I have deleted my SoundCloud account. It was little used in the past few years, and apparently they’ve just decided to use everyone’s content for AI training, without bothering to ask the permission of anyone who already created an account.
Most of my listens on SoundCloud were gear demos of the E370, Plaits, Beads etc. There was lesser interest in my actual music, and as far as I can tell, people browsing music on SoundCloud rarely head over to some other site to search for more of that artist’s music. (I’ve only tried that a couple of times myself, and one of them simply didn’t have any other music to find.)
Sistersong builds up a bit slowly, but it builds up to a very intense moment. As I thought, while simple jealousy was the main driver of events in the ballad, it was not even the main motive in the novel. The situation was complicated, outside forces were at work, tempers were high, neither sister was innocent.
The thing I wrote about it being a horror tale comes from wondering why, if you were wandering along and found a young woman’s corpse, you’d think “this will be perfect for that harp I was planning to build.” The novel gives a reason. But where the ballad tends to a brief and detached “he made strings from her long yellow hair” sort of thing and the horror of it really only hits later, the novel very much emphasizes the gruesomeness of taking apart a human body and building something else from it.
Myrdhin/Mori did the Gandalf thing of disappearing and reappearing in the story at various key moments. In Tolkien’s stories, it was to get the overpowered archangel out of the way so the mortals could get some XP, or something to that effect. 😉 Obviously we were meant to identify more with the hobbits, the common folk; although Aragorn and Galadriel were both really compelling characters as well, but Gandalf just wasn’t so much. But in Sistersong, I feel like I was shown a super intriguing character that I wanted to read more about, who then was set aside to slowly build up less interesting ones. Maybe some of that feeling of slowness was due to the parallel development of the three siblings so we couldn’t just concentrate on one point of view. But all three of them got somewhere eventually.
I disagree with the reviewer who said the trans sibling and the characters with disabilities were just tokens. The middle sibling didn’t hold a place in the murder ballad, but the novel was really two intertwined stories, and his got actually more of the focus. He found respect and triumph even while the other story was tragic and macabre. Frankly I thought the representation was better here than The Story of Silence, although that one does have its sort of postmodern triumph at the end as well.
Superbooth started yesterday and if I thought the flow of new gear announcements was strong before, it became a flood. One has to do a kind of triage to decide what to pay attention to.
Korg Phase 8 fascinated me in previous Superbooth showings. But now it just seems like a fancy expensive kalimba with a sequencer. One could do neat things with it I’m sure. But what I was imagining was sustained tones, manipulation of harmonics, perhaps processing external audio as a resonator… actual synthesis in a Helmholzian sort of way. This is not that.
The new Moog thing is… eh. It seems very much like the feature set of the Arturia Minibrute 2, except with 6 patch points instead of 48, for almost twice as much money. (Or 4x as much if you get a good deal on a used one like I did.)
What has my attention the most is another Make Noise NUSS entry, this time just a prototype so far. The Polimaths is an 8-channel triggered function generator, sort of like Just Friends or Tides 2018, but with additional oscillation imposed on that kind of like Auza Wave Packets. Like Tides it has a single trigger input, but rather than always triggering all channels together, the trigger is CV-addressable or round-robin with a CVable amount to advance. Compared to OG Maths, it seems to lack an analog input for slew purposes, and there are no EOR/EOC outputs — which are both vital features for some patches. There’s some other stuff that hasn’t been explained yet, but there’ll be more info later in the summer when it’s ready to release. My guess is, I won’t be convinced to replace any of my stuff for this one, but we’ll see.