…patience…

building new Boost libraries gives you this lovely piece of advice.

Been working on an issue at work that doesn’t happen in development builds, only in executables built on the build server. Which means no catching it in the debugger, and very slow iterations where I make a code change, add a crapton of log messages, save it in source control, start a test build, wait about 46 minutes, install it on my secondary development machine, run it, and then look for the log messages. This has been going on for 4 days now — four very long, boring days. I identified exactly which function call is locking up, but not at all why; I attempted multiple workarounds and updates to third-party libraries and no luck. Today I at least figured out which code change from two weeks ago caused it to happen, but still not why. There’s a huge pile of stuff to finish for this release (including planning for the next one) and a couple of things I have to do on a side project contract and ugh, this is the worst time for this sort of thing.


I have 38 minutes of music ready for the next album, after thinking things were going slow in that department. And there’s some decent ambient bass noodling in it. So that’s okay then.

The back pain has been gradually relenting. The realization that it’s easing off came shortly after I realized that some portion of it is probably arthritis, due to the occasional weird feeling of “wrong” rather than pain per se, that reminded me of when I had it in my left wrist, like those body parts are just not going to bear a load anymore. So, hmmm. The body and mind are complex and don’t really understand each other very well sometimes, I think.

Behringer (may they rot in corporate hell) today made about the 49th new product announcement/teaser of the year: the Enigma, a clone of the Buchla 208, the main part of the famous Music Easel, with an estimated price about 1/8 of the real thing. At first I was thinking if there’s anything they could clone that could possibly tempt me to give them another penny, it’d be a 208. But their mockup of it looks like they’ve made some ill-advised design changes, and when I think about what the Minibrute 2S offers, and how relatively decent the Arturia emulation of the Easel is… nah.

slow?

When I’m not recording something every week or so I start feeling like my music-making pace is slack — even last year when I released 8 albums and participated in two compilations.

But this time, things have been slower. I started to do the math, but instead I will say: that’s okay. I don’t have to be super prolific, it’s not as if any income is riding on it.

(Speaking of income: I collected my 2018-2019 royalties from DistroKid last year, all of $14, and they diligently reported it to the IRS. Which means I had to fill out extra “self-employment” paperwork, which meant TaxAct charged me $50 or so more on top of the $40 in DistroKid fees that I already paid to earn that $14. I don’t consider what I do a business, and if I did, I would report a loss — but it wouldn’t be enough of a loss to push us over the standard deduction. So it’s all pointless bureaucracy, and someone else is profiting from my mistake of thinking I might offset the cost of my hobby a little bit.)

Why slower? Partially it’s been the bass thing. Sometimes I’ll fire up my stuff and just jam, practice, or experiment and not record something. I expected some of that when I got into it.

But some of it has been motivation. The late winter/early spring mood has combined with back pain ever since our road trip, and that doesn’t encourage creative efforts. I’ve spent more time sitting in the big chair in the living room with the shiatsu massager (usually helpful in the short term), or just playing video games. (The usual Noita and Art of Rally; I’ve moved from Dirt Rally 2.0 to WRC 10, and recently started up Guild Wars 2 again thinking I might pick up the End of Dragons expansion but I don’t know whether I’m feeling it.)

Regardless, I’ve recorded four good tracks in the month since the last release, so maybe I should just stop worrying about my pace. Two of those tracks were Ambient Online compilation submissions, but if I play the four of them sequentially they sound like they’re meant to be on the same album in that very order — so I’ll include them all. And I have a name for the album in mind, and a couple of ideas for next tracks.


I started to read From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory which was posthumously compiled from several writings by James Tenney. Whoever is missing their tea, I’m sorry, I grabbed the wrong cup because this one is not mine. In retrospect I’m not sure why I thought it might be. There’s a lot of analysis of Schoenberg (blech) and I feel like what Tenney did was creating a set of rules with some arbitrary definitions and vaguely statistical concepts, to describe something that was already created using a set of rules using vaguely statistical concepts. Did Walker Farrell recommend this, or was it someone on Lines, or an Amazon or GoodReads suggestion based on other books I was looking at? I will go ahead and blame an algorithm I think.

