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At the Threshold of the Underworld: Deep Time, Music, and Ecstatic Truth

2025· article· en· W4410588696 on OpenAlex
Sean Steele

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueIASPM Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArtLiteratureArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The article engages with filmmaker Werner Herzog’s theory of ecstatic truth to explore how music can open a pathway into a reckoning with deep time. Coined by John McPhee, deep time refers to vast geological scales of time. The discussion is focused on Lawrence English and Lea Bertucci’s 2023 experimental ambient album Chthonic. Herzog’s theory of ecstatic truth refers to moments that transcend logic and reason, entering a realm of imagination. “Chthonic” simultaneously refers to the mythological realm of the underworld and the subterranean world studied by geologists. The combination of field recordings and instrumental performances, along with the song titles, album title, and cover image alludes to an imaginative world that blends mythology and geology. This combination creates the conditions for a reckoning with an ecstatic truth about the story of our planet and an imaginative understanding of deep time.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.700
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.256
Teacher spread0.214 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it