Partly because religious experiences are one of the things that makes me feel more fluid, and partly out of defiance toward the Project 2025/MAGA transphobia, I’m feeling more like actually expressing my… nonbinarity? enbiness? rather than keeping it entirely under the surface.
However, because I also don’t want to have to explain, or be stared at and judged, I’m likely to limit this to going back to painting my toenails (mainly in silvers, blues, purples, greens) like I did for a while several years ago. Which will be under socks and shoes in public most of the time. Under the surface, indeed. (Maybe even under the sea, given the color choices. It’s that mermaid thing again…)
A couple of my toenails have issues — quite possibly diabetes-related — but there are OTC treatments and a brand of polish that’s made to be safe and healthy regardless. So I’ll try that.
I do wish there was a way I could signal, with my presentation, that I am nonbinary but only to people who get it, not to the sort of people who will sneer and ask “what are you, anyway?” or try to turn me in for a bounty in Texas or whatever. I think I may need to dig for some more stuff in nonbinary pride colors maybe. (A bit of a challenge — I happily wear black and purple, but white and yellow are not my thing.)
For the next album: recording is done, art is done, and it’s had a name for weeks now. But not that many weeks. The first track was finished on 10/8, then we went on vacation… after that everything happened between 11/1 and 11/24. Wheeee….!
I’m 4/14 of the way through mastering. Tracks 1-3 went super smoothly and effortlessly in one pass. Track 4 had some “crunchies” that took several attempts to clear up.
What I call “crunchies” is a kind of distortion or clipping that sounds like clicks, rasping, rattling, something of that general description. There’s a certain unpleasant texture to it that can stand out from the rest of the material. Tape saturation effects, if pushed hard, can sound like this. So can a bad headphone connection (sort of), which has fooled me a couple of times…
Crunchies happen with my stuff more often than I would like, and often I don’t notice until it’s already recorded (or during the mastering stage when things are generally louder and clearer). Sometimes it is associated with intentional distortion and is easy enough to explain; other times it just happens in otherwise smooth sound. It’s definitely not clipping in the recording process because I keep my levels quite safe, probably usually lower than I ideally should. But perhaps something else before that… I used to think maybe a specific Eurorack module or effect was doing it internally. But this track is one software instrument and one reverb, and I don’t think it’s that reverb but I’ll keep a suspicious ear out for it in the future.
Izotope RX7 De-Click is wonderful and it often cleans up little clicks. I can often (but not always) get away with processing an entire recording with it, or even use it on individual tracks live. More often I just target the specific time of noticed click(s). But crunchies are very often resistant to this treatment.
What I usually do is set up ZPlane Peel with a window in about the 5KHz-10KHz range. I’ll mute that range and fiddle with the frequencies and stereo width until I can’t hear the crunchies anymore. Inside of that, I start with a transient processor that tries to lower sudden attacks but keeps up sustained sounds. That… usually doesn’t work!
So I switch to putting Velvet Machine inside that window instead. At 100% wet, it can smear the attack of sounds and stretch the decay so that the texture of crunchies is smoothed out into a continuous sound. This also can unfortunately suck the life out of some sounds so it has to be used with some care.
Another trick is to mask it. White noise, intentionally buzzy or noisy textures, cymbals etc. will easily cover up the unwanted bumps with bigger bumps. Of course, that assumes I am willing to invite that sort of texture/timbre at that moment in the track…