This morning before the alarm went off, I was dreaming that I was at a really dreary office party. A potluck where all the dishes had been made from AI-generated recipes.
I distinctly recall a bowl of green and yellow macaroni — no cheese or other sauce — which had the label “execute population all the time.”
The long-awaited Bitwig 6.0 was just announced today and is in beta. The features of interest to me consist of:
nothing
This is their big update to clips and timelines, with MIDI piano roll features and automation editing improvements and a global key signature. People who are not me have been clamoring for this for a while. (And also clamoring for ARA and for MIDI comping, both of which are also of no use to me.)
I don’t begrudge other people their updates, and I agree with mdoudoroff when he writes “So far, I haven’t identified any that will make my life worse.” But hey, I can still say what I’d like to see in a future version of Bitwig:
The ability to host plugins inside the Grid. You can do this with very awkward workarounds now, but it’s easier not to.
A way to group objects in the Grid and turn them into a sort of “subgrid” or “black box” which can be abstracted out of the view, copied, saved for use in other patches, etc. Some of the mechanics for interaction/modulation are similar to what would be wanted for modulating plugins within the Grid, so I feel like these two go hand in hand.
A way to toggle on visualization of otherwise invisible modulator assignments. If you point a modulator output at a knob or other control, it doesn’t create a “wire” in the Grid — and with some parameters this is the only option. That can make those relationships unclear when looking at your patch.
Support for feedback in the Grid. Again, it’s possible to do this using some (slightly less terrible) workarounds with those invisible modulation assignments. It’d be lovely if it was just automatically supported.
Those would all be quality-of-life improvements for me, and the likely end result is that I would record entire projects in a single FX Grid instance which handles all the routing, mixing, effects, modulation etc. But like I said: it’s been fine so far without these things.
The hole in the sidewalk and street from the gas line hit back in April? A crew finally came to take care of it yesterday. Partially. They left off at about 11 AM yesterday with a hole in the street with a layer of asphalt not quite built up to surface level, and the big steel plate awkwardly placed right in front of our driveway entrance. Hopefully they’ll finish this up today.
I didn’t mention, but E352 and E370 are now available in VCV Rack !!! !!! !!!!!!!
Am I a little excited? Um, maybe.
!!!
As I have probably said quite some time ago in this blog, I was an early adopter of the E352, and then beta tester #1 for the E370. Paul Schreiber (RIP) shipped me a beta test unit (which literally said “beta test unit” on the front panel) to beat on back in September 2017, for about 10 days before I shipped it to fellow bald ambient synthesist Robert Rich, and then after other beta testers and a demo at Control in NYC, it got sent back to me. After a while I eventually traded it back to the simpler and smaller E352, and then eventually that and my Hertz Donut were replaced by Shapeshifter. But SynthTech’s wavetable oscillators still have a place in my heart, so I’m quite happy to have it again in virtual form.
I thought I was going to prefer the E352 in VCV Rack, since I can spawn as many instances of it as I want. But where the 352 has 3 dedicated CV inputs, and different modes depending on which parameters you want to control with them, the 370 has fewer modes but a total of 8 assignable CV inputs, and I just found that a bit more to my liking. Also having four oscillators in one module encourages modulation, stacking etc. which makes the thing shine even more.
Also, Dawesome, makers of some really creative synth designs, have announced a new one. Kontrast, a wavetable synth that apparently scans 2D maps using all kinds of nonlinear patterns…
Digital oscillators typically use a lookup table. Feed it a rising sawtooth wave of exactly the right min/max values, look up a stored data value and output that. Wavetable synthesis (invented by Max Matthews in 1958) uses a 2D array, so you have time in one dimension and timbral morphing in another.
I’m not sure if Paul’s E350 was the first to do this, but you can also add another dimension and have two parameters to smoothly morph the timbre. This has become a popular feature in Eurorack modules.
Some oscillators have used a sort of 2D topographical map, scanning over it in patterns to produce the output. (Starling’s Via Scanner was one of those, but it was a bit obscure and tricky to use.) Kontrast is taking this approach, but with an excellent UI and some really novel looking ways to form paths… almost approaching the strange attractors etc. in Dawesome Kult. A really simple map but complex paths is potentially a lot more interesting in terms of modulating parameters, than a really simple path with a complex but static wavetable.
