[D66] Praestabilis: A Philosophical Cartography of Sound

[René Oudeweg]

Cleaned Album List (sorted by album number)

ALBUM 1 – #1

ALBUM 2 – APO MECHANOS THEOS

ALBUM 3 – DJON DON PANDORA

ALBUM 4 – Highland Hybre

ALBUM 5 – Soixante Huitard

ALBUM 6 – VERTIGO VENGEANCE

ALBUM 7 – Chrono Gratio

ALBUM 8 – Traditio Thoreau

ALBUM 9 – ORCHESTRAL VARIATIONS

ALBUM 10 – Two for Fury

ALBUM 11 – Epic Fusion

ALBUM 12 – On The Road

ALBUM 13 – Tranquility Base

ALBUM 14 – Extragalactic Drumfestival

ALBUM 15 – Fusionesque

ALBUM 16 – Odd Meter Odyssee

ALBUM 17 – Double Drums Vortex

ALBUM 18 – Metarythms

ALBUM 19 – Sun of Venlo

ALBUM 20 – Soixante Huitard (No. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10)

ALBUM 21 – The Adorno Interpretations

ALBUM 22 – Postcard to Nowhere

ALBUM 23 – Oneiric Sessions

ALBUM 24 – Thought Echo’s of Nietzsche

ALBUM 25 – Indians

ALBUM 25 – Place of the Coyotes ⚠️

ALBUM 26 – A Throw of Dice

ALBUM 27 – All Drums on the Horizon

ALBUM 28 – Machine Eros

ALBUM 29 – Dirty Fabrik

ALBUM 30 – Amanecer Tranquilo

ALBUM 31 – Alien Tambour

ALBUM 32 – Shiva Dhola

ALBUM 33 – The Janssen and Jansen Rock Storm

ALBUM 34 – Snow Moon – AO MAR

ALBUM 35 – Ticket To Paradise

ALBUM 36 – Calling Cassiopeia

ALBUM 37 – WEATHER FLASHES

ALBUM 38 – DLG & P

ALBUM 39 – Kinetic

ALBUM 40 – Era Sessions

ALBUM 41 – The Winds of Artemis

ALBUM 42 – Industrial Breakdown

ALBUM 43 – Semper Avanti

ALBUM 44 – Semper Avanti II

ALBUM 45 – Tyr

ALBUM 46 – Requiem for Bachmoet

ALBUM 47 – Once Upon a Time

ALBUM 48 – Jazz in the Maria Street

ALBUM 49 – Night Division

ALBUM 50 – Too Mad to Be True

ALBUM 51 – Mint and Mind

ALBUM 52 – Moon Roads

ALBUM 53 – Two Dogs

ALBUM 54 – Cassandre

ALBUM 55 – Quixotic

ALBUM 56 – Shanaya

ALBUM 57 – Sirius

ALBUM 58 – Alien Tambour II

ALBUM 59 – Quixotic +4

ALBUM 60 – Home

ALBUM 61 – Bats

ALBUM 62 – Dragons

ALBUM 63 – Die Siebengewald Improvisationen

ALBUM 64 – Mirage

ALBUM 65 – Two Heavens From Hell

ALBUM 66 – Universal Impov

ALBUM 67 – 2 Meters met Han Bennink

ALBUM 68 – Japanese Kaleidoscope

ALBUM 69 – Skin in the Game

ALBUM 70 – WSMCHINE

ALBUM 71 – (title missing) ⚠️

ALBUM 72 – Non de Ju

ALBUM 73 – Dopamine Hypersensitivity

ALBUM 74 – THE ARIAM

ALBUM 75 – Million Legs with Misses and Takes

ALBUM 76 – Power Goes On Strike

ALBUM 77 – Man Missing

ALBUM 78 – Demons and Angelistas

ALBUM 79 – Fighting the Cesium Clock

ALBUM 80 – Three Steps from Amore

ALBUM 81 – Time Zone Traveler

ALBUM 82 – DREAMS AND DRUMMINGS

ALBUM 83 – The Massage and the Medium (TODO)

