by Stevphen » Thu Mar 05, 2026 9:02 am
The Minor Compositions Podcast began life as part of Firefly Frequencies, an ongoing experimental online radio project – vernacular radio for molecular forms of life and (un)learning – broadcasting alongside a range of very excellent and unruly sonic experiments. For quite some time the conversations lived primarily there, circulating through the Firefly site like semi-clandestine transmissions. After years of insisting that we would “soon” make the full archive more widely accessible (where “soon” functioned less as a deadline than as a speculative political horizon), we’re happy to say that the entirety of Season One is now available across a wide range of platforms, YouTube included, alongside all the usual podcast-type places where your headphones go looking for trouble.
Over the course of the season (42 episodes over five years), we ask what it might mean to make a podcast about Mark Fisher without turning him into a monument, and what kinds of futures might be conjured from stateless histories and decolonial imaginaries in Alifuru World. We wander into the factory to ask whether utopia ever clocks in for a shift, and trace lines from institutiona lpsychotherapy toward practices of collective care and resistance rather than individualized adjustment. We consider what communism might look like after Gilles Deleuze, how to dismantle the master’s clock without simply installing a more efficient one, and whether refusal might be something you can, in fact, dance to.Surrealism appears more than once – post-war, anti-authoritarian,and occasionally detouring through the sideways logic of Bugs Bunny. We follow the politics of free jazz through the uncompromising sound of Peter Brötzmann, and revisit punk historiography with The Subhumans and conversations orbiting Penny Rimbaud. Along the way there are discussions of feminist antifascism and contemporary microfascism, Italian operaismo and Autonomia, squatting and gentrification, football as an emergent assemblage rather than a spectacle, logistics as an art form,anxiety as vibration, universal prostitution and the crisis of labour, feral class formations, the deep commons, mutual aid in times of disaster, and the persistent, unruly possibility of joy.
There are episodes with musicians, artists, theorists, militants,publishers, and those who resist such tidy labels. Some conversations are historical, others speculative; some return to unfinished struggles, others map terrains still coming into view.All of them share a commitment to thinking collectively,experimentally, and sometimes mischievously about how culture and politics intertwine. If you’ve been meaning to listen – or tore-listen – everything is now easier to find, share, circulate,and conspire with. Please feel free to pass it along widely,whisper it discreetly, or let the playlist carry it into unexpected corners.
We don’t need more heroes. We do need more conversations.
And more than that, we’re interested in shifting what a podcast episode, book, or publisher, even is. Rather than closed dialogues sealed and archived, we’re moving toward a more participatory format where episodes become ongoing study sessions: extended processes of collective reading, listening, and experimentation that connect directly with our publishing work. We’re running a year-long reading group on Mario Tronti’s autonomist classic Workers and Capital. Minor Compositions has always been as much about making spaces for shared inquiry as producing books or audio, and we’d like to open that up further. Publishing not solely as the production of fixed objects but rather as an ongoing studious practice. To help plot and plan this next phase, we’re setting up a Discord server as a space to gather ideas, organize sessions, and continue conversations beyond the airwaves.
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Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.infoThe Minor Compositions Podcast began life as part of Firefly Frequencies, an ongoing experimental online radio project – vernacular radio for molecular forms of life and (un)learning – broadcasting alongside a range of very excellent and unruly sonic experiments. For quite some time the conversations lived primarily there, circulating through the Firefly site like semi-clandestine transmissions. After years of insisting that we would “soon” make the full archive more widely accessible (where “soon” functioned less as a deadline than as a speculative political horizon), we’re happy to say that the entirety of Season One is now available across a wide range of platforms, YouTube included, alongside all the usual podcast-type places where your headphones go looking for trouble.
Over the course of the season (42 episodes over five years), we ask what it might mean to make a podcast about Mark Fisher without turning him into a monument, and what kinds of futures might be conjured from stateless histories and decolonial imaginaries in Alifuru World. We wander into the factory to ask whether utopia ever clocks in for a shift, and trace lines from institutiona lpsychotherapy toward practices of collective care and resistance rather than individualized adjustment. We consider what communism might look like after Gilles Deleuze, how to dismantle the master’s clock without simply installing a more efficient one, and whether refusal might be something you can, in fact, dance to.Surrealism appears more than once – post-war, anti-authoritarian,and occasionally detouring through the sideways logic of Bugs Bunny. We follow the politics of free jazz through the uncompromising sound of Peter Brötzmann, and revisit punk historiography with The Subhumans and conversations orbiting Penny Rimbaud. Along the way there are discussions of feminist antifascism and contemporary microfascism, Italian operaismo and Autonomia, squatting and gentrification, football as an emergent assemblage rather than a spectacle, logistics as an art form,anxiety as vibration, universal prostitution and the crisis of labour, feral class formations, the deep commons, mutual aid in times of disaster, and the persistent, unruly possibility of joy.
There are episodes with musicians, artists, theorists, militants,publishers, and those who resist such tidy labels. Some conversations are historical, others speculative; some return to unfinished struggles, others map terrains still coming into view.All of them share a commitment to thinking collectively,experimentally, and sometimes mischievously about how culture and politics intertwine. If you’ve been meaning to listen – or tore-listen – everything is now easier to find, share, circulate,and conspire with. Please feel free to pass it along widely,whisper it discreetly, or let the playlist carry it into unexpected corners.
We don’t need more heroes. We do need more conversations.
And more than that, we’re interested in shifting what a podcast episode, book, or publisher, even is. Rather than closed dialogues sealed and archived, we’re moving toward a more participatory format where episodes become ongoing study sessions: extended processes of collective reading, listening, and experimentation that connect directly with our publishing work. We’re running a year-long reading group on Mario Tronti’s autonomist classic Workers and Capital. Minor Compositions has always been as much about making spaces for shared inquiry as producing books or audio, and we’d like to open that up further. Publishing not solely as the production of fixed objects but rather as an ongoing studious practice. To help plot and plan this next phase, we’re setting up a Discord server as a space to gather ideas, organize sessions, and continue conversations beyond the airwaves.
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info