there's something unpleasant in the air. nothing seems to be going right. idk
i "finished" the secret project. tell you about it next week. it's only going to arrive slightly late.
murder on the dancefloor was fun. sounds good i think.
saturday was the movie night. watched Spotlight (2015). very good movie, great as a spiritual successor to All The President's Men. deeply uncomfortable subject matter. i don't want to watch it again but i'm glad i did which is the whole point.
sunday we gardened. was going well until something went ping in my wrist. there'd been a stabbing on Lavender Hill and the pharmacy was inside the police cordon.
a friend's in hospital. his wife separately had to go to A&E. we stayed with her until midnight and drove her home.
there aren't enough hours in the week to do everything i want to be doing. i don't have enough money to be doing everything i want to be doing. trying to get more hours in the week means i'll have even less money.
last night i went to bed with a migraine and this morning i woke up with a slightly less bad migraine then decided to come into the office. this is going to be a brief one.
monday, as usual, choir. going over "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" and "To The Moon And Back". we're in phones away going over the entire setlist mode at the moment. i had been worried that we'd get everything down in time but we're truly getting there. tonight a subset of us are practicing Murder On The Dancefloor. i'm hyped. come watch us yeah?
tuesday: back to back meetings all day. just one more meeting bro, just one more meeting, just one more then i swear we’ll be on the same page, i just need one more meeting bro, just let me have one more meeting
wednesday, took Kettricken to the vet for a routine, 6-monthly checkup. i'd thought it odd timing. so did the vet, they had no idea why their reminder email went out then. she hates being taken to the vet. i hate causing her distress. sorry :(
Sophie was away friday/saturday. i stayed at home and worked on her secret birthday project. which might become a secret christmas project jesus fuck i'm running out of time
i'm at the tail end of a cold. i seem to get a lot of colds these days. this was one of the head full of cotton wool throat full of phlegm muscles don't work variety.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a cinematic masterpiece of a game, my second favourite Metal Gear, and i haven't owned a PS3 in twelve years. time marches on: it's now acceptably playable, in an emulator, on the Steam Deck(!). so far i’m at Laughing Octopus. i think Hideo needs a healthier outlet for his kinks.
managed to make it to Amanda’s birthday roast dinner. Morden is too fucking far away. i live in zone 2 south london and it still took eighty minutes to get there, including a half our walk, which completely wrecked me the next day because i wasn’t recovered from the cold. lovely evening though
still not a clue what’s going on with origami. trying to get them to write things down instead of constant meetings where we all agree on what turns out to be different things we’re talking about. still cleaning up eight year old tech debt.
god, a day “late” on the weeknotes and it’s not even been interesting
it is the season of ending and decay and i really do not want it to be.
and why he ourple
i have switched from Firefox to Floorp.
this isn't a bit, that is the actual name of a real browser. it's a fork of Firefox. it has some nice customisation features built in like being able to move the tab bar around and being able to use userChrome.css like Firefox could before 68 (yeah you can do that with an about:config flag still but that's not the point). using the theme colour from the website in the toolbar like Safari does isn't even a Floorp feature, it's just straight up a Firefox addon.
none of this is the point: i just don't trust Mozilla any more, and i do not trust Google. it would be nice if we weren't putting all our collective energy into capitalism-eating-itself-plagiarism-surveillance-and-climate-change-hockey-stick-machines but oh well
my mother-in-law (who is very nice) visited this weekend. we went to the Tower of London, then saw Operation Mincemeat, the musical about Operation Mincemeat, that one time MI5 stole a corpse, dressed him up as a marine officer, and dropped him in the Mediterranean with a briefcase full of fake plans for the Spanish to responsibly return to the UK and definitely not show to the Abwehr.
genuinely one of the funniest and most moving plays i've ever seen. i cried a lot. the Fortune Theatre is not built for 6'1" girls. but they do have an order-drinks-online-and-deliver-them-to-your seat thing. 10/10 go see it
everybody has a different idea of what "the Origami project" is. or, everybody is using different words to say the same thing. or, everybody knows what everybody else wants "the Origami project" to be and is lying to me about it so they get what they want from it. or, all of the above. TK too spicy rewrite this para
Origami is the design system for the pink newspaper website. there's a new version of it coming any year now. i am to test its components and fix any technical issues with using them in the pink newspaper website. or, i am to come up with a proposal re: the pink newspaper website's old weird CSS that is consuming the design system for us to work on. or, i am to work with the design system team and the design team on the things they want to improve about the wholesale design of the pink newspaper website that may or may not be related to the new version of Origami.
