Founder of phreak.fm. Music producer, hacker culture archivist, and the voice behind the long-form pieces. Writing about the people who bend signals since before most of you were born.
~ cut by ripper / phreak.fm ~
Richard D. James hid images inside his music. Run certain Aphex Twin tracks through a spectrogram and you will see faces, spirals, and hidden messages encoded in the frequency domain. It is audio steganography as art.
Ripper :: April 7, 2027 :: 1 min read
Roland designed the TB-303 to simulate bass guitar lines for solo musicians. It was a commercial failure. Then Chicago producers got their hands on it and accidentally invented acid house.
Ripper :: February 24, 2027 :: 1 min read
When the Cult of the Dead Cow released Back Orifice at DEF CON 6 in 1998, they called it a legitimate remote administration tool. Microsoft called it malware. The truth was more complicated, and more important.
Ripper :: December 23, 2026 :: 1 min read
In 1998, seven members of the L0pht hacker collective testified before the U.S. Senate and told them, plainly, that they could take down the entire internet in 30 minutes. Congress listened. Then did nothing.
Ripper :: December 2, 2026 :: 1 min read
The media called him the most dangerous hacker in America. But Kevin Mitnick's greatest weapon was never a computer. It was his voice, his confidence, and his ability to get people to hand over the keys.
Ripper :: July 29, 2026 :: 1 min read
A toy whistle from a cereal box turned out to produce the exact frequency that could seize control of AT&T's long-distance network. John Draper, known as Captain Crunch, built an entire subculture on that discovery.
Ripper :: April 15, 2026 :: 1 min read
Rykard returns on Hunya Munya Records with NCO, an album that sits at the intersection of ambient composition and something harder to name. A close listen.
Ripper :: April 5, 2026 :: 2 min read
Before hackers had keyboards, they had tone dialers. The story of phone phreaking, from Cap'n Crunch's whistle to the fall of the analog network, and why it still matters.
Ripper :: April 1, 2026 :: 9 min read
Three decades after its release, Northern Exposure remains the benchmark for what a mix album can be. A retrospective on the compilation that turned the DJ mix into an art form.
Ripper :: March 25, 2026 :: 3 min read