# Ex-Plain

> Underground Culture, Uncovered


## Posts

- [Menacing Earthworks and Atomic Priesthoods: How to Store Radioactive Waste for 10,000 Years](https://ex-pla.in/menacing-earthworks-and-atomic-priesthoods-how-to-store-radioactive-waste-for-10000-years/): Radioactive waste can remain lethal for tens of thousands of years. When it’s buried deep in the ground, how do you warn future generations to stay away? What message survives ten millennia? When researchers tried to answer that question for nuclear waste repositories, their ideas drifted into strange territory, bordering on speculative science fiction. The Louvre Stele, containing the complete Code of Hammurabi, dates to around 1792 BC. When it was discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Susa in 1902, the text carved into its black basalt surface, written in Akkadian (Babylonian dialect) using cuneiform, could be […]
- [One of the Most Ambitious Art Projects in History Is Hidden in an Extinct Volcano](https://ex-pla.in/one-of-the-most-ambitious-art-projects-in-history-is-hidden-in-an-extinct-volcano/): Some projects are built to last centuries. At Roden Crater, James Turrell has spent over fifty years transforming an extinct volcano into a vast instrument for observing light, sky, and the slow movements of the cosmos, creating one of the most ambitious long-duration artworks ever attempted.
- [Lalibela: A Holy City Carved From Stone](https://ex-pla.in/lalibela-a-holy-city-carved-from-stone/): A vast complex of monolithic churches carved from living rock in medieval Ethiopia, Lalibela was conceived as a “New Jerusalem” and despite the ravages of erosion, conflict, and time, it remains one of Christianity’s most extraordinary pilgrimage sites, but you might not know it.
- [A Skeleton in the Church Window: Wim Delvoye's X-Ray Stained Glass](https://ex-pla.in/a-skeleton-in-the-church-window-wim-delvoyes-x-ray-stained-glass/): A Belgian artist turned medical X-rays into Gothic stained glass, replacing saints with skeletons and radiography with cathedral light. The works represent the culmination of a lifelong pursuit in Delvoye’s practice: meeting the sacred with the the profane on his own terms.
- [Things We Found on the Internet, Vol. 2](https://ex-pla.in/things-we-found-on-the-internet-vol-2/): It's been a while since we did the last one Hope's everyone's had a good month since the last time this was posted, ideally this becomes more a regular feature on Ex-Plain, because there's no shortage of interesting things to find on the internet, and the proverbial file cabinet we're putting those things in is getting a bit full. Without further explanation, let's get right into it.
- [What the Hell Is Keller Synth? A Guide to Tänzelcore and Basement Goblin Techno](https://ex-pla.in/what-the-hell-is-keller-synth-a-guide-to-tanzelcore-and-basement-goblin-techno/): A strange underground genre with roots in Germany involves blending dungeon synth, hardcore techno, and black metal aesthetics into something that sounds like a rave thrown by wizards. Welcome to Keller Synth and its chaotic offshoot, Tänzelcore.
- [Michael Rakowitz and the Afterlife of Destroyed Art](https://ex-pla.in/michael-rakowitz-and-the-afterlife-of-destroyed-art/): After terrorism and war erased centuries of Iraqi heritage, one artist began reconstructing the missing artifacts, creating ghostly stand-ins for objects, histories, and lives that can’t be recovered.
- [The Glass Temple Hidden Beneath Kyoto](https://ex-pla.in/the-glass-temple-hidden-beneath-kyoto/): Almost invisible from the surface of a 17th-century imperial temple complex, Kyoto’s Glass Temple hides a stark white chamber beneath a maple garden, an underground experiment in light, minimalism, and the seamless meeting of modern architecture with centuries of ritual space.
- [Outsiders as Drawn by an Outsider: Jo Brocklehurst and London After Dark](https://ex-pla.in/outsiders-as-seen-by-an-outsider-jo-brocklehurst-and-the-hidden-worlds-of-london/): A reclusive artist hidden behind dark glasses, Jo Brocklehurst moved through London’s underground as both a witness and accomplice of life on the fringes of culture, sketching punks, goths, club kids, and clubbers with uncompromising empathy. Decades later, her drawings are scattered, nearly unseen, and uncannily ahead of their time.
