...cyberpunk ...

    There are certain genres in the world of the arts that do not merely entertain but that also disclose something of one’s own personal ontology, that is, genres that feel less like invention and more like a kind of recognition. To me, cyberpunk has always been one of those mirrors. Beneath its neon and noise, it vibrates with the same philosophical tension that animates my own music and music-making, that is, the friction between body and code, memory and mechanism, dream and decay. It speaks to a world where transcendence no longer descends from the heavens but flickers on a screen, where the sacred has been rewritten in algorithms, and yet the hunger for meaning persists like a pulse under the circuitry.

    And so, I love the cyberpunk genre because it speaks to my deepest sensibilities, philosophical, poetic, subversive, and existential. 

    I'm drawn to ontological thresholds, where reality fractures and identity becomes vaporous. Cyberpunk’s obsession with what is “real”, that is, simulated minds, prosthetic bodies, blurred lines between organic and synthetic, mirrors my own metaphysical inquiries: What is the self? What is embodiment? I ask these questions through piano, through words, through composition, and cyberpunk asks them through neon-lit rain and neural implants.

    As someone who has often felt like an exile, geographically, spiritually, artistically, cyberpunk’s protagonists resonate. They are nomads, misfits, hackers, displaced from utopias that never came. I, too, drift between languages, disciplines, nations, and identities. Cyberpunk doesn’t offer wholeness. It offers fragments that speak, and I’ve always been a collector of fragments.

    Cyberpunk’s power lies in its prophetic realism. It anticipated our present long before it arrived, the corporatization of emotion, the monetization of desire, the disappearance of the private self into data streams. Its worlds are not distant futures but the deepening of what already surrounds us: a civilization where consciousness is outsourced and memory is monetized. What fascinates me is not merely the dystopia, but the residue of lyricism that survives within it, the small tenderness of a machine that still dreams of music, the glitch that feels like a prayer.

    I have a deep-seated suspicion of hegemonies, whether musical, political, or technological. Cyberpunk is inherently anti-corporate, anti-utopian, and anti-authoritarian, a rebellion against sterile perfection. Like my own written and exercised critiques of historicism, cyberpunk tears off the smooth skin of official narratives to reveal the circuitry of exploitation beneath.

    I'm a sort of baroque and romantic soul in a digital age. Cyberpunk worlds are rotting cathedrals of data, decaying palaces of information, opulent and broken. That tension between beauty and ruin, between ritual and decay, matches my own aesthetic. 

    My ear hears more than tones, it hears symbols, ghosts, afterimages. Cyberpunk is a genre that sounds like a synthesizer in a cathedral and looks like a haiku etched in code. It’s no wonder that I, who understands music as allegory and breath, would resonate with a genre that makes machines weep and networks dream.

    At its core, cyberpunk is not about technology but about the soul surviving technology. Its protagonists fail, often beautifully, but they fail humanly, through love, betrayal, memory, longing. The neon lights only serve to illuminate their fragility. That, to me, is profoundly musical, that is, the insistence of melody within noise, the persistence of pulse in a disintegrating rhythm.

    I’ve always sought to restore the human voice within abstraction. Cyberpunk doesn’t trust disembodied reason, and neither do I. It demands soul in the circuit, and my entire artistic life has been a fight to remind the world that the soul still sings even when encoded.

        So, then again, why do I love cyberpunk? Because it’s not just a genre. It’s a mirror. A warning. A confession. A poem scratched onto a screen in the final hour. And like music, it remembers futures that never were, and futures that still might be.

    Cyberpunk, in the end, is not a vision of despair but of endurance. It tells us that even in a world built from artificial light, the darkness still listens, and somewhere, through the static, a fragile human song continues to hum... 

    Here are some personal recommendations:

   

    

Books / Literature

(Cyberpunk and its philosophical or poetic satellites)

The Core Canon

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the seed of Blade Runner), Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS

William Gibson – Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive (The Sprawl Trilogy)

Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon

Bruce Sterling – Islands in the Net, Schismatrix

Pat Cadigan – Synners

John Shirley – City Come A-Walkin’

Richard K. Morgan – Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies

Philosophical / Existential Extensions

J.G. Ballard – Crash, High-Rise, The Atrocity Exhibition (psychological proto-cyberpunk)

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland (for the paranoid tech underbelly of modernity)

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go (cyberpunk minimalism in slow motion)

Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood

Stanislaw Lem – Solaris, His Master’s Voice, The Cyberiad (theological cyberpunk before its time)

Haruki Murakami – Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Yoon Ha Lee – Ninefox Gambit (cybernetic metaphysics meets military sci-fi)

Jeff Noon – Vurt (poetic British cyberpunk classic)

Nick Land – Fanged Noumena (for the philosophically unhinged, cyberpunk as philosophy of acceleration)

