The latest Ambient Online Themed Compilation has been released, available on Bandcamp for pay-what-you-want. And the theme is… Earth!
This compilation is a bit shorter than many of AO’s, possibly due to a shorter deadline and busy, worn-out participants… but we’re still talking about 54 tracks here. 🙂
This time I just squeaked my second track in a couple of days before it was due, and I had to talk myself into participating. The issue is, I feel like it was in a different headspace from the cyberpunk album I’ve been working on, and it took some time to switch. And then switching back, I felt like I could feel the gears meshing again almost tangibly.
I usually just start making something, and then decide what it is and what to call it partway through or after it’s done. I often have a list of possible titles to go with my theme, and I always have a bigger list of titles I like in reserve. But this one is more directed. I have a specific set of phrases from the book, each related to a specific scene, to write for, and each brings a particular mood and associations with it. I can’t use a pensive drone piece for a panicked escape scene, for instance. So far I’m happy with what I’ve done, but it does require a bit more mental gaming.
It’s time for another book report, but now also with anime and gaming.
The Ministry For the Future was a bit surprising overall. As I said before, it’s a science fiction story about how humanity finds the leverage to make the changes to cope with climate change, climate justice and related social justice issues. However, some of those levers and some character arcs were unexpected. Overall I found it mainly plausible, and both heartbreaking and heartening, if that makes sense. People are people — both foolish and wise, selfish and generous, callous and compassionate.
Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower is a shortish book by the author of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. This is a very different book — simpler, even predictable, but a fun and subversive parody of fairy tale and fantasy RPG tropes and a satire of traditional gender roles. It kind of is and isn’t a children’s tale, so parents of younger children might want to read it themselves first.
I’m most of the way through rereading/semi-skimming Musimathics Vol. 1. Not so much entertainment, in fact it’s very dry and textbookish at times. But it covers some of the science of sound, from basic physics to harmonic motion, vibrating systems, the anatomy of hearing and psychoacoustics, tuning systems and scales, and composition.
I figured I’d go back through it looking for inspiration. Haven’t really found much this time, but I do understand the Bohlen-Pierce scale a bit better now. (It works very well with cross-FM on the 4ms Ensemble Oscillator because the intervals are very consonant.)
Volume 2 — which I don’t have but have just ordered — covers digital audio, musical signals, spectral analysis and resynthesis, convolution, filtering and resonance, and other topics extremely relevant to sound synthesis and processing.
Scissor Seven is a Chinese anime, or I guess donghua, about a hairdresser / soup cook / would-be killer for hire who never kills anyone, the blue-feathered chicken who rescued him, the martial artists that are out to get him, the technocratic empire out to get everyone, and a pheasant with a taste for vengeance.
It’s as wacky as it sounds, and it has no trouble whiplashing between utterly goofy, deadly serious, super cute, disturbing, tragic, and romantic. But it’s pretty consistently good no matter which emotional buttons it’s pushing at any given time.
The Disastrous Life of Saiki K is completely silly. The main character is a super-powerful psychic, with clairvoyance, mind control, psychokinesis, teleportation, invisibility, super strength, super speed and whatever else the plot needs… and he hates it and just wants to keep his secret and live a quiet, unremarkable, normal life, avoiding attention. But of course, there is nothing “normal” about life in high school, and attention inevitably falls on those trying hardest to avoid it.
“But the pink hair and the antennas,” one might protest. But he knew you were wondering about that, and explains in one episode that he’s used his mind control on the entire world to make them think unusual hair colors are completely natural. It’s not just a convention to help audiences distinguish dozens of simply drawn black-haired people, and for more information we can read his manga, he says.
A major part of the fun is that we get to hear his inner monologue, and he can hear the inner monologue of everyone around him (except for his “pal” Nendo who is too dense). And nearly everyone is either incredibly shallow, completely ridiculous, or likely to get him into trouble.
Yes, I’ve been playing Dirt Rally 2.0 fairly solidly since its release. But my employer gave out Amazon gift cards for Christmas and I decided to splurge on a Logitech G29 force feedback racing wheel.
A far cry from the old Atari paddle controllers or the plastic wheel thingy you can fit a Nintendo Switch controller in, wheels like this are motorized so they can transmit simulated friction, road bumps, the tendency of a car to straighten out on its own (or oscillate wildly under some conditions), and so on. It feels much more like actually driving a car, and gives feedback that helps you react more quickly and accurately.
