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Nice interview with Taylor, who runs 12k and is a mastering engineer and musician in his own right.
I made a record.
31 December 2017
It’s the last day of 2017. I released a record today. It’s mainly electronic, a bit ambient, and there’s quite a lot of piano music on it. You can stream it in its entirety, or pay a little to download it.
I wanted to write a bit more about it.
I’ve been a musician for a long while. Sometimes, I forgot that. I always knew I had things in my hands (which is where I think that knowledge lies) but I didn’t call myself a musician any more.
Towards the end of 2015, I was playing with music again, exercising my hands and brain, building electronic instruments. It was still tough going: the war of art always is, and I found it hard to be happy with my work, to create an environment where I was comfortable with it growing slowly. I always wanted everything finished immediately, couldn’t work out how to be comfortable with the work in progress.
So I set a slow goal. In 2016, I decided I was going to try to make four pieces of music in a year that I was happy with. Just four. One every three months. That made it a goal that’d be achievable, rather than impossible. And I did! By the end of 2016, I had a few things on my hard disk I was happy with. More than four.
And something else had changed: I’d started calling myself a musician again. In doing so, certain small quadrants of my head began to unlock. One night, at End of the Road, I played the piano on the Piano Stage in the middle of a grizzly rainshower. The few people who were there enjoyed it; I remembered that I could play this instrument, and I should give myself permission to do so more. So I did what I’d been wanting to do for a while, and bought a full-size electric stage piano. Keys have always been my main instrument, and now I had space to have one. Not just space in the house: space in my head.
Come 2017, I set a new goal: not necessarily “an album” of music, but recording ‘more’ tracks I was happy with. I continued to play with music: building and tinkering with modular synthesizers, practicing the piano, selling synthesizer kits. Music was slowly growing into the corners of my life again. It’s still a challenge: sometimes, it’s difficult to compose or invent at the end of the long day. Sometimes, I need to let myself be tired, or let myself switch off. And I also need to be kinder to myself when I don’t have the energy to make a thing – because another time, I will.
One thing that’s always helped is the Disquiet Junto, weekly creative briefs organised by Marc Weidenbaum. I don’t participate that often, but I’ve done enough that have led to fun, interesting, or good results, and which timebox the effort. Half the record is Junto tracks, and that’s telling, I think.
Another thing that helped was being fairly quiet about this. It’s a thing I do for myself, not other people. I’m wary of the performative nature of pasttimes in the 21st century: not everything is made better by being shared immediately; not everything is made better by being open to critique the second it leaves my hands. I’ve been sharing in some small, close music communities, but not more widely, and that’s been somewhat deliberate. It’s been liberating making things primarily for myself, rather than as part of some public social portfolio. (Hence: a name, and a Soundcloud account, just for this; a fresh start).
It’s the end of 2017. It turns out I have a decent pile of tracks I’m happy with on my hard disk. So why not put them together as some kind of record? It’s not mastered, and it’s not work that was originally intended as an album. Think of it more as a sketchbook; a collection of work over a year. It’s available on Bandcamp to stream for free, for as long as you want. Many of them exist elsewhere online. Or, it’s a fiver to download. I don’t know if anybody will. I don’t know if that’ll put them off. But why not put a value on art, eh?
I’m still calling myself a musician. I’m making instruments and tools I use in my own work. I know that it’s probably only ever going to be part of my life. Not an entire career, but a thing I do nonetheless, and I know it’s going to take many forms – I’m probably never going to stop playing jazz at home, for instance. But at the end of a year when I’ve felt busy at work, and quiet outside it: a reminder I wasn’t doing nothing, and I wasn’t that quiet.
KiNK on Beat This
01 April 2015
Beat This is a regular show on Don’t Watch That TV that challenges producers to put together a track in ten minutes. They’re all quite varied – some people are clearly assembling things from the depths of their sample libraries; others are starting from somewhere more barebones. (I love the Swindle one for his piano chops.)
Anyhow, they teamed up with Novation to do some promotional content – showing off producers producing on Novation kit. And I completely loved what KiNK then went on to do: he just started playing.
It’s a lovely, ten minute live performance. At the end, you can hear the producer say ‘can you play the track?‘ and he points out that was the track. He didn’t record it.
It’s also amusing to see how little of the equipment he’s using. Mainly, he’s using an old headphone into an audio input, and then feeding that into a variety of effects in Live to variously be a kick, snare, all manner of other percussive sounds, and then at the very end he uses the audio signal to gate or side-chain the Bass Station loops he’s recording.
It feels right: straightforward, relatively improvised, space to layer without having to hit stop or break frame. I’m really into live performance techniques for electronic music; as such, I enjoyed watching someone perform and compose all at once.
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Mike Senior on gain staging, which I'm still terrible at.
