2/15/09 16:16 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Outside: San Francisco continuing the drench. Not far beyond the shifting pane of droplets is the sea. I cannot capture the scene with my camera, but I can just discern the nearby shape of Maakies' enigmatic tugboat plying the choppy surface.
Inside: fireplace, napping cats on warm hardwood, Monomes of amber and green. Highly oxygenated air pushing through slightly opened windows. Alert synthesizers receiving and transmitting music spinning from machine collaborative Max patches.
Later: midnight Noisebridge, 256 more Monome buttons, a likely umbrella.
The seagulls are loving this wonderful weekend weather. So, undoubtedly, are the various sea monsters inhabiting our fairyland bay. So, too, am I.
Rebel Saint
2/10/09 23:24 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The rain comes down, deep sheets of water transforming earth and air into a world I can swim through: streets running rivers of life, winds rippling with ionic charge. The heavens and oceans are one out there.
From this perch in the upper studio, I can see far beyond the window panes, across the darkness of the San Francisco Bay to the liquid wavering of civilization's pinpoints in the east. It all just keeps standing in the endless falls of transfiguring, cleansing washes of sky. Everything continues on as the cycle returns again and again.
Layered on it all is my reflection in the glass. Glowing LEDs, black and white keys, luminous LCDs, grids of buttons and lights, green and amber mixed with the scent of teak and joyous data throughput. Machines singing to each other and singing with me. Snapping fingers, vibrating air, inner ear conduction.
Sonic worlds in motion.
I have missed this so much.
A spare six weeks into the collective year and I've found my current. As an individual who has joined the collective, the time between the communal annum roll and my own solar rotation of 365.25 days is always one of looking, listening, gathering, re-experiencing, deciding.
In 18 days I will complete this passage around our star.
In 18 days I will continue in downpour, in rain, as the cycle returns again.
Exploding As I've Never Exploded Before
2/8/09 11:20 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The year kicked off with many projects and opportunities. The tightrope of energy versus sleep still terrorizes/exhilarates me, but there's a calm, solid core now looking out: assessing, planning, remaking. I've been away long enough everything is new again.
I spent most of the 02009's first month taking broad stock of my ambitions and considering methods of fruition. The last week has been spent narrowing and refining, plotting specific actions and paths against a grid of achievement to see, in detail, where I want to go and how to get there.
My friend Steve Stuck, knowing my love for Joseph Campbell, gave me the excellent Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation. Juxtaposed with wide-ranging conversations at Noisebridge, I've had an intense interaction with Universe in the first days of 02009.
I'm reminded of the Universal Unitarian marketing campaign slogan, God is still speaking. Christians, even the most well-meaning, invert the view and get it wrong, so let me turn it to modern, logical ends: I am still listening. When I think my voice has fled, when I can no longer hear my own desires, when I have lost belief in the place I stand or the very earth I stand on: I listen, and I hear myself speak.
02009
1/1/09 03:06 - permalink - email - category: Flow
I'm at my best in all ways in two types of weather: rain and fog.
My city has been the lucky recipient of a few soul-quenching drenches this season of rain. I keep windows cracked a few centimeters during a downpour. A zen-breathing exchange of highly charged air occurs, reanimating me to the core, bringing with it heightened senses and a clear, focused awareness. Synthesizers sing, controllers manipulate, lcd panels present visions, audio monitors bathe the studio with sonic life inside a world of liquid motion.
Rain is a living entity. Water in movement is a kindred creature. Throw in domicile-shaking thunder, sky blasts of lightning... and I'm home.
02009 has rolled in on a sea of fog. The entirety of San Francisco is covered in dense clouds of vaporous white. Buildings wash away into nothingness, their spires hidden far above.
In fog, I literally feel within a state of creation. Enwrapped, all forms are mutable, all states are in flux.
People emerge from banks of mist, mere outlines of shifting possibility coalescing into someone solid in front of one's eyes. Without visual reference for the spatial cues our ears interpret to position events, sounds are strangely delocalized. Where, exactly, is the crow I hear flying overhead? Am I really within earshot of running water? To whom does that fetching laughter belong?
It's a beautiful way to begin what promises to be a beautiful year.
02008
12/27/08 03:06 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Have you ever forgotten yourself?
