0620 decisions

0620 decisions

0619 resonance

0619 resonance

0618 delasalle

0618 delasalle

watched ENO, a generative documentary by Gary Hustwit last night. I was surprised to find it suddenly appearing on the Criterion Channel. I'm reading a book about Brian Eno now called BRIAN ENO VISUAL MUSIC by Christopher Scoates. It's one of those books that I read in pieces between other books.

so thoroughly soaking in Eno these days and I made the music and visuals very quickly turned Enoesque, without setting out to do so.

Also, it had to be a quick one today, as will the next 2 weeks at least.. my brother is staying with us here in Korea. Lots planned. Much fun in the works.



Eno's full name is Brian Peter George St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno.

0617 shoestring

 0617 shoestring

dusted off my Ableton Live Lite license and am re-learning it

plans for this involve a project with Kenneth May later in the year that will require me to perform pieces live alongside spoken word. Cubase is not the tool for that job. Ableton however..

My brother, Colin is flying here as I type this.

It's going to be great!

My challenge will be how to keep pace with this project at the same time.

I did it in the first couple of weeks in January when I was in Madison, but I'm looking forward to how the time limitation will squeeze cool new things out of this project.

0616 pressure

0616 pressure

0615 sanctum

0615 sanctum

0614 planes

0614 planes

0613 which flows

0613 which flows

took 7.5 hours.

one of those started with one idea, worked on it for a while, stumbled upon something else randomly, and ended up shelving the first one and went with the new thing.

same thing happened w the music; did a big percussion thing, added a synth pad, discarded the percussion thing and finished it from there.

the title is from a phrase that caught my eye in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

0612 osc~rand

0612 osc~rand

when naming these things, I almost always run my title through a search engine and it almost always hits some business with the same name. Perhaps I've missed my true calling in branding/marketing. Maybe it's in my blood. 

Dad was in marketing for Illinois Bell/Ameritech corp.. until he accepted a "retirement package" after the company was split up (in 1984) and eventually acquired by what is now AT&T, along with ~70,000 other employees who were cut between '84 and '95.

none of that has anything to do with today's piece.. except to say that I struggle with naming things 

"osc~rand" refers to two programming objects in Pure Data that featured prominently in the code that I made to make the animated foreground visuals.

it was inspired by but doesn't at all resemble my friend Go Hye-jin's generative piece on display until this evening. I'm going to pop in before it closes to see how the piece looks after a week of generative iteration/evolution. She's a genius.

0611 meanwhile 3

0611 meanwhile 3

this meanwhile got it's title and tone partly from hearing the sound of someone softly sobbing through my window

i also went looking for the other one titled "meanwhile" and found TWO others.

note to self, append their titles with 1 & 2.

0610 helvetica

0610 helvetica

don't look for actual examples of the typeface in the video.

last night I enjoyed a documentary of the same name from 2007 by Gary Hustwit.

so good.

not only was it about the font and it's background and impact on design, but also about the strange creature that is the modern graphic design artist. their widely varying takes on this ubiquitous font turned out to be even more interesting. 

i wonder if they had stumbled upon it while interviewing these delightfully weird people. some weren't weird at all. it felt like a study of creative people in general. i could see traces of people I know in the personalities of some of the design people in this docu.

so very good.

i think tonight i'll watch more by him.

the feel of the film and the music in it put me into a frame that followed me into making today's music and video.

0609 we build

0609 we build

we overbuild

we start out making things to simplify life and when that's defined as making more money, they become more complex and things need to be built into or over or around the original things to make them easier to deal with, but they only add another layer of complexity. So jobs and bureaucratic processes are added which require more work for more people just to navigate the complexity we've added. At some point we cannot dismantle any of the complexity without destroying lives attached to the complexity system. we fight wars to keep this whole mess profitable to the right people (not the most people). every generation is born on top of a pile of mess upon mess which can't be dismantled or else the whole world falls apart. it's a big big mess. we can't even see the original things at the core of the rock layers of mess we've built over the generations. 

0608 meandering

0608 meandering

I've got this friend who refers to these pieces as "ambient" pieces, and it always kind of chafes me.. but when I go back and listen to them with that term in mind, I think.. you know, that's fair. He's generally correct in calling them that. I guess I don't think in terms of genres when I make them. So it feels limiting to me. But he's right to say that.

And it's right for me to avoid approaching these with genre names in my mind. I should just let my influences sit mixed in the test tube and not let them settle into their derivative original sediments.

this is the meandering mind today.

0607 psychotrope

0607 psychotrope

0606 prism

0606 prism

I don't think this one is very good. It needs more work and time than I have today.

that was a confession, not an excuse. 

0605 timefolding and Backrooms

0605 timefolding

source footage: quick video through a glass elevator coming back from watching Backrooms in a multiplex theater.

I spent the first 15 minutes grinning and thinking, ok, acting is good, sound and music are amazing, and it's good to be back in the world of Backrooms from the internet. I can relax, surrender to the story and enjoy myself..

then spent the rest of the movie gripping my seat, jumping out of my pants and laughing (quietly) at myself. Loved it.

one problem though: it wasn't until the end credits that I realized I wasn't going blind.. the projector was out of focus.. good at the bottom, but pretty blurred at the top. that sucked of them. but I'm glad I'm not losing my mind or my vision.

there is a scene where Mary finds the backrooms (that's all I'll say).. if this film isn't at least nominated for sound or music I'll be surprised.. and that scene alone will have earned it. also, wonderful acting and direction in that scene. just she and the wall. astounding.

I hope I didn't spoil anything for you.

I'm not a fan of the horror genre, but films like this might just make me one.

0604 aftermath

0604 aftermath

https://archive.org/details/tmp_50168

San Francisco Earthquake footage

Usage Public Domain

I love the Internet Archive. It's like sifting through the world's attic full of stuff that you wouldn't/couldn't sell at a garage sale. Astounded at how much porn there is. Just astounded. Then I think.. oh yeah.. we're mammals, that's right.

0603 hex

0603 hex

Pure Data by Miller Puckette

was thinking about buying Max (the non-open source "advanced" version of Pd)

but nah.. haven't run out of cool discoveries in Pd yet

Max will have to wait

0602 lifted

0602 lifted

some of these show the journaling aspect of the project

they reflect upon the mood of the day (my mood)

yesterday I was in a pretty foul mood

burning on the inside

and this morning I awoke to a better one

one lifted by an absolutely exquisite rain even the birds seemed to enjoy

I recorded them singing and the sound of the rain

composed version A of the music

dug out my gimbal, suited up, including new rainproof sandals and a new umbrella to protect my gear

headed out to the courtyard; i was the only human around

filmed everything on the tiny tripod

the camera sound was so good and uninterrupted by human noise that I used it in the final mix along with the one on the Tascam earlier in the morning

applied the lessons from my guru, Matthew Koshmrl

took my first steps into video color editing

realized the music was too pedestrian, too youtuby

reopened it in Cubase, changed it, mixed it back into the video in Davinci Resolve

posted it

this is the most fun I've had on this project in weeks

i am lifted

0601 singed

0601 singed

some of these pieces are intended to be main courses

others, like today's, turn out more like chips and dip

I try to make each one interesting in some way

at the very least, they are enjoyable to make and I learn something about something each time