In harder news, the city/county/whatever is finally fixing the hole in the street that’s been there since the wall builders caused the gas leak back in April. (Honestly, I half expected it to go through the entire winter before getting fixed.) I haven’t looked to see if they also are dealing with the sidewalk, or if it’s just the street.
The new yard guy, despite needing to delay a day from the original schedule, arriving a bit late and taking a while, did a fine job. He didn’t charge extra for the abnormally tall grass due to the other guy’s failure (but I supersized the tip anyway), and also offered to fix our gate latch next time, no charge. So that’s encouraging.
Thursday last week, my computer at home starting making a constant grumbling moaning sound. It had made weird noises sporadically before, at least once related to the liquid CPU cooler, but this was definitely the sound of one of the three case fans failing. Bearings going bad probably, since it resisted spinning by hand.
The old ones were InWin Sirius Loop fans — but thanks to Calvinball tariffs, those are no longer shipped to the US unless you pay some third party $120 for an $11 fan. My replacement choice was an Arctic P12… basic, cheap but with a solid reputation for quality. The cables were different though, and I had to rig up some crazy stuff with jumper wires and electrical tape. I think I’m lucky I didn’t fry anything while accidentally hot-plugging stuff with the power still on, or accidentally get cables irrevocably tangled up in one of the other working fans. Still, it’s done now and I’m realizing how much low-level noise the old fan had been making all this time.
I roared through reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It definitely wasn’t entirely a feel-good novel — there was a lot of loss, loved ones being difficult, dealing with trust issues, dealing with harassment, and 18th century English literature. There were no unambiguous moments of “and now everything is okay.” But there was magic and wonder, moments of queer joy or simple delight, and a few moments with a certain kind of satisfaction in them.
It is very much a story for the times. Anders began writing it while dealing with the loss of a parent to Covid and the stress of the first Trump administration. One of the transphobic jerks in the story just happens to be named Gavin, which tells me that the novel was probably completed relatively recently. (CA governor Gavin Newsom was once thought of as an LGBTQ+ ally, although criticism began in 2023 when he vetoed a bill to consider trans kids’ gender identities in their parents’ custody battles. His March 2025 embrace of right-wing media figures’ transphobia was seen by many as a surprise betrayal, and is the reason why none of us want him as the candidate for 2028.)
At the time she also wrote Never Say You Won’t Survive, which is like the nonfiction counterpart to the novel; it’s about being a writer during difficult times. I’ve started reading that one too. The advice is specific to writing, but some of it applies to other creative pursuits as well. “Part of the joy of writing is being surprised,” she wrote, and that’s absolutely something I love about making music.
Joy is resistance. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, the “machines” of creation kill fascism. Or as my spouse said in a Kemetic Orthodox context, “creation defies isfet.” (Without writing a lengthy discourse: Ma’at is essentially both “what is right” and “what is”; isfet is its nihilistic opposite, the vacuum that abhors nature.)
I think this upcoming album is going to be a bit of a mishmash. I want to keep negative space in mind, and the first track very much does that. But I also want to explore a shoegaze-adjacent space, and the second track very much does that. Sort of a sharp, crystalline beauty but also blurry; delicate but heavy AF. I’m just going to wing it and play what comes to mind. I have an experiment to do for the next one, with a certain aesthetic I want to go for, including that negative space.
I filled a lot of time with Guild Wars 2 this weekend. There’s a largish sale going on for in-game stuff, and a beta test for upcoming profession specializations. In the process of giving my squad a fashion update, I wound up doing a couple of collection quests for items to convert crafting materials I’ve been throwing out into something with a chance at some value. And that used up my entire stash of those junk minerals, so now I have something to farm for to increase my chances at giving one of my Sylvari a warm golden glow.
In the temple, our Discord server gives us daily, annotated, translated entries from the 19th dynasty Cairo Calendar, as well as the list of various feasts/festivals/processions/etc. from antiquity. Yesterday’s had the admonition “Do not start anything” as well as “Do not […] today.” We had some fun with that in the chat of course, and it coincided with some other funnies in a completely unrelated forum.
But with the mowing cancellation and needing to set up with another service, that was on my mind because all the bids that came in were either 4x as expensive, or kind of sketchy or unreviewed, so I was hesitant to choose any of them. And my parents’ service gave me web errors and then didn’t answer their voicemail.