god, i don't know. i think i'm doing all these things? for the time being at least, i'm lifting up logs and finding woodlice and then taking a flamethrower to the woodlice. most of my job for the last few years has paying down eight-year-old tech debt caused by a bunch of people coincidentally all with my deadname. again, not a bit; i'm talking about three people who are not me whose code i am very excited to be deleting.
last monday was a day of travelling, didn’t get chance to write that week’s notes. today is a day of travelling, but i messed up the train times and have an hour of downtime in a cafe in Buxton. for simplicity’s sake i’m calling these “last week” and “this week” despite monday. it’s just as well, this week’s entry is fairly short.
the dermatologist(s) referred me for UV phototherapy. the first session was on the wednesday last week, at the Bermondsey Wing of Guy’s Hospital, which has great vibes in an 80s shopping centre atrium kind of way. it turned out was just a patch test of sorts: the nurse had a small handheld UV gun that fired a window pane pattern of ten beams of UV in increasing strength on my back, and a briefing on what to expect from the phototherapy itself, which left me with more questions than answers, and too much anxiety to ask them.
then thursday was the first actual UV session. i want you to imagine Jon Osterman getting locked into the Intrinsic Field Subtractor. i go behind a curtain, strip naked, put on goggles and a visor, step into a box, close the door, the UV fluorescent tubes lining the walls go binkbinkbinkbinkVUUUUUM, i stand there rotating my limbs for the longest forty-eight seconds of my life.
is this just what sunbeds are? i have no idea
also wednesday,
okay so on /r/synthdiy Martin from Neutral Labs was asking “hey is anyone in london able to do a tiny repair job that really doesn’t warrant shipping the thing back to Germany?” and i said “yes i can do that”. some back and forth later and this guy turns up at my studio with an Elmyra 2 that needed a jack replacing.
i test the unit and confirm there is no signal coming through that jack, take everything apart, the jack looks physically okay. i poke around with a multimeter some, there are no discontinuities. on a hunch, i plug a patch cable into the suspect jack, and everything is working fine??? i put everything slowly back together, testing at each step to make sure it is still working, doubting myself the whole way. but everything is absolutely fine.
saturday i went to one (1) day of Greenbelt Festival. i volunteer there every year, making somewhat competent barista coffee at the Tank Cafe. i’ve done it since 2012, with exceptions for 2017 (completing a house purchase that weekend) and 2020-2021 (). this year the week after (the one i’m calling “this week”) was the only week we could do our annual uni friends cottage holiday, which would have entailed either taking three (3) trains from Kettering to Buxton with all our camping stuff plus a week and a half worth of clothing and then taking it home one week later also on trains (no) or taking five (5) trains from Kettering to Buxton via Nunhead to drop our camping stuff off (also no). so, no volunteering.
going there for just the saturday was totally feasible though and meant carrying just a handbag and a folding festival seat. it was wet and muddy, the wettest the festival’s been for a good seven years (but not nearly as uh interesting as the knee deep mud of 2012).
some good talks, some good music, managed to catch Beer And Hymns. popped my head into the Tank to say hi to and hug my friends, which was bittersweet. i’ll be back next year.
and then Buxton. well actually Cowdale, this tiny hamlet on a moor about 2mi out of town. an enormous barn conversion holiday cottage, six bedrooms downstairs, huge open plan livingkitchendining upstairs plus a snug. walking (although not as much as i’d have liked); boardgames (although not as much as i’d have liked); synth noodling (although not as much as i’d have liked); working on a cute visual programming language idea (although not as much as i’d have liked); playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (way more than was socially acceptable); we saw the house that inspired Pemberley, the house that inspired Thornfield, some excellent caves. i cooked the best roast dinner of my life.
half of the group needed to leave on Saturday. three quarters of the rest had to leave on Sunday. which left me spending the night alone in a cottage that sleeps twelve. 0/10 absolutely haunted do not recommend
let's get the not particularly humble brag out of the way:
i spent friday afternoon driving supercars around a track.
not these ones tbh. i was too excited and forgot to be taking photos or video of the actual cars or driving
so for christmas my parents got me a Virgin Experiences voucher to go abseil down the big red spindly sculpture thing in Olympic Park. except when i tried to book it it was was no longer available. i was able to exchange the voucher for another Experience, and looking down the list it was like:
wine tasting
massage
supercar track day
bottomless brunch
and so there i was on friday, in a portakabin on a disused airfield just outside Hemel Hempstead, learning how to not crash several hundred thousand pounds worth of car. then an instructor drives three of you round the track in a normally-fast BMW, going slow to teach you each corner, then going fast, then doing everything wrong on purpose so you know what not to do, then going really fucking fast to make sure you're suitably terrified by the time you get behind the wheel.