At least in theory. It’s going to take some practice, particularly with the faster and less stable cars, to figure out how to correct my course each time things get a little off kilter. It took a while with a gamepad too — where there was very little physical feedback aside from rumbling, where instant swings from left to right were simple (but translated indirectly into wheel turning in the simulation), and quick little full-range flicks were often the most effective adjustment.
The wheels comes with a set of pedals, which are much more precise feeling than the short-throw triggers of an XBox style controller, but I can say that stomping a “real” brake pedal leads to a more convincing sense of panic than squeezing a plastic button. And it allows for a clutch, which is optional in the game but provides another method of control for turning or regaining stability. It’s just a matter of trying to play Dance Dance Revolution below the desk while armwrestling with a robot atop the desk.
I didn’t get the optional H-shifter accessory. There are shift paddles on the wheel itself which I thought I would prefer anyway, since I liked them on the Steam controller. But it’s pretty hard to downshift while also turning the wheel hard, so for now I’m mostly sticking with “semi-automatic” transmission so I don’t have to worry about it. Reversing is a bit awkward either with sequential paddle shifting or automatic — requiring either rapid taps of the left paddle to get all the way to reverse, or a sort of double-stomp on the brake pedal to start rolling backwards. But even with an XBox or Steam controller, if you ever have to back yourself out of being stuck you’re already going to lose several seconds and possibly slide around like a fish out of water and find more cliff faces and trees to ram into.
So my racing times are much worse right now but should improve with practice. It’s a lot more fun and exciting this way though, and a little bit of a workout too.
My spouse got me three books from my wishlist for my birthday. The authors wrote them, the publisher was responsible for marketing blurbs, and I chose them and am the reader. So any disappointments here were not my spouse’s fault, but I’ll give her some credit for where I find delight or enlightenment in them. 🙂
Currently I am reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future. It is a fictional story of an international organization tasked with saving the future from the present, mainly in terms of climate change and equitable distribution of resources. There’s a fair bit of nonfiction sprinkled throughout. It grapples with all kinds of geoengineering, carbon capture, and energy technologies, the question of how to value human and nonhuman life (present and future), and most importantly, where and how to apply the leverage necessary to do what must be done. It is excellent so far.
Sonic Possible Worlds was, unfortunately, a hard pass. When I was quickly going through lists of books about music and sound, it seemed interesting. From the introduction and the start of the first chapter though, maybe it is brilliant and esoteric in some way but to me it is just impenetrable word salad. I gave up.
Sound Objects is a set of essays that mostly center around Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of objets sonores. Schaeffer was famously the inventor of musique concrète — a sort of musical collage assembled from snippets of audio recordings — and performed studies categorizing sounds according to their actual characteristics rather than what produced them. (I may be oversimplifying that.) Most of the essays are drily academic and philosophical arguments about what the words mean and what words would have been better, and honestly not exactly inspiring.
However, “Spectral Objects: On the Fetish Character of Music Technologies” by Jonathan Sterne grabbed my attention — it is about the relationship of musicians to instruments (and other equipment) in terms of the Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism.” That is: a sort of worship of goods as having intrinsic value, without recognizing the labor and social relations that produce that value.
The highlighted last couple of sentences in particular is what really grabbed me.
Where is the magic located — in the wizard, or in the wand? Or did it come from whoever made the wand? Or is it in the mind of the one witnessing the magic? That can be a key question in fantasy fiction or in roleplaying games, but I think this article has a good point where it comes to musicianship.
I can’t bring myself to say that in electronic music, the instruments are unimportant. I’ve often found switching gear (heh) or finding the right kind of setup to match one’s temperament helps bring inspiration, and certainly each instrument has its own character which can contribute to the music. But I do think there is something skewed about many electronic musicians’ relationship to gear, and perhaps that is more true in both modular and software-based electronic music. Like we do a lot of chasing more and different things, when we already have more that we can handle. Perhaps the related concepts of magic and agency are the right way to contemplate this.
The end of 2020 is approaching — finally! — and it’s time to start thinking about how I did in my goals for the year and what I want to focus on next year.
Gear: uh. I changed a lot of stuff again. Not sure I stuck to any goals here all that well. I did track all my purchases, sales, shipping costs and software. Unlike 2019, I wound up spending a bit overall.
