My brother and his wife were in town for the last 6 days, and I took time off work to hang out. Hot weather and potential storms conspired against some of our plans, and folks not feeling 100% conspired against some others, but we still managed to have a good time overall.
One thing we did a lot of was book shopping. We visited a couple of indie bookstores in downtown St. Charles (Main Street Books which was decent, and The Book Worm which had a pretty great collection but high prices), and then the incredible Left Bank Books in St. Louis as well as a Half-Price Books. I picked up a few at Main Street and then went a little nuts at LBB. This was my overall haul:
…and at the same time, Bookshop.org had discounted several items on my ebook wishlist, so that’s stocked up a bit too. And I still have some books left from my last Alibris purchase. And my dad gave me The Throne of Saturn which is a big thick novel he enjoyed. So there’s quite a queue now, probably enough to hold me over until Jólabókaflóð.
(On this pile, starting from top: a chapbook by a local author, a book about wildlife in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris which is also a nature preserve, a Southern Gothic horror novel that caught everyone’s eye, a graphic novel about trans history, a novel I read on loan from the library that I’ve always wanted to buy to reread and support the author, a novel I keep hearing good things about, a book I was looking for after a chat about that very subject, a book on music that grabbed my attention, a graphic novel that looks fun, and a graphic novel by an artist who I used to work with.)
At LBB we also bought a couple of t-shirts, plus magnets and stickers, and we’ll be back. “Literacy and Justice For All” is their tagline, they are very much into progressive activism and local community solidarity; they had plenty more featured books that I’ve already heard great things about, they have multiple interesting book clubs, and I feel like their employee recommendations are super on point.
I’m currently reading Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, which has been pretty entertaining so far. In the near future, California has seceded from the not-so-united States and there was a whole war and everything; intelligent robots theoretically liberated from slavery who don’t actually have full rights (obvious historical parallels much?) start their own business.
What with the visit, I haven’t started on the new album yet. But I have some additional ideas. I might go all-FM this time as well as carrying a constant rhythm and no echoes.
I’ve also been looking at a couple of other module options for later:
Orphiser, which is based around an accumulator similar to one of the four on Walk 4… but it also has a “reflect” mode, slew, CVable min/max range, a CVable probability of taking a reverse step, momentum/gravity (which can interact with reflection for bouncing ball patches), and a “Shadow” output which can take on different duties depending on the selected mode. It seems like a lot of fun, though it’s a module where a cheat sheet is probably helpful.
Undertow, which was announced at Superbooth and isn’t out yet. It’s something like Kermit it that it’s a dual, syncable wavetable LFO/VCO. But instead of two outputs it has 15 — a span of 5 across which interpolate the waveshape and frequency between the two sides, and 3 down which have different “mod” settings (additional modulation of the shape) — making it also somewhat like Just Friends and Multiwave, just with a different philosophy. At this moment I’m leaning more toward Orphiser, but will keep my options open.
The plan is still Budapeszt first, then Splines. I’m also wanting a gate/latched switch of some kind — I might go back to Ladik for a basic one (dependent on another module as voltage source, but that’s no problem) or perhaps go for proper arcade buttons. And then quite possibly one of these two.
Speaking of gear acquisitions, I broke my “no more plugins” thing for the sake of Plogue OPMZ — a bit-accurate, meticulously researched emulation of the Yamaha OPM, OPP, OPZ and OPZ2 chips — as found in the Yamaha CX5M computer, several arcade and pinball machines (including my favorite, Marble Madness), the DX100 (which I used to own), Korg DS-8 (which I also used to own), FB-01 (which I borrowed from a friend for a while), TX81Z, etc. I watched their video on the years-long labor of love that was researching and reverse-engineering the chips and the hardware that controlled them, and was convinced to grab it. It’s very much the sound of my teens and early 20s, and yet it’s more than that. Unlike the OPS7, you can tweak stuff while a note is droning which is PERFECT for how I want to operate with it. Absolutely no regrets with this.
Plus, on that last album I got more use out of Sinusoidal Run Rhythm and Pyros, two of the effect plugins I bought this year that I started to doubt afterward.
I still think the overall strategy of limiting my gear purchases has been a great approach to take, and plan to continue that in some form in 2027.