- [The Time a Japanese Noise Musician Destroyed a Venue With a Bulldozer](https://ex-pla.in/hanatarash-japanese-noise-musician-destroyed-a-venue-with-a-bulldozer/): In 1985, Hanatarash frontman Yamantaka Eye drove an excavator into a Tokyo venue, turning a noise performance into an act of real-world destruction and cementing the band’s reputation as the most dangerous force in the Japanese Noise scene.
- [The Porsche 356 Bonsai: Preservation Without Restoration](https://ex-pla.in/the-porsche-356-bonsai-preservation-without-restoration/): An artist’s rare Porsche is stripped down to its bare essentials and reimagined through Japanese craft traditions and wabi-sabi philosophy, transforming into a fully drivable art object intended to weather, evolve, and register the passage of time rather than conceal it. When an abandoned classic car is rediscovered in a barn or garage, the first instinct is to return it to its former glory, and bring about a sense of timelessness to a piece of old engineering. But what if the elements of time and wear were actually collaborative forces rather than problems to be erased? Oxidation, fading, scratches, and […]
- [Getting High with Shakespeare? It Might Have Happened](https://ex-pla.in/getting-high-with-shakespeare-it-might-have-happened/): From clay pipe residues to cryptic sonnet lines, a long-running theory proposes that William Shakespeare experimented with mind-altering substances, raising questions about evidence, interpretation, and the enduring appetite for literary conspiracy. The evidence reveals as much about modern fascination as it does about the Bard himself.
- [Behind the Beat: Inside the Homes Where Hip-Hop Is Made](https://ex-pla.in/behind-the-beat-inside-the-homes-where-hip-hop-is-made/): Raph Rashid’s intimate photographs map the domestic environments where hip-hop producers build influential records, showing how constraint, routine, and personal space become part of the music itself.
- [The Eccentric Soviet Composer Who Conducted a City: Arseny Avraamov and the Sound of a Future That Never Arrived](https://ex-pla.in/the-eccentric-soviet-composer-who-conducted-a-city-arseny-avraamov-and-the-sound-of-a-future-that-never-arrived/): In September 1922, amid the fifth anniversary commemorations of the October Revolution in the capital of Azerbaijan, a little-known Russian music theorist realized one of the most audacious sonic projects of the early Soviet period: The Symphony of Sirens. His life is a story of radical invention, ideological fervor, and hearing the future of music long before anyone else could.
- [When Sci-Fi and Body Horror Found Advertising: Chris Cunningham's Commercial Work](https://ex-pla.in/when-sci-fi-and-body-horror-found-advertising-chris-cunninghams-commercial-work/): Before retreating from the spotlight, Chris Cunningham, the elusive director behind the music videos for Aphex Twin and Björk injected sci-fi dystopia and body horror into some of the most unusual commercials of the late 1990s.
- [The Australian Afterlife of Elvis Presley](https://ex-pla.in/the-australian-afterlife-of-elvis-presley/): Each year on August 16, Elvis fans gather at a Melbourne cemetery on the anniversary of his death, observing the date with regularity and ceremony. One local photographer documented the event over 15 years.
- [A Loud Minority? Investigating the Subculture of Audiophiles in Japan](https://ex-pla.in/a-loud-minority-investigating-the-culture-of-audiophiles-in-japan/): Stories of Japanese audiophiles installing personal utility poles have become legend, but behind the myth is a shrinking, aging subculture chasing an ideal few can hear. Japan has a reputation for turning personal interests into lifelong disciplines, pursued with a seriousness that borders on devotion. Audiophiles are no exception. Within this niche subculture, digital sound is dismissed as inherently tainted, while analog listening is treated as a kind of ritual, one that demands not just the right equipment, but the careful purification of electricity, architecture, and environment until nothing remains but sound itself. Recently, I discovered Takeo Morita, an 82-year-old […]
- [Longplayer: One Song, A Thousand Years, No Intermission](https://ex-pla.in/longplayer-one-song-a-thousand-years-no-intermission/): A quarter of a century ago, a Celtic punk musician started a performance of a song so absurdly long that it has still not finished playing. Measured against historical averages, it should still be playing centuries after most countries as we know them today will have ceased to exist.