I tried to give it a chance, but it’s not just dry and academic. It’s dry, academic, completely irrelevant to my process, and unable to generate any sort of insight or inspiration I can work with. I feel like for all that I’ve read through it, it came to the conclusion that “stuff can be grouped together if it has similar characteristics, and separated into different groups if it has different characteristics”… not exactly life-changing stuff.

Termination Shock: a novel and a bad idea

I usually enjoy Neal Stephenson’s novels a lot. Termination Shock gave me some pretty mixed feelings, though.

The plot: it’s the near future and the climate has (surprise!) gotten worse. Sea level rise is a serious threat to some places in the world, while others are all but uninhabitable witout air conditioning or cooled “earthsuits.” Lots of ecological side effects, two more COVID pandemics and ongoing supply chain chaos, are really not helping any.

A Texas billionaire oil baron kicks off a desperate geoengineering project to launch sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere — a similar effect that volcanic eruptions have. He doesn’t ask permission, he just rounds up a bunch of other rich people with a stake and shows them the system.

Outside of the fiction, this method has been modeled and is expected to effective at cooling temperatures and even relatively cost-effective… as long as you don’t ever stop. (Stopping causes warming to rebound worse, which is called “termination shock.”) There are also a lot of unsettled questions about how much it would reduce rainfall (and make it more acidic), reduce sunlight available for agriculture, increase ocean acidification, potentially damage the ozone layer, affect atmospheric circulation, and have generally unknown effects on the ecosystem. Whether it’s an extremely bad idea, a questionable one, or something to maybe try out very cautiously depends on who you ask and which models they’re looking at.

In the story, the effect on rainfall is assumed to be regional, very dependent on where the sulfur is introduced — in this case, it is the “breadbasket” of the Punjab that is adversely affected, which is a major plot point. Ocean acidification is briefly mentioned as a main reason for carbon capture and reduction rather than continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere; the sulfur is meant to buy some time for that. Termination shock of course is a serious concern, as is the political destabilization factor of an eccentric, rogue non-state actor having control of a “climate weapon.” But overall, the attitude of the book’s characters — and thus, apparently (?) the book and the author — is that opponents of the geoengineering scheme are either India (facing possible starvation, so their opposition was rational, but misguided because more sites were supposed to balance the first one) or deluded lefty Greens (rarely if ever shown in a sympathetic light). The book’s political stance is kind of unclear, with the US as an example of a nearly failed state thanks to its “Comanche” individualist warrior redneck attitude, but also its choice of protagonists (Libertarian Texan, gun-toting redneck, a literal queen who owns significant stock in petrochemical and mining companies, and… a Sikh martial artist?) It’s weird. If I hadn’t read other books by Stephenson I would really wonder about the politics in it. He’s absolutely not on the Fox News/Trump side, that much is clear. But a lot remains ambiguous — partly because of where it ends, on the assumption that this “solution” is probably going to work and therefore the world is saved by one of the rich white patriarchal Libertarian gun nuts who broke it in the first place.

It’s still a Neal Stephenson book, and therefore a dogpile of crazy fun tangents (although some of them drag on a little bit), absolutely hilarious and absurd moments and characters. I don’t regret reading it like I do some things that turned out to be pretty clear-cut Ayn Rand worship, but I’m not fully comfortable with it either. And it’s a different sort of discomfort from reading Ministry for the Future, which confronts rather than abstracts human suffering, and where eco-terrorism contributes positively to the eventual solutions (a different sort of rogue actor, anonymous agents rather than a protagonist).