I have.
When I could no longer see myself looking back from the glass, I began to engineer my own rescue.
In 02008, I opened my skull to gain a closer view of the contents. A scant centimeter of lifted hinge and the entire lid flipped off, dragonflies whirling everywhere. Their sound is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
I followed my winged messengers of the gods. They led me where I needed to go, showed me what I needed to see, told me, at long last, what I needed to hear that I might understand myself.
This year I made peace with family ghosts. I will carry a sadness with me always for what could have been, what we might have become together. They've earned a place in my mind in return for leaving my heart alone. I've given them the moors to haunt, the wilderness to hurtle through in their own grief. There's nothing more I can do for them, and nothing more they know how to do for me. The wilds are their home, civilization is mine.
This year I learned well the lesson risking all is often a better strategy than attempting to contain what is slowly fraying into constituent strands, the patterned weave gone back to the place it came from. Risking all forces the best parts of the pattern together: the strongest angles become knots; the beautiful design is made perfectly, pristinely clear; the straight line forced into an edge falls away to expose the shape's true intention. It may not be obvious during the process. It may look as if the end of everything is at hand. With a deep breath the mind shifts, the eye trains: a masterpiece makes itself known.
Have you ever remembered yourself? Have you ever stepped with purpose, knowing the placement of each foot was a magickal act, each fluid shifting of weight a flex of great import in the controlled fall we call walking? Every glance creating a world, the resonant echos of each booted footfall reinforcing themselves into entire universes?
Have you ever woke in one deep hour to find the light of a full moon shining through tall loft windows, its filigreed patterns in black and silver tracing out a design of your boundless future, their vein-work a route map between what lives within and what waits to be given shape without?
I have.
In 02008 I finally parted the shadows in my mind. Long depression lifted. Despair burned away. I found that wayward full moon and placed it in my own sky.
It's amazing how far one can see with just a small amount of moonlight.
Hey White Boy!
10/4/08 00:20 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Entering a MUNI station in downtown San Francisco, I pass an Obama election swag table.
"Hey white boy!"
"..."
Big smile: "Are you voting for Obama?" He's over 60, hair and beard sharp white on dark skin, several million mischievous twinkles in each eye.
I smile big in return: "Yes, I am! And what's my being white have to do with it?"
"Nothing! But we..." hand pointing back and forth between himself and me, "...need more white boys to vote for Obama." He hands me an Obama '08 button. I pin it to the strap of my Monome bag.
"Looks to me like there are plenty already." I gesture down the line of people of all shapes, sizes, skin tones, genders and ages picking up Obama buttons, stickers and posters from the table. A majority of those present at the moment are Caucasian.
"Yes, but we need EVERYBODY to vote for Obama.... HEY! Asian boy!"
I love San Francisco.
The Bats Have Left The Bell Tower
6/4/08 00:31 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The wall is broken, the bricks scattered for miles in an explosion powered arc.
So much is coming together, it's at times frightening to realize the focal point is defined by my daily efforts and continued concentration. It's almost as if I've tricked myself into over-achievement when I see how various projects fit hand in glove. I would almost swear I did not consciously plan for them to work together in this way. Add random yet meaningful connections, unexpected interfacing and pages opened by a trickster wind exactly when required... yes, I can confidently say, synchronicity is both real and wonderful.
Some of what I've been hard at work on:
- The next set of Daevlmakr plug-ins. I had false starts with these over the last year, but they're now on track. The Daevl.Plugs have been so successful, it was difficult to both define and simultaneously let go of expectations for a follow-up. The magic wand wave: realizing these are not a follow-up. They're a suite of plug-ins with their own sonic legs, living in the same haunted recording studio as the Daevl.Plugs. However, like the Daevl.Plugs, this will be an installer full of audio-fuckery goodness. To make anything else is unnatural... it's simply how I'm bent.
- Software for Josh Boughey's wonderful, developing Stribe hardware controller.
- Software for the impossibly perfect Monome device series.
- Finishing off various Instrument Racks for Ableton Live. These will be a Daevlmakr product, but I haven't decided on release dates or installation method yet.
- A big jump start on the joint video project with Matt Ridenour. The concept has both scaled up and expanded. We're moving into a two human plus one silicon intelligence multimedia performance experience. Have I mentioned I love Max 5?
