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

2025· article· en· W4410588696 on OpenAlexaff
Sean Steele

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.015

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0040.023
Scholarly communication0.0060.005
Open science0.0000.004
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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