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Found these useful, just on going from composition to final mix – and a particular simple take on something approaching mastering (or, at least, bus compression). Not just useful for Live, either.
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"The story description is "Giving objects in a story world symbolic weight has often been done by hand, but rarely procedurally. Here's one method for doing so."." This is stunning.
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"The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title." This sounds great.
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Brilliant.
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Nice, if somewhat DVD-extra-y, video on the RDR soundtrack. The most interesting footage is of the recording sessions and the musicians. It's a shame we're still at layering everything at same tempo/key, when it comes to interactive scores; I miss iMuse. But otherwise: great stuff.
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"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.
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Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.
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"I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless. In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.
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"With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company." Phil is right; it's a wonderful, bonkers piece of improv-email theatre.
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"Record gives you unlimited audio tracks, world class effects and mixing gear, and a whole new take on music recording." Lovely: seamless Reason integration, virtual Line6 Pods, and a DAW-ish bit of software that works the way my brain does. Excited!
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"In this article, let us review 15 practical examples of Linux find command that will be very useful to both newbies and experts." I've never really understood find, so these are very helpful.
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"In the 14 months since [TeamFortress 2] shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” [Newell] adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week. The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”" Great write-up from Chris Remo of Gabe Newell's DICE talk.
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"This is a sort of thorough, empirical, sociological study of art students at two British art schools at a very interesting moment, the late 1960s (a moment when, as the book says, anti-art became the approved art, bringing all sorts of paradoxes to the fore). I find it fascinating that such a subjective thing as developing an art practice can be studied so objectively, but then I find it amazing that art can be taught at all. The book shows the tutors and students circling each other with wariness, coolness, misunderstanding, despair, appreciation." Some great anecdotes and observation.
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"Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations). Audio recorded will be posted to this audio-blog and made available to all who cherish lo-fi original music. Try it out at your favorite subway station or street corner." Dial-A-Song comes full circle.
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"Poole – HAL 9000 is a fictional chess game in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the astronaut Frank Poole is seen playing chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer… The director Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, so unlike many chess scenes shown in other films, the position and analysis actually makes sense. The actual game seems to come from Roesch – Schlage, Hamburg 1910, a tournament game between two lesser-known masters."
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Lovely demo – some interesting interfaces that feel quicker than current alternatives, as well as experimental ones that, whilst slower and clumsier, represent information a bit better. I mainly like the form-factor, though – but what's the unit cost? These things get a lot better the more you have.
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"Something like: Trying to create a reading list that gives the best introduction to everything. This may change." Phil is trying to collect the Good Books in many fields. It's an interesting project, for sure; it'll also be interesting to see how it pans out.
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I was a little excited from the ongoing Offworld love in, but Oli Welsh's review suddenly makes me insanely excited about Keita Takahashi's new plaything. Why is it that all the reasons for me wanting a £300 PS3 are £3 PSN titles?
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"…the biggest consequence [of a universal micro-USB adaptor] will be the ease of transferring data/content from street service provider to consumer, and consumer to consumer… There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It's largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed."
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"30 Second Hero is an action RPG which consists of really short battles that require no interaction, as players race against the clock to save the kingdom from an evil wizard's wrath. As indicated by the title, you only have thirty seconds to level up your character sufficiently for the final battle, although additional time can be bought from the castle at the cost of a hundred gold pieces per increment of ten seconds." Hectic; the entire early JRPG genre (FF1, et al) condensed into a minute-long rush. Grinding as poetry.
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"I was convinced that it was a spoof. As if there’d be a genre called Donk. Everything is wrong about the video. The knowing subtitles over subtle Northern Accents. The presenter’s slight grin when he’s chatting to folk. The funnily named shops. Everything. There’s no way I’m falling for a prank like that. It reminds me heavily of the episode of Brass Eye where they whang on about Cake (the made up drug). And all the characters and the interviews look like they could be setups or clever edits." But no, it's real. Iain Tait discovers Donk.
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"…with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end." Home of the Underdogs is no more; just gone, like that. It wasn't that it had the best games or the worst games, or that they were illegal, or free; it was history, and childhood, and the smell of cardboard and boot disks, all wrapped up in one giant cathedral to Good Old Games. Most things I played on my old DOS machine were there. A shame; I hope they're elsewhere. This is why we need proper game archives.
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Tweaking a game five months after launch to make it both more playable, and also more realistic; understanding that realism is key to NHL09 fans, and delivering on that as an ongoing promise.
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"Warcraft’s success has always been substantially due to the extraordinary physicality of Azeroth, to the real sense of land transversed, of caves discovered, and of secrets shared. Players old and new bemoan the endless trudging that low-level travel requires, but it’s crucial for binding you to the world." Yes. Despite QuestHelper, I'm always in awe of the new areas. I just wish more people were playing the game as slowly and badly as me. Another beautiful One More Go, and one that resonates a lot right now.