and then they call you up one by one, sit you down in a stupidly fast car, and let you at it, with an instructor in the passenger seat extremely calmly talking you through which cones to aim at, which corners to cut, when to brake, when to floor it. i drove:
a Toyota Supra done out in the exact colour scheme and decals as the one from The Fast And The Furious (2001). great car, but i was a bit too nervous on my first few laps to get much out of it.
a Subaru Impreza WRX STI. got in it slightly disappointed, as the instructor wanted to put me in an Audi R8, but that was occupied. i was not expecting it to go as hard as it did. very fun in the corners.
a Lamborghini Gallardo LP540. honestly not as fun as the Scooby, felt a bit too abstract, and it was LHD so i didn't trust my proprioception.
supercars are not like other cars. you might think you've driven fast. floor it in a supercar, it genuinely feels like you're going to fucking hyperspace. like you are being willed forward by God Herself. like your soul has some inertia and needs a second to catch up to your body. it's a visceral, intensely physical experience. 11/10 i need to go back there i don't even care
and that was just day two out of a run of four busy days.
for a little while back in 2018/19 we would occasionally pack up our laptops, leave the office, and go work from the 6th floor bar at the Tate Modern, mostly as an excuse to leave the dinge of One Southwark Bridge. last year we tried it again unsuccessfully; the Tate is somehow way more popular than pre-pandemic, and there were massive queues for the bar and a sign saying "no laptops". we ended up in the terrace at the Anchor pub instead, which was fine, but not what i'd been going for.
i'd had a little revelation that right on our doorstep was a venue that ticked all of my boxes: The Barbican Centre. which ticks the additional box of being my favourite place on earth (lmao when i wrote this i forgot the background of ghost.computer was the pixel art Lauderdale Tower. what a nerd kara). so thursday we went and tried it out, a few of us grabbing a table on the lakeside terrace, and it went pretty well! a little cloudy and windy but worth trying again.
after that was London Synth Club, at the Walthamstow Trades Hall & Institute. which is basically a working men's club except with pride progress stickers on the bar and "terfs are weird" stickers in the ladies' loos. great venue, great vibes.
Synth Club is a scrappy little event put together by this guy Ben from the EMOM scene, one part meetup, one part open mic night. buncha synth men (plus me) with their synths talking about synths for several hours, puncuated with short live sets. i did a little set on a tiny but surprisingly versatile Eurorack system built into an Ikea TAVELÅN box. got some very loud industrial techno/garage(?) out of it. somewhere between SOPHIE & Modeselektor vibes? good shit; went about 47% to plan, which is about par.
still trying to find any photos or video of the set. surely someone in the room had some
my old friend Ed lives in the area; i texted him an invite not expecting anything (i had never successfully invited anyone to a live performance i've done? so i eventually just kind of gave up inviting people). he turned up! with his best friend/ex Emma, who it turned out is a member of the Trades Hall. we had a lovely evening!
saturday we met up with my parents, my brother, and his partner, in Leicester, and spent the day wandering around, doing lightly tourist things, my dad reminiscing about his uni days, the "kids" (the under-35s) doing silly things on the playground equipment and injuring ourselves (okay tbh that was just me).
we ended up at The Marquis Wellington pub at my suggestion, which it turned out was my dad's local. it's changed a lot in the last thirty seven years apparently.
and then at last, sunday. i went climbing for the first time in a few months. inspired by how weak i felt on the monkey bars in Leicester, i only managed 45 minutes before giving up. and now i ache even more. it's perfect timing though, i go on holiday next week so i'm just on time to have my rekindled habit entirely broken by the change in routine. love my brain, it's great here.
then in the evening was our movie night, we watched Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966) from Piers's list, a stressful movie about horrible people, which was actually incredible.
i fixed the rss feed url, you're welcome all you rss nerds.
i left my fan at the studio on friday. today was the hottest day of the year. i was surprised by the rain but at least surely it would make the heat more bearable. did it fuck
i had an angry couple of days on wednesday and thursday. i don't know why. i'm sorry everyone, you didn't deserve it.
good news: my work private health insurance covers shooting me in the face with lasers to the tune of twelve and a half grand. bad news: they have some specific laser shooty face people who are not the people who have been shooting me in the face with lasers for the last five years. i will miss you
good news: the end-to-end tests on the financial times mobile app actually caught a bug in the new content pipeline. bad news: it took me four (4) working days to figure out that that's what the e2e test logs were trying to tell me. worse news: it's in a really annoying part of content pipeline that i don't like how it's written. better news: oh wait that means i get to rewrite it, cool
i write this on the train home from the choir. we got back from camping this afternoon. i have been in ten london boroughs today, that feels like a record. please let me sleep now.
