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.