from zero

Z being the only letter left that I don’t have an album for, allow me to announce Zeroes.

Zero isn’t a bad thing. It’s a starting point, it’s potential. Everything comes from zero and returns to zero.

In ancient Egypt, they had glyphs for different powers of 10, and you’d write them in groups much like Roman numerals. So zero didn’t serve as a part of positional notation. But they had the concept of zero as a quantity (as they used it in double-entry bookkeeping), to represent ground level in architectural plans, and in geometry. To write zero, they used the “nefer” glyph — which is also the word for beautiful or good. Balanced accounts was akin to the balance of the universe. And ground level, where things rest, is the place of most balance.

In electronic music, zero is silence. Sound waves wobble positively and negatively, crossing over zero and (if all is well and there’s no DC offset) averaging to zero. As long as the fundamental is stronger than other harmonics, counting the number of zero crossings per second and dividing by two gives you the frequency in Hz. Thru-zero is an important concept in frequency modulation, and some other types of modulation.

In fact I thought about running with an FM theme here, or other things geekily related to zero (such as ring modulation) but decided that I already do that a lot and I’d rather leave my technical options open and just make music with my heart.

I have one track recorded, having found some inspiration in exploring sound, plus a start on a second one.

I have that feeling like change is in the wind — change for the better. Maybe it’s the particular bubble I’m in cycling around to general optimism, what with Chump’s attempted birthday party which was giving Fyre Festival vibes getting cancelled, obvious frustration over not being able to weasel his way out of the Iran mess he made, losing his name on the Kennedy Center, fear of the midterm elections, etc. And maybe some of that is down to a couple of small shifts in my personal thinking, changes at work, etc. Maybe it’s just the arrival of Pride. But a little hope isn’t a bad thing.

Guild Wars 3 was just officially announced. Beta testing to begin next year. Set 1000 years before Guild Wars 1, when Orr was a new frontier (rather than a sunken disaster city that got raised back up full of zombies). So, this might be shortly after the Six Gods (with Abaddon and Dhuum rather than Kormir and Grenth) brought humanity to Tyria through the Mists as refugees from something terrible, and built the city of Arah. Which means the Elder Dragons would all be slumbering and are not a factor.

No Sylvari (their entire race is only about 20 years old at the start of the GW2 timeline, but they emerge from the Pale Tree as conscious beings in an “adult” form rather than children). Likely no Asuran tech, and that whole race is likely living peacefully underground and aren’t a player race. Likely no Charr. Maybe Norn? Dwarves would definitely have been around at that time. There’s definitely a Kodan in the video.

There’s magic granted by companion spirits who also serve as mounts, and also travel powers than involve running up cliffs with glowing hands and feet… so maybe this will be a game without the invisible walls of older GW2 zones? Here’s hoping!

They have committed to continue development and support on GW2, and in fact since they just re-released the original Guild Wars in a new and updated version, I can believe they’ll stand by it if at all possible.

more reasons to oppose the AI bubble

The state of Utah apparently approved plans for a giant data — twice the size of Manhattan, requiring 9 GW of energy (more than the entire state of Utah and its 3.5 million residents use currently) and requiring massive quantities of water in a draught-stricken area. Studies say that the local daytime temperature may rise 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit and the nighttime temperature by 8-12. And even without this data center, Great Salt Lake is already at risk of drying out and releasing toxic dust clouds carrying arsenic, mercury and lead into Salt Lake City.

Less dire than that, but still kind of shocking: the price of Valve’s OLED Steam Deck just shot up by 45% entirely due to RAM shortages caused by the AI industry.

I wasn’t in the market for a Steam Deck, but I was looking for an external backup drive, instead of using a not particularly reliable cloud backup service who’s in the process of awkwardly changing its billing. (I discovered, after finishing my album, that none of my 2026 work got backed up because I hadn’t configured it to — but I had to be choosy about what to back up because my storage is limited.) I went with a WD_BLACK spinning platter hard drive because they’re so much cheaper than SSDs at this point…

The price of a 1TB SATA SSD went from $100 to $275 since November 2025. For a nice NVME 4TB SSD, it went from $325 to $825. Fast DDR RAM just about quadrupled. The price of spinning hard drives also went up significantly, but not as steeply — these also have some RAM for caching purposes, and are probably also used in these AI data centers, and demand has probably gone up just because SSDs are so expensive.