busy week: moving a cat cage from streatham hill to wandsworth road; meeting a new catsitter Haasje who is the loveliest and made sure kettricken loved her too by the end of the weekend; moving andy and piers’s camping gear from wandsworth road to nunhead.
and then camping. we’re getting it down to a fine art. our tent goes fwoomp, it takes literally two minutes to put up fully. i can turn a bag of logs and a box of matches into a campfire. the replacement stainless steel mesh i put eyelets in for the portable bbq works great. i’m pretty sure i have a phobia of wasps.
they’re shipping some Curves by rail just over there.
in summer the choir apparently scatters to the four winds. monday there were about ten of us, and the person teaching To The Moon And Back wasn’t one of them. we just sat on the floor and ran through basically our entire setlist. a lot if which i don’t know yet! really gonna have to learn them before our gig in october.
so a friend worked on Deadpool & Wolverine. her partner couldn‘t make it to the cast & crew screening, so she put a message out on our Discord. sorry folks, i am More Online Than You,
film was pretty good? i dunno, if you're at the point where you write three (3) fourth-wall-breaking breaking jokes about how long the film is that’s a sign you should cut a few pages.
go see it before you get spoiled, if you care about that kind of thing.
oh yeah i turned 0x21! lovely presents, lovely people at the Angel Oak, and thank you for indulging me in deciding to move us out into Peckham Rye Common to sit under the tree with the fairy lights when the pub got too loud. and thank you for staying there past midnight. love you all
we’re back doing our movie night, where we pick a random person and they pick something from their list of ten(ish) films they think everyone should see before they die. JoJo was chosen. her list is mostly full of grim Danish films and A24.
oh wow it’s actually joever, didn’t see that coming.
we’ve been trying to diagnose a Weird Problem at work, the kind you’d see in breathless Medium posts or SCP containment reports. me, Ivo and Rowan had each spent a few days trying to understand what was going on before getting burnt out, and the CDN support engineers were clueless.
on tuesday i got everyone together around the breakout area table in the office, trying out stupid things like editing the CDN config live to add more logging and point it to a temporary app i wrote and deployed in five minutes to log full request details we weren’t getting from the CDN logs themselves. by the end of the day things were pointing to the WAF as the culprit. the next day we narrowed it down with the help of a WAF support engineer to the WAF's CDN loop detection (crucially not the CDN's CDN loop detection, which we'd already configured our way around).
the support engineer told us we had an "interesting" architecture, which is support engineer for "what in god's name are you doing".
thursday was a bit of a piecemeal day, but I did manage to crank out a 1600-word internal work blog post, a crash course in Splunk. might syndicate it here, because apparently a technical blog post is on brand for me now.
another community dermatologist appointment for the Chronic Skin Problem. she'd told me this was a supervision session, and her consultant dermatologist would be sitting in and might be able to offer better advice. what she didn't tell me was there would be three more (trainee question mark?) dermatologists, and that they'd spend the next twenty minutes basically doing a table read of an episode of House. which was great in terms of getting me treatment, not so much in terms of anxiety.
i ended up with some downtime in Herne Hill on the way to the appointment, so i grabbed lunch (a chorizo and anchovy pizza) and ate it sitting on a log in Brockwell Park, then worked on the Splunk blog post for a bit.
at the studio i have two larger Eurorack cases, both 6U by 84HP, that stand together to make one bigger 12U case. except, sometimes for a live set i want to use a case bigger than the portable techno groovebox, i can’t possible take both big cases out with me, and half of a 12U system is not a 6U system, it’s a bunch of modules designed to work together with the half you’re not bringing. my studio’s default state is a mess anyway without me having to rearrange all my modules every few weeks and leaving half of them on the desk.
12x84 ≈ 9x110. one single bigger case, slightly wider, with the modules curated to (hopefully!) fit both the studio and live set use cases.
soldering all 800+ power header connections on the bus boards took three hours and all my stocks of solder
as for the old cases: hey do you want a free Eurorack case? one is still available, the other is Alex’s dangerous new hobby.
friday i went to the local hipster brunch cafe for avo on toast, then saturday on the way home from Kensington Palace we grabbed olive bread and blue cheese for lunch from Whole Foods in Kensington, then went to the local rooftop bar for drinks. living my best bougie life.
we were planning to go to the other rooftop bar in Peckham, but as we walked out of the stairwell they were blasting music loud enough to immediately trigger my apple watch "loud environment" warning. look lxds i love Crazy In Love as much as the next girl but i also love having a) ears and b) conversations.