This is okay, because we (oddly enough) saved money thanks to COVID lockdowns and working from home. The amount of money we didn’t spend at restaurants, including breakfast and lunch on most weekdays for me at work, was much more than the increased amount we spent on groceries and on food delivery (and some extra goodies like my entire music gear budget and then some).
About 1/4 of that budget went to software. A good chunk of that went into the charity auction, which I probably wouldn’t have spent otherwise. I might still recover a portion of the rest if I can resell a couple of licenses — Soundtheory Gullfoss is great, but then TEOTE was released and I prefer it (and it was cheaper). Audio Damage Enso isn’t one I’ve been using at all after demoing it seemed promising, because it just doesn’t seem to fit my workflow.
My hardware budget included the E520, which I technically paid for last year but counted this year. It was well worth it. Considering trades and all, I did add the DAFM synth, the Purple Rain, the 0-Ctrl, and additional HP from getting the Pod 60.
I have some more detailed thoughts that need mulling over and writing about in terms of gear, before I figure out next year’s goals. I will say that I don’t expect major shakeups or additions next year, but some slow churn is possible.
Music generally: I was very good about supporting other musicians this year through Bandcamp (and more rarely through other means) rather than streaming. Certainly the whole #bandcampfriday thing helped encourage that, and I hope they continue it, perhaps even post-COVID.
I was also good about continuing to make music. 5 albums released, and it looks like I’ll be ready to release the next either at the end of the year or early in January. Participation in 5 compilations (6 before the end of the year).
I didn’t manage to increase my pure listening time the way I wanted to, though.
Health:
Well. 2020 happened.
Less exercise this year than any previous year I can think of.
Stopped tracking things like meals after the first couple of months, and didn’t really keep up with blood sugar testing.
In terms of mental health, COVID and the election did me no favors at all. I didn’t have many panic attacks once my office switched to working from home, but constant tension and occasional serious (and entirely justified) worry.
Online health: I stumbled a few times. But, considering, I also backed away from the crazy and the infuriating more than I ever used to. Asking myself “is this going to be worth it?” and “is anything good going to come out of posting this?” was very helpful.
Where it comes to skipping even reading stuff… I had that goal before “doomscrolling” was a word. I could have skipped a lot more. But I feel like three previous years of a Trump presidency and other disheartening bullshit before that (racism, crapitalism, climate collapse denial, anti-science idiocy etc.) built up some cynicism with which I didn’t get too burned by the giant garbage fire.
So, yeah. Not a great year!
The best thing I can say is, I made music, and I am pretty proud of the music I made. I survived, and all of my friends and family that I know survived. (Some former acquaintances had a really rough run-in with COVID though.) And I wasn’t completely miserable the entire time despite everything.
It was nice having a week off. Not as nice as an actual road trip, and I could have done with less rain and another walk around the lake, but it was all right.
For Thanksgiving, we had jerk chicken and zucchini on the grill, sweet potato fries, coconut rice and cornbread. My spouse also made me a German chocolate cake for my birthday. We Skyped with our families, which felt pretty special and holiday-like since it was the first time for my side and almost the first for her side (and we got to see the new house and our young nephew).
I recorded three tracks for the new album project, and am confident the theme is going to work.
I wasn’t tempted by any Black Friday sales, but did get my Christmas shopping done. [UPDATE: I did get four little Puremagnetik plugins at 50% off on the Tuesday part of “Cyber Monday” though.]
I was tempted to pick up the last Mystic Circuits Portal in the special edition black panel — having decided that I don’t need another delay or reverb in my modular, nor more modulation sources. Portal is a unique distortion module that, above a threshold, wraps around to 0V instead of folding over or clipping. And it can wrap around a ridiculous number of times, feedback itself into ultrasonic ranges, generate interesting rhythmic crackles, perform “oscillator sync” with only one oscillator, and other things. This got my attention because (beyond “Black Portal” just sounding kind of badass) it’s similar in concept to an experimental plugin I wrote years ago, but takes that concept much further. There are two other derived outputs, one of which is a somewhat gentler quasi-quantized output, the other a spiky delta output. While the module can do ludicrously heavy distortion, I’m more interested in the other things it can do. So this is definitely more about curiosity than absolute confidence I will love this module, but satisfying curiosity is a valid use of remaining rack space.