Meanwhile, over this same period the price of CPUs, and even GPUs, have remained fairly steady, for the moment.

The “Stochastic Parrot” paper, published in 2020, predicted 5 kinds of failure that would be caused by AI. One of its authors was fired by Google for refusing to take her name off the paper, but every prediction has come true:

  • systems that mimic fluency but have zero comprehension of language or fact are by design incapable of being reliable — and yet fool users and developers into trusting them.
  • a training process that assigns higher confidence to more frequent phrases is one that amplifies existing biases and inequalities — with the result that systems based on these tools discriminate against women and minorities more than an average human while people assume they are impartial. (And indeed, it was found that when a man and a woman submit the exact same financial application, the man is granted a 10x higher credit limit; the appearance of the word “women” anywhere in an Amazon job application reduces the score assigned to that application.)
  • this same amplification effect works on a cultural level. Less common languages and viewpoints in the training data tend to be filtered out as part of a feedback loop when AI-generated output is used to train AI. Automatic translation of less common languages has demonstrably gotten worse over time. (We also see and feel this homogeneity in AI-generated “art.”)
  • the energy cost of training an LLM on a massive data set is large, and this gets far worse with scale.
  • massive data sets too large for human review inevitably contain objectionable material, defamatory and dangerous disinformation, child SA, etc. and this iworks its way into the output.

All of this so that people can ask ChatGPT questions they could have used a regular search engine for, make fake photos, put artists and customer service workers out of a job, and get extremely bad medical advice.

We live in the dumbest timeline.

With that, I wanted to point out that DuckDuckGo Search has a no-AI version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

(Yes, I was going to try Kagi, but that 100 free searches has me leaving it as a secondary option rather than a primary search option, so far. The Brave browser on Android, I’ve found much faster than Chrome… but its search engine is not so hot. And unfortunately you can’t add custom search URLs to the mobile Brave.)

what do you mean, an African or a European sparrow?

The “J album” now has all its recording done, a name, an album cover (hush, Sean Connery), and is partially mastered. That process has been a little tricky and slow on a couple of tracks so far, but it’s moving along.

I’ve decided that, when Budapeszt is released, I’m going for it. I’ll plan to set aside Rings and Katowice — however, depending on how it goes I might want to at least try Budapeszt and Rings working together.

As a sort of apology to my no-gear pledge, I’ll forgo any new software synth this year.

I’ve decided I’m annoyed enough with Big Tech in general and Google specifically — now they are planning to completely replace their search with an AI-based mess — so I’ve decided to move away from their services a bit more. I’ve heard good things about GrapheneOS but am not quite ready to step away from Android yet. YouTube isn’t really something I want to give up either. But search, browser, calendar, notes, email, and maps? Those all have more or less decent replacements.

The email change is the most work, because I’ve been giving that email address out like candy for both important and trivial things. But having GMail forward to my new email makes the transition not terribly painful nor something I have to fix immediately. And now I have multiple email addresses, with their own folders, on my own domain, on a single login. Nice.

For Maps, Here WeGo isn’t as refined as Google’s offering, but it’s functional enough (and in some ways the interface is a bit nicer), and private.

For mobile browsers, I don’t remember now why I switched back to Chrome — it may have been DDG trying to promote AI crap at me — but I’ll have another go at other options.

As for search… I am going to give Kagi a try. StartPage and DuckDuckGo are less of a mess than Google Search has become, but they’re still honestly not great. Every review of Kagi I’ve read has been like “this is the best subscription to anything that I have.” So… yeah.

blown away

Xaoc Budapeszt: I’m waiting on a demo of this, and will update once I’ve heard it.