let’s just pretend I’ve been doing these the whole time and don’t have to recap the last checks notes two years
after a disastrous few weeks at the choir trying to learn No More Tears (Enough Is Enough) by Donna Summer feat Barbra Streisand (weird disco key changes, stupidly wide range, way too much funk rhythm) we moved onto To The Moon And Back by Savage Garden. it’s a lot of fun! we got through most of it in one session, we’ll probably finish tonight?
i’m really starting to get comfortable with my singing voice, it’s a great feeling. even just warming up and singing something once a week makes a huge difference. ASYMPTOTES vocals when
thursday was the father in law’s 60th birthday party, at a Very Fancy Restaurant in Orpington. i’d been completely dreading it, i’m not close at all with that side of Sophie’s family, and i knew there'd be a bunch of people i'd met 1 (one) time, a decade ago. but it was actually super lovely! i ate too much and burnt my tongue on the chocolate fondant but somehow avoided both a physical hangover and an anxiety hangover.
my regular board game group are five sessions into The King's Dilemma, a cool legacy-ish game where you're playing as the king's advisors in Definitely Not Westeros. it does some really interesting things with limited game mechanics, and (unlike Seafall, the last legacy game we played) the rules are really well explained. almost too well explained tbh, for a game mostly built around just voting, they're 25 pages long and pretty verbose. but i prefer that over the several index cards of houserules we had to maintain for Seafall where it simply didn't explain how a bunch of its separate systems interacted.
after that, Piers (a very much non-sportsball person) hosted the sportsball final. before the match everyone agreed with the prediction it would be 2-1 to Spain after ninety minutes of England's usual "pass it around a bit, get crowded out, lose possession to unforced errors, occasionally get lucky". and hey what do you know
okay maybe a little recap, as a treat. i've got a new album out! when i released IN PROGRESS i felt completely musically spent and didn't make anything new for eighteen months. but after SYNCRETISM i still somehow had fresh ideas?
it's extremely hype, i learnt a lot of hyperpop/future garage/progressive house production techniques. the whole thing came together mostly over one weekend (#humblebrag). chee says it's my best work and i'm inclined to agree with them.
you can listen now on all good streaming services and Spotify but please consider buying it on Bandcamp because that actually gives me money
IN PROGRESS is the new album by ASYMPTOTES (me), out now on 972276 Records DK. here's how each track just barely came together.
BLOOD BLISTERS
this track actually started out around 2014 with a cracked copy of Ableton Live 9 and even less idea of what i was doing. it was called Red Kite and it was basically a Four Tet knockoff using the jangly bits and whurmp bass you hear in the final track. i would play it in a loop in Session view and sit there going "okay now what" until i quit Ableton disheartened.
when i started working on this album in late 2021/early 2022 i came across the session file again, played it, realised i liked the sounds, deleted all the midi and reused the instruments in a different track that needed something extra (working title i am not ludwig goransson since it was uh heavily inspired by the Tenet soundtrack).
OLD SELVES
in 2017 i got my 49-key midi keyboard out from under the bed, plugged it in, loaded the cracked Live 9, created a track with a grand piano instrument on it, and recorded five minutes of absolutely terrible piano improv midi. just awful, zero artist merit.
in march i found the session file, played it, cringed, bounced it to audio and sliced to midi by transients, put a bunch of audio effects on it i ended up saving as an effect rack called Deconstruct Smear and using a lot on the album (it's a Beat Repeat into a Reverb with some fake tape saturation and wobble which turns random slices of the dry sound into a big lush wash of noise), and played a the slices with chee's Ableton Push. then as became common for this album i went "what this really needs is... some house drums".
THREAT ACTORS
the last song finished if you don't count /// (FALSE STARTS). written entirely in a single day, at work, the friday before the album released on wednesday june 1st. lol.
i wanted to somehow make a circa-2010-65daysofstatic song. it started with putting some synthesised clean guitar arpeggios through a bunch of pedal-like audio effects and somehow programming a legit 7/4 math rock drum pattern with some session kit samples, then throughout the song going like "a real drummer would put a half bar fill here, some snare rolls here, switch to the ride cymbal here".
BONE IDOLS
not intentionally done (at first), but this is also very heavily inspired by 65dos (which is why i wanted to do that intentionally for THREAT ACTORS; if i could make something that sounded vaguely like them by accident, what could i do on purpose). the detuned sine chords came first, then the very reverby plucks, then the glitchy drums were a natural choice.
before i wrote THREAT ACTORS, this was the only song on the album not in 4/4. it was i think the only song i'd written since of substance not in 4/4. that was a deliberate choice; i wanted to try to make "more conventional" music to bring out more of the subconsciously weird choices i make that are often hidden by deliberately weird choices.
then i wrote this in 5/4 and i remembered why i like weird time signatures. this is also the only song i've ever written with a time signature change, and every time i listen back to it i get to that section and think "oh! dope".