- [One Free Ride: When Texas Prison Inmates Became Rodeo Cowboys](https://ex-pla.in/one-free-ride-when-texas-prison-inmates-became-rodeo-cowboys/): For more than fifty years, the Texas Prison Rodeo turned incarceration into public entertainment, drawing massive crowds to Huntsville to watch men serving long sentences risk their lives for cash, awards, and a fleeting sense of glory. Fittingly enough, the first inmate ever brought to Huntsville in 1849 was a convicted horse thief. Nearly a century later, that small historical irony would metastasize into one of the strangest, most popular, and most morally ambiguous spectacles in American sports history: the Texas Prison Rodeo. In the decades leading up to the 1930s, conditions across the Texas prison system, now known as […]
- [The Bulldozer Exhibition: When the Soviets Tried (and Failed) to Literally Crush an Art Show](https://ex-pla.in/the-bulldozer-exhibition-when-the-soviets-tried-and-failed-to-literally-crush-an-art-show/): In 1974, Soviet authorities used bulldozers, arrests, and violence to destroy an unsanctioned outdoor art exhibition, only to ignite an international scandal and turn it into one of the most important moments in Russian art history.
- [Paintings of Tattoo Guns from a Mexican Prison](https://ex-pla.in/paintings-of-tattoo-guns-from-a-mexican-prison/): Willingly spending two months in a Mexican prison and collaborating with the inmates, artist Scott Campbell built tattoo machines out of whatever was available, but they were never meant to last. In his project Things Get Better, they became a meditation on ingenuity, constraint, and survival. Scott Campbell’s 2013 project Things Get Better is introduced on his website with a single, disarmingly plain sentence: “Two months, 17 Walkman motors, and whatever I could find inside the walls of a prison in Mexico.” It’s a simplification, but it also accurately gets across what actually happened to create one of the most […]
- [Ancient Roman Brutalism? This Tomb Defies Classical Expectations](https://ex-pla.in/ancient-roman-brutalism-this-tomb-defies-classical-expectations/): Two thousand years before concrete brutalism, this ancient Roman tomb built to honor a former slave appears staggeringly modern, but the real story reveals how labor, technology, and ambition reshaped architecture outside Rome’s elite traditions. Tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, an ancient landmark beside Rome’s Porta Maggiore and one of the historical entrances to the ancient capitol, sits like a mislaid fragment of the twentieth century: a sharply-defined mass of pale stone with unbelievably simple geometry and seemingly stubbornly indifferent to classical grace. Yet it is a structure with global importance, one of just a few surviving examples of funerary […]
- [The Lost Art of Internet Game Guide ASCII Art](https://ex-pla.in/the-lost-art-of-internet-game-guide-ascii-art/): In which we rediscover the overlooked trend of ASCII art hidden inside fan-made video game guides from decades ago, created at a time when including screenshots was impossible in the era of dial-up connections.
- [The Belgrade Phantom: The (Mostly) True Story of Yugoslavia’s Most Legendary Car Chase](https://ex-pla.in/the-belgrade-phantom-the-mostly-true-story-of-yugoslavias-most-legendary-car-chase/): A stolen white Porsche 911 in 1970s Yugoslavia turned an ordinary car thief into an urban legend. For several nights, an anonymous driver taunted police, electrified crowds, and briefly exposed the cracks in the socialist state's tightly controlled order, leaving behind a story that still blurs the line between documented history and modern myth.
- [When Google Earth Breaks, It Accidentally Becomes Art](https://ex-pla.in/when-google-earth-breaks-it-accidentally-becomes-art/): New York–based artist Clement Valla has been steadily collecting images of the Earth, but not the Earth as we know it. Through his ongoing series, Postcards from Google Earth (2010–present), Valla has compiled a digital archive of topographic anomalies that defy the reality they are meant to represent: visual artifacts that expose the limitations of early machine learning and quietly anticipate today’s debates over the accuracy and authority of artificial intelligence.
