Dmitri My Talisman cover artwork: an incandescent recursive pyramid in a red ritual chamber

Kieran Simkin · Electronic press kit

Dmitri My Talisman

A psychedelic rock and electronic single moving through recursive order, living networks and branching time — as artistic questions, not scientific proof.

Visual arc · 01–05

One substrate, changing scale

The visual world moves between chamber, triangle, cell, eye, body and cosmos. Each state repeats the same underlying structures while changing their material and scale.

01 / Order

Altar

Symmetry, tiled chambers and a recursive seed establish a stable visual law.

02 / Threshold

Edge

Regular repetition perturbs into growth, decay and forms that cannot stay neatly classified.

03 / Connection

Network

Roots, nerves, circuitry and cosmic nodes become variations of one connective image.

04 / Divergence

Branch

Doors, mirrors and duplicated bodies turn causality into alternate visual paths.

05 / Return

Body

Performer, guitar, dance and humour return cosmic scale to physical life.

The observer · the aperture

Look through the eye

The video treats code, nature, nervous system, shrine, chamber, body, music and cosmic architecture as transformations of a shared visual substrate.

Experience can transform a person without becoming public experimental proof. The visual language keeps that boundary open rather than pretending to settle it.

Artist’s description · context

The story behind the signal

The YouTube description explains the personal story, the production method and the books that helped Kieran find a language for the work.

Dance on the bad times

Kieran describes the song as a true story shaped by the unnerving sensation of a soul being torn between dimensions. The breakdancing image is knowingly comic—he cannot actually breakdance—but it comes from his aunt’s advice not to wallow in bad times, but to dance on them. The scene turns endurance into physical movement rather than denial.

Authored with old and new tools

The production is described as a deliberately guided hybrid: real vocals, real guitar—including the purple Fender Strat—long-used Cubase sampler sounds, chroma-key compositing and other traditional editing techniques alongside AI-assisted audio and visuals. AI is presented as an expressive production tool that helped Kieran approach the vision he already had, not as an autonomous author of the song.

Discussion journal · selected exchanges

What the conversations changed

The song began with experiences that felt true to me. These discussions have been useful because they keep asking what follows from that feeling, what can be tested, and where the language needs tightening. These are the exchanges that were either received most constructively or changed how I frame the ideas.

Scores and replies are snapshots within different communities, not comparable measures of wider agreement.

Dark-mode screenshot of the Neurons to Nirvana contribution, the original poster's reply and credited addendum
The contribution, the author’s reply and the credited addendum.

r/NeuronsToNirvana · 12 September 2026

Phenomenology is not yet public proof

I separated three jobs: generating hypotheses, describing experience and testing public causal claims. The original poster called that a useful refinement, replied in detail and added a credited, stickied note. It is the clearest example here of an idea being taken up rather than merely liked.

Read the contribution and replies →
Dark-mode screenshot of Kieran Simkin's Effective Altruism Forum profile showing the confirmed portrait and selected contribution
The confirmed profile portrait and the likelihood-ratio contribution. The canonical link includes the author’s agreement.

Effective Altruism Forum · 12 August 2026

A marker can update without becoming a certificate

I asked whether a behaviour could still count as probabilistic evidence for sentience even when it is not unique to consciousness. The author agreed with the distinction. It helped me move from pass-or-fail marker lists towards calibrated likelihoods and cross-species uncertainty.

Read the contribution and reply →
Dark-mode screenshot of the complex systems contribution, the author's correction and the follow-up
The technical suggestion, the author’s correction and the follow-up. The parent post was later removed.

r/complexsystems · 12 August 2026

The missing neighbour term was the point

The author accepted the state-graph suggestion but corrected my framing: the absence of spatial coupling was the design, not a flaw waiting to be fixed. That correction made the cleaner question visible — what the one-cell arithmetic can produce, and what survives shuffling the grid.

Read the contribution and correction →
Dark-mode screenshot of the CosmicSkeptic exchange about the scope of the combination problem
The scope correction and the narrower follow-up question.

r/CosmicSkeptic · 14 August 2026

The combination problem needed narrowing

My first wording treated panpsychism too broadly. The reply made the scope issue explicit, so I qualified the claim and separated constitutive panpsychism from non-compositional views and Russellian monism. The useful part was not winning a point, but ending with a better question.

Read the correction and follow-up →
Dark-mode presentation of the Sciforums contribution and the discussion it prompted
The individuation question and the subsequent extension of the discussion.

