Month: June 2026

looking back

Saturday night, we went to the 40th anniversary performance of St. Louis Osuwa Taiko. One of the last shows I was in myself was on the 25th anniversary. Some of the folks I knew from back in the day are still playing, and better than ever even as their bodies show their age a bit more. Some of the fiendishly difficult parts still trip people up a little bit (and I recognize the familiar “yeah we blew that again, what can you do?” grin) but overall things are pretty tight, and more importantly, exciting and fun.

A handful of pictures… keeping in mind I was enjoying the moment so much I often forgot to take them, was less than half paying attention to my photography when I did, and didn’t have the best angle for a good wide shot that captured the whole stage in the bigger pieces.

In almost every performance, they take a couple of moments to mention the beginner classes and community group (which can, but doesn’t have to be, a path to joining the performing group). Each time, I think about maybe doing that — it’s a much smaller commitment of time and energy than the 10 hours of rehearsals per week plus personal practice time and exercise, and sometimes multiple shows per month (and travel/setup/recovery). As satisfying as it can be to take a big stick and whack a bigger drum, and to play in a group, for me it still doesn’t beat the experience of making my own music from start to finish.

Speaking of anniversaries, today is our 22nd wedding anniversary. We didn’t really plan much in advance, but between Father’s Day lunch with my parents and the taiko show, going out tonight, and planning to make a couple of fun dinners later in the week including a Caribbean mini-feast, I think we’ve got celebration covered.

And more looking back: I re-listened to some of my older Starthief albums, and my opinion right now is that Materials is the oldest that I would recommend to listeners. There’s some okay bits on the earlier albums, but it sounds like a transition period to me — it lacked confidence and sometimes direction… or was frankly just a little dull.

Conversely, there’s some nice material from my pre-modular era which I find worthy, and generally representative of my current aesthetics. Once I’ve released Zeroes, my next project might be to remaster the best of the old stuff and re-release it. I may even include a very few of my 2016-2017 experiments previously only shared on my website or YouTube, or rarer stuff.

I did end up converting my Reaper in GW2 to a Ritualist, and… whoa. Definitely another Easy Mode build once you get the hang of it. With excellent damage output, a Flesh Golem tanking for you, and the ability to stay in Shroud (protecting you from actual damage) nearly forever as long as you’re not taking lots of big hits, you can just stand still and melt most Champions without breaking a sweat. And when you find something that can crush you in two hits, you still have a bit of a buffer for survival and escape.

It’s nice to have multiple, valid, solid, and not-too-difficult playstyles available that all feel very different, but can still scare or challenge you every once in a while.

more than zero

Weird dream last night where I had been recruited/pressed into service for some kind of ultra-wealthy, intimidating, but smooth-talking genius crime boss. On my first day on the job, he had a scheme to resurrect Thanos, for which some other wealthy villain was willing to pay an exorbitant fee. It all sounds like a bad idea, right? I was supposed to be there during the negotiation and actually perform the resurrection, which involved dumping some chemicals into the complicated “bucket” that held the remains as well as adding my own magical touch… and also pointing a very nasty sci-fi-ish Gatling gun at the subject in case he tried anything funny on waking up. But most of the dream was about protocol — who stands where, how to address various people, etc. so as not to offend anyone or make them nervous.

Okay.

Four tracks, 30 minutes Five tracks, 38 minutes recorded so far for Zeroes. Once again, I find that a distinct feel and style have spontaneously emerged for it, and everything sounds like it belongs together, without a conscious design behind it.

I don’t want to say my conscious mind isn’t involved — of course it is. I don’t want to say the music comes entirely through me rather than from me, or that it was “always there” and I’m just revealing or discovering it, or that there is no intent. But there is a fair amount of letting things happen, and running with them.

There’s a style of modular patching where one builds the patch and lets it play itself. Some people spend months on a single patch. This is generative music, but what fundamentally separates it from generative AI is that this entirely takes place as a combination of simple motions (and sometimes sources of randomness or sensors for outside phenomena), with feedback and logical combinations, unsynchronized signals coming into and out of convergence, etc. creating complex results. Notes, rhythm, melody, variations in timbre and density, all emerge in a very natural way. Gen AI, on the other hand, takes massive data sets which other people created, boils them down to statistical matrices and creates sort of an “average” of what should be next to this pixel in a picture of “a “banker eating a hoagie while riding a motorcycle” or whatever the prompt is. (And inevitably the banker is a white guy within a particular age range, dressed a particular way.) And the more generations that happen, the more average it gets.

