Nathaniel Clark » ocean 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 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.

]]> http://nathanielclark.org/2009/09/symbiosis/feed/ 0 august imbroglio http://nathanielclark.org/2009/08/august-imbroglio/ http://nathanielclark.org/2009/08/august-imbroglio/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:11:37 +0000 nathaniel http://nathanielclark.org/?p=35 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.

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