My impressions while watching this were something like this: it sounds neat… no, that’s just over the top… oh nice!… yuck… oooh… cool… meh… oh wait OMFG OMFG YES!!!

For a long time now I’ve hoped some enterprising synth designer would take the source code for Mutable Instruments Rings, and do something more with it instead of just cloning the module as is or implementing it in a plugin or whatever. The big thing I wanted was more variety of / control over structures.

While I doubt Xaoc used Emilie’s code, this takes the same core concept — bandpass/comb filters as resonators — and runs with it in a different direction. Less prescriptive, but more variety. There’s a taste of 4ms Spectral Multiband Resonator and Smoothie Audio Smear in there as well. And it’s true stereo and also dual, with the two filter(bank)s interacting in feedback. And… it’s glorious!

It’s still in the prototype stage, with an expected release somewhere in the autumn. And I have my No New Gear Year pledge, and I’m thinking about that. I know for sure I’m going to want this module and will get it anyway, so how much sense does it make to wait until January 1, 2027 just for the sake of that pledge?

Because this is pretty much a must-have module for me, if anything is. I’m getting the excitement about it I did for Rings originally, but with much more modular experience on my side I have even bigger expectations and plans.

I’m comfortable with swapping out Rings for Budapeszt, but Budapeszt is 6HP larger so I’ll need to figure something else out. Katowice might be an appropriate choice, as it’s the one I said I’d allow myself to sell to make room for stuff — the things I do with it can be done by plugins.

Alternately, there’s Castle. I know, every time I contemplate letting it go, I patch it up and say “no, I have to keep it.” To be honest though, I have a lot of FM stuff, and don’t strictly need this specific flavor. That opens a lot of space for other things. But I’d want to be slow to fill that space.

Or there’s Nibbler, fun but not really a frequent flyer. GTE — I know I just got it and haven’t even explored it all that much, but it’s unlikely to ever really be an essential. Perhaps one might say I should have held off on it and made Budapeszt my new module for 2026.

For that matter… I want to put some thought into combining “get Budapeszt” with “shrink my rig.” I could clear out enough space to let go of the Pod60, and also bid adieu to the Elmyra and other small desktop thingies — keeping the main case, Minibrute/Strega pair, and the four pedals. The problem with this is that introduces the temptation to fill the Pod again, or to put something else in the newly available space.

Of course, these opinions are colored by the droney approach I’ve been taking with this album — there’s been even more minimal use of sequencing than my usual. I’ve been loving that process. I just don’t want to commit to all future releases being similar.

I will have at least several months to make any decisions, anyway. But that’s what’s on my mind now.

I have 61 minutes of music for this album recorded but I’m not quite done — I think there’s going to be one more track. And then on to the “Z” album, which I have some thought toward already…

I just saw this image posted on Lines, and… yes, that describes me and my music to a T.

cont’d.

Herodotus did get some things right, and he rightfully showed skepticism over certain claims and stories or at least said “this is what I was told…” But he reported a lot of stuff without such disclaimers. Some of the wilder claims from his Histories that are given as fact:

  • Egyptians have thick, strong skulls that can’t be smashed with a boulder, and Persians have thin, weak skulls that can be shattered by a pebble. This is because Egyptians shave their heads and are exposed to the hot sun, while Persians keep their heads covered.
  • Egyptians are the oldest civilized culture and are greater than Greeks, but the “backwards” flow of the Nile naturally causes them to do certain things backwards. For instance, they knead dough with their feet, and Egyptian men pee squatting while the women pee standing up.
  • Cassia comes from Arabia and is guarded by flying serpents; those harvesting it have to lull them to sleep by fumigating with storax. These same flying serpents try to invade Egypt every year but are defeated by ibises.
  • Arabia also has ants bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs, which dig up gold and can kill camels. People crossing the desert have to ride on female camels with a pair of (slower) male camels, and if pursued by ants, they release the males as a distraction while they make their escape.
  • Camels’ back legs have four knees and four thighs.
  • Lions only ever give birth to one cub because the fierce claws ruin their mothers’ wombs. (I don’t think he followed this idea to its mathematical conclusion.) Rabbits, on the other hand, can get pregnant while already pregnant at any stage, giving birth to endless streams of babies without limitation. Both of these, um, “facts” are divine miracles.
  • Ethiopians are the tallest and most beautiful people on earth, and so strong that nobody else can draw their bows. Their skin is black because it’s been burned by the sun… and their semen is also black. (Please see a doctor.)
  • The Enarees (transgender priests) of the Scythians are that way because they’ve inherited a curse from ancestors who sacked a temple of Aphrodite.
  • It’s very unlikely that there is a sea to the west of Europe.
  • When Egyptian women die, their families let the corpses rot at home for several days before sending them for embalming to discourage necrophilia.
  • In India, when a parent dies, the children eat them.
  • Everything in history plays out exactly like a Greek tragedy, complete with irony, hubris, misleading oracles, and wars and assassinations that are always caused by women and/or personal insults.

I know I did earlier first takes on new gear announcements, but things move fast and now more has been revealed. Thoughts:

  • Bastl Kalimba is a sort of hybrid electronic/electroacoustic instrument where twanging tine-shaped PCB bits triggers resonators, I guess somewhat like Korg Wavedrum did. Physical modeling and FM, but also pressure sensing and effects and looping and glide and pads and drones and other stuff. Definitely pretty neat, and I approve. At the price, I can remind myself I said no more desktop synths and can let it pass by without anguish — if it was cheaper I might have broken. But nothing is cheap now, and they spent considerable development time on this and it’s more than the toy it appears to be at first.
  • Buchla Ziggy: “not even next year” thing for me. In what I’ve heard so far, it pretty much doesn’t sound like a 208c. It has no sequencer of its own and its “cycler” can’t trigger an external sequencer either. I don’t like it when presets fight with analog pots, and don’t think a simple synth like this needs presets at all. It just can’t offer me anything, really.
  • Make Noise Plexiphon: some of my guessing was wrong. To categorize it simply, it’s more in the vein of Desmodus, Valhalla Supermassive, or Phonolyth Cascade — somewhere between delay and reverb, where the “Plexus” knob affects feedback networks that determine which way it leans. Some of the mojo seems to come from short delay times and the way the feedback loops interact with diffusion. But playing with Cascade just now, I’m realizing what an underrated thing I have in that — so I’ll play with it more and have talked myself easily out of Plexiphon already.
  • Expert Sleepers Forever was the one that stood the greatest chance of maybe sneaking into my rig in 2027. It’s just a nice simple smooth texture-preserving buffer freeze effect with overdub features. But like Plexiphon, it got me playing with plugins and I found happiness of different flavors with Cascade, Raum and SpecOps; with the latter I produced a drone that’s going into the next recording for sure. So again, I will nod and say “that’s cool” and happily let it pass me by.
  • Xaoc Budapeszt: I’m waiting on a demo of this, and will update once I’ve heard it. I’m quite curious to hear demos — it’s a dual stereo comb filter (or “exploratory spectral lattice” as they call it) with internal LFOs and some different feedback options to get them interacting. Chorus and flanging are among more esoteric things it can do. It’s 20HP, so if it turns out to be spectacular it’ll be a difficult call to make… in some other year. But again, maybe it can inspire some fun usage of software.

hero.us

I”m reading Herodotus’ The Histories now. For those not familiar, he was a 5th century Greek historian, “the father of history” according to Cicero lately. But these writings, themselves certainly a piece of history, are to history what alchemy was to chemistry. Not rigorous, and full of wild stories that are uncomfirmed, in some cases with an “allegedly” disclaimer and in many cases, without. So many events in these “histories” are suspiciously very much in the form of Greek tragedies. There are grains of truth, obvious tall tales, and probably quite a lot that’s somewhere in between. I suspect he got a lot of his stories from people who either made them up or didn’t know what they were talking about, and embellished them along the way.