Now I’ve started reading She Who Became the Sun, “a reimagining of the rise to power of the Hongwu Emperor in the 14th century.” Which is less dry than it sounds. A young starving girl disguises herself as her dead brother and also takes on his destiny — becoming a monk (narrowly escaping detection) and then attaching herself to a rebellion against the Mongols and eventually becoming emperor. If it sounds a little like Mulan, well… it’s at least 300 years later, not the same situation or politics, and more queer overall (there’s also a general who’s a eunuch and kind of despised by his peers, but who fascinates the protagonist).


I keep GASsing for that Miezo bass or similar, and asking myself why. It’s still essentially a bass, and would provide similar (probably not identical) sound to the Mikro. Most of the time when I want a different piece of synth gear, it’s either for the sound, experimental possibilities, or some aspect of modulation or workflow that I’m confident will suit me well.

The reasons come down to:

  • It looks really flipping cool. It’s distinctive and frankly kind of SF/fantasy-ish.
  • A shorter scale length than even the 28.6″ does have some appeal for me, in that it’d get me solidly to OFPF (one finger per fret) throughout the full range.
  • Shorter overall body length makes it more wieldy. The Mikro’s total body length is 42″, and I do sometimes bump its headstock into stuff when tweaking other things. The U-bass is about 29.4″. Mini-basses range from about 20-26″ in total length.

I still need to put some thought into it though.

  • Is this something that ends up replacing the Mikro, or supplementing it? That depends, I guess.
  • Do I want to go for 16″, 18″, 22″? (Shorter is cheaper; longer is supposed to work better with standard tuning ranges and slapping, but the 16″ have been demonstrated to be decent. The 22″ has 4 more frets.)
  • 4 strings? 5? 6? (On a shorter instrument, more strings compensates for the shorter “reach” of each string. On a longer one it extends the range and adds more fingering options. Would be nice to have a low D for when I’m accompanying my spouse on the dulcimer. But more strings = pricier and more complex.)
  • Fretted or fretless? I’m leaning toward frets because that’s better for slapping and tapping, and the U-bass is covering fretless ground pretty nicely.
  • Why not a second U-bass then, fretted? I’m not sure even with the steel flatwound strings and frets, they are as good at slapping and tapping. And they’re not as short. But it is still something to think about.

where it’s at

Both the Strega and A-150 arrived yesterday. The latter is mostly just plumbing, but the former is a very cool instrument.

It was baffling for the first hour or so — the design and layout are a bit unconventional, many of the controls are cryptic, and the manual is not entirely illuminating. But it’s not quite as alien an instrument as one might first think. Behind the “alchemical” symbols there are some conventional synth sections, albeit strung together with unusual modulation sources and routings and feedback paths. It has the nicest waveshaper I have heard on any Make Noise gear, and just a lot of cleverness. Well done Tony Rolando and Alessandro Cortini.

There’s no need to worry too much about it having too much of that specific artist’s stamp on it either, or being stuck doing nothing but noisy drones. It’s capable of a lot of different stuff. More so when patching it to other gear, like the 0-Ctrl or more conventional modulation sources, but that is The Way of Modular.

Was it a good choice to replace the Microfreak and 60HP of modules with this? For sure it was.

Here’s the current modular rig:


And here is The One That Is Getting Away:

A Maurizio Uber Bass Miezo 16/5, normally a custom job but this one is just sitting there available, without the wait time.

This is very close to the next bass I want. I think I would prefer the 18″ version, and would probably prefer a different color. And I’m also not sure I am prepared to spend this much on a bass, and there are similar, slightly less stylish but less costly alternatives. And also I think I should probably work on my technique first to help justify such a thing. And also dig in with the new stuff I have recently acquired and get cozy with all of that before jumping into another simultaneous adventure. But seeing this available and not going for it is still causing some proverbial nail-biting.

It’s a bit different to drool over something I could potentially get and would actually play, than it is many of the really pretty basses I see posted all the time now that I know I wouldn’t buy. For now this remains a “someday” instrument, and… that’s OK.

retracting the claws

I’ve decided to downsize my synth setup just a little.

