I’ve begun mastering the next album, which is still nameless. Guess I need to take care of that little detail too…
Unsurprisingly, it does seem to have its particular sound and style which emerged without any particular planning. It sounds like a horror soundtrack, noisy and with dissonant “horns” in places. To me it paints mental scenery that makes me think somewhat of the Shattered Plains in the Stormlight Archive series, although my reread began after I started working on it.
It’s very difficult to pin down the things that influence my music. Obviously, other music I’ve listened to — but just as much, the books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, games I’ve played, things I’ve been thinking about. The gear I was beta testing or was new to me, or wanted to understand better, the patching techniques and musical ideas I wanted to try. Some dumb luck discoveries. And most of these things were influenced by other factors in turn. Maybe one reason I chose to reread Stormlight Archive again because I subconsciously felt like it fit the music I was making…?
I’m expecting news on the Miezo any day now. I plan to take a bit of a break between projects to get to know it and put it through its paces, but there’s also the chance it will inspire a lot of new recording instead. We’ll see!
I discovered that if I’m playing an 0-Ctrl touchplate and touch the encoder on BeetTweek, it cancels out the touchplate. The motor on BeetTweek is electrically isolated to prevent it from interfering with audio by feeding back through the power supply, so when I do that, I’m effectively grounding it, instead of closing the circuit of the touchplate. The designer had a few possible suggestions, with the simplest being to wrap the knob in non-conductive tape. Some gaffer tape might do the job nicely, since it has a little texture and is supposed to leave minimal residue when removed.
Inspired by some peoples’ photos of their Eurorack setups with clear distinctions between silver panels and black panels, I’ve rearranged my case. I was able to do this almost perfect grouping by manufacturer:
This is with a third-party black replacement panel for Planar on its way. Now, I could get silver panels for all my Noise Engineering modules on the third row, and replace the Mazzatron Mult+Passthru with a TipTop Wayout8 and then have exactly one dark-panel row. But that would cost more than I like just for the temporary aesthetic flex (I assume I’ll continue slowly evolving my modular over time)… so this will do. Beyond just panel color though, I like this grouping; there’s something right about having the Mutable Instruments family together, the Xaoc bloc, the Noise Engineering cluster.
We’ve been watching the new Sandman series on Netflix. It’s quite faithful to the comics without being slavishly so — I feel like it was updated both for the 2020s and the different media format. At times it does come off as kind of slow for TV, while I never thought the comic dragged at all. It could just be because there are few surprises — I wonder how it comes off to an audience that hasn’t read the comics.. But for the most part, it’s definitely got the look.
It really says something that the John Dee character (not meant to be the original “Doctor Destiny” of history, but certainly alluding to him) — a regular human with a broken mind who acquired far too much power for anyone’s good — is far scarier than any nightmare, demon, god or monster in the series. We faced the “24/7” episode with dread. It was indeed mighty tense, moving from awkwardness into conflict and then very swiftly to shock. Possibly the best constructed episode so far, though I’m not sure I would want to rewatch it.