/// (FALSE STARTS)
i was trying to finalise the track ordering and realised i needed an interlude. i haven't deliberately made any ambient since un ep in 2019 (rise / hold / fall from of substance was never meant to be a finished piece). like un ep the philosophy was "take an interesting sound, tear it up, have the pieces become something more dangerous".
this was recorded on the evening of the friday before the wednesday. it's all from Eurorack; my original 38hp case in a gutted DAB radio is now a portable ambient-focused system. the patch went something like: midi from Ableton → 2HP2CV → Pico Voice → Monsoon → Monotropa → Freez (in the Monotropa feedback loop).
Pico Voice is providing the karplus-strong plucks, Monsoon is glitching and reverbing them, Monotropa is doing the feedback distortion, and Freez is just there for sample rate reduction for extra gnarl on the feedback.
SUBTLE BODY
working title: rhodes arps and stabs (i am not modeselektor). it didn't end up sounding much like Modeselektor but the bloop loop did on its own.
this is probably the best song i've ever written, and will write for a while. i mean listen to that drop. damn girl.
the chopped vocals are from I disappear in your arms by Christine and the Queens. i took the chorus vocals, sliced by transients, listened to every single slice and wrote down what kind of syllable it was, sorted them, put them across all 64 pads of the Push, and played them like drums over the section that wanted them.
FALL DAMAGE
another one that came together mostly in a single day. i had the basic loop of the samba drums and the two fighting arps down before, but no structure and no donk bass that forms the driving core of the song. i started arranging things, had a good build up going, got stuck, went for a walk, wrote in my notes "fm bass calls 'donk donk', kick responds, drop", then it was all over. i think maybe there's a music name for the thing i do where the "donk donk" comes back. but i don't know music theory.
the title is a pun. the song is about seasonal depression. if you're not paying attention to how the song actually feels, you might say it sounds summery. but it's very much full of sadness and pain.
CHEAP SHIT
the closest i've gotten to like, actual house? this grew up around the mallety plinks, the bloops, and the sort of breakbeat with the finger snaps. the FM bass is an Ableton preset (99% of my sound design at least starts with presets. about 80% is just straight up the unmodified presets, which, who cares) and it's definitely the dankest bass sound i've used.
there's a very chopped up sample of SHAME by Young Fathers in there which really just comes out as breathy mouth noises. this and the Christine and the Queens sample came from me listening to 6music and being like "that's a nice sound. i'll have that".
this is the track i'm probably least satisfied with tbh. it could have done with another pass of cleaning up and adding some flourish. so could everything, but then i would never release any of it. so it goes.
RARE JPEGS
i'm so so sorry Lady Sovereign. you have a great voice and it sounds so good all chopped up and scrambled. i just needed something vocal and rhythmic and almost but not quite familiar. i hope you're doing okay. i would love to see you making music again.
i literally googled "techno drums tutorial" for this, then watched five videos and ignored them all. i think i'm recreating the progression of electronic music in my own way, because i wanna try making some DnB or garage next. i have another Eurorack system that's meant for live techno but i haven't played with it much yet.
mixing and mastering
it turns out these are both really hard, and i've avoided putting any effort into either for past releases and they've somehow turned out alright? but having spent at least a day mixing and mastering IN PROGRESS has made it sound a whole lot better than anything i've made before. even the single releases of SUBTLE BODY and RARE JPEGS just sound like complete shit next to the album versions.
because i'm a goblin who knows nothing about music production all my tracks originally just had a limiter on the master channel and everything turned up to 0dB. okay look it works fine and produces a sort of okay mix level for listening back to but with wildly inconsistent levels between tracks (governed by how much sound there was being mixed down before the limiter).
i went through every track, removing the limiter and turning all the levels down, then listening through with an LUFS meter on master to get the final levels more or less the same on each track (aiming for -16dB LUFS integrated i think?). they were exported to flac and put in a single master session.
the mastering chain was just: Gullfoss, EQ with a 30Hz cut, Limiter. that's it. Gullfoss is pretty interesting, it's an EQ that something something 300 times per second something perceptual audio something something clarity. i sort of regret using it. overall it had basically no effect, maybe giving things a bit more space? but it also reduced a bunch of impact from the drops, and in a couple of places it did some completely fucked up things that sound awful but also like deliberate stylistic choices, like making the skittery glitch thing in THREAT ACTORS extremely uncomfortable to listen to when it plays on its own on that one bit.