My original thoughts about getting the Strega were that I’d either have to put aside my Microfreak or unload 60HP of modules to empty the Pod60. Now that we come to it, I’m going to do both.

  • Microfreak is now officially sold, I just need to ship it.
  • Mixwitch is being replaced by a Doepfer A-150 — a little smaller, cheaper, simpler, but dual. I honestly have been using Mixwitch rarely and only for transposition and rare switching, reaching instead for the more ergonomically favorable Shades or Blinds for everything else. And I honestly could probably have skipped the A-150 too.
  • Angle Grinder is out. It’s a lovely filter and pretty interesting as an oscillator. But between Blades, Inertia, Katowice, Lacrima Versio, the Minibrute’s filter, Strega’s filter and software I am really well covered here!
  • Jena is out. Wavetable-based waveshaping is covered by Shapeshifter and Bitwig Grid. I can still use Drezno for making audio dirtier, reshaping signals, extracting and generating patterns, and so on. (I also won’t be picking up Erfurt, which would largely just been enhancements for Jena.)
  • Crush Delay is out. Strega has its own, similar but more mojo-fied dirty delay. And I’m seriously not lacking for other delay FX.
  • Plancks is out. I used it rarely, mostly for crossfades I could be doing with Planar or Blinds. I’d put some thought into going for a Morph 4 instead of this downsizing, but nah.

So the Strega will sit right next to the 0-Ctrl, the awkward laptop arm of my monitor stand will be folded back out of the way, and I’ll also put away the towering DJ stand that’s holding up the Model:Cycles. The latter I’ll keep as an occasional toy for drum jams in the easy chair, and a once-in-a-while contributor to my recordings).

Selling off this stuff will also go a long way toward re-zeroing my music gear spending for the year. Which means more leeway later if I decide to pick up that headless travel piccolo bass (a category that needs a more concise, less awkward name).


Speaking of basses, I have found my holy grail: reliable pitch to MIDI conversion (and thus, pitch to CV). Jam Origin Guitar to MIDI works very well and is polyphonic, though it only tracks guitar range (losing almost the bottom octave of standard bass tuning). Bass to MIDI is monophonic — more appropriate for CV anyway — and tracks the full bass range with decent reliability and pretty low latency.

I had all kinds of fun last night not just playing synths with the bass (which can be really nice when doubling it with the original sound), but using it to make filters and oscillators track pitch — nice with comb filters, ring modulation, and some funky stuff with using the amplitude to control waveshaping. But the ultimate was Rings, particularly in the chord modes. It was hypnotic! I’ll also definitely be trying it with other resonator patches using Mimeophon, Beads, Minimal Audio Rift and so on.

inevitable witchcraft

I’ve mentioned the Make Noise Strega 8 9 times in this blog so far and talked about it on forums a little more. A few of those times were “I’ve decided not to buy one.”

To nobody’s surprise, I decided to buy one.

Like I originally said, the instrument seems to have been designed to appeal directly to me specifically. (I know it was actually for/by Alessandro Cortini, but that’s nearly the same thing, in terms of sound design aesthetics. I wish it was as similar in terms of musical career success and acclaim…)

The Launchpad Pro mk3 certainly made me happy enough to put the Launchpad X up for sale. Yes, pressure works a little differently on it, with a low threshold making it less aftertouch-like… but it is extremely well suited to directly controlling the level of a synth voice, which is great for most of my purposes. The sequencer, too, is pretty nice to work with, allowing for better editing than the Microfreak although obviously with a few limitations compared to using a DAW. It also has more immediate appeal and simplicity than a typical piano roll in a DAW though, which was the point.

