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.