- [Things We Found on the Internet, Vol. 1](https://ex-pla.in/things-we-found-on-the-internet-vol-1/): We're doing a new regular feature where we collect all of the strange and wonderful things we find thanks to this internet of ours that are too short or too specific to warrant their own post. Here goes nothing.
- [A Door Dedicated to Death in the World’s Most Powerful Church](https://ex-pla.in/manzu-door-dedicated-to-death-in-the-vatican/): To the left of the main entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City stands a controversial bronze door that does not celebrate victory, salvation, or triumph. Instead, it confronts visitors with something the Church has rarely chosen to depict so directly: death itself. 
- [80s Youth Culture in a Dying English Industrial Town](https://ex-pla.in/80s-youth-culture-in-a-dying-english-industrial-town/): Between 1979 and 1989, photographer Christopher John Ball documented the people of Blackburn, the Lancashire industrial town that shaped his early life and artistic eye, during a period of deep social and economic change. 
- [Decades Ago, Pharmaceutical Drugs Were Advertised Using Fear, and It Wasn’t Subtle](https://ex-pla.in/decades-ago-pharmaceutical-drugs-were-advertised-using-fear-and-it-wasnt-subtle/): In the postwar era, pharmaceutical print advertising, especially for psychiatric drugs, was blunt, graphic, and often disturbing, using fear and medical authority to sell chemical control to doctors rather than comfort to patients. Innovative graphic design of the time often met with imagery that was anything but subdued.
- [How a Forgotten German Expressionist Painting Influenced Iggy Pop and David Bowie's Berlin Era](https://ex-pla.in/how-a-forgotten-german-expressionist-painting-influenced-iggy-pop-and-david-bowies-berlin-era/): Moving to West Berlin, David Bowie and Iggy Pop found unexpected inspiration in German Expressionism, most notably in the form of a haunting portrait of psychological collapse, seeing a mirror into their own psyche, and forging a direct line between the city's cultural lineage and some of the most influential music of the 20th century.
- [Beyond the Simulation: The New Romanticism of Kristoffer Zetterstrand’s Virtual Landscape Paintings](https://ex-pla.in/beyond-the-simulation-the-new-romanticism-of-kristoffer-zetterstrands-virtual-landscape-paintings/): The version of romanticism truly unique to the 21st century experience may have already come from a lesser-known Swedish artist whose paintings of virtual worlds explored beyond the boundaries of intended gameplay, namely the maps of Valve's original Counter Strike, echoing a childlike wonder and desire for exploration even beyond the constraints of virtual space.
- [A City Dressing Itself: 90s London Fashion Through The Lens of Shoichi Aoki](https://ex-pla.in/a-city-dressing-itself-90s-london-fashion-through-the-lens-of-shoichi-aoki/): Beginning the 80s, Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki has quietly built one of the most revealing visual records of London street style, capturing the city’s ravers, goths, artists, and club kids at a moment when fashion was still local, handmade, and deeply tied to subculture. Published in Japan’s Street Magazine, these photographs offered an unfiltered view of how youth identity was being constructed on London’s sidewalks long before social media.
- [Outsiders In The Cradle of Humanity: Joji Hashiguchi’s Street Photography Across Six Cities](https://ex-pla.in/outsiders-in-the-cradle-of-humanity-joji-hashiguchis-street-photography-across-five-cities/): In the summer of 1981, Japanese photographer Joji Hashiguchi left Tokyo on a self-directed journey through Liverpool, London, Nuremberg, West Berlin, and New York to capture young people on the streets of those cities and show them as they were, the images he captured are a document of the times, yet the struggles they depict are hauntingly timeless.
- [X-Rays You Can Hear: Soviet Bootleg Music's Non-Clinical Birth, Death, and Rebirth](https://ex-pla.in/x-rays-you-can-hear-soviet-bootleg-musics-non-clinical-birth-death-and-rebirth/): During the Cold War, access to music in the Soviet Union was tightly restricted by state censorship. Despite the risks, a covert community of music enthusiasts and bootleggers emerged, determined to defy censorship and share the sounds banned by the regime using an unlikely medium: discarded hospital X-ray film.