The Microfreak is certainly competent as a synth, but I do have the modular and Minibrute and lots of software. It’s a fun little package overall, and I may end up missing it in a nostalgic sort of way, just as I miss the Lyra-8. But I don’t really need it. I was mostly keeping it mostly for sequencing and simple parts, but I can do those on the Launchpad, whose responsiveness and flexibility I prefer. I think overall the Strega is a better fit for my purposes — patchable with the modular and the Minibrute, designed to work well with the 0-Ctrl, an excellent range of sounds overall, and able to process and react with external audio.

And on that last point, since part of the Strega is a dirty crunchy delay, I’ll also let go of my Befaco Crush Delay. I believe they’re based on the same PT2399 delay chip, but with different analog circuits in the feedback path, and from what I’ve heard of the Strega it’s really got something special in its implementation. No idea yet what might fill the space in the modular, but something will come up eventually I’m sure.


That back pain is still obnoxious at times, and leaves me almost completely alone at other times. I haven’t figured out much of a pattern.

But this weekend I did at least manage to fix the kitchen light (replacing the ballast, which was the cheapest and simplest thing to do), and recorded a track with bass and drones, with the expression controller to tweak feedback levels on reverb for the bass. I was thinking it’d be for the next Ambient Online compilation, but of course it’s kind of ominous (like I do…) and maybe not what is wanted for this round. So I’ll try to be a little more cheerful and bright if I can stand to 🙂


Reading!

Before and during the road trip I re-read Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, back to back. Harrow made a bit more sense this time, though it wasn’t because I remembered the plot entirely. To be fair, the sometimes first-person perspective is meant to have the reader share in the protagonist’s disorientation, as someone who is both metaphorically and literally haunted…

I followed those up with two stories from qntm: Fine Structure and Ed. Both share themes of extreme weird science fiction. The former involved superheroes and much more chaos; I think it might have been the weakest of qntm’s books because the escalation just didn’t hit as hard as Ra. But it was still fascinating in part. Ed is about a super-genius mad scientist, is tongue-in-cheek and might be the funniest of qntm’s books, though it too gets blown up to multiversal proportions. I’d like to read something by this author that is equally weird but remains on a relatively human scale, where everyone remains in the same universe and timeline, the year is measured in no more than four digits, and the Earth is destroyed a total of zero times.

I’ve begun Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. In some ways you know what you’re going to get with a Stephenson book — lots of tangents and trivia and deep nerdery, and usually a great combination of humor and doom — but within that formula you really have no idea where it’ll go. A novel about climate collapse, so far it has involved the kind of badass Queen of the Netherlands, a guy on a mission to kill rampaging feral hogs, and fire ants that destroy air conditioners. I groaned an audible “nooooo!” when “COVID-19, COVID-23 and COVID-27” was mentioned. Still not as much of a kick in the face as the first chapter of Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s take on climate disaster and recovery.

sound

x: Sounds are not “analog” or “digital.”

x2: Analog envelope generators do not cause synths to sound “more analog”.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.


Addendum:

If you happen to like the way thing A works more than you like the way thing B works, that does not make thing A objectively better. It is the opposite of that, it’s subjective.

Likewise if thing A has features that thing B doesn’t, and thing B has features that thing A doesn’t, and you like the features of thing A and wish they were in B, that still doesn’t make thing A objectively better.

Let’s review:

harderobjectiveMohs, Vickers, or Brinell hardness scale
bettersubjectiveno applicable unit of measurement
fasterobjective(any measureable unit) per time unit, e.g. meters per second, gallons per hour, frames per second; OR the time to complete a standardized action (e.g. booting into Windows)
strongerobjectivemaximum load that can be lifted (kg, lb, etc), material breaking strain (MPa/psi), etc.

