Newsletter goes out as normal on Sunday. Otherwise, I seem to be resolutely away from internet engagement; working on podcast-slate pre-production, doing admin with publishers, starting autumn garden prep, starting to plan work and life design for next year. Back soon. I meant to experiment this week with returning to a computer channel model, but I guess that’ll have to wait.
Inbox: 112, apparently. Huh.
Listening:
I was lucky enough to get in fast – only 8 copies of the CD left as I type this. But you can stream the whole thing for free through the magic of Bandcamp, which remains a pure joy in the murky misery of 2020s internet. The middle tracks clinched it for me: perfect early autumn sounds.
Message from Ourobonic Plague reads:
over the last few weeks I’ve been working out something of a live show that doesn’t require a computer.
I thought I’d share one of my favourite sessions so far, for anyone interested.
it’s a ~25 minute improvised, one take, ambient/drone/noise type of thing.
Lovely noises.
“….acclaimed figurative painter Eric Fischl declared Aleah Chapin “the best and most disturbing painter of flesh alive today…” The art of Aleah Chapin.
“Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an organization called Yakum is seeding a better, cleaner, greener future for the indigenous Siekopai” – Planting The Future.
The act of writing itself takes the least amount of time for me. For Beautiful Country, I spent three years (and one might say, most of my life) thinking about the book, researching through my diary and retracing my steps, and processing how I wanted to write it. But actually writing it took me just shy of three months. The long initial marination stage is awful and terrifying, because it looks and feels exactly like procrastination.
.
Kathy Hinde – Earthquake Mass Re-imagined, 2022:
Earthquake Mass Re-imagined from Kathy Hinde on Vimeo.
Hinde consulted with Mexico’s top seismologists to inform the artwork. Seismic data from the earthquake that shook Mexico on 19th September 2017 shapes the behaviour and playback of the record players. As seismicity rises, the vocals become more fragmented and shift in density. As the earth re-settles, the voices are reconfigured in a new way, yet remain disjointed.
The pure, untreated vocals on the record players are accompanied by a textural, spatialised soundscape created from processes inspired by seismological research. Hinde resonated the vocal recordings in locations with significant historical seismic activity in Mexico, including 16th century monasteries that sustained damage from the 2017 earthquake. She further displaced the recordings by re-recording them travelling through the earth at relevant locations in Mexico. Seismic data has also been directly translated into sound within human hearing range.
Back in the distant web past, Jemma Gura used to run a site called Prate, which was always defined as “Prate™ Computer Channel.”
I always took the “channel” thing to heart – years ago, I’d begin a day’s posting here with a startup or station ident and end the day’s posting with a Closedown. The sort of thing that you’d see in early Twitter usage, where people would bookend a day’s activity with “good morning” and “good night.”
When I returned to blog writing, I had the intent of creating longer, more evergreen pieces. And I did a few, and would like to do many more. But the energy and inspiration just haven’t been there, especially as I began driving into creating a slate of original audio-drama podcast productions. The newsletter tends to suck up more of the joined-up thinking than it should.
But. As I’ve noted here, this place has value to me as a personal digital tool.
I’m conceiving of it, at this time, as the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.
Perhaps it was always supposed to be a computer channel. Not just a repository of thoughts and information on storytelling, culture and knowledge work, but also the digital diary for the things I can’t easily record with a pen, and the low-power radio station run by a single hermit with a battery-operated transmitter who just rambles into the ether from startup to closedown.
I tried pasting in an embed from Amazon Music, which is where I’m listening to it from, but it insisted on only presenting an ad. I seem to have misplaced my copy of the CD.
ALPHA CENTAURI, Tangerine Dream is today’s selected soundtrack while I work in concept creation.
My cutoff point for Tangerine Dream is around 1979. STRATOSFEAR is where I bail out: the point where they exit Kosmische and become a stadium act. More power to them for following their dreams, but I only wanted to dream of space.
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here over the last month and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward. This is a thing I’ve forgotten to do since like June, which in itself is a sign that I’m not keeping up.
Cutting Wood For A Chariot: On Trying To Build A New Project
The Only Good Notebook and Five Hundred Words – jottings on work/writing practise.
A General Landing Off The Unwrapped Cliff: On Architecture And Radio
30 Notes On THE TURIN HORSE (1 – 3) – really need to consolidate my notes and add more to this chain.