Minutes

About 10 years ago I was working in an old industrial building in Ballard, listening to the sound of hammers on floorboards in the office space above mine. It was quiet so I caught the hammering clean, and it always reminded me of the opening of Boogie With Stu off Physical Graffiti. Here it is beneath one of my Circular 4Track sketches. It's a dark mood tonight. Link to the post.

Lessons have been learned in using a power bank with my Roland R-07 recorder, and now I can take > 24hr recordings of an environment. From Friday night into Saturday morning, Olalla was very calm weather wise, and I manged to catch these coyotes. This night I imagine 3 or 4 individuals checking in with each other as they make their rounds. There's a backdrop of frogs that went quiet rig...

This pattern was written on night 2 with no sleep 11 years ago almost to the day, about 3am (my orig recording is Memo 2013.03.01-EndlessLoopTuktu.mp3). Creating something angular that sits in one position and can be looped. Voivod show last night was amazing. Got to meet Away briefly and talk to Dan Mongrain (Chewy) for a bit. They both thought they'd met me before, and I think I did meet Awa...

This popped on on the drive home from Edmonds last night. Such a big sound from a little buddy - love me some PO-35 - everyone should have one. It's often the best metronome too. Heading to see Voivod tonight at El Corazon so getting this one in quick before the workday begins. Link to the post.

A little audio verité from Jason's place, layering guitars and more guitars. These zippy slidey lines are so fun to play - I'm glad I can fall into the pocket eventually. Here's me stumbling through making this up while Jace tweezes the sounds. Link to the post.

Laying it on with the SK-1 and the TE toys, aaaaaand I spent my lunch break at the piano. A quadruple timed guitar solo seemed necessary. I've been listening to Squarepusher's new one a ton (Dostrotime) and tried to ape a guitar solo thing he's done really beautifully on Holoform - mine sounds super primitive but that's what happened in the moment. Link to the post.

Destructive day next door. Link to the post.

The first thing I made on a DAW, Mac OS 9 and Deck on Mike's fancy 1997 Mac - 7100 AV I think it was? This loop keeps popping into my head for a song Jason brought in. Link to the post.

Reminder to play with this texture: noise blanket hovering beneath a very quiet ASMR-like instrument. This is a quiet noise guitar carpet with a kalimba over the top. This weekend Jason built us this enormous kitchen island counter and we listened to Scorps and ZZ Top. Link to the post.

VCS3 vs Ebows on VERY cranked guitar, stroking the strings and leaving a harmonic behind, to be magnified by an ebow. I gave notating it a stab. One of those techniques I found by accident, and still need to explore. Lightly rubbing a wound string with your fingertip only generates a little bit of sound energy - you need a ton of gain for this to work, so I should give it a try w/a limited in the...

This is from the very first version of the Circular 4 Track, from a live set I did in 2005 on KBCS 91.3 in Seattle. I was working on a music subscription service with my longtime friend Glen and a new bunch of people, all curious to know what my own music was like. This show aired from 12pm-3am if I remember right, so I'm not sure anyone of them actually listened to it live, but those who did...

Can't get this one out of my head, especially that marimba/xylo line that you see transcribed here. I keep hearing some Prince guitars over these beats and this is what happens in the moment. Link to the post.

More TidalCycles - working on emulating the random-microslices-of-samples I've been doing in Csound. Spring is beginning to spring, despite the freezing temps and potential for snow. Link to the post.

Learned a bit about sample slicing and dicing in TidalCycles, using ebow and gtr samples I've been playing with in Csound/Thuja forever. There's a different feel between this and Thuja - everything aligning on a cycle feels like a constraint I want to work around sooner rather than later, so it'll be learning to string patterns together for longer ideas next. Link to the post.

Another bit from Circadia. Three simple elements, a little bit closer to goal: trying to make something that sounded like a circle out of these little clipped acoustics. I was really excited about this at the time, but it didn't seem to catch anyone's ears except filmmaker Dan (thankfully). I had just quit Baby, was just wrapping Stupid Kids at the Empty Space with what-would-become Cmon C...

So many shortwave tapes made on the San Juans. One time (on Jan 17, 2009) we went to a Lopez house Mike and Anna had rented for a family getaway. graciously including Leesa and I. Gracie and I were hanging out in the beautful backyard, and I recorded these bits. Some signals and something in German - I'll have to get Sven's help to translate. Being on the San Juans always feels like you ha...

Here's another spectrogram from these crazy seal / sea lion vocalizations I recorded on Lopez the other night. I did a little experiment in Audition and Photoshop to link the spectrograms, so you can see the sound patterns. Check out the upper frequencies at about 5 seconds in - I put a marker in the sound file calling this voice "the kid", since it's one of the only indi...

Headed up to Lopez today with Leesa, Kim and Chris, the dogs, and my Soundshark parabolic mic. I managed to catch some aquatic mystery sounds. There's a rock where the sea lions hang out all day and chat, but at night things really get rolling. This mic is crazy - the rock we're talking about is at least a 1/2 mile from the shore, but you can hear their conversations really clearly. What a...

I've been picking out Csound pieces that feel half-finished to me. There are lots of things sitting in my notebooks (or notebook drives), and I want to go back and explore them. This is a clip from a trippy little move I made called Circadia Sees the Moon by Dave Hanagan. I very much have the Books first three records in my ears. I got caught up between sampling, programming and being musical,...

I am so sad tonight, thinking about Navalny. If you've seen the recent oscar-winning documentary they made on him, you may remember the scene of him trying to film in Novosibirsk, while a guy was taking a piss in the background. Navalny says "welcome to the Russian ghetto" or something. I was in Russia for 3 months in 1998. Yeltsin time. I was in Chelyabinsk, outside of Yekat...

This line over Jason's funk was a pain for some reason - I couldn't settle on what left hand fingering to use. You check it out. Still learning TidalCycles, and playing with how I might deploy a line from Tidal in sync with Ableton. It seems I need to anticipate either an 1/8th or a 1/4 note, but it doesn't seem consistent. Link to the post.

Brainstorming parts to a tune Jason set up with the working title of loss, my hands we not warming up, so I rabbit-holed on this. This is one of 4 studies I wrote during a Satori moment in Boonville in 2006. For me, these pieces ground me and present new challenges whenever I pick at them. Today I decided to play with a straight boom-kat and not take any repeats. It induces a brain fog while I&#39...

Mama's birthday tonight - great times with great familly. Before bed I heard a wild chorus of Coyotes - not the distant cries we've heard in Olalla (which I'm posting here), but more voices, closer, countered with someone's distant howl. Was it a domestic or wild dog? I imagined it was a wolf. One of many nights I wish I'd been recording! The sounds have been stuck in my head a...

Quick doodle before I go see some shredders play. Link to the post.

The bass lines I make with this thing get stuck in my head. Ableton can sync the tempo of a fuzzy noisy shortwave recording. Will the two tracks sound in tune tomorrow morning? Link to the post.