.…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”.

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.