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…)