Nathaniel Clark » filter http://nathanielclark.org Mopping the floors of consciousness Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:04:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Lift the Censure http://nathanielclark.org/2009/10/lift-the-censure/ http://nathanielclark.org/2009/10/lift-the-censure/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:25:42 +0000 nathaniel http://nathanielclark.org/2009/10/lift-the-censure/ I had heard it said that the older people get the crazier they get. I am not so sure this is true– it feels rather more like, the older one gets the less one values the social filters that dominated one’s younger life. It takes a lot of energy to keep oneself socially acceptable on all fronts. You start to care less and less, and more and more of your genuine thoughts come through as action/words.

This is just a thought that occurred to me whilst buttering my banana bread, which I baked last night; I was thinking how funny it was that the image of self I strove to create as a younger person didn’t include such domestic tropes like baking, but how they– now– give genuine pleasure and I don’t much care about an external view, only about the end product (the baked good) and the happiness it can bring (to myself, and family).

Anyway, nascent thought, untested, must think more on it.

]]> http://nathanielclark.org/2009/10/lift-the-censure/feed/ 0 Symbiosis http://nathanielclark.org/2009/09/symbiosis/ http://nathanielclark.org/2009/09/symbiosis/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:04:28 +0000 nathaniel http://nathanielclark.org/?p=63 So interesting thing sort of just happened… I was too tired to tackle the “music” music tonight (though I got a few ideas off a deep-listening to the scratch tracks), so i decided I should play with some of Logic’s software instruments and make some cool and non-specific textures.

OK, wait, back up, important point skipped: Aunt Jenny gave Lucian a sleep-noise machine (I forget what its real name is) which has several different settings. Currently, he is in there past the gates of deeper slumber whilst digital waves crash with white-noise crests on the virtual shore. Lest you think I am making fun, I am not: I love white-noise machines, could listen to them all day long (cf. my sound art). I am ‘monitoring’ the baby through a ‘monitor’ which is sitting next to me, god’s-eye view of my son curled up asleep.

A highly compressed, noisy, distortish-type sound comes thru to me, through this monitor, but I really didn’t notice it before, mostly because I had on my recording headphones on which heavily (though not completely) filter out ambient sounds.

Anyway, I set up some synthesizer through a series of compression, eqs, and distortion, then played with an EVOC Filter which, in total coolness, allows one to chop up the harmonics in two ways and gently morph them into each other, fueled by an LFO. I got the sound meditatively cool, deep grainy distorted breaths of sound heaving in waves, sort of liquid noise undulations. I looped it for a while, trying to think to what purpose I might put the sound…

Now to the meat of the story: taking off the headphones, blinking my eyes, and realizing the sound i just spent 20–30 minutes crafting and zoning on was pretty much the sonic equivalent of the waves being hushed out by Lucian’s sleep-noise-machine. I mean, nearly identical. Must have leaked through and bent the synapses towards the sound. Sort of viral, or invasive. Or maybe my brain is just sort of ‘yield’-y lately.

There you have it, the funny/odd/interesting thing. Two ends of a psychic electrode touch. An aural ouroboros. Sort of.

Except, in the end, i have to say: my sound was better.

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