of deja vu during the opening moments of Mixing Colours. Sixteen seconds into “Spring Frost,” a bell-like tone mirrors the first few notes of Ambient 1: Music for Airport‘s opening salvo “1/1” before spinning off into a haze of variations and reverie, all underpinned by an ethereal synth sounding something like a church organ.
Kinski: Stumbledown Terrace

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | J Simpson

In certain respects, Stumbledown Terrace – the tenth album from Seattle’s Kinski – could be seen as getting back to basics. First and most importantly, they’ve returned to their original Power Trio format with the departure of second guitarist Matthew Reid-Schwartz. Second, they’ve re-focused on long, sprawling and spiraling instrumental rock.
How to Deploy a RAG-Based Assistant Over Your Internal Resources

1 month ago | nordicapis.com | J Simpson

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been generating a lot of buzz recently, as it promises to solve many of the issues currently facing AI, machine learning, and LLMs. RAG augments the knowledge from large datasets, which are outdated by their very nature due to how they’re collected. Public LLMs are also trained on publicly available data outside the scope of internal or proprietary data. Without the ability to add or integrate your own data, an LLM’s usefulness is greatly limited.