This morning, the message is “It is favorable to do anything” — and I got a much more promising bid. I sent some details in text and they asked a couple of relevant questions, so I’m hopeful.
Following my thoughts about crosspanning, switching etc. in the modular I started thinking again about quantization — particularly microtonal quantization.
It’s a feature I have often gone without. Sometimes I tune only by ear. Sometimes I’m playing 12TET stuff in software and by ear in the modular. Sometimes I use Marbles sequences. It’s more rare lately that I use Univer Inter, but it can handle microtonal stuff via Entonal Studio. But this is a thing I’d like to be able to do more readily.
Right now there’s only one correct answer where it comes to a dedicated microtonal quantizer module: Tubbutec uTune. But given that this isn’t something I will always want to use, perhaps I should look at a module that also can do other things for me?
Two options are the open-source Ornament & Crime (O_C), or Expert Sleepers Disting. Both of these offer multiple different functions, in some cases simultaneously. O_C has spawned a whole ecosystem of successors, including Hemispheres, Phazerville and Squares & Circles. Disting went from 8 LEDs to a 5×7 LED matrix to an OLED display like O_C, adding more functionality and complexity with each step. But all of them have interface compromises because of that lack of specialization. I’ve had a Disting mk4, an original O_C, a Hemispheres, and a Disting EX and resold them all because they were fiddly and/or redundant with Bitwig Grid integration. Getting one mostly for quantization would give it purpose, but not entirely fix the fiddliness.
But! The good folks at Noise Engineering have something in the works, Mimetic Digitwolis, the successor of their cool sequencer Mimetic Digitalis. Like Disting, they went from an LED matrix to a (tiny, but color) screen. It adds MIDI in/out, and quantization of external CV signals (with Scala tuning support), and possibly some other things. They’ve only teased it online and showed it a bit at a synth club meet in LA, which I’ve heard little bits about. So I’m extremely intrigued, and am holding out for this now. It looks to still be 10HP like its ancestor, which will fit in my setup just fine if I pull out Univer Inter, which will probably be made redundant anyway.
I blazed through reading High Vaultage, because the Victoricity universe and characters are utterly hilarious and entertaining. Having come from the radio show/podcast first, I could hear most of the characters in the voices of their actors. Chief Inspector Keller, the ever-sarcastic and furious police chief, is no doubt my favorite.
Having finished that, I moved on to the enby indie book bundle that I got from itch.io before their recent controversy, and… uh-oh. The first one I tried was not the book by the same title I had heard of, but an apocalyptic novel full of torture and body horror and I noped right out of it and wanted to wash my brain clean. As a rule, I don’t like apocalyptic, survivalist stories especially when it’s an excuse for brutality and (all too often) toxic hypermasculine fantasies. And that’s when they’re well-written. This one started with an unexplained wave of fire tornadoes, to unexplained lack of any help from the rest of civilization, to a group of people suddenly going from maybe friendly and cool to kidnapping, murdering and torturing people without any apparent motive. And that torture was some of the most misanthropic, human-body-hating foulness I have ever been exposed to. I noped out fast.
The next one on my list looked cute. I got a few pages in and gave up, because cute was all it had going for it. The writer needs a mentor, more experience, and a stricter editor.
Opened up the third one, it started with a content warning similar to the (relatively mild seeming at the time!) one that the first story had, I thought about the implications of the title, and noped out without even going any further.
I’m just disinclined to try anything else from that entire collection. It’s a little too indie I think.
Thankfully there’s a new Charlie Jane Anders book, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, plus one from a couple of years ago about being creative in difficult times, Never Say You Can’t Survive.
For a few years, we had our yard mowed by Big T, who we hired through GreenPal. He did a pretty decent job, was almost always right on time (or within one day) unless weather was an issue, and let us know when he couldn’t make it. He did raise his prices a little over the course of several years but was still not what I’d call expensive.
Last year, he contacted me and said he was trying to get off of GreenPal because of their fee increases and some other issues, but he could keep cutting our grass at the same price. And I said yes. But without that service he wasn’t as well organized; sometimes he’d mow and not text me (which was my prompt to pay) and a couple of times he managed to lose us in the schedule entirely.
At the start of this mowing season I looked for other bids. I went with All Star Solutions in sort-of-nearby-ish-but-not-really Collinsville. He was cheap and seemed reliable and had good reviews; he had worked for another lawn company and was branching out on his own.