I played my usual Dirt Rally 2.0, Noita, Bewejeled 3 and Guild Wars 2, all of which have been in rotation since before this pandemic struck, and Art of Rally which has been out for a couple of months. Noita has been getting significant updates even after leaving Early Access, with surprise new spells and monsters, so it’s always fresh.
I also grabbed Drag, which is neither about drag queens nor drag racing, but rather, an Early Access game of futuristic-ish off-road racing. The setting is a little strange, with sleek driverless rail buggies that have what seems like a vestigial roll cage too small for a human driver, with a long steering column ending in an odd bracket where the driver’s head would have been. Two of the courses are muddy wilderness roads that occasionally cross concrete or metal bridges or overpasses, bounded by forcefields to either side, occasional radio towers and oddly shaped concrete towers in the distance; the third is a raised bridge-like track mainly covered in a mound of mud, in an arctic setting with mysterious cranes and towers numbered in Arabic numerals but Cyrillic text. Graphically it looks good, within its sparse design. In terms of physics, it’s challenging, slippery and feels fairly realistic (although, once you’ve started to roll over it goes a little nuts, like many racing games do — and wheels are prone to pop off at the slightest provocation). Gameplay-wise there is not much to it yet, just different sections of course to do time trials on, with no sense of competition or career progression. I’m curious to see where future development takes it.
Probably where I spent most of my time was reading Rhythm of War, the fourth and longest book (at ~460,000 words) in the Stormlight Archive.
(I also read Dawnshard, a novella that takes place a little before Rhythm of War. I technically should have read it first, but at least thus far, it’s almost entirely a side story. It may very well become important to later novels, but if so, it will probably be retold.)
One thing I like about Sanderson’s novels is the “hard SF” approach to magic; there are definite rules and mechanics, the magic is highly integrated with how society works, and in most cases there’s a very scientific approach to determining the limits and applications of magic. This extends to the Cosmere as a whole — an overarching setting uniting most of Sanderson’s series, permitting some characters to cross between them and carry exotic artifacts with them.
But what I love about his books is the emotional impact of the story, both the lows and the highs. I care about the characters and want them to stop hurting and being frustrated. I celebrate with their moments of incredible triumph. I reel from the big revelations, shudder at the implications and cheer on their discoveries.
For a while I felt that the Stormlight Archive books kind of “cheat” at this; human emotions attract “spren” that can telegraph how they’re feeling even if they’d rather hide those emotions (or hide themselves!), while the Parshendi people speak and hum to rhythms that make their attitude explicit (with some conscious control when they concentrate). But this ties in nearly with the nature of this world’s role within the Cosmere, and it’s not as if his stories in other settings don’t convey emotion just as effectively.
Without even considering connections to other worlds, there are a lot of characters in this series. That is both a strength and a weakness of epic fantasy, I feel. This particular novel concentrates on three in particular, with lesser concentrations on a couple of others, and interludes, flashbacks and side trips to keep up with a few more. But the three main ones get a lot of development and growth and some of those great emotional moments that I love. The book also crams in a ton of that “scientific” discovery, and revelations about the greater universe and historical perspective on current events. Mental health is a huge theme — when you put people under continuous stress as these have been, they break. Their ability to hold it together, heal from emotional trauma, or just get some rest for once, is as important as how they face external threats. The truly important battles in this book were — for the most part — either against personal demons, or battles of wit and cunning rather than spear and sword.
I don’t think this book would make a lot of sense without reading the previous Stormlight Archive novels. It should be fine without reading any other Sanderson novels, although one would miss recognizing many tidbits scattered throughout. But then, there’s so much going on that I’m not sure even the wiki-article-writing superfans are able to catch everything. I don’t feel too bad not realizing on my own that so-and-so mentioned by a minor villain in this novel might be such-and-such character from a different series, who died, and now has a different name and completely different goals… while Sanderson’s novels are full of that sort of thing at this point, that’s not the main attraction for me.
Test results are back and my spouse is negative for COVID-19. Whew!
It was what we expected, but it’s still a relief. Aside from the threat of actual harm from the disease, to have to quarantine and wear a mask and feel possibly unsafe in one’s own home, which is supposed to be a sanctuary, is not a great feeling. Nor is separating yourself from a loved one (in my case, pretty much the only person I interact with directly at this point).
I’ve finished reading Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and woo boy, is that not the book to read when you’re already down. It’s in a somewhat similar vein to Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket, but if anything it’s darker and bleaker. It was not a fun read, but I do think more people should read stuff like this to immunize themselves from the mythologization of war — the nationalist propaganda, the very idea of “a just war,” the canonization of murder and martyrdom, the self-destruction of culture and memory.