back home, back pain, back at it

We’re back from our 9 day vacation (+1 day for recovery). The visit with my parents was nice and peaceful. Bringing instruments (my bass uke, her dulcimer) turned out to be a great idea and I’m sure we’ll do that again. Since so many folk songs that my spouse plays are in D, I tried dropping my tuning to DGCF but the strings are way too floppy that way. Drop-D tuning (DADG) works, but can be a bit confusing, so most likely I’ll just stick to EADG on the uke at least. Maybe the LaBella strings on the Mikro will be up for DGCF. At any rate, it gave us something fun to do, our families seemed to enjoy it to some extent as well, and I’ve maintained the minor callouses on my left hand fingers. 😉

In my parents’ backyard we saw plenty of birds, deer once, and a fox in the evening right as we were getting ready to leave. We played a couple of board games, watched Captain Marvel and a few TV shows that were not too bad considering, ate some experimental meals that my mom made which mostly turned out quite well, watched my dad’s slide shows for the last couple of years, and just hung around.

The next step was to drive to Atlanta in the dark and rain, and it reminded me how much I dislike Atlanta. But our morning visit to Georgia Aquarium was pretty fantastic — even without a stingray touch pool, I’d put it at a very close second to Shedd (Chicago), right alongside Tennessee Aquarium (Chattanooga) or Ripley’s Aquarium (Gatlinburg). (The St. Louis Aquarium is more modest yet still worth a visit if you’re in town.) They have the largest tank in the world at 6.3 million gallons, which houses a whale shark and mantas among many other things; they also have a big shark tank and a beluga tank, and a nice variety of other animals as well, including all my personal favorites. We didn’t do any of the “optional” ticketed shows since the goal was to go through and then hit the road, but it was still about 2.5 hours of stuff to see. I took something like 150 pictures, and it took three rounds of culling to bring that down to 19 photos and 3 videos to post on Instagram.

The drive to my in-laws’ new house from Atlanta is just slightly shorter than from our house to my parents, though with fewer traffic snarls. The new place is pretty nice, with a bunch of land in the back — the chickens are all set up, but the goats are still at their old place which they’re sloooowly moving out of. My mother-in-law has an erhu (Chinese spike fiddle) that she hadn’t set up yet, so I learned a little about it, tuned it up and started to rosin the bow (but it really needs a lot more rosin for a good tone). It’s an unusual instrument to me, in that the horsehair of the bow can be disconnected and is threaded between the two strings (tuned to A440 and D below that), and the nut is made from string, surprisingly far down the neck. There’s no fretboard to press the strings against, it’s just finger pressure as needed. It’s a pretty neat instrument though and I could see getting one maybe… but I feel I should concentrate on synth and bass.

The official justification for this trip was my nephew’s second birthday party. He’s a cute kid with an infectious laugh — fond of dinosaurs and frogs, red and orange, and throwing balls at peoples’ faces before announcing “catch!” I’m glad I finally got to meet him. He got approximately a million toys for his birthday and I’m pretty sure he deserves them all.

The drive back home was shorter and generally less traffic-filled and stressful — but by that time I had developed a nasty persistent backache which I’ve been unable to shake. It’s high enough I can’t apply Aspercreme myself, and I’m not sure that would help. Lying down flat, the pain almost entirely disappears. Unlike my usual aches, a heating pad is pretty marginal. The shiatsu massager or my wife’s efforts are a bit more helpful but it’s not long before the pain creeps back. I tried a Salonpas pad that’s supposed to bring 10 hours of relief, and it was more like…. 10 minutes of nothing, then 15 minutes of discomfort, then 7 hours of some help, and I still keep smelling menthol even though it’s been another 12 hours and I’ve showered since then. Weird.


Music! After doing some online research during the trip, I’ve bought a Launchpad Pro mk3. The main feature it offers over the Launchpad X I have now is a very friendly standalone sequencer mode. There’s some concern that they’ve changed the pad response significantly and it might be better at velocity and a little worse at pressure, but probably tweakable enough in software to make me happy. My thinking here is that the main reason I have been holding on to the Microfreak isn’t necessarily its synth capabilities — which are fine but not really outstanding compared to the modular, Minibrute or my software collection — but its controller/arpeggiator/sequencer combo. So the LPPmk3 could replace both the LPX and Microfreak, leaving room for a Strega if I choose to pick one up, or just consolidating if not.

