Amphibian (Amphibious?) is really moving along now — four tracks finished in the last week and another one already started this morning!
“Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen,” I wrote. Well, track 4 recorded on Drone Day in some ways feels like an inflection point, trending more toward drones in general. 5 does have a definite rhythmic pulse and some surprise complex zaps, but 6 is slow and nearly dronelike and 7 is shaping up to be dronelike as well. Perhaps I will arc things back toward the more chaotic, but I’m leery of trying to steer too much rather than just riding. [EDIT: 7 absolutely does slide into chaos territory, and it wasn’t a forced maneuver at all.]
There’s a thread on MW titled “Do almost all audio rate FM (or PM) sound like a pissed off cat?” If you’ve read pretty much any of my babble about electronic music you’ll know that I like FM a lot. But I prefer my cats to be contented and in a friendly mood (just not quite as insistent on constant attention as Rico can be when it’s time to sleep). FM can certainly be beautiful and tranquil, “glassy” and sparkling, but it can also growl and hiss. In my music I often like a bit of growl, some tension, some dissonance. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot with the FM tracks on this album is clustering frequencies — modulating a chord or detuned unison with a single modulation source, or perhaps modulating a single carrier with a detuned set of modulators. Whether this results in a chill Hello Kitty, a peeved Tardar Sauce or full on Rytlock Brimstone in a murderous rage is gonna depend on how dissonant those intervals/ratios are, but mostly on the depth of modulation.
I don’t usually think of cats at all with FM. I think of crystal, brass, a fuzz of iron filings stuck to a magnet. The arcade game Marble Madness, like a few other Atari titles of that era, had a glorious FM soundtrack, but in particular I recall these brass suction pipes that resonated with a particular chord. I recall them shaking to help sell the effect that they were active, with a barely contained fury. Less fangs and claws, more malevolent pipe organ. There’s a lot of that attitude through the FM tracks on this album, and that hasn’t shifted.
(If I ever win the lottery, I don’t want a lot other than to not have to work and to donate a lot of money to good causes. But two of the things I would want are a Marble Madness arcade cabinet, and a TRON arcade cabinet. Those two games and their music influenced me so much. It’s not quite grossly impractical and not quite obscenely rare and expensive, but not something I would normally do either.)
During my wardrobe update, I wound up with several unsuitable or borderline undershirts. (Turns out if you buy packs of cheap tank tops online, they often don’t fit very well and/or don’t hold up after a few washes.) But I’ve found the perfect ones: they’re by Latuza, made of bamboo viscose and 5% spandex. Super comfortable and soft, and the fit and cut are perfect for me. The color selection is limited, so my second choice is Mier’s polyester quick-dry sleeveless shirts; they fall short of amazing but are at least solidly good.
This morning I saw someone recommend a British clothing store called Alsofitit (which seriously seems like a Chinese word-salad brand on Amazon turns out to be Chinese despite appearing at first to be British aside from the name) for button-down shirts, and I spotted (heh heh) a snow leopard print that I liked the look of, as well as a retro stripe/pattern one in the shade of green I’ve been hoping to find. I’m trying not to buy too many different shirts, but I can let go of the Peau de Loop ones that just don’t fit me all that well.