k.cast

k.cast is the moniker and audiovisual project of researcher and videographer Michael Thomas Rowland. Since June 2025, k.cast has investigated music culture, modes of humanity, historical narratives and technology through the combination of interviews, visuals, fictional storytelling, soundscapes and music. In March 2026 Michael joined Universiteit Leiden to work on the project “Tracing Players Playing Traces: Non/Human Music in Modern and Contemporary Literature” with Daný van Dam and Ruth Clemens. Rowland/k.cast’s research centres on narratives, economic, legal, racial, literary and civilizational - the ways in which we interpret reality. He draws on the works of Walter Benjamin, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Malcolm Ferdinand, Mark Fisher and Octavia Butler. k.cast was born out of the belief that music is an immensely powerful force around which populations can be mobilised. As in Benjamin’s ‘underclass history’, k.cast maintains that the music of the people contains memories of past struggles and the will to live as humans. If music survives, we are connected to the past and, with the knowledge of the past, we can remake the future.