- [Not Just Propaganda: Graphic Experimentation From the Other Side of the Curtain](https://ex-pla.in/not-just-propaganda-graphic-experimentation-from-the-other-side-of-the-curtain/): Founded in 2018, COMRADE Gallery has grown into one of the most compelling new archives of Eastern Bloc visual design. Since the gallery's inception, founder Stephane Cornille has traveled across several former Soviet republics and beyond, meeting with the artists who designed these prints (or their descendants) and bringing to light stacks of work long hidden in studio drawers, forgotten archives, and apartments.
- [Surrealism Meets Class Divide: Louis Pohl Koseda’s Art Is What the UK Feels Like Right Now](https://ex-pla.in/surrealism-meets-class-divide-louis-pohl-kosedas-art-is-what-the-uk-feels-like-right-now/): London-based artist Louis Pohl Koseda is emerging as one of the most distinctive chroniclers of contemporary British life. His intricate, fine-line drawings map a turbulent, often absurd landscape of economic uncertainty, social dysfunction, and spiritual longing, at once sharply observed and mythically charged.
- [In a Berlin Bunker, Asian Antiquities Converge with Contemporary Art at the Feuerle Collection](https://ex-pla.in/in-a-berlin-bunker-asian-antiquities-converge-with-contemporary-art-at-the-feuerle-collection/): Art collector Désiré Feuerle has spent a lifetime dissolving the boundaries between ancient and contemporary Asian art. Having transformed an old wartime bunker into one of Berlin’s most contemplative museums, he hopes to present his vision of art not as a series of timelines, but as a dialogue across centuries.
- [Documenting Euphoria: Peter J. Walsh’s RAVE ONE and the Rise of UK Rave Culture](https://ex-pla.in/documenting-euphoria-peter-j-walshs-rave-one-and-the-rise-of-uk-rave-culture/): Peter J Walsh was an eyewitness to one of the most transformative moments in modern British youth culture: the birth of acid house and the UK rave scene as a whole. With his long-term photo project RAVE ONE, Walsh offers a visceral, on-the-ground chronicle of the late 1980s and early 1990s acid house and rave movement, particularly in Manchester, a city that pulsed at the heart of it all.
- [The Man Who Created a Record Store That Only Buys One Album: Rutherford Chang’s White Album Project](https://ex-pla.in/the-man-who-created-a-record-store-that-only-buys-one-album-rutherford-changs-white-album-project/): In an era when digital algorithms can summon nearly any song on demand, the late Rutherford Chang’s obsession with a single album, The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled LP, universally known as The White Album, felt like a deliberate act of analog rebellion. His long-running conceptual project, known as We Buy White Albums, is less about The Beatles and more about what happens to objects, and the lives that pass through them. It’s one of the most quietly radical record collecting experiments in modern art.
- [From Nuclear Power to Brutal Silence: Reginald Van de Velde’s Haunting Photographs of Abandoned Cooling Towers](https://ex-pla.in/from-nuclear-power-to-brutal-silence-reginald-van-de-veldes-haunting-photographs-of-abandoned-cooling-towers/): In his striking series Landscapes Within, Belgian photographer and urban explorer Reginald Van de Velde turns his lens toward a seldom-seen side of post-industrial Europe: the monumental, cylindrical interiors of abandoned cooling towers. Where others see dereliction, Van de Velde finds meditative beauty, architectural poetry, and a chilling stillness.
- [The Tag That Changed New York: The Lasting Legacy of TAKI 183, Graffiti’s First Icon](https://ex-pla.in/new-york-lasting-legacy-taki-183-graffitis-first-icon/): Graffiti, one of the most pervasive aspects of spontaneous creativity in modern life has surprisingly simple stylistic origins, and while the real names and faces behind much of early graffiti remains unknown, TAKI 183 is one New York artist that famously made waves in the 70s and is still writing his name on walls today, over 50 years later.
