Nathaniel Clark

.…research has gone well, in ret­ro­spect. There were some frus­tra­tions, and I wasn’t ulti­mately happy with the two major “cre­ative” attempts today (one attempt at grainy, scream-esque vocals that just fell painfully short but left me with a ragged throat, and one attempt to insert a motif-expanding break into a dri­ving song– the result was actu­ally sort of inter­est­ing, but it dropped the energy of the song way below an accept­able limit, so it must be (a) scratched, or (b) sliv­ered into the end por­tion of the song, where I am already doing some discordant/chromatic stuff), but over­all, advances were made. Played around with Logic’s wild and woolly ES2 in search of a mean and fat ana­log bass, some­thing way over­driven with that warm ana­log detun­ing .… didn’t get it, but found some fine set­tings along the way. Also, down­loaded some weird mel­lotron voice sam­ples for the EXS24 and drew some faux-middle-eastern modal lines over the end of snake­skins, which I am re-working for about the 100th time.

I am sip­ping some Ther­aflu, try­ing to nurse the final stages of the week­end ill­ness that gave my fam­ily a micro­bial upper­cut, and pok­ing through images of old mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers. The week­end just went and dis­si­pated into the blurry atmos­phere, and it’s dif­fi­cult to turn one’s mind back to work already. So it goes. So no clever turn of phrase to end this post, just one last sip of medicine-flavored lemon drink and then it’s off to tuck my head into a pil­low of sleep. Or some­thing that resem­bles sleep, which is just about where things are at, at night, in this hill­top aerie.

Going along with the idea that “if you build it, the ideas will come”, I have cre­ated homes for my recent audio work. Guitar/Synth/Band for­mat stuff I believe will become Engine Ares {work­ing band name, based off an old song from my for­mer band and one that hit me with the force of epiphany this morn­ing on the walk around Avo­cado Lane}; exper­i­men­tal synth/noise work will prob­a­bly go to The Invis­i­ble Noise Expe­ri­ence, a name that’s bet­ter than the ones that kept cir­cling through my head about quiet noise, though that’s the way I think about a lot of my sound work — quiet noise. Invis­i­ble Noise opens up the world to para­nor­mal audio, methinks.

In honor of the truth, the pic­ture above is not my audio set up — but oh, how I wish. No, it is an image from an MIT Media Lab vet­eran who has been build­ing this thing incre­men­tally, for years, or so I just read today. Here are some audio works from the owner’s web­page.

Post­ing the “cart” before the “horse” is an attempt to trick myself into dis­ci­plined action — now that I’ve put it out there, I need to ful­fill it prop­erly or know myself as truly, deeply “lame”.