Perhaps ironically, the book I am looking forward to (in just a couple of days) is Rhythm of War, the fourth in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. But then, major themes in this series are the questioning the assumed rightness of one’s cause, and the realization that “honor” and “glory” are amoral at best.
For now I’m finishing the Sprawl trilogy with Mona Lisa Overdrive. If I do choose a cyberpunk theme for my next album, I think it’ll be specifically Neuromancer-inspired rather than just general tropes or a fiction of my own. But it won’t be particularly about Case, Molly, Wintermute, etc. or a “soundtrack to the novel” sort of thing necessarily, either; it will be a step removed from the story but more closely related to the language and feel of the thing. I’ve gathered 15 possible song titles, though I like some more than others.
I’ve also been watching High Score Girl, about gamer kids in Tokyo in the 90s. The story centers not on a girl, but a boy who is a slacker and doesn’t really have anything going for him but his skill at Street Fighter II. The main female protagonist never speaks, and in fact is completely absent from a few episodes… which is unusual given that a lot of the story seems to be parodizing and dismantling sexist tropes. Overall it’s kind of sweet and kind of dumb, but entertaining enough.
A major part of the appeal for some is the nostalgia, of course. As a nostalgia vehicle it is certainly less obnoxious and one-note than Ready Player One and its ilk. But for me, arcade nostalgia is centered in the early to mid 80s. My dad worked in an arcade and I’d often accompany him on Sunday mornings to help out a bit and then play a lot of games free. In the early 90s I was in college, and in the mid-90s I moved half a continent away and was playing PC games and PlayStation (I mainly favored racing games, thanks to Wipeout, Ridge Racer and Gran Turismo). The Golden Age of arcades had faded by the mid 90s too. So my nostalgia is more for Marble Madness, 720°, Tetris, Galaga ’88, Joust, TRON, Xevious, Gauntlet, Out Run. I strongly suspect that a lot of my love for FM synthesis and certain kinds of synth sounds comes from the games of that era, particularly the Atari ones.
That’s a phrase we have been hearing a lot this year, isn’t it?
Over the weekend one of my spouse’s coworkers tested positive for COVID-19, and her workplace is temporarily closing while everyone self-quarantines and the place is disinfected. Since she’s in a high-risk category, she was advised to call the county coronavirus hotline. They told her to get a “real” test since the rapid tests have too many false negatives, and because of timing, it wouldn’t show up in a test for a couple more days anyhow. She has to quarantine herself from me — spending most of her time in the guest bedroom and wearing a mask otherwise — and the test is on Thursday. Of course if she tests positive, I will get tested myself. I’ve also read now that wearing masks does offer some protection to the wearer as well as preventing outward spread, so I’ll wear mine in the house too when necessary.
Last week seemed to last forever while waiting for election results, and this week-or-so (however long it takes to get the results) looks like it’s going to feel even longer. And of course, every little headache, or the throat irritation I had briefly last night (probably allergy related) is going to make me even more paranoid than it has since March.
And now for a software update…
Plugin Alliance had super deep discounts for Halloween, and I tried several things and wound up going for Noveltech Character. The description of its technology is kind of vague, but through some analysis/feedback mechanism it does “adaptive filtering” to make stuff sound better different. It’s not something I will slap onto every track, but it does add a little extra something to some parts.
In the charity auction I won three things. The first (in no particular order) is SoundRadix SurferEQ2. It’s a flexible equalizer made especially for monophonic parts, which can track the pitch and adjust its bands to match. So no matter what note is playing, it can boost or cut particular harmonics, or filter out unwanted noise outside the desired region. It can also act as a resonator, so it’s as much of a synthesis tool as a sound engineering one. It’s frankly awesome, and gives me some ideas about ways I can use Shelves in my modular.
Another was the AtomicTransient/AtomicReverb bundle, of which I was much more interested in the transient processor. While most transient effects can reduce or enhance the impact of transients relative to sustained sound, this one can create a new envelope or apply the detected dynamics to a filter, with cool results. There’s even a polyphonic mode that sort of separates the envelopes of individual notes. (The reverb on the other hand, has a ton of parameters and doesn’t sound better to me than Valhalla & company.)