Well. He didn’t mow as well as Big T, but… good enough, I thought. Then a couple of times he had to reschedule, and I thought, well, growing pains of a new business, I’ll keep giving him a chance. And it started happening more — he’d reschedule on GreenPal without contacting me. He apologized and said he was hiring some extra help to make things go faster. But then it happened again, repeatedly. Once it was more than four weeks between mowings, instead of two. Then he had some equipment problems and more delays. Then when we got the new retaining wall, my instructions about what to mow and what to leave alone confused him. Then he had vehicle trouble. Then he injured himself. And now he’s cancelled with “I don’t have the equipment for the job” given as the reason, again four weeks after the last time he mowed here. GreenPal automatically started a new bid search and there’s one early hit but I’m not sure about those ratings, so I’m hoping for other options.
Looking at All Star’s profile on GreenPal — which I had to use a separate browser for because my logged-in one refuses to show me anything but the “Hire one of your bids now!” page, including any way to log out — he has a 5/5 star rating and a 92% reliability score — because instead of missing a scheduled mowing he’s always just reschedule it in their system! They don’t show how many times he’s done that to people. And the rating system always made me feel reluctant to give less than 5 stars even for a half-assed job.
My parents use another service, which I think they may have found through GreenPal, but they also have a website where you can hire them directly. We’ll see how the bid thing goes.
St. Louis hasn’t gotten unhealthy amounts of smoke from the Canadian wildfires as badly as some other areas have, but we had our turn at it several days ago. That was also right before when we were doing our festival stuff and there was probably too much incense. (We do use the Japanese stuff which is relatively clean and produces less smoke, but… particulates anyway.) We thought this was why my spouse came down with chest congestion.
But then about a week later, I did too. Really harsh cough, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even work from home on day one. Day two I was functional but semi-miserable. Day three, the coughing eased way off (but my nose ran much more) and I was merely run down. Day four, almost okay (and I recorded something). Today, I feel… almost good? I’m really too used to these things lingering and having bronchospasm for weeks (coughing triggered by activity or change in temperature).
On a side note. Why do so many things contain menthol? I really dislike the stuff, but it can be hard to avoid. When I put it on my skin (in the form of shaving cream, or aftershave or whatever) it feels hot more than it feels cool, like maybe I am mildly allergic to it. In cough drops, it tastes nasty and doesn’t seem to provide any actual relief. And apparently it’s in the nasal spray I bought too. (Which was effective, but… blech).
The thing I mentioned which I recorded? Inspired by someone asking me for my takes on some different modules. None of them looked like my cup of tea, but I explained why and what I use instead. That got me patching some stuff up, driven by a Marbles sequence…
…which I wanted to cut out and turn into a drone some of the time. I realized that I had nothing in the rack that is suitable for switching a pitch sequence. When I got the Jumbler, I assumed it could do my switching and I set my Doepfer A-150 aside. But Jumbler doesn’t maintain 1.0x gain from input to output, so it strangled my nicely tuned pitch sequence. Okay fine, I’ll just feed it through a VCA that I can gate with a button… no, that’s not 1.0x either, though maybe if I amplified the voltage from the gate the exact right amount… what a hassle. I didn’t even try routing this through Bitwig, because that also meant tweaking ranges so I get out what I put in (and also, coping with latency). I wound up just plugging and unplugging the patch cable by hand to “gate” the pitch sequence, and frowning the whole time.
I was already thinking that Jumbler wasn’t, in my actual usage, living up to the promise I saw in it at its release. You can do a lot with it, but these are the bummers, as I see them:
you can’t continuously rotate in the same direction, but run into limits. Input 1 doesn’t crossfade to input 6 and vice versa.
it’s basically impossible to set up a circular, glitch-free rotation using a ramp wave in the Rotate CV input. One of the things I dream of doing in Eurorack is “orbital panning” or 2D rotation — given two inputs X and Y, rotate them in 2D about a central point represented by 0V, 0V. There’s a VCV Rack module that does this quite nicely, and it’s a pretty simple patch in Bitwig Grid.
the aforementioned loss of signal level means it doesn’t preserve pitch CV. Granted, I could still use it with 0-Ctrl or Zorlon Cannon etc. where I tune unquantized values by ear… but only if I know I’m going to want to switch it before setting it up.
at the same time, the gain isn’t lowered enough when mixing several audio signals, so you get clipping and have to individually attenuate all of the inputs.
