*Edition of 100* With Ex Stasis 69, Joseph Nechvatal continues to expand the possibilities of sound as both philosophical construct and sensorial event. Issued in a limited cassette edition by Pentiments on October 17, 2025, this long-form electronic composition further develops the artist’s lifelong investigation into the overlap of immersion, eroticism, and digital ontology. Known equally as painter, writer, and theoretician of “noise aesthetics,” Nechvatal translates his visual and conceptual work into an auditory field of vibrational intensity—an environment where the erotic, the sacred, and the technological dissolve into one undulating flux.

The title, Ex Stasis 69, plays on the twin ideas of ecstasy and stasis, hinting at the tension between transcendence and paralysis within the ecology of digital life. Constructed through algorithmic feedback systems—extensions of processes first initiated in his Viral Tempest and Selected Sound Works—the piece deploys a network of generative programmatic noise, filtered voice fragments, and spectral drones. Within this sonic matrix, pulses of rhythm and fragments of synthetic breath surface like signals from a systemic unconscious. The number “69” acts as a symbolic hinge: a recursive mirror and erotic code, a gesture toward circular exchange between machine and human sensorium.

Ex Stasis 69 is not merely music but aural ceremony. Listening becomes an act of surrender to liquid architectures of sound that oscillate between density and void. The composition’s extended duration emphasizes immersion rather than direction, seeking what Nechvatal calls a “post-corporeal intimacy”—an interface where feedback, noise, and desire generate new perceptual thresholds. The accompanying limited edition includes artwork derived from his Information Noise Saturation series, as well as a brief text by the artist examining the relation between erotic experience and digital ontology. The design reflects Pentiments’ ongoing commitment to avant-garde cross-disciplinary practice, marking their second collaboration with Nechvatal after The Viral Tempest (2022).