Films

(From the mythic to the cult, from noir to neon metaphysics)

The Core Pantheon

Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)

Blade Runner 2049 (2017, Denis Villeneuve)

The Matrix Trilogy (1999–2003, Wachowskis)

Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii; Japanese original)

Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo)

Tron (1982, Steven Lisberger) & Tron: Legacy (2010, Joseph Kosinski)

Johnny Mnemonic (1995, Robert Longo; based on Gibson)

Total Recall (1990, Paul Verhoeven; based on Philip K. Dick)

Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg; also from Dick)

Philosophical / Existential / Aesthetic Extensions

Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)

Tenet (2020, Nolan again — time, identity, inversion)

Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland)

Her (2013, Spike Jonze)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Spielberg/Kubrick)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004, Oshii — a masterpiece of metaphysical cyberpunk)

Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon — the dream/mind-tech prelude to Inception)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller; post-cyberpunk’s apocalyptic twin)

Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas)

The Thirteenth Floor (1999, Josef Rusnak — underrated simulation noir)

Upgrade (2018, Leigh Whannell)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, Shinya Tsukamoto; industrial body-horror cyberpunk)

Strange Days (1995, Kathryn Bigelow; a masterpiece of consciousness and recording tech)

A Scanner Darkly (2006, Richard Linklater; rotoscoped Dick paranoia)

Code 46 (2003, Michael Winterbottom; poetic, minimalist cyberpunk love story)

Gattaca (1997, Andrew Niccol; genetic cyberpunk humanism)

Elysium (2013, Neill Blomkamp)

Chappie (2015, Blomkamp; the cyberpunk Pinocchio)

Prospect (2018, Christopher Caldwell & Zeek Earl)

Anon (2018, Andrew Niccol)

The Machine (2013, Caradog James)

Automata (2014, Gabe Ibáñez)

Nirvana (1997, Gabriele Salvatores — Italian cyberpunk gem)

Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley — a decaying dystopian classic)

Avalon (2001, Mamoru Oshii — live-action Polish cyberpunk, haunting and forgotten)

Series

(Philosophical, noir, and existential cyberpunk on screen)

Altered Carbon (2018–2020, Netflix) – my favorite and the purest in spirit.

Black Mirror (2011–present, Charlie Brooker; the anthology of technological dread)

Mr. Robot (2015–2019, Sam Esmail)

Westworld (2016–2022, Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy)

Love, Death & Robots (2019–2022, Netflix)

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002–2005)

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022, Netflix; anime masterpiece)

Cowboy Bebop (1998; space-western cyberpunk fusion)

Serial Experiments Lain (1998; metaphysical proto-internet classic)

Aeon Flux (1991–1995, MTV animated series)

Continuum (2012–2015; time-travel corporatism)

Max Headroom (1987–1988; satirical, media dystopia classic)

Music

(Sound worlds of steel and spirit, where pulse meets transcendence)

Vangelis – Blade Runner OST

Daft Punk – Tron: Legacy OST

Kenji Kawai – Ghost in the Shell OST

Yoko Kanno – Cowboy Bebop OST (a jazz-cyberpunk fusion)

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Babel, Black Mirror: Smithereens, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – The Social Network, Ghosts I-IV, Gone Girl

Cliff Martinez – Drive, Only God Forgives

Hans Zimmer – Blade Runner 2049, Inception, Dune

Artists / Albums in the Cyberpunk Spirit

Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85–92

Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Massive Attack, Burial, Gesaffelstein, Lorn, Arca

Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, Mega Drive, Com Truise – (retro-futurist synthwave lineage)

VNV Nation, Front Line Assembly, Cyberaktif, Skinny Puppy, The Future Sound of London

Visual Art / Aesthetic Worlds

(For inspiration, mood, and philosophical resonance)

H.R. Giger – bio-mechanical surrealism (Alien, Necronomicon)

Syd Mead – concept designer (Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens)

Masamune Shirow – Ghost in the Shell manga

Moebius (Jean Giraud) – visionary science-fantasy drawings (The Long Tomorrow, inspiration for Blade Runner)

Simon Stålenhag – Tales from the Loop, The Electric State

Beeple – digital surrealism (modern cyberpunk through motion art)

Zdzisław Beksiński – decayed metaphysical landscapes (baroque cyberpunk anxiety)

    If Altered Carbon (my absolute favorite cyberpunk) is one's entry point, then follow that neural path outward, that is

Begin with Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell (the sacred texts),

Continue through Mr. Robot and Black Mirror (the confessions),

And end with Paprika, Vurt, and Avalon (the dreams).

    Cyberpunk is not just fiction, it’s an x-ray of the present, an elegy for the human within the machine...

    A nocturne played on circuitry, for a world still capable of trembling...