And also, reading it is sometimes like reading the dullest part of the Silmarillion — lots of place names that mostly have no context for a modern reader, and lots of people with brief mentions that we never hear from again, making it hard to follow and rather dull. But I will endure, because it’s got some entertaining bits as well (whether because they’re wildly improbable/inaccurate or just good stories) and references that are still used to this day. And some history, whether originally true or not, repeats itself — Trump’s ill-advised attack on Iran, Croesus’ ill-fated attack on Persia, really not so different.

I’ve continued to be happy with the Stelo glucose monitoring, and signed up for a subscription. I may eventually decide to discontinue it once I’ve learned more, but there are still occasional surprises. Like the Oura, it’s also serving as a constant reminder to pay attention to my health. Fast feedback is easier to learn from than eventual consequences, especially once you’ve had a small taste of the latter to really appreciate the importance.

Music’s definitely going well — four tracks at 35 minutes so far, and a patch more than halfway ready to record after work today. Honestly, finding a mesmerizing drone texture and just sitting with it for a while, then building on it a bit is super easy, at least with experience. I’m thinking I will keep recording a ton of stuff for a while, then release the best of it.

It’s not really pure Éliane Radigue drone all the way, there’s some light sequencing, some shifting of filters to bring out different resonances in a way that suggests chord changes or melody, etc. But I would call it more drone than not, where XQSTCRPS was more not than drone. There are certainly stretches where there is just subtle variation to follow with the ears and heart 🙂

Superbooth weekend is nearly upon us, and new synth teasers and announcements have been flooding in. I, of course, still intend not to buy any more music hardware in 2026, and at most one software synth and two more software effects. So is this a test of my resolve? For the most part I’m finding it easy to say “oh, that’s neat and I don’t need it” and move on. A few things I’ve taken note of:

  • In a blurry still from a blurry teaser video, Bastl seems to be doing something with a kalimba. Whether this is their budget answer to the Korg Phase 8, or they have a new contact mic or are just using it to demo an effect, is unclear. I’m curious…
  • Expert Sleepers has a “temporal freeze” module called Forever, based on their algorithm from the Disting NT. Like a smaller version of the Blukac Endless Processor in some ways. It sounds pretty great, preserving the textures of sounds quite well without noticeable granular or spectral artifacts. Something I should look into in software probably.
  • Neutral Labs has the Queen Elmyra. It takes the Elmyra/Elmyra 2 concept and just runs with it in a different direction, an 8-voice drone machine with higher sound quality, a ton of patch points, more DSP effects, tube saturation, etc. Out of my budget range, but I still think it’s a fun place for them to go.
  • Buchla Ziggy. This is the biggest surprise — it takes the 208c concept (top half of an Easel), gives it MIDI and Euro-compatible control inputs, digital routing and no patch cables, and DSP effects, and (ugh) presets, and it costs about a third as much. I was immediately intrigued and thought “maybe I’ll plan to buy one next year.” But after some thought: it’d probably have to replace the Minibrute which is such a great partner to the Strega, and I think that’d be a net loss in my rig’s capabilities. I was momentarily dazzled by the Buchla name. I’m still looking forward to hearing some demos though.
  • The new firmware for CVilization was just released, offering a quad oscillator as an alternate mode. It’s not like I need more oscillators…! But there are two modes I’m not using at all, so I might as well do the upgrade.
  • Make Noise Plexiphon (someone ferreted this out a couple days earlier than the official announcement). My guess is spectral processing, but it could be some kind of dispersion thing like Arturia Efx Refract.
  • Xaoc is teasing some stuff, and I find they’re always worth curiously watching.
  • Komplete 26 was just announced… wait, actually I do not care about this at all, since I already got Absynth 6. (Which I haven’t been using very much, though it’s pretty decent.)

it happens every year

It seems like every summer we have an extended power failure. The last two years it’s been right around July 4 weekend, when hot weather with no AC becomes an issue. Hopefully we have gotten this year’s out of the way now…

The outage from the storms lasted a total of 16 hours, and there were no updates at all from the power company during the whole process. In fact the last “update” (with no changed information) was at 3 AM, only 6 hours into the mess.

