(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.