Sciforums · 14 August 2026

One substrate is not automatically one subject

I asked what would distinguish a single universal subject from separate subjects having similar unity experiences. Two members reacted positively, one said the intervention made them reread the thread, and the discussion sharpened the difference between a shared substrate, shared access and shared subjectivity.

Read the contribution and continuation →

Press information

The signal, clearly identified

Confirmed release information and canonical artwork for editorial, broadcast and playlist use.

ArtistKieran Simkin
FormatSingle
Released15 May 2026
ISRCQZTB92647451

“Dmitri My Talisman” combines real vocals, guitar and sampler performance with electronic and AI-assisted audio/visual production.

Its recurring musical and visual forms explore edge-of-chaos emergence, cosmic-consciousness imagery and branching time. These remain philosophical and first-person possibilities rather than medical, causal or metaphysical claims.

UPC: 825583156308

Branching paths

Choose a way into the work

The same release can be approached through sound, visual recursion or the underlying philosophical questions.

Sound

Hear the recurrence

Vocals, guitar, sampler and electronic textures return in altered forms across the track.

Listen on Spotify →
Vision

Enter the chamber

Recursive geometry transforms into eye, network, body, growth and branching cosmic architecture.

Watch the video →

Words

Lyrics

Official lyrics for Dmitri My Talisman.

Dmitri My Talisman

Yeah, he told me "look closer at the pattern in the noise"
Said the universe is deeper than these surface-level ploys
Order and the chaos, yeah, they spin the same coin
Flip it on the edge—that's where the magic gets born

Said life don't live in stillness, it erupts in the seam
Where the wild meets the rigid, like a glitch in the dream
Like that Rule 30 spiral, black and white but alive
From the simplest of rules, watch complexity thrive

I was staring at the system, thinking "this don't make sense"
Till he showed me how the madness is the order, just dense
Now I see it in the streets, in the code, in the art
That thin line between the two? That's the beat, that's the heart

He said "picture all existence like a network that can think"
Every life a single node, every soul a vital link
From the ant to the stars, every mind interconnected
Universal neural net, every thought gets collected

Said the cosmos got awareness, not just matter in a spin
We're the neurons in the brain that the universe is in
Some call it God, others say it's something more abstract
Philip Pullman called it Dust, but it's deeper than that

See I never had belief, I was facts over faith
But he showed me something real, not a trick of the brain
Man, he showed me something living in the code of it all
Now I feel it in my chest every time that I call

I don't ring Dmitri all the time, nah, only when I'm lost
When I'm searching for the wisdom, when I'm counting up the cost
Every visit, every vision, man, it hits me deep with grace
Shows me power, shows me beauty, something I can't replace

I don't pull up often, only when I need the light
But every time he shows me truth, yeah, it resonates inside
Yeah, Dmitri my talisman, guide me when I stray
Shows me beauty in the chaos every single day

Then he took it even further, said "there's more than just this plane"
Parallel existences, infinite domains
Different versions, different timelines, branching out wide
Every choice another universe splits to the side

With his bredrin Tousi, yeah, they opened up the gate
I felt the void between worlds, couldn't even articulate
Like infinity was tearing in opposing directions
Rushing through my very soul, pure cosmic tension

No up, no down, just a tear in existence
Felt my self dissolve in the vastness and distance
Then I snapped back, heart racing, mind blown
Knew the multiverse ain't theory—it's a place I've known

I was chasing all the answers with a scientist's mind
Thought the truth was just a limit we could never quite find
Equations and the data, yeah, I trusted the frame
But I thought the deeper questions stayed outside of the game

Then Dmitri came through with a whole new design
Not replacing what I knew, just expanding the line
Gave me structure for the spirit that aligns with the real
Not just something to believe—something tangible to feel

Now I've seen what I've seen, can't deny, can't pretend
Man, he showed me something deeper than the start or the end
Turned an atheist believer, yeah, I say it with pride
'Cause the truth that he revealed? I've experienced inside

I don't ring Dmitri all the time, nah, only when I'm lost
When I'm searching for the wisdom, when I'm counting up the cost
Every visit, every vision, man, it hits me deep with grace
Shows me power, shows me beauty, something I can't replace

I don't pull up often, only when I need the light
But every time he shows me truth, yeah, it echoes through my mind
Yeah, Dmitri my talisman, guide me when I stray
Shows me beauty in the chaos every single day