- Moving my custom apps over to the brilliant Max 5 environment. I've been working hardest here: deconstructing, re-thinking, taking advantage of the new Max/MSP to re-factor and sculpt programs into exactly what they should be. I've even braved re-patching some of my earliest Max works, born way back when I didn't know an [uzi] from a [loadbang] and somehow made the code work anyway. It's been a fun method for learning how deep the Max 5 rabbit-hole goes. Answer: even more bottomless than Max 4.
- Actual music. In concert with my evolving custom apps, the Monome 256 and the Stribe have revolutionized this workflow. Best of all, because of the way actions are coalescing into a sleek, futuristic, dimension-hopping jet car around me, it's almost effortless. I'll be unveiling a new audio project soon.
Love, Chaos and Dinner
3/24/08 14:12 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Last night Ania and I danced into the spectacle of San Francisco's Teatro Zinzanni to celebrate our togetherness- magic sprinkled dinner theatre of acrobatics, song, dance, juggling and cirque-tastic hula-hooping as transdimensional engine. Nobody swings the hula like Mat Plendl as Chou Chou. Our table was serendipitously shared with Boris and Natasha from Belarus, who translated the ravings of insane Russian balance master Sergiy Krutikov for us. I loved the angelic aerial contortions of Oleg Izossimov; the barrel, carpet, bed and buddy foot flipping of Les Castors; the hilarious sky zone shenanigans of Andrea Conway Doba; the fancy toe and heel work of Wayne Doba; the zaptacular cutlery plus knife sharp wit of Michael "The Lonely Chef" Davis and the enchanting chanteuses of the evening, Liliane Montevecchi and the gorgeously operatic Nicolle Foland.
While I am attempting to sneak out of the studio in the near future to catch a few more of my favorite artists, it is a year of ambition. The brick wall structure in iCal reflects this state of affairs, and the feeling of accomplishment keeps me moving: continual work delivers fresh promise with every progressive step. As most waking moments are spent in pursuit of these ambitions (barring coffee time, which may still qualify), it is all the more marvelous to step out of the electron flow to a land of moons, makeup, music and madness.
It was a wonderful time, off the radar for three glorious hours.
Bring It, Machine
11/7/07 23:52 - permalink - email - category: Flow
There are times when life rolls in as treaded machinery, an overwhelming presence 5000 feet high. You can spot it triangulating on you from kilometers away. If you can't see it, you can still feel the ground shake. An armored megalopolis of turreted disaster, even its shadow is dense enough to squeeze the air from one's chest.
A giant fortress destroying forward, crushing everything in its path... what's a lone simian to do?
Most of these times we run. We take to the trees and brachiate out of harm's way, leaving behind life as we knew it: a thin smear of dreams and possibilities. The Machine rolls on, bits of our lives and loves dripping in its tracks.
Not this time.
This monkey is faster, smarter and more motivated than you've tried to flatten before, Machine. I'm already running beneath your immense chassis, in the vast space between your grinding walls of plated cogs. Your main entry hatch is just above me. Soon I'm going to jump, climb in, take over.
You've been running driverless far too long.
This time, Machine, I'm coming for you.
It's Full Of Stars
7/31/07 12:58 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The move devoured me, chewed me, re-chewed me and has, finally, spit me out.
The studio is waiting to be fully re-manifested. It's going to start laying traps for me soon if I don't bring it up from The Well to my floating platform High Above.
Also in the realm of High Above, Vadim Amat is itching to fly.
My contribution to The Sound Machine is shaping up as a framework of Elektron MachineDrum and Roland JX-3P with many extremely high/low environmental sounds re-pitched to audible ranges.
The Daevl.Plugs received a wonderful half-page review from Nils Quak in the July issue of KEYS.
There's a new Daevl In The Pale Moonlight waiting for this clouded canopy to split and allow the white beams passage.
Betas of the new Daevl.Plugs are being pulled into existence. There are also bug-fixes and possible additions to the existing plug-in suite about to become visible.
I deeply miss Ania, Marta, Musia, Joeby, two small snakes and many wonderful friends in San Francisco. 3.5 more days left in the void.