The third was a Voxengo premium membership, giving me licenses to all their products current and future. I’ve tried several of their plugins and wound up installing CRTIV Tape Bus (a saturation plugin), Elephant (a limiter, which I might use next time I master an album), OldSkoolVerb Plus (a mostly retro but also creative reverb), OVC-128 (a hard clipper with 128x oversampling), and SPAN Plus.
And recently, AudioThing released Wires, an emulation (and enhancement) of a Soviet wire recorder, which was developed in partnership with Hainbach (a musician who is into all kinds of exotic gear for making music, including old test equipment and lo-fi dictaphones, and whose YouTube channel is a delight). It imparts some nice lo-fi character as well as having a very tasty delay. Wire recorders are a neat piece of tech history. The hair-thin wires were more compact than tape and could have a longer recording time, making them great for flight recorders and spy devices (as well as a few consumer models, but they could only record in mono, the fidelity wasn’t great, and editing was problematic.
It’s October 28, and definitely a good time to break out the scary music. I’ve never wanted to watch the movie a second time because it just wasn’t that amazing, but every year I break out the 30 Days of Night score. The composer invented several new instruments for it, some of which involve objects whirling dangerously at high speed…
For Halloween, I’ll be staying home, wearing a t-shirt with a skull-faced mermaid lounging by a pool, and keeping an eye on the end of the charity auction. Though the bid totals are quite good (over $22.5K so far), there are relatively few hardware offerings this year. I’m not interested in any of the sample or preset packs. There are a few software items I could go far — but in many cases they are bundled with a bunch of stuff I’m less interested in, so bidding competitively doesn’t make sense for me. Right now I am only trying to win one particular item, though I might throw a bit more money at something for the sake of the charity. And in the secondhand auction, there’s one minor plugin that I have a $5 bid on that’s on sale for $7 anyway.
Although… maybe on Halloween I may have to drive over to Lake Creve Coeur and walk around for a while, if it’s not too crowded. Hopefully the fall colors will be somewhere at peak, though it might be late for that. I’m probably too out of shape at this point to walk the full distance without overdoing it, but some semblance of “forest bathing” will probably do me some good. Unless it’s raining of course, in which case it would be a forest shower and not quite so pleasant.
With COVID cases hitting new records, we are following the advice to not risk travel this Thanksgiving. It’s a shame we will miss out, but it is not worth anyone getting life-threateningly ill.
I finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, and… I was not really prepared for how broken the ending is. I feel like the state of the series kind of reflected the apocalyptic events in the story and peoples’ mental states, but it also apparently was a reflection of the writer’s depression and the exhaustion of the overworked production team and pressures that were hitting the studio in general. Things just sort of fell apart, and aside from some (disturbing) hints, we lost perspective on events other than Shinji’s inner voice in the process of merging with everyone else’s…
There was a movie that presented sort of an alternate viewpoint and alternate ending, called appropriately enough End of Evangelion. Where the original series ending was, in its odd way, “the good ending”, this is the bad one in terms of Shinji’s personality and which conspirators “win” the apocalypse. There is also a remake slowly in progress called Rebuild of Evangelion, which apparently makes the main character more macho and has a lot more fanservice. I’m going to eschew those, and consider the original series and all its flaws a complete work of art. (Granted, one that doesn’t quite stand up on its own without a little support from outside explanation.)
I’ve sent the DAFM synth back to Kasser in Spain for repairs. Given that it took a month to arrive here in the first place, I will not be surprised if it doesn’t get back to me in 2020.
The album is up to 57 minutes of material. I feel like I’m on a roll and have more to say here, but an album shouldn’t be overly long or it challenges the attention span and does the music a disservice. If my next set feels like a continuation, I could always call it a Part Two.
Listening to what I have, I think it needs something to close it right, and I’m considering dropping one of the songs. But I do expect to release it on Bandcamp Friday on November 6.
I did do another recording with three parts rather than one or two, although the third is just using the other output of Akemie’s Castle which was used as the first voice, and some different processing to make it a simpler, background part.
On the album front: I have 41 minutes of material recorded so far, and I’ve been sticking with the minimal voices theme. One of the tracks does have three voices rather than a max of two, but since one of those is just a sub drone than blends with the chords of another voice, I’m letting myself get away with that. I figure I will probably release before Thanksgiving.