i should definitely have listened through to the entire master while tweaking the settings on Gullfoss, but by that point it was like 11pm on the sunday and i needed to get the album submitted to Distrokid that day to have a chance of meeting my fake made up release deadline of wednesday 1st june. there might be a lesson to learn here but i'm just not seeing it.
for millennial hipsters (hi). we did hipster tourist things like Brick Lane and the Thames Path. i went to a gin pub with Rowan and Charlotte and drank a chilli negroni and played Subjective Guess Who and i went to a spa and i wore a bikini in front of real people and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
tonight i made roast beef short rib and if you ever want to make Pub Roast Beef, buy some short rib from a supermarket and just like cook it any way you know because oh my god
top rope climbing
so those queer climbers have a weekly meet up at a different climbing wall in London. last week was The Castle: it's this ridiculous victorian water pumping station that's, well, it's a castle, and in the nineties some people built a climbing wall in it.
top rope climbing is a different beast to bouldering. you need a partner to belay you (hold your rope and catch you if you fall). so it was pretty much "hi! i'm Kara" "i'm Lisa" "i trust you with my life now" "same"
i used to be good at climbing but that's okay, i will be again
btw on world war 4, if you have the wikipedia page for ukraine open in another tab rn i do not need to hear from you
💙💛
come to the milton keynes snozone last saturday if you want an asskicking
i hadn't been snowboarding in two years. i had been going once a year, with university friends, to the French Alps. i miss it so much! our last trip was in February 2020, and i'm pretty sure all we thought about you know was feeling a bit weird playing the board game Pandemic.
sometimes i remember "oh i'm an adult with money. i can just frickin, go to milton keynes and snowboard if i want", so i did! i had one first slow, steady, careful run down the slope, letting my legs remind me how every turn, every carve, every stop works, and from then on nyoooom. it takes about four minutes to get to the top of the slope and twenty seconds to get back down.
milton keynes is a fucking weird place. it's like they decided to build the business park on the edge of a town but forgot to build the town.
pizza time
i have a list of the top ten pizzas i've ever eaten. number one is John's, of Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, New York, New York. i was there (New York) for a conference in 2017 and ate at John's, this massive anchovy pizza that i also ate cold in the hotel room for breakfast.
third on the list is my own pizza i make at home.
i mean it's literally just the recipe from The Pizza Book but i've gotten pretty fuckin good at it.
the recipe canonically ferments the dough in the fridge for three days. except, i've worked out you can just not do that, you can add too much yeast and use yoghurt instead of olive oil and let it overproof a bit and it tastes just as great and is actually slightly easier to throw, even.
this means instead of having to plan pizza three days in advance, i can have it on a ninety-minute whim.
i have eaten pizza for lunch five times in the last two weeks.
spicy pork bun
on Thursday, Alice and Rowan were in the office. we went for lunch at this little Korean place around the corner; i had spicy pork bun. we ate them around a big table in a breakout area at work and chatted about tech strategy and team gossip. felt like i was at the big kids' table. love you folks.
i suppose, in terms of technical leadership at work, i am one of the big kids now. people keep looking around the room at meetings for a grown up to make a decision, and often that's me, and i have to stop also looking around the room for a grown up and be the grown up. which is a great feeling, and also has caused at least two panic attacks.
WFS(tudio)
i (finally!) finished and programmed the keyboard i had built for my studio (the H keyswitch was just straight up not soldered in), and this monday i actually did my day job from there. i had such a lovely day, the weather on monday was lovely, i went for a walk at lunchtime along the Thames Path at Greenwich Reach and the world felt open and fresh again.
i did an experiment and tried to get some packages delivered to the studio. the Amazon package arrived no problem and somebody received it and put it by my studio door. the Pimoroni package did not. i asked around, looked everywhere (including the large pile of flytipped rubbish on the street outside) but no. eventually i realised that the Iceland downstairs actually has the same address, so i went down there and asked (feeling a bit weird about it) and the manager went into the back and came out with a small cardboard box with my name on it.
in the box is a raspberry pi based automatic watering system for my peace lily.
new laptop who dis
work finally came through and gave me this. it's a thirteen inch pro with an M1. it's,,, good? the fan is running never, instead of always, and the keyboard doesnnn't ddo thiis
i should wake up; grab a brush and put a little makeup (you want to)
Storm Eunice hit two days ago and it was actually kind of scary to be told by the Meteorological Office "hazard to life from flying debris". we shut the cat in, charged our battery packs, made sure we had enough candles and butane and didn't go outside.
around the corner a row of houses' garden walls fell down and are blocking the pavement. the vent on the boiler flue is still going ham rattling as i type.
