The wrestler puts it in its place: this fascination, this seduction, this will to pretention, pop and representation. He holds it to the mat where it can’t remix the justice of the Real. Holding the line, Tom Kazas’ Dysomphē refuses the democratic pornography of our being three times removed from the true. Dysomphē is necessarily twice made: cut, break, disjunction / intervention, invention, sustained. An abnormal song of the damned. It takes on what can be nothing but a few chords and the truth.

Our hollow man, western man, tuned to the siren song of the lyre, has yearned, churned and burned at the stake, via doloroso, for this Real be undone. Always, tightening and loosening, ready to set up a good man scam; “strayan attributes, jingo fascism, wellness industries, call Psychline.” For Tom, the hollowing is ‘What is to be unDone’.

The tonic break, difficult and oneiric, resonate and sustained. Barrawarn: that cartesian renegade who ‘turned and sung’, the unholiest line of the lovers quarrel; never give way on your desire. Let the “flawless lacerations” of your pedagogue masters foretell the tale of a world “cranked in a trolley on the roundabout,” ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’. Tom sounds us the empty place of the emptying men; their bathetic crescendo at the end of the world is a clear give away: an atonic “Barrawarn envy!”

There are no redeeming features here, sonically or lyrically. Agonistes, not emotion, is the working-through: a new infinity, a new music, an other set of forms; resonating an always-will-be from the river to the sea. Tomorrow came today, here and now, where a thousand flowers of Falasteen bloom. Tom demands of us we attend to this phonic polemos, the re-sounding impress of what a present would be. Tom’s Ab-sens-song recalls: the liberal-is-stripper for every occupying force. Dys-omphē denudes the piper’s tune; the empire, in truth, has no rhythm, no reason, no poetry. It cannot dance. It will have died, alone.

“Arrythmia,” though, indifferent, fast, slow, slow-fast-slow, fast and slow, “you should try it,” displaces the place; horlieu.  The out-side is in, if you want it. Sit tight, listen keenly, you are almost at the door, become in plain sight what you will never not love twice: dysomphē.

A J Bartlett

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     Begin email from Clinton

     7 February 2026 at 10:46:50 GMT+11

     To: Tom Kazas

     Re: Dysomphē

     Hi Tom,

     I enjoyed listening, and was slightly freaked out as well.

     I was listening while on the train, using a brand new set of

     AirPods, which for some reason changed my phone settings so

     I would get text-to-voice notifications; so whilst listening,

     I started getting the iPhone voice cutting through saying

     "Jenny liked your message," etc. I thought, how has Tom

     managed to hack my phone to personalise the listening

     experience?

A common question of late is ‘how are we to make art

about the present global moment, in all its absurdity

and horror and self-censoring reflexivity?’

With 'Dysomphē', Kazas has found a way; through an engagement

with gritty poetry in the mouths of a virtual room of AI

operatives, a subversive songwriting methodology, and

an eye for the beautiful and the ridiculous.

Clinton Green

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I listened as I read, and I oscillated between

here and there.

Alice Preston

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