Speaking of which, we plan to visit my spouse’s parents at their new house for Thanksgiving, if we can arrange for dog sitting. We’re both a bit worried about traveling during the pandemic, and plan to avoid public spaces as much as we possibly can on the way. It’ll be nice to go do something though, spend some time with family and see my nephew and the new place.
Recent reads:
Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky was mostly great fun, with a few grim bits. A witch and a mad scientist whose lives are entangled wind up on opposite sides of a conflict over two horrible plans to save the world.
I gave up partway through The Book of Strange New Things. A Christian missionary is recruited by a megacorporation to minister to aliens on a dreary remote planet, after the previous pastor went missing. I found most of the characters tedious and/or unlikeable, and the mysteries not very compelling either to the reader or the characters experiencing them. Despite the title, it feels like a book that had its sense of wonder surgically removed.
I’m currently enjoying The City in the Middle of the Night (also by Charlie Jane Anders). Misfits living on a tidally locked planet on the border between the always-day side and the always-night side, with various culture clashes paralleling that same opposition. And most importantly, compelling characters.
I’ve also started watching Neon Genesis Evangelion and I am finally, 25 years after its original release, going to watch it all the way through. It’s on Netflix, so there are some unfortunate changes including the loss of “Fly Me to the Moon.” Now that I know that the original English subtitles weren’t quite so awkward, I can deal. If they had replaced “Cruel Angel’s Thesis” too, then I’d be annoyed.
Right now I’m listening to my previous album on a new pair of headphones: German Maestro GMP 8.35 D. I picked them up because they were very highly rated by those who’ve used them, and they’re closed-back style with fairly good isolation. That’ll be helpful when I need to concentrate on work or music making and need to block out other noise. While I can still hear, for instance, the sound of my own typing on a clicky mechanical keyboard, the ticking of the desk fan behind me, and cartoons that my spouse is watching, it does block quite a bit more than the semi-open HD 668Bs I have used for years.
In general I don’t like closed-back headphones as much — they feel more “boxy” and when there’s no music (especially when you first put them on), you can hear the rush of your own blood. But I found it really didn’t take long before music started sounding right in them. Comparing between the two pairs of headphones, I think the GMPs are either revealing more detail, or it’s just not getting lost in the low hum of fans. The frequency response is a bit different, but I will probably not wind up using corrective EQ, opting instead to listen to a lot of music for reference in both sets of headphones so I have a proper feel for them.
I write music with the assumption that my listeners will use headphones, but it’s probably a good idea to check with two kinds of headphones anyway (as well as the wireless earbuds I usually check with on my phone during the mastering stage).
I did go ahead and preorder a CVilization, after the matrix mixer video dropped and a couple of beta testers commented about how friendly and flexible it is to work with. And it shipped this morning, so there wasn’t a lot of “pre” in that order. I’m not going to sell off my AI008 until I know for sure I like CVil, but… I probably will.
I’ve put the Doepfer 256-stage BBD on my birthday/Christmas wish list. The new Mutable Instruments modules are planned for a 2020 release but may or may not make it due to production schedules, so I’m holding out for that. If it’s not a must-have, I have a few options to consider.
I’m still waiting for that DAFM Genesis synth to arrive. The last update from Correos (Spanish parcel post) was “Leaving the Exchange Office” on October 2, but from a quick check online these sorts of delays and/or a failure for USPS to show any tracking data isn’t unusual. If another week goes by I will write to the seller.
u-he is a company that makes some pretty great plugins, and they announced a foray into Eurorack a couple of years back. CVilization is:
a 4×4 matrix mixer (with optional sample+hold & clock divider)
a sequencer/ sequential switch
a “Mucorder” (mutating CV recorder, something like a different take on the “x” side of Marbles)
a quad panner
quantization and clock divisions per channel on the first three modes.
The interface seems as clever and useable as is possible for something with so many different functions, and from reading the manual I expect the cheat sheet is mostly needed for occasional/rare config options.
In fact, the matrix mixer mode seems like it is probably more clear than my AI008. You deliberately select an input and then adjust its output routings, or you select an output and then adjust its input routings. It seems to me like this method reduces the impact of the “geometrical transform” issue the AI008 has.
So I could see replacing the AI008 with it, and then I’d also have another quantizer, which is something I was considering. And something else to complement Marbles, which is something else I was considering.
I do think I’ll wait for the other videos beyond the intro to make sure usability looks as clear as it seems from the manual, but chances are pretty good I will pick this up.