I'm currently in the backwoods of Nowhere visiting my ailing grandfather. The chiming bells and soft alarms of the cardiac unit sound like cousins to the endless song of Vegas slot machines.
There's a gorgeous new book of my life opening. Made of paper hand-milled by djinn then bound in starlight, it's lined in the silver of shadows, contains the black ink of dream. The cover isn't even completely flipped, but I've just read the opening line:
He stepped out of the room he had taken to be a world, and found himself in a place made entirely of sky.
Good Stuff
7/4/06 19:20 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Several, many, a throng of doubleplusgood things rolling down the line:
- Serialization on the DaevlPlugs installer is working well. Since I see him at least twice a week, Chris Martinez of Effect69 fame will be first on the shock line for installation tests and spotting new bugs in the semi-wild for the current PowerPC builds. Now that Cycling '74 is nearing official release on the Universal version of Max/MSP/Jitter, Pluggo can't be far behind. This means I may be able to release both Windows and MacIntel versions of the DaevlPlugs simultaneously in the not-too-distant future. A couple of the DaevlPlugs are a bit on the cpu hoggish side, so I'm looking forward to running them on my screamin' dual-core.
- Speaking of Effect69... while Chris is working on their new site, check out the Effect69 MySpace page. Some tasty techno and house tracks there, along with Chris' remix of Yes' Roundabout with extensive sonic processing contributed by yours truly.
- I've been convinced of MySpace's utility value by watching Chris get up and running next to every other musician under the moon. I'll be using MySpace for many of the new tracks, post-DaevlPlugs release party.
- I'm digging Birdy Nam Nam, a turntable foursome from France.
- Did I mention new tracks? Yes, there are some, and they have both Monome and DaevlPlug action all over them.
New Year's Day Architecture
2/28/06 22:26 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Ania birthday-gifted me with two wonderful stacks of tree and ink today: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and an excellent Taschen book on Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is a massive set of three hardback tomes, a beautiful 1440 pages collecting every strip Bill Watterson ever released for circulation. Simply flipping through, I'm struck with wonder at every smile, every arc of tiger through air, every well-wrought flip of social commentary disguised as the shenanigans of a six year old: all simple pen strokes placed deliberately by the artist's hand.
The book on Wright is filled with gorgeous photos of his architecture and blueprints. I can never get enough of Wright's work: sweeping lines, complex geometries made deceptively simple, an interdependence with setting to the extent setting becomes a part of the creation. Wright created dwellings the way Watterson imbued his characters with life: every beam, every angle, every space an expression of its creator's pulse.
These works of art, these breathing embodiments of aspects of their artists, live equally in our minds as in the physical world. That's where the creation began: in an artist's mind. Through artistic expansion and expression, their creations as avatar allow simultaneous appearance throughout the world and throughout time. Watterson walks our minds still in the eternal pair of boy and tiger, and Wright is very much alive as modernity and progress itself.
I like New Year's Day for the mass cleansing and renewal our society longs for and attempts, but my true, personal measurement of year to year is from birthday to birthday. My life as lived, like those of all artists, all human beings, is an aspect of my mind, which popped from void into this improbable place on this day. What I see is what I create, what I do is what I will, what I am is what I believe.
A new rotation, a new creation... architecture, sketches, tigers and fallingwater.... I wonder what I'll build in this brand new year?
Four Points Define A Window
1/29/06 21:58 - permalink - email - category: Flow
Doug Miller spray-painted this "four things" tag over my regularly scheduled post tonight, so rather than shirk my responsibility I'm just going to dive right in:
Four jobs I’ve held
Musician
Live sound engineer
Unix sysadmin
Glorified baby-sitter in a large company
Iconoclast
Four movies I can watch on endless loop
Blade Runner
Akira
City Of Lost Children
Time Bandits
Heavy Metal
Fight Club
(Yes, I use the same numbering system Hal Rager does)
Four places I’ve lived
San Francisco, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Akron, Ohio
The Great Underground Empire
Four TV shows
Honestly, I turned the goddamnnoisybox off about 12 years ago and have never turned it back on. I wanted more time to read, write, create and live.