Also while I was away, the Noise Engineering “Bundle 1” plugins were released: Cursus Vereo, Basimilus Iteritas and Desmodus. I’ve owned both Basimilus and Cursus in Eurorack form and moved on from them but I’m very happy to have them in this format for occasional use, and Desmodus even more so. Basimilus struck me as a killer kick drum module but I so rarely need kick drums; in plugin form and polyphonic its versatility stands out a bit more. Likewise, Cursus feels like a different beast as a polyphonic plugin than an oscillator. It was one of many “this is good but I have too many oscillators” choices. And the Desmodus plugin is not-so-secretly both Desmodus and Electus (with sync) and its variety shines in this format too — and also lets me feel more free to keep running Melotus and Lacrima on my two Versio modules without dipping back to the Desmodus firmware on occasion.

Befaco Noise Plethora — not one I’d paid too much attention to before — also dropped as a VCV Rack plugin, and it’s pretty great. A dual digital noise generator with 30 different algorithms (independently selectable) and analog filters, plus a white noise with “grit” generator and another filter. Some of the algorithms are clusters of oscillators, reminiscent of the Odessa, and if it had volt-per-octave tracking and linear TZFM I might actually have been tempted to free up the Odessa. But for me it’s a nice free addition to the already amazing VCV.

And Bitwig 4.2 has left beta and become official. This is the update that adds MIDI manipulation to the Grid, which opens up a lot of hybrid sequencing and processing of controllers.

So I have a lot to explore. I do have an idea for the next album but in retrospect it seems like an idea for part of an album — a suite or concerto perhaps.

All Points Collapse

The new album is now available! As usual it’s free/pay-what-you-want.

Enjoy!


Speaking of collapse… with the news that Epic Games has bought Bandcamp, there has been much discussion and pessimism about that in various online communities. I am… let’s say “not thrilled” because to me Bandcamp is pretty great already, with just a few convenience features wanted but basically having a great thing going both for listeners and artists. Epic promises not to screw that up. But what happens nearly every time a relatively small, cool company gets bought by a larger, uncool one? Promises get broken.

Epic didn’t buy Bandcamp just because they love independent music and musicians so very much. They have a bigger plan, which involves buying other media companies outside their area of expertise and doing something with them.

As I’ve just demonstrated — and will further demonstrate this afternoon when I get home from work and buy a bunch of music, skewing toward Ukranian artists and labels this time — I’m not abandoning Bandcamp now. But if things go south, in the form of more emphasis on popular artists over independent ones, canceling Bandcamp Friday, taking bigger cuts from artists, NFTs/crypto, required subscription fees, pivoting entirely to streaming, or other general fuckery, I will find an alternative.

if it ain’t one thing…

New album has been ready to release, I’m just waiting for Bandcamp Friday.


I got some La Bella white nylon tapewound strings for the #1 bass. These are supposed to be super smooth yet relatively bright, and are very well liked. I know I previously said I’d just stick with the roundwound strings it came with because of how well they worked with a specific resonator effect… but sometimes those bug me in normal playing. So I’ll see how these work out.

I kinda feel like my basses should have names. “#1 bass” may not be accurate in the future — in terms of how much I’ve used it in recordings it’s already not — and “the Mikro” is kind of boring. Since it’s purple and relatively small, I thought about “the little Prince,” but I’m not that big a Prince fan. The name of its exact color according to how it displays on the Ibanez website is apparently MediumOrchid4, though the closest named CSS color is simply “purple.” I’m not sure Orchid is a good name for it though. I’ll figure something out, or I’ll just stop worrying about it 🙂


We’re going on a road trip soon: to visit my parents, a morning visit to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, and then my in-laws. Thanks to the pandemic I’ve never met my lil’ nephew Luke in person (and it’ll be his birthday!), and I’ve never seen my in-laws’ new house. My spouse is thinking about bringing her dulcimer and I’m considering the U-bass.

