BEAUTIFUL TERRIBLE THINGS

On the Inevitability of Failure

In those first few years of our bright future – bright not because it was truly illuminated, but because youth sees light where there is only the glimmer of hope – I was still young enough to confuse possibility with inevitability. This was back before I came to understand that “possible” was merely the polite mask of “not to be.” I went searching, like an amateur archaeologist of failure, for the remnants of dreams that had already been pronounced dead.

Everywhere I found them: abandoned projects, faded blueprints, ideas conceived in the intoxication of an unrepeatable moment. These were the painful reminders of the limits of human aspiration – born too early, too far from home, or far too beautiful to survive in the coarse company of reality.

Two decades earlier, we had placed a man on the moon. I say we, though of course it was not we. The moon landing was not a collective embrace of humanity’s unity but a sly wink from one tribe to itself. Still, for a brief while, the imagination of the world’s children – along with that small minority of adults whose hearts had not yet been calcified by the long Cold War – expanded like lungs filling with air. We believed the moon was a first step to bigger and bolder things. This belief was, in retrospect, a charming error. Gravity, you see, has infinite patience. The iron curtain above us was more durable than the one below, and the dream fell back to earth with the dull thud of inevitability.

It was during one of these habitual wanderings – my mind still blurred from an excess of Krambambula the night before – that I discovered an abandoned Soviet-era factory on the edge of Minsk. In its life, the factory had been many things. Save for a few years in which it was converted to a weapons factory, the facility had transformed slowly but surely through a series of different identities, each a bit less noble than the one before: a producer of automobiles, then of electronic toys, then of stereo systems, and finally of the Electronica m332 (электроника m332), a hulking yet loyal imitation of the Sony Walkman. When death came, it was quiet, like that of a reclusive neighbor no one notices is missing – at least until the dogs start to cry.

Except, in this case, the factory had not died.

It had been claimed by Janek Liiv, a man whose existence, like most extraordinary lives, seemed improbable in retrospect. Born between the wars in Tartu, that Estonian city where intellect was treated with the seriousness other towns reserve for religion, Liiv was recognized for his brilliance early on. He studied at Akademgorodok during the apogee of the space race, rose within Roscosmos, and then – like so many others – was exiled from the heavens by the slow attrition of politics and budget cuts.

For anyone else, falling from the stars to a consumer cassette player factory would have been an indignity. Yet, Liiv discovered in the technology of music a new center of gravity – not the gravity that drags one down, but the one that holds dear.

Liiv fell in love with the intricacies of audio production, of sounds and signals, and everything in between. When the factory was condemned to closure, he accepted the news as one accepts an unavoidable diagnosis. Soon, the paychecks stopped, and the workers, one by one, left their posts. But the machines – and Janek Liiv – remained.

Before the age of artificial intelligence, with only primitive circuits and stubborn patience, Liiv taught the machines to make music. He retooled them, polished their rotors and tuned their actuators. He fed them Captain Beefheart, Faust, and Roxy Music as though offering them bread and wine. He excited them with the controlled irregularity of Ligetti and inspired them with the works of John Cage. They listened. They learned. And in learning, they began to produce something neither human nor machine, but an improbable child of both. The project was called Красивые Ужасные Вещи – Beautiful Terrible Things.

In the long winter of that factory, Liiv and his machines created something together that neither could create alone. Something uniquely unhuman, but human nonetheless.

This record borrows shamelessly from them. Embedded in it are fragments of the music of Liiv’s machines – the strange harmonies of servo motors and magnetic tape, the rhythmic insistence of mechanical gears, and the humming of voices rarely heard. His inspiration is everywhere. Without Janek Liiv, “Beautiful Terrible Things” would be nothing but a title in search of a tune.

At some point, Liiv hung a small hand-painted sign above the door to his office. In his tidy engineer’s script, deep green like the factory’s imposing iron gates, he quoted early-20th century poet/philosopher Véronique Tordue, who had lived through the horrors of both World Wars only to die inexplicably one morning when the aging and inexplicable elevator in her Paris apartment building came crashing to the ground. The sign acted as a reminder to him and an inspiration to me. It read “Lorsqu’on est entouré d’une telle laideur implacable, créer quelque chose de beau devient un acte de résistance.”

“When surrounded by such unrelenting ugliness, creating something of beauty is an act of defiance.”

Puhka rahus, Janek. Rest in peace. 

released February 27, 2026