So Monday night we went to retrieve our rescued dairy products from my parents’ fridge… only to have the power go out again Tuesday as my lunch break from work was wrapping up. This time, instead of small clusters of 10 homes without power here, 50 there, 1 elsewhere, it was one big batch of 1400. My UPS estimated 38 minutes of usage, but it seemed to actually give about half that or less. I waited a little while to see if the power would come back, then dragged myself to the office to finish the workday, figuring that we’d have to shuffle our groceries again. Naturally as soon as I arrived I got a text from my spouse saying the power was back. Then the power company said it was restored.

I started getting a little more used to the sound of those Space 2 headphones, but I found I really didn’t like them for walking around even just for a short while at work. They’d have been completely unsuitable for a longer walk in warmer weather. So I gave them to my spouse (who’s a bit less picky about sound, and just wanted some wired headphones to use for her computer… they do wired as well as Bluetooth) and researched open earbuds.

There are a few categories of designs for them, but the generally favored style now seems to be one where there’s a little speaker blob that sits in front of your ear canal, attached via flexible band to a battery blob that sits behind your ear. It doesn’t pinch but remains both secure and comfortable. Eliminating the most expensive options, almost every reviewer gives top marks to the Soundcore Aeroclip. But a strong second, among those that reviewed it, is the Tozo Open EarRing… nearly as good in sound quality and 1/3 the price (or less!) I opted for those…

…and I’m not at all disappointed. I was listening to Heilung and Client_03 on them at my home office today and didn’t feel tempted to switch back to my studio headphones; after work I gave Stärker’s Spectral (a Bandcamp Friday pick) a first listen while walking around the park. Super comfortable. Decent but not perfect sound — open earbuds can’t deliver much sub-bass. But what’s there is clear and pretty well balanced and doesn’t feel “wrong.” There’s no sound isolation, nor active noise cancellation… but there’s no air isolation either which feels great. The charging case even has a nice LED screen to show its charge level and that of the two buds. I wouldn’t mix or master an album on them, but for a day at the office or some exercise, at this price I could hardly be happier with them. Maybe eventually I’ll upgrade to the Aeroclip (perhaps when there’s an updated version) or even Bose or something.

Speaking of Bandcamp Friday, I really focused on dark ambient this time. In addition to the aforementioned Stärker, I went for Schloss Tegal, TROUM & Raison d’Etre, Kloob. One from Muied Lumens and a live album from Kristoffer Liselgaard rounded it out, and while not strictly dark ambient they’re not all that far off from it either. I guess this kind of goes with my inclination toward a more droney form in my own recording project, but I also turned away a bit from more typical ambient stuff (stringlike pads playing calm major chords, you know the sort of thing).

in the dark

Yesterday I woke up, felt only a little bit blah but sleepy enough to burn a sick day. We had severe thunderstorms morning, afternoon and evening. Our house was within a tornado warning zone once, and my parents’ place was in one three times. That third time we got a lot more wind, some hail and heavy rain, and then the power went out at about 7:20.

About an hour later we rescued some groceries from the fridge and brought it to my parents’ place, since they still had power (and a generator besides). We were joking about how the notification that power was restored would come right as we pulled into their driveway. Nope — 11 hours later and we have no power and no estimate.

I didn’t sleep very well, and wound up going in to the office 45 minutes early for the comfort, phone recharge, and blogging.

I recorded my first track for the new album, and had planned to do a second one yesterday but the weather killed that. I feel like getting back to more of a drone style with this one, since I strayed so far from it with XQSTCRPS.