The amazing thing about Jumbler is that it has a whopping 36 VCAs — one to route each input to each output. It’s kind of incredible that it’s not stupefyingly expensive. But the limitations are a drag, and like I said… I just have not been using it as much as I had hoped I would.
One thing I’m looking at as an alternative is Jolin Rosa. It’s a whole different kettle of fish though: it does have the continuous rotation that Jumbler lacks, but it doesn’t actually rotate one input to another output. Rather, it has a 4-1 “scan” mode, a 1-4 “pass” mode, and a 4-4 “wave” mode where each VCA is independent but there’s a sort of rolling opening and closing of them. This has required some tricky thought where I’ve tried to figure out what this means for various patch ideas.
I think, after more contemplation than it should require, Rosa can’t do stereo crosspanning. This is a fairly simple operation but it confuses people. So here’s my lovely 5-minute MS Paint diagram:
Each rectangle represents a VCA, and the red lines the direction of influence that the CV has over it. When panning, as the L channel decreases the R channel increases. But crosspanning requires 4 VCAs, two of which open together and two of which open oppositely from the first two.
Rosa’s 4 VCAs do something more like this:
So I guess I have to ask myself, what exactly am I looking for here? And I’m not sure I am, I just got caught up in the possibilities. If I want to crosspan in the rack, I should probably just look for that (or get a Cold Mac again) — but I’m not sure this is necessary. As fun as Rosa might be, I should be able to do most of that with Multimod and the Doepfer Octal VCA.
A funny thing though — while I was researching this, I searched YouTube for “Jolin Rosa.” It pointed me to a video by Taiwanese pop star Jolin Tsai, called “Womxnly.” Maybe because the song lyrics mention roses? I’m not exactly into C-pop (or J-pop, K-pop, or… pop) but it’s pretty catchy and sweet (even if I’m not big on the unpronounceable x replacing vowels thing). It’s a song for Yeh Yung-chih, a gender-nonconforming student who was bullied and beaten to death in 2000. But Taiwan being more progressive than most of Asia in terms of LGBTQ rights, that incident led to some actual changes. (Still not perfect, but ahead of the US even before this year’s fascism got started.)
Basement waterproofing work yesterday apparently went fast and easy, and they got a little further along on the first day than they expected. We’re still going to have sloped edges around the outside, due to the footers for the wall not being as deep as they should have, but that’s not a big issue.
Under these black covers are the drain tiles and gravel. Aside from a better design of drain tile, they drilled new weep holes in the walls, and there’s now a proper pipe going into the sump pump instead of just holes in the side of the sump pit.
And outside, the sump pump outflow and two of the downspouts are getting routed into a 4″ pipe that will run down the hill right beside our new retaining wall, carrying water away. Those two downspouts had, previously, uselessly just dumped water between the house and the sidewalk, and the sump pump outflow had a short trench with a corrugated plastic pipe that would just pool water up until it didn’t have anywhere to go. (We didn’t have an issue with the sump pit overflowing — but it was also handling a lot less water than it should have been.)
They’re here now, doing the basement/garage concrete, finishing the trench and pipe, and weather permitting, they’ll pour concrete back in where they’ve cut out the sidewalk. They’ll also dump excess dirt right next to the house so it’s not quite as low there.
Maneco Labs, which I knew of from Eurorack stuff, has a fairly new pedal out in collaboration with Pedal Partners: Mesmeriser, a reverb designed for shoegaze by some surprisingly young shoegaze fanatics. Called that because of the tendency of guitarists to stare down at massive pedalboards full of effects taken to extremes, this is a genre that mostly lived and died in the 90s, with Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. But it has had an ongoing if not especially large following, continued influence and cousin genres. It is related to dreampop, ethereal wave, darkwave, drone, ambient, and noise.
My own opinion on shoegaze is a bit divided. Aside from the obvious drone, I like the more ethereal side — generally floaty, woozy, dazzled, with (largely unintelligible) female vocals or none at all, but also sometimes quite heavy and busy in its saturated, lo-fi, overbaked sound. Contrast between stereotypical beauty/lightness and stereotypical ugliness/heaviness, with all of it ultimately serving beauty and breaking expectations. In this area, my top pick is Lovesliescrushing. (I do quite like some stuff on the more dreampop end of things, particularly Cocteau Twins.) There’s plenty of shoegaze where I’d like it far more if it were instrumental, and/or without the drums.
