Back in 2011-2013 or so, this was originally supposed to be a music blog. Life, politics, the Meme Wars, COVID etc intervened. After I sold the old house back in 2019, I no longer had room for a dedicated music studio. I did try to work laptop-only for awhile, but honestly, that has never worked […]
Here’s why I stopped long-form blogging all those years ago: I didn’t see the point of it. Because, you see, No Audience. No Pushback. By 2013 the blogosphere was already in decline. Too many of us out there, no way to share ideas with Others without having to turn oneself into a Brand, to attract […]
I’ve held off a bit noting the Starship Launch Failure. Wanted to give the news a little time to settle. Even with his now-weakened Reality Distortion Field, King Elmo still gets special treatment by the press. The tech aspects are covered in depth elsewhere, but so far the basic knowns are: Basically the 30+ engine […]
So: Jack Teixera. D’affaire Snowden was about ten years ago, oddly enough. It was a very different political climate at the time: Trump was still just “a celebrity”. The ongoing War on Terror, initially started by GWB and his GOP a decade before, was now associated with Democrats in general and with Obama in particular. […]
…is this thing on?
…is still in progress. But everything now sits here under this one banner, at least. All of “me”, from the various special-purpose sites I (very) sporadically updated over the past decade. It seems fitting to do this now, at the end of the year. End of the decade. Also the end of this particular ‘era’ […]
Merc, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune AND Pluto all retro, with Old Jove crossing my Sun while Kronos and the Lord of the Underworld tag-team teabag my Mars-in-Cap? Well, what better way to celebrate such Chaos… than by merging a few pre-2013 posts from the old place into this blog (backdated to the original publication dates)! I’ll pull […]
…we were Fighting for the Real. Time to fight back, kids…
Been awhile… Made a release: Some of the sounds used are re-purposed sounds made awhile back. Other sources are (layered) guitar, processed through (variants of) an Audiomulch patch, from the same timeframe. Lots of retrograde in the Air. Seems appropriate to have appropriated these past sounds, just about now. Also ironic: It was known, then, […]
Had one of those early-morning, overly vivid dreams: Two pairs of perfectly human-looking robots (they were ‘robots’ in the dream, not ‘androids’, so let’s use that word here). And these were Manichaean robots, apparently: One pair felt ‘good’– or at least I was supposed to feel more sympathetic towards them– and the other pair were ‘bad’. […]
First of May (though you wouldn’t know it from the dull, cold grey outside). Most cultures, ancient and modern, have some sort of Springtime/rebirth holiday today: Beltane, Mayday, Walpurgis Night. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans each had their variants, too, all with much the same general intent: As agricultural societies, they wanted a good growing […]
Ok well, no human voices were used, only synths, so technically not a ‘carol’. But Christmas ghosts were on the mind while putting this one together: Three tracks, all sound synths (Logic Pro and/or Ableton Live). Live was used for the final arrange and mix down. Happy Merry, all…
Basically just wanted to put this here since Twitter feeds are so ephemeral. Snapped this last Friday when I got home from work. I’m no gardener at all, so this poor rosebush has been left to fend for itself until I can find a decent landscaper next Spring. One can only admire its stubborn opportunism, […]
Tell me your race, how you worship (and/or, if you do), what socio-economic class you happened to be born into, which subculture (professional or otherwise) you most identify with (again, if any) and where you live now… and I’ll have a really, really good chance at guessing: How old you think the earth is. Your opinion […]
How does one destroy a Republic? You destroy the very notion of res publica. You convince the people that there is… no People. No civic space. No public forum. Every square inch of the planet, owned by someone. Every idea, every invention, every thought, every human creation of value, owned by someone. Every one of […]
It’s been over a year. Not yet over, a year. (Won’t get into that… here). Just never really felt like writing. Moulting time, I suppose. But at least I’ve been making a lot of music. Maybe I needed that more. IMO, the particular “decade-ness” of any decade doesn’t really become apparent until the 3rd or […]
Just uploaded this weeks Project. For now I just need a place to post this picture so I can link to it: More later…
In Mid-November, five titles occurred to me. Just the titles. From then on until mid-January, I made tracks to match the names. The result: About 20 core sounds involved. More than a few of them remixed/repurposed from pre-existing material. Released under Creative Commons license (non-commercial/attribution/share-alike).
Well, not really. But Disquiet Junto Project #0104 had us go through our past year’s work, and splice five seconds per month into a one minute year-in-review piece: Details (and links to the source tracks) are at the SoundCloud Link. In other news, last week’s Disquiet had us make a secular holiday track, using material […]
For Disquiet Junto Project #0102, we were asked to make a one-minute loop that was “glistening, reflective and gentle” to make a secular holiday track: Done in Ableton Live. Used a Collision patch to make the tolling sound, and ran a Korg WAVESTATION soft synth through the effects part of the emulated Korg MS-20 to […]
Uploaded the second drone of the series of tracks I’ve been working on: Like the previous track, this one was done in Ableton Live (still trying to wrap my brain around Suite 9). Some of the core sounds were made in AudioMulch (the ‘collision’ sounds in the background are actually a guitar run through AM, […]
I participated in a Disquiet Junto project this week: My kitchen sink, a microwave, and a small battery-powered drill I bought at Costco years ago. More details at the SoundCloud link.
I’ve still been playing with Ableton 9, as time has allowed. Gone back to drone for a bit: The main drone tones are two of Live’s “Resonator” presets, modified somewhat. Also used four Audiomulch-treated guitar tracks I had created for another project and not yet used. I’d like to do three more of these…
Newmusicbox has a brief interview with Marc Weidenbaum about the Disquiet Junto. (The newmusicbox site looks pretty good in general, I’m largely linking to the article so I’ll remember to check it out later). Also found another ‘constraints-based exercise’ SoundCloud group, this one with a monthly deadline, where the stimulus is a particular photo. Could […]
I’ve been skipping the Disquiet Junto projects (and music in general) these past few weeks. Real life has been a bit… event-filled. But this week’s project appealed to me: We were told to generate three elements: A beat, a drone, and a ‘melodic fragment’. We were then to use these to create a 90 second […]
I am, of course, posting this because of the soundtrack. Though the visuals are… interesting. h/t io9.
Finally had a chance for final mastering and upload of this, my second bandcamp release: This is best described as a self-remix piece. The core sound materials were produced in the period 2001-2004. Some of these were fully-formed pieces in their own right (e.g. a version of comes pale horse, from 2002; and an unused […]
Real life has been brutal, frankly, so I haven’t been updating the music blog even though I’ve managed to participate in a few Disquiet projects since the last post. First, #77, ‘disquiet0077-netlabelsplice’: This project gave us links to three deriv-friendly netlabel tracks, and specified a time range for each of them. We were to take […]
Andrew Sullivan has apparently chosen neuroscience as a pet topic for the past few weeks. Key quote: Without religion or a shared culture, science has assumed a role it is not qualified to play: a judgment of the whole, not just of its relevant area of inquiry. Don’t get me wrong: science is a vital […]
no peanuts in church... 