Two days ago I posted a preview video I recorded of some virtual synthesizer modules being developed by my friend Mahlen Morris, who does so under the name Stochastic Telegraph. What appears here is a video that Mahlen himself recorded, earlier in the development process, when some of the modules had different names, and at least one of them had fewer features. You can read along in the video as he describes, by typing, what it is that he’s up to in real time. The source audio that he’s working with here is a guitar part that I recorded for him with this delay/buffer approach in mind ..read more

I wrote about one of my favorite movies of all time for hilobrow.com, as part of a series of 25 pieces on “the topic of ‘offbeat’ movies from the Eighties” (the decade loosely defined). Here’s how it opens: In 1993, the year Groundhog Day hit theaters, that furry near-term Nostradamus named Punxsutawney Phil gazed into the meteorological future and saw his shadow. Historical records of this Americana hokum date back to the late 1800s, when Groundhog Day first became an annual ritual at Gobbler’s Knob, an inland Pennsylvania town with the sort of Capraesque name that lends itself to fables mixi ..read more

I was talking, some time back, with a friend of mine about my fascination with buffers in the making of music, with the way digital memory access has become a normal function of sound production. One doesn’t simply play the sound of the moment, with the pluck of a string or the touch of a key on keyboard; one can reach back into the recent past and play something that has already occurred. Furthermore, if we gain a sense of ease in that prior moment, we can linger there, essentially inhabit that pre-moment moment for the length of the performance, and occasionally reach into the future to pla ..read more

A Keith Haring boombox illustration from 1984, displayed as part of the Urban Art Evolution exhibit at the Nassau County Museum of Art through July 7, 2024 ..read more

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media. ▰ I was in New York for the past week — a few days in the city, then out on Long Island for family time — and thus I posted very little to social media. Back in Sa ..read more

Went on a trip, managed to purchase only two books ..read more

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) trac ..read more

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Grid of oscillators in the structure of a building’s air conditioners ..read more

Did a little record browsing. This section is from Paradise of Replica on Grand Street in Manhattan ..read more