During the course of Suspension I came to realize I was feeling a bit of that influence. I think it’s because of the relatively open chords and playing with tons of reverb, the dreamy dizzy modulation of Slöer. It hit a bit more when I recorded “Tug” with the Miezo, with chords emerging from Multimod sounding a little like a shoegazer’s strumming. And of course, the whole contrast thing runs right alongside my own “ambient but messy” aesthetics.
Anyway, that pedal. On a thread about stereo delays for synths, there was some talk both of Slöer and Dark Star… and someone brought up Mesmeriser. I watched the video, and loved the sound and decided I had to have it. The first drop sold out super fast, and then they very quickly opened up orders for a second one that’ll go out at the end of the month, and I’m in on that.
The shoegazer’s pedalboard tends to be very much like a modular synth except for guitar, and they too are gear connoisseurs and experimenters. So it’s kind of wild that this bunch has come up with a design where a single pedal with five knobs is more than sufficient for the complete sound (even if nothing is enough to quench the thirst for experimentation, or the satisfaction in taking some old cheap effect and turning it to a new never-imagined purpose).
Between these thoughts and these effects, I may be diverted from my first thought about the next album project after all. I might be leaning into this more shoegazey thing. I want to try the Miezo, and the lap steel and even the kalimba and tongue drums, with Dark Star and with Mesmeriser. So I’m not necessarily committing one way or another yet.
I’m still reading the Mabinogion Tetralogy, but am now on the fourth branch. Wherein Arawn, Lord of the Dead, sends some exciting new technology to Pryderi, the (step)son of the guy who saved his bacon in the first branch: pigs. That’s right, people have been boar hunting for centuries but it took a god to domesticate them. This newfangled invention is so disruptive that a war is started over it.
Also in the book, apparently there are pharaohs in Egypt at this time, which would be… oops, probably around the 11th-12th century AD. This is roughly the equivalent degree of anachronism to giving William the Conqueror an iPhone. This bit came out in yet another Old Tribes/New Tribes thing, only this time it’s about how maybe incest is a good idea sometimes.
I’ve changed my mind about wanting to read a translation next for comparison, I’m going to just be done with this and move on. Next up will be High Vaultage, a novel set in the world of Victoriocity — a steampunk detective comedy podcast that we thoroughly enjoyed. And then some of those books from that Indie Enby Bundle.
I rearranged the track order on the album a little, which makes it work better, and recorded one final, fairly short track. Recording phase is officially done. The album doesn’t need to be two hours long; I don’t want it to get to the point where I’m either rehashing ideas, or desperately looking for something that sounds different while still sticking to the theme. It’s good where it is.
Time for mastering, art, write-up and release…
One thing about a lot of ambient electronic music, and especially drone music by its very nature, is that there isn’t that “space between the notes” that Debussy famously wrote of. Moments of silence, negative space, or ma as it’s called in taiko. Rests, breaks in action, time to breathe. Some drone music does breathe, but either it is always at rest or it never rests… hmm. This is a thing I want to explore, because there is so very little of it in my music.
(I want to be clear: I don’t think that negative space is necessary in this type of music, and the lack of it can even be a defining, intentional factor. Caterina Barbieri has said there’s a Hindu idea of drones being eternal and outside of time, it’s just that we only hear them during a fraction of our own brief lives. But, I don’t consider my music strictly drone anyway, and this is a compositional variable I can play with.)
On 2021’s Pulse Code, I have a steady 49 (or 98) BPM straight beat carrying through the entire album (as long as seamless playback works for you instead of gaps being inserted). The tempo doubles or halves, space opens or closes, echoes come and go, and timbres change so the album can tell its story. I am thinking that on the next one I might do something similar to that, but with each track having its own rhythmic pattern. I contemplated also trying to make the order of tracks randomizable, but… nah 🙂
Kitchen plumbing was finally a success. I am not a plumber by any means, and I was wrong about the leak in the bathroom, but I was 100% right about the problem here: the shutoff valve under the sink was clogged. It was basically growing a calcium carbonate rock the full width of the pipe and at least an inch long. Not the first time we’ve had sedimentary trouble. We live on limestone, and the waters of the Missouri and Meramec rivers are perfectly capable of growing stalactites and stalagmites in caves. I’m not sure why two local plumbers were reluctant to believe the same was happening in our pipes. We’ve had sedimentary trouble before, with the crappy plastic valves of the fridge icemaker and with gravel building up in the aerators of our faucets.