With a little more than a week before that, our kitchen lights died. No problem, I thought, I’ll just order new bulbs. We have ballast bypass LED tubes replacing the old fluorescents, which used to be an online order from a specialty store and is now common and cheap. But new bulbs didn’t do it — it’s the ballast itself. Probably the old bulbs are still fine…

My options are:

  • Replace the ballast and continue using the same type of LED bulbs. This seems kind of silly, but it doesn’t cost too much.
  • Cut out the ballast and rewire direct. In our case this unfortunately also means replacing the sockets with non-shunted ones, and also probably replacing the bulbs… which in total would cost more and be more difficult than just replacing the ballast.
  • Replace the fixture with an integrated LED light and not have to be think about it for the next 40-50 years. The light itself barely costs more than the ballast would. Since I’d want professional installation, labor would cost something. But it’s not too big a deal.

Really this was just sort of a hassle right before a trip, so we’re waiting until after. We also had some plumbing stuff happen that was looking pretty dicey but managed to resolve ourselves. We also need to have a roof leak repaired (we had to wait for the ice to thaw first).


I haven’t said anything yet about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…. and I think that’s the correct way to say it: it’s not Russia, it’s Putin. The Russian people seem mostly not to want this. It’s inexcusable. Other than that, there’s not much for me to say.

I do feel a bit weird about calls to donate to the Ukrainian military. I’m trying to imagine that in the US, where the budget already exceeds basically everything ever and it doesn’t need crowdfunding. I am mostly a pacifist, but I think this is exactly what an army is for — stopping other armies from doing what they should not. Actual defense, not offense with a euphemistic name. Still, I am more comfortable giving to a cause that will help refugees and other civilian victims. I’m certainly planning to support a few Ukrainian musicians on Bandcamp Friday.


Recently read: Ra by qntm. If it’s not the weirdest book I have ever read, it’s on the top five. Magic is a branch of physics, discovered in 1972… and anything else I might say about it other than “it’s not about Egyptian mythology in any way” would be a spoiler. Each new chapter makes the story exponentially stranger than the last.

Between this and There is no Antimemetics Division I’ve decided to just go ahead and buy their other two ebooks, Fine Structure and Ed. But right now I’m re-reading Gideon the Ninth, which is certainly weird, but mostly funny + over-the-top-goth + mystery.

That makes me think, though: what would be on the “weirdest fiction I’ve ever read” list? In no particular order, and with the caveats that (A) weird is not necessarily always fun and (B) I have vague memories of some other weird stories and no recollection of the title or author or even any search terms:

  • qntm, Ra
  • Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (Goes off in a completely different direction than Gideon, time is extremely nonlinear and the perspective character changes. Still pretty enjoyable though.)
  • China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Weird city, weird citizens, weird magic/science, just weird everywhere.)
  • Greer Gilman, Moonwise. (Entirely written in impenetrable dialect, as I recall. I don’t particularly remember enjoying it and I may have given up on it in frustration.)
  • Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren (I did not like it. All I really recall is it was post-apocalyptic, the protagonist wasn’t necessarily sane, and there was a lot of sex of every kind but all of it came off as grunting and sweaty and completely unsexy.)
  • Rudy Rucker, Spaceland (Like the classic Flatland, but with higher-dimensional creatures visiting us in our 3-dimensional space. Disturbing and gross at times, but also funny and brain-bending.)
  • Gene Wolfe, pretty much anything (Can be hard to follow, sometimes brilliant, often baffling, usually disturbing.)
  • Elizabeth Hand, Winterlong. (I kind of want to reread this to see if I can make more sense of it. A weird journey in a weird society after some kind of weird magical/chemical apocalypse? But quite poetic in its imagery.)