Those replacement ear tips I ordered were WORSE than the stock ones for getting stuck in my ear — it happened pretty much on the first try and the stuck one was more difficult to remove. So that’s a no. Poking around online I saw several other complaints about the Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro having that issue. I decided to retire them, though I liked them a lot aside from this (serious) problem. Figured I’d try over-the-ear wireless headphones, and settled on the new Anker Space 2. They are super comfortable — I fell asleep with them on yesterday morning — and the sound isolation and active noise cancelling is extremely effective. The battery life also goes way beyond wireless earbuds, but that’s to be expected. What I don’t like as much is the actual sound quality — it’s a bit meh, and though the Soundcore software offers more options than Samsung’s (*), no amount of monkeying with the EQ quite fixes it. Also, like their Bluetooth speaker, I feel like the max volume is way too much and so the volume control at the range I want (handled entirely on the phone) has steps that are too big. But I’ll stick with them a while and see if this is just a “get used to it” thing — and how I feel about them when going on a brisk walk. I might end up springing for some open earbuds (the kind where you don’t stick a silicone or foam tip in your ear canal at all). On the whole, those tend to be less good at noise cancellation and bass response though, so I don’t know whether I would be happier with the sound or not.

(*) it also has more notifications and feels more “in the way” than Samsung’s. They’re very obviously trying to build up brand loyalty and sort of gamify the whole thing and I don’t like that.

Something my spouse observed is that the in-between-size, on-ear rather than over-ear, wired headphones that were super common with the Walkman, Discman etc. and their clones just seem to not exist anymore. I wonder why that is — I think a lot of people would prefer them for everyday use rather than over-ear cans or in-the-ear buds. Isolation isn’t great but sound really wasn’t bad, and they’re light, cheap, and can be fairly comfortable.

After bailing out on that last book, now I’m reading Claire North’s Slow Gods, which is a strong candidate for favorite fiction of the year. I’m reminded of Ian Banks (especially The Hydrogen Sonata, which is my favorite of his) and Anne Leckie. They say science fiction is almost always a critique of the present — but in some stories it’s much more intentional and pointed and obvious, and this is one of those stories. The Shine is very much an unflattering but brutally honest mirror of the modern USA.

I’m listening to Wendy Carlos’ Digital Moonscapes this morning and realized… the appeal of her music to me, especially on this album and somewhat on the TRON score, is the kitsch. The Bach covers? Also kitsch, but I feel like there’s something about the way she composes that just can’t get away from it. There’s some appeal there and a personal style but… the kitsch is very strong here. The way the brass lines so often have that cartoonishly stereotypical dun-da-da-dunnnn fanfare, the overuse of whole tone scales, the way that melodic lines are passed between instruments including tympani that are played like a bass guitar and have extremely robotic 32nd-note rolls, the 1984-era General-MIDI-ass synthesized orchestra instruments. (*) I’d be curious to hear a real orchestra perform it to see how it changes the experience.

With Tomita… I grew up loving his stuff and I can still very much appreciate some of his sound design work and the overall, get-lost-in-the-music vibe he has sometimes. But the more kitschy aspects are somehow more cringey and less fun than with Carlos.

While I’m name-dropping electronic music pioneers, Jean-Michel Jarre has become a shill for AI. For me that’s an instant ticket to dismissing them as an artist (aided by my not really caring much for anything he’s done in the past 40 years). Equinoxe, Oxygene, and Rendez-vous had their enjoyable bits and Zoolook, which primarily was powered by abstract vocal samples and Marcus Miller’s slap bass with some help from Laurie Anderson chewing scenery in a fake language, is still kind of fascinating. Kitsch was certainly an element in those too.

Tangerine Dream though? I don’t feel like they were particularly kitschy until they went full stride into their digital age with Optical Race. (Another album I appreciate for its goofy earnestness.) Hmm.

(*) Actually the Crumar GDS, a rare additive/FM synth similar to the Synclavier but with no sampling, and the almost equally obscure Digital Keyboards Synergy which was a cheaper version of the GDS. Not awful machines for their age, just… they sound like a Sound Blaster card or a Playstation 1 when you try to recreate most acoustic instruments with them.