The music
Songs by zooty and Kevin Wu, produced solely by Jonum — the follow-up to Extended Play (the Valorant musical).
He wrote this about it
“Inspired by the grind, we're releasing Underneath the Lights as a tribute to those students, gamers, nft degens who burn the midnight oil.”
— Kevin Wu, on m0nk.xyz
It is an unusual dedication, and it is the hinge of the whole project. The record is not addressed to the devout. It is addressed to students, gamers and “nft degens” — people awake at three in the morning in front of a screen, which is precisely the posture the m0nk character is drawn in.
The album art came out of the same work. It is where the character was first described:
“My goal is to create a character to help me navigate the future of technology and machine society. His name is m0nk.”
— Kevin Wu. Art by Marekolani and Kevin.
And he ended with this
“We hope that Underneath the Lights inspires your own grind in life and that you find that connection in everything you do.”
— Kevin Wu
“That connection in everything you do” is not a throwaway line from someone who spent years around a devotional tradition. It is the same claim the mantra page makes, said in the language of people who will never read a mantra page.
What the record has to do with the beads
A producer builds a track by looping a bar until it stops being a bar and becomes somewhere you are standing. Four passes, sixteen, a hundred and eight. The loop does not get more interesting on the fortieth time round — the listening changes. Anyone who has sat with a part they had stopped hearing, until it opened up again, knows that nothing about the part moved.
That is the claim japa makes, in much older language. Sixteen names in a fixed order, repeated, and the proposition is not that the words acquire new meaning on the way round but that the person saying them stops skimming. The tradition is unfashionably blunt about it: repetition is the training, and a thing repeated with the whole of your attention stops being repetitive.
So a record addressed to people awake at three in the morning and a practice worked out in sixteenth-century Bengal turn out to be making overlapping claims about attention. Neither page on this site is an interpretation of the other. They are simply next door, and it is worth noticing how short the walk is.