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.

On the eve of my dear wife’s Cit­i­zen­ship Cer­e­mony I have a few moments to untan­gle the skeins and make sense of august, the most august of months: play­ground of the leo; birth day of my daugh­ter; string of sleep­less nights; frac­tured arrhyth­mia of unfo­cused days; the late night slosh-and-hum of the dish­washer; the bram­ble thicket of inchoate words that never quite man­age to stain the pages of my jour­nal. A month of blurs, with a few moments that sur­face in clar­ity: a beach party & watch­ing my daugh­ter weave her way in and out of her friends; a dis­cov­ered fever for the micro-blog; rat­tlesnake (!); an inex­orable (though anx­ious) roll towards Iryshka’s cit­i­zen­ship; a watch that informs me of the tides; stunned paral­y­sis in front of the mixer; a touch of the beau­ti­ful sun­set after weeks of cloud­less, clean fades; the weight of code and pho­to­shop files that drags my face down into a soft jelly; sleep train­ing long over­due; the teenagers’ passion-play of love & betrayal as an ancient rit­ual played over and over again, every gen­er­a­tion; the grad­ual but inex­orable meta­mor­pho­sis of songs that start out too over­run by their influ­ences but begin to sound more and more like just me every change; days of par­adise walk­ing along the ocean, feet in the clear water, watch­ing mas­sive waves curl in slow motion and pound the surf with a fluid strength that has built to break­ing over geo­logic spans of time; Infi­nite Jest by David Fos­ter Wal­lace; being reminded every day how amaz­ing humans are– what they can do with their incom­pa­ra­ble brains– by watch­ing the mir­a­cle of con­scious­ness explode expo­nen­tially in my child.

As I fin­ish this, I real­ize how Leo­nine this August really is… it’s a water­shed month, it’s a turn­ing point, it’s the peak; in so many ways, it is (impe­ri­ously) deter­min­ing the months to fol­low. In like a lion, out like a maiden.