ALBUM 84 – Rockin’ Rooland

ALBUM 85 – ECOTOPIA

ALBUM 86 – Percusiones

ALBUM 87 – Theos Anglos

ALBUM 88 – Apeiron

ALBUM 89 – Ultra One

ALBUM 90 – DEATH OF THE AI GRID

ALBUM 91 – Ruin Be the State

ALBUM 92 – Alien Tambour Returns

ALBUM 93 – Stratos

ALBUM 94 – Heraclitian Jazz

ALBUM 95 – Polymission and the Impossible

ALBUM 96 – Broken Lithography

ALBUM 97 – La Musica de Iluvatar

ALBUM 98 – Angelic Drummer

ALBUM 99 – Mississippi Improvisations

ALBUM 100 – The Full Centaur

ALBUM 101 – Vicarious Causation

ALBUM 102 – Troubadour Tambour

ALBUM 103 – Categorical Imperative

ALBUM 104 – Durée

ALBUM 105 – Nothing Inside the Text

ALBUM 106 – Photogram

ALBUM 107 – No Bike No Dike

ALBUM 108 – Machine Eros II

ALBUM 109 – Viva México

ALBUM 110 – Draw the Meridian

ALBUM 111 – Nightshift

ALBUM 112 – Paradise Upset

ALBUM 113 – Sinister

ALBUM 114 – Moods

ALBUM 115 – Romanticism

ALBUM 116 – Prophets

ALBUM 117 – Casiri-Cosata

ALBUM 118 – Vicarious Causation II

ALBUM 119 – Desiring Machine

ALBUM 120 – Plane of Immanence

ALBUM 121 – Line of Flight

ALBUM 122 – Pantheon Passagen

ALBUM 123 – Arcen

On 12/26/25 11:01, René Oudeweg wrote:
> "philosophy does not begin with concepts but with pulse."
> 
> Praestabilis: A Philosophical Cartography of Sound
> 
> Praestabilis is less a producer in the conventional sense than a 
> cartographer of concepts. Across more than a hundred albums, 
> Praestabilis treats sound as a mode of thinking and the album title as a 
> philosophical proposition. The vast discography does not merely document 
> musical output; it stages an ongoing inquiry into ontology, causation, 
> time, desire, politics, and becoming. Read philosophically, these titles 
> form a parallel text—an index of problems explored not only through 
> language but through rhythm, texture, and improvisation.
> 
> 1. First Principles and the Question of Origin
> 
> The earliest titles—#1, APO MECHANOS THEOS, ORCHESTRAL VARIATIONS—signal 
> a concern with beginnings. “Apo mechanos theos,” echoing the deus ex 
> machina, frames creation as intervention: an external force breaking 
> into a closed system. This establishes a recurring tension in 
> Praestabilis’s work between structure and rupture, order and accident. 
> The producer’s universe is not born smoothly; it is thrown into motion.
> 
> This concern returns later with Plane of Immanence and Line of Flight, 
> titles that implicitly reject transcendental explanation in favor of 
> forces operating within the world. Here, sound is no longer imposed from 
> above but emerges from the relations between bodies, instruments, and time.
> 
> 2. Rhythm as Ontology
> 
> Albums such as Odd Meter Odyssee, Metarythms, Double Drums Vortex, and 
> Extragalactic Drumfestival treat rhythm not as decoration but as being 
> itself. Meter becomes a metaphysical problem: what happens when time 
> refuses regularity? The “odyssey” of odd meter is the journey of 
> consciousness through instability, while the “vortex” suggests a 
> collapse of linear temporality.
> 
> Drums recur obsessively—All Drums on the Horizon, Angelic Drummer, 
> Dreams and Drummings—implying a philosophy grounded in the body. Rhythm 
> precedes reason; percussion is pre-linguistic thought. In Praestabilis’s 
> work, philosophy does not begin with concepts but with pulse.
> 
> 3. Desire, Machines, and the Post-Human
> 
> Titles like Machine Eros, Machine Eros II, Desiring Machine, and 
> Universal Improv frame creativity as machinic rather than expressive. 
> Desire here is productive, not personal: it assembles, connects, and 
> flows. The machine is not opposed to humanity but intertwined with it, 
> anticipating later anxieties articulated in Death of the AI Grid.
> 
> In this sense, Praestabilis’s discography charts a trajectory from 
> optimism to critical vigilance. Early machine-desire albums hum with 
> generative possibility; later titles confront collapse, ruin, and 
> exhaustion. Yet even Death is framed as an event within a system, not an 
> endpoint.
> 
> 4. Time, History, and Political Memory
> 
> Albums such as Chrono Gratio, Time Zone Traveler, Soixante Huitard, and 
> Fighting the Cesium Clock situate sound within historical pressure. Time 
> is neither neutral nor universal—it fractures along political and 
> geographic lines. “Soixante-huitard” invokes revolutionary memory, while 
> “cesium clock” references the scientific attempt to master time 
> absolutely. The struggle between lived time and measured time animates 
> much of Praestabilis’s middle period.
> 
> Ruin Be the State and Paradise Upset push this further, suggesting that 
> political structures, like rhythms, are provisional and vulnerable to 
> breakdown. Improvisation becomes a political stance: responsiveness over 
> control.
> 
> 5. Knowledge, Text, and Interpretation
> 
> Philosophical self-reflexivity surfaces explicitly in titles such as 
> Categorical Imperative, The Adorno Interpretations, Nothing Inside the 
> Text, and Thought Echo’s of Nietzsche. These albums do not illustrate 
> philosophy; they interrogate it. “Nothing inside the text” implies a 
> refusal of hidden meaning, while “interpretations” foreground mediation 
> over authority.
> 
> Here, Praestabilis positions the listener as co-thinker. Meaning is not 
> delivered; it is produced in the act of listening. The album title 
> becomes a frame, not a conclusion.
> 
> 6. Cosmology and the Sacred Without Transcendence
> 
> Finally, albums like Apeiron, Pantheon Passagen, The Winds of Artemis, 
> and La Musica de Iluvatar gesture toward myth and the sacred—but without 
> dogma. The infinite (apeiron) and the pantheon are treated as symbolic 
> reservoirs rather than theological claims. Sacredness emerges 
> immanently, through sound and relation, not revelation.
> 
> Conclusion: A Philosophy in Motion
> 
> Taken together, Praestabilis’s album titles outline a philosophy that is 
> experimental, materialist, and unfinished. They reject final answers in 
> favor of ongoing variation. Sound becomes thinking-in-motion; rhythm 
> becomes ontology; improvisation becomes ethics.
> 
> To listen to Praestabilis is to enter a laboratory where philosophy is 
> not written but performed—where concepts sweat, stumble, repeat, and 
> transform. The discography is not a monument but a process: a reminder 
> that thought, like music, only exists when it is happening.