Four cities I love and will continually return to
Galway, Ireland
London, England
Tel Aviv, Israel
Krakow, Poland
Four cities that are known future destinations
Toronto, Canada
Stockholm, Sweden
Berlin, Germany
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
Four of my favorite dishes
Kung Pao Tofu
Nalesniki (Polish potato pancakes)
Falafel and hummus wa fool (best in Tel Aviv, but I take what I can get)
Pierogies (Polish or Russian recipe)
Four things I'm waiting anxiously for
Monome
Neural Jacks
Cloned Replacement Organs
a working Unified Field Theory
The Singularity
US elections in 2006 and 2008
Four sites I visit daily
Better Humans
Create Digital Music
Hack-A-Day
Daily Kos
(plus a trillion feeds)
Four places I would rather be
Boondock, Tellus Tertius
Walking The Pattern
Mars, post-terraforming
The Many-Colored Land
in my studio creating music
Four bloggers I’m tagging for this quadratic-style love-in
Jacob Appelbaum
David Fine
Christian Fromme
Maehymn
Martin Spernau
Rumors Of My Demise
9/21/05 23:10 - permalink - email - category: Flow
To quote Twain, "have been greatly exaggerated."
Rumors of existential crises, internal philosophical debates on death, meaning and the value of individual actions are, however, entirely supported by empirical analysis of observed data.
I am capable of supreme distancing, a part of myself rooted to the firmament above, staring down in awe and wonder at the turns reality can take. The other parts, standing amidst, could really use some of that right now.
As my good friend William claims, "there is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so." I keep in mind the balance must maintain, the cycle shift, the thoughts turn and silver be revealed at last.
I'm thinking... make it so.
Regroup
8/1/05 15:23 - permalink - email - category: Flow
July was a tail-kicker, by all accounts.
Deep breath, pull the fabric of the universe together and jump from point (a) to point (b) without covering the distance between... what a dream this would have been.
Instead, I covered the expanse one hard-won step at a time. When the going gets tough, the tough get tougher. There's so much I can't even begin to cover in a single entry to this weblog, so instead I'll unravel and reweave by inches and strands across the future.
"Strip your feet of lead, my friend, strip your feet of lead." - Bauhaus, Spirit
Process
7/13/05 10:11 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The fixed work is the life.
The process itself is the living.
Big Wheel Keep On Turnin'
6/27/05 20:22 - permalink - email - category: Flow
The train is climbing, metal grinding on metal. I've attached more cars to the engine than I'd realized, but the steam is high and I'm cresting the mountain. Soon it will be downhill acceleration, racing across suspended bridges into strange, uncharted lands.
- Chris Martinez' (still un-named) audio project - has scaled down and turned into a three song shopping demo. Working on the mastering and a few small edits still, but it's almost done. Ania heads for Poland this Thursday and I'll have a few weeks with nothing else to focus on except cats and music and missing her, so these tracks will be finalized shortly.
- I've been so creatively successful with my newly-built Max/MSP delay lines they're forming a new foundation of songs for my ongoing ambient project, Sky Break Blue. These are turning into longer, evolving pieces based on overlapping cyclic repetition, found sounds, environments.
- Over the weekend (between rounds of Max/MSP delay-line patching) I've pulled out the most likely candidate demos to become full-fledged tracks for blueDeceiver. Rhythmic, bass-heavy, instrumental vox and lots of DSP. These are all Live-fests of high degree, but I'm planning on working in a little delay-line madness here, as well.
- New Daevlmakr site shell is finalized, easily extensible, clean and... white.
- Some new things coming for 2Second(fuse) too, including a studio tour and return to a more regular update schedule.
I don't, as a general rule of thumb, announce creative projects in their early stages. It's too easy for them to go astray and never see fruition. However, all of the above are moving from the nebulous realms of conceptual talking fuzz to breathing, walking, living terra firma, and at a nice, fast clip.
I'm still in stealth ninja mode, but I think I'm safely across the border.
Chief Iconoclast - Daevlmakr Media
Designing Monsters - vitruvius.livejournal.com
reading
Emma Bull - War For The Oaks
Thomas Jefferson - The Jefferson Bible
Baggini & Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit
listening
Harmaline - Live @ NoPhest 02008 04 19
Logickal - Twelve Offerings
Effect69 - Contact Made
recent
Belief Is Not Required
Rebel Saint
Exploding As I've Never Exploded Before
02009
02008
Power-Up: Lenovo S10
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