I’ve been “almost done” with the cyberpunk album for quite some time, and I’ve probably recorded 4-5 tracks since then. But I think I am finally ready to move on to mastering, and finishing the artwork that I started.
I already have a thought about what I might work on next. I’ve done “studies” (more or less) of Rings, Akemie’s Castle and the Lyra-8; this would be a study of… a particular eagerly anticipated module that has been in beta for quite some time. A very versatile module which I know is capable of more than I have used it for, and the point is not just to demonstrate it but to advance my own mastery of it.
Yesterday, Arturia released a firmware update for the Microfreak. It includes three new oscillator types created by Noise Engineering — “Bass” based on an Electronotes circuit, “SawX” based on the Manis Iteritas, and “Harm” very loosely based on the Basimilus Iteritas. The lineage of SawX is pretty obvious to me but none of them really feel like NE modules in a keyboard any more than the original oscillator types felt like Mutable Instruments Plaits in a keyboard — the context makes them different. In particular, SawX doesn’t sound as crushingly heavy as Manis — but it is very good and works well with the Microfreak.
Along with some other changes that don’t concern me much, the update also added a Unison mode, layering 2, 3 or 4 oscillators and allowing them to be detuned up to an octave relative to each other. This allows for not just typical “supersaw” stuff (already possible with a couple of oscillator types) but some truly scary inharmonic drone clusters. I love it!
I still have not heard back from Doepfer about the possibly defective A-110-4. I know they took a holiday, but this should be the 5th day they’ve been back from that. Are they really that swamped with email, or did all email from that time just get pitched and I’ll have to ask again? How long should I wait to send another? Hmmph.
I’ve decided that if the A-110-4 is defective and they advise me to return it, I’ll get a Manis Iteritas instead (and not count that against my “no changes” goals). Some great, doomy music from a couple of Instagrammers I follow that uses it has made me miss mine, and I feel like SawX is more different from Manis than the A-110-4 is from other FM options I have.
Recent/current reading has been:
The rest of Thinking, Fast and Slow: after a while it seemed to drag as the major interesting points had already been made by the time the book was half done, and it got increasingly repetitive. But the first half was pretty interesting, showing just how much we shortcut mental effort in ways that bias our decisions and beliefs… including biases that bias us against recognizing our own biases.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory: a study of jobs where the employees know that they perform little to no useful work. “Duct tapers” is one of the categories — people whose job it is to do some nearly mindless task that only exists because of a problem that could easily be fixed. My first job involved a lot of that: for instance, hours spent manually turning a plastic gear to advance the ribbon on an old printer because the boss wouldn’t buy a replacement motor; clearing frequent jams in an envelope printer because they stored the envelopes in a humid warehouse; doing manual data entry from an address list that a customer printed from their database because they didn’t trust us with a floppy disk with the data and our OCR software couldn’t read their font.
That was also arguably a “second-order bullshit job” because the company itself did something of no real value to society: pre-sort, address, and drop off bulk junk mail at the post office.
The Order of Time: a rather poetic book about the science of time in physics, from the major proponent of loop quantum gravity theory. Every so often, there’s a book or article about how weird time is, either due to relatively or subjective perception or other reasons. There are no things, this book says, only events; time is not as serial, universal or “real” as we tend to believe, and it emerges as a phenomenon entirely from entropy — the most fundamental equations of the universe do not have time as a variable. And entropy itself is probably relative in some way…. honestly this book is not what I would call clear and illuminating. But the main point is to illustrate that the subject itself is not clear — and in fact, the “blurriness” of perception is a major feature of both how the universe works and how we perceive it.