We could benefit from a water softener or some kind of descaler, but I am looking into the options. This is lower priority than fixing the dangerous deck, or the bottom of the chimney. Prices range from cheap (but possibly ineffective) to ludicrous (and high-maintenance and environmentally not great). The best bet may be a water conditioner with TAC, but… like I said, still researching.
(that’s “Happy New Year”, or more literally, “beautiful Opening of the Year”) Minds have been blown, hearts have been filled, the Sun has been greeted, evil has been ritually smashed and burned, goodies have been consumed, and now it’s time to just chill for a while.
Plumbing Monday was a big fail. The guy said that the problem with the hot water in our kitchen sink was the cartridge in the faucet, which was admittedly a Black Friday discount thing on Amazon from a Chinese brand with a goofy name, so it seemed plausible that it might fail after only two years (and also, we have hard water and things get full of sediment). After he tried to clean the cartridge out and put it back, it leaked… so we couldn’t use it for cold water either. He said we just needed to replace the whole thing (he recommended Moen, with Delta as a second choice and Kohler third). He didn’t charge us, since diagnostic fees are covered by our membership (same company does HVAC and plumbing).
We ran out to Home Despot and picked up a $200 Moen faucet we liked, and I popped it in — relatively easy if awkward — and no, we still have no hot water pressure. So it wasn’t the cartridge. (And honestly, from our first impression the Moen doesn’t really feel or look or have better features than the old one… but they do have a lifetime guarantee on the cartridge. Which again, wasn’t what had failed until the guy tried to clean it.) Next plumber appointment to try again is tomorrow afternoon.
Also the basement repair also got pushed to Monday/Tuesday instead of Friday/Monday.
Also, the deck got way worse — perhaps another joist has given way, because there are a couple more boards that flex and bounce alarmingly. Our little dog is afraid of it again, and this time he’s not wrong… except he weighs about 5% of what we do while having twice as many legs.
Friday I said I hadn’t been working on my album lately? In the 4 days since then I’ve recorded 5 more tracks… so far. There’s time for a sixth. 😉 6 more tracks. Album length is at 70 73 minutes now and I think I will keep going a bit more. Probably one more short track, a very pure sus4 chord without much screwing around, to close it out right.
OBNE Dark Star arrived. A couple of days later, the cables I needed did too. Dark Star and Slöer are both Spin FV-1 based, relatively lo-fi reverbs that lean hard into ambient space. (FV-1 isn’t a super powerful processor, and doing things in stereo means it’s got half as much capacity for fancy DSP…)
But within those parameters, they couldn’t be more different. Where Slöer runs toward a cleaner, smoother and more blended (if also woozy and dreamy) sound, Dark Star embraces the dirt. The pitch-shifting is lo-fi granular stuff with noticeable rhythmic pulses and bent timbres, there’s a knob that’s sample rate reduction in one direction and overdrive in the other, a knob for (not at all subtle) lowpass/highpass filtering, and the feedback will go well into infinity. Slöer has a tendency to sound pretty similar across its whole range, pretty much one giant sweet spots unless you happen to go too far with modulation (which is easy enough). Dark Star I feel is a little more of a specialist, is less willing to be subtle, and requires some dialing in. But it can be rewarding.
Right now I have a single effects loop, a pair of stereo outputs on the interface running through Dark Star and then Slöer and then back. If I want to route something to it, I do that in the DAW. This is convenient in general, but I think reversing the order might be beneficial, so I can take Slöer’s opium-den hazy reverb and then distort/crush/disrupt it.
In the Mabiongion tetralogy, I do think the story of Branwen is more engaging that Pwyll’s story. It’s got the troublemaking half-brother offended he wasn’t asked permission when his sister married (the subject of a few later murder ballads); a princess teaching a bird to speak to call for her own rescue (imitated by Tolkien’s Gandalf); a giant of a king who lies his own body down in a river to be a bridge for his troops; the Cauldron of Rebirth (yes, the one from the Disney movie); and is related to the raid on Annwn (the underworld) in Taliesin’s poems.