- [Richard Avedon’s In the American West: When Fashion Turned Its Lens from Glamour to Grit](https://ex-pla.in/richard-avedons-in-the-american-west-a-portrait-series-that-turned-its-lens-from-glamour-to-grit/): In 1985, when Richard Avedon's In the American West debuted, it didn’t just surprise people, it unsettled them. Avedon, the high priest of polished elegance in fashion photography, had done something almost unthinkable: he turned his camera away from the glitz of Paris runways and Manhattan studios, and toward the sunbaked plains, dusty truck stops, and weathered faces of America’s overlooked.
- [Remembering the LAN Parties of Yesteryear](https://ex-pla.in/classic-lan-party-gaming-photos/): The internet is full of photos from the 90's and early 2000's when competitive multiplayer gaming was a niche hobby enjoyed between friends in basements and living rooms.
- [These Vintage Print Ads for Sunn Amps Are as Iconic as the Gear They Promote](https://ex-pla.in/sunn-amps-vintage-print-ads/): Big-name endorsements and sharp visual design from the classic era of Sunn amplifiers.
- [Photos From The Most Fashionable Nordic City](https://ex-pla.in/finnish-fashion-street-photography-helsinki/): For nearly two decades, a Helsinki-based photographer with an eye for street style has been capturing the Finnish capital's best-dressed denizens, revealing a hidden hotbed for everyday fashion.
- [Estonian Animation Is the Weird Trip You Didn’t Know You Needed](https://ex-pla.in/estonian-weird-soviet-animation/): Forget Japan—This small Baltic country is possibly the true master of surreal and weird animation, here are the films that deserve a spot on your watchlist.
- [The Most Experimental Renaissance Artist You've Never Heard Of](https://ex-pla.in/experimental-dutch-renaissance-artist-hercules-seghers-prints/): Across the history of Renaissance Art, the mysterious Dutch printmaker Hercules Seghers is perhaps the most innovative–and relatively unknown.
- [Flyers from Black Flag and the California Punk Scene of the 80s](https://ex-pla.in/auction-flyers-pettibon-black-flag-california-punk/): A new auction unearths classic works from Raymond Pettibon, frequent Black Flag collaborator and the foremost artist of the Southern California hardcore punk scene of the 80s.
- [Photos from the Carefree Early Years of Ibiza's Party Scene](https://ex-pla.in/maspons-ibiza-clubbing-nightlife-early-years-photography/): A revealing glance by one Spanish photographer into the halcyon early days of the Ibizan clubbing and party scene, where nudity and freedom reigned from morning to night.
- [This Obscure Experimental Graphic Novel Was Decades Ahead of Other Comics](https://ex-pla.in/avant-garde-graphic-novel-the-cage-vaughn-james/): Avant-garde surrealism and comic books come together in a little-known early graphic novel created by visionary artist Martin Vaughn-James.
- [Rare Photos of Southern California Skateboarders Tearing Up Empty Pools in the 70s](https://ex-pla.in/southern-california-pool-skating-photography-by-fineman/): Rediscovered photos of the renegade pool skating phenomenon of 70s Southern California captured by Craig Fineman.
- [Rough and Rude: Uncovering the Vivid Raver Art of 90's UK Garage](https://ex-pla.in/uk-garage-90s-underground-rave-art/): The frenetic visual culture of the classic UK jungle and other underground rave scenes is preserved in zine form. 

## Pages

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- [About Us](https://ex-pla.in/about/): Ex-Plain documents alternative and underground culture with a focus on refinement without excess. It exists in the space between the experimental and the iconic: informal lifestyles, subcultural aesthetics, outsider art, and the darker, moodier edges of contemporary and historical culture. The through-line is what might be called Wabi-Noir: a synthesis of the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi – that is to say an appreciation of imperfection, impermanence, and time – with the raw, informal sensibilities shaped by friction, scarcity, and reinvention. The perspective behind Ex-Plain is shaped by years spent immersed in global cultural centers including Berlin, New York, Tokyo, and […]
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