Anyway, I don’t do that. My patches last hours, or less. But there is certainly an aspect of things happening spontaneously by coincidence of their arrangement — and then I play off of it. I react to it with tuning and rhythm and timbre and articulation choices, with live improvisation and new layers of complementary sound. I don’t use random sources very much unless they’re tightly controlled and limited in scope, but those accidental convergences are part of the process. Usually a delight, and occasionally a challenge or nuisance as feedback blows up or the levels clip/distort more than want. But “repairing” those moments, or finding ways to work with them, brings its own inspiration too.

In terms of gear stuff: I have to admit that GTE, Nibbler and CVilization are not getting a lot of play. The gap between knowing I can do certain things with a module, and actually doing them in practice, is real.

So, if Budapeszt does release this year, while I’ll still primarily be looking at setting aside Rings and Katowice to make the space, I may experiment with Rings and Budapeszt together. And for 2027, there’s potential to replace up to 36 HP. I have some thoughts but let’s see what becomes available. We’re not quite 50% of the way through 2026 yet!

Since GW2 is running Dragon Bash early and had a sale on its expansions as part of its celebration of the GW3 announcement, I went for the Visions of Eternity expansion and started a fire Evoker. While she’s a lot more squishy than my Mechanist, it’s a very damage-heavy, effective build… most of the time. You’d think using 100% fire-based attacks would be a disadvantage against fire elementals, Destroyers, Forged etc. but there’s so much direct damage that the Burning effect is fairly minimal. Instead, it’s the centaurs that attack Nebo Terrace which she doesn’t deal with nearly as effectively as some of my other characters.

I might also play with switching my Reaper to Ritualist; the open world build at Metabattle uses the same gear, so it’s just a matter of gathering enough hero points if I haven’t yet. I’m really not that excited about launching into a new story though, to be honest. As I’ve said before they’re kind of a mess and it’s the gameplay the I like. (And the Fashion Wars. Unlocking outfits, armor skins, weapon skins, fancy special effects and fun gizmos honestly drives a lot of the rest of gameplay…)

from zero

Z being the only letter left that I don’t have an album for, allow me to announce Zeroes.

Zero isn’t a bad thing. It’s a starting point, it’s potential. Everything comes from zero and returns to zero.

In ancient Egypt, they had glyphs for different powers of 10, and you’d write them in groups much like Roman numerals. So zero didn’t serve as a part of positional notation. But they had the concept of zero as a quantity (as they used it in double-entry bookkeeping), to represent ground level in architectural plans, and in geometry. To write zero, they used the “nefer” glyph — which is also the word for beautiful or good. Balanced accounts was akin to the balance of the universe. And ground level, where things rest, is the place of most balance.

In electronic music, zero is silence. Sound waves wobble positively and negatively, crossing over zero and (if all is well and there’s no DC offset) averaging to zero. As long as the fundamental is stronger than other harmonics, counting the number of zero crossings per second and dividing by two gives you the frequency in Hz. Thru-zero is an important concept in frequency modulation, and some other types of modulation.

In fact I thought about running with an FM theme here, or other things geekily related to zero (such as ring modulation) but decided that I already do that a lot and I’d rather leave my technical options open and just make music with my heart.

I have one track recorded, having found some inspiration in exploring sound, plus a start on a second one.

I have that feeling like change is in the wind — change for the better. Maybe it’s the particular bubble I’m in cycling around to general optimism, what with Chump’s attempted birthday party which was giving Fyre Festival vibes getting cancelled, obvious frustration over not being able to weasel his way out of the Iran mess he made, losing his name on the Kennedy Center, fear of the midterm elections, etc. And maybe some of that is down to a couple of small shifts in my personal thinking, changes at work, etc. Maybe it’s just the arrival of Pride. But a little hope isn’t a bad thing.

Guild Wars 3 was just officially announced. Beta testing to begin next year. Set 1000 years before Guild Wars 1, when Orr was a new frontier (rather than a sunken disaster city that got raised back up full of zombies). So, this might be shortly after the Six Gods (with Abaddon and Dhuum rather than Kormir and Grenth) brought humanity to Tyria through the Mists as refugees from something terrible, and built the city of Arah. Which means the Elder Dragons would all be slumbering and are not a factor.

No Sylvari (their entire race is only about 20 years old at the start of the GW2 timeline, but they emerge from the Pale Tree as conscious beings in an “adult” form rather than children). Likely no Asuran tech, and that whole race is likely living peacefully underground and aren’t a player race. Likely no Charr. Maybe Norn? Dwarves would definitely have been around at that time. There’s definitely a Kodan in the video.

There’s magic granted by companion spirits who also serve as mounts, and also travel powers than involve running up cliffs with glowing hands and feet… so maybe this will be a game without the invisible walls of older GW2 zones? Here’s hoping!

They have committed to continue development and support on GW2, and in fact since they just re-released the original Guild Wars in a new and updated version, I can believe they’ll stand by it if at all possible.