Storm Franklin is on the way, i hear.
queer climbing
i went climbing, again, this afternoon. i tried less hard, and things still hurt. climbing is pretty social: i actually talk to strangers when i climb? i got chatting to some people about this one route we were taking turns on, that i apparently made look easy (sorry! i climb only for me), and it took them about two minutes before inviting me to their queer climbers' Discord server.
we spent the next hour and a half following each other around and chatting and taking turns on bouldering routes, and if you're reading this Emma and Beth and Amika(? sorry i didn't quite catch your name, it was loud and i'm awkward) you are all cute and lovely and i can't wait to see you again
laptopn't
work said i could have a new laptop. i said "i'll be at the office on tuesday". work said "". i went to the office and they were like "you never booked a slot with us". i said "whatever, book me a slot please". they said "we don't have any 32GB ram laptops". i said "whatever, 16GB is fine". they said "would you like this 16" pro"; i was like "oh dope, i didn't know you had those, sweet. is it an M1" and they said "oh, no, lol, it's a 2019 16"". i said "please just give me whatever new macbook you have, i literally don't care" and they said "cool can you be in the office on tuesday".
it'll still be fucked up with jamf and sophos anyway. i don't know why i bother
things change
a bunch of people i love are leaving my employer and istg i'm gonna be still working there as a sixty year old lady that nobody can get rid of because she knows how all the Spicy Code works
first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.
everything hurts.
that was sunday.
i uh. i did a v4 grade? which was surprising. there's a large hole in one of my climbing shoes and i bought some replacements, except there are two types of climbing shoes:
cute ones
ones that fit
and, fuck everything
i made a synthesiser, for my dad
well okay so i made one in december for him for christmas. it was built on stripboard in an altoids tin, and looked like this:
and got it printed by a company in Shenzhen. because it turns out you can just, do that. and it's just a bit of soldering, and troubleshooting, and working out the headphone amp you added never would have worked because of something something capacitance something phase inversion. and now it looks like this, which is a real thing, that i made, i can design and make real things:
(sorry, this bit's pretty nerdy, skip on if you don't care)
i built a new eurorack case. this one's designed to be a portable live techno set in a box. it's massively inspired by the mylarmelodies Suggested System video with the same premise, except:
rhythms and modulation are handled by Pamela's New Workout and the 6eqencer. no external clocks here
mylarmelodies uses Percall for a bunch of mixing, muting and drum envelope duties. i've got a Pico Drums and my own Mallards for that
the main voice is a Knit (a 6hp Plaits clone) which has a built in decay envelope so no envelope/VCA needed
i managed to get a μBurst in there. i love Clouds derivatives
the box is actually just straight from Amazon. i happened to find one with internal dimensions that are exactly 58hp × 4u. it's pretty cramped inside; the deepest modules are but millimetres shallower than the case itself, so i had to get creative to make the power bus and all the cables fit.
just need to learn how to play it now.
i gave two surprise presentations on thursday
by "surprise" i mean "i forgot they were happening until five minutes before". still a disaster ✌️
i talked to the Engineering Enablement group about Tool Kit. EE is the part of FT Technology that makes stuff for other parts of FT Technology. my team is the bit of Customer Products that makes stuff for other bits of CP. we've been working on completely rethinking our shitty ageing unreliable developer tooling, and EE was like "owo what's this". it went pretty well!
our Tech Director, Anna, has been meeting with all the tech leads in the group to relearn how all our tech works after being on leave for a while. my team owns most of the weird old stuff in the group, so we had a fun hour chatting about what we could do about that and what the future might look like.
speaking of old weird tech
my team did another mobbing week. this time we were learning how the FT.com Fastly configuration worked. we started the week not knowing anything really about how VCL worked, and by wednesday were asking each other questions like "if this request is always doing PASS and then restart how would we ever cache that response". i love my team.
we also spent an afternoon drawing architecture diagrams. in person, on a whiteboard. god i miss whiteboards.
it's feeling kind of like spring
okay it fuckin WIMDY out there as i write this but yesterday my brain presented me with a strange new emotion that i eventually realised was "lack of seasonal depression". we're almost there, lxds.
a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that
i have a studio space
on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there's an iceland. above the iceland is this 70's pebbledash concrete box. i don't know what it used to be, it's a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.
i've put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it's really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.
it's a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.
some of the things i'm making there
i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they'll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it's so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.
from left to right, top to bottom that's:
Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you're either going "why is that useful", to which i'll say if you're live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you're going "holy shit i want one" in which case hmu
Ants: (probably) the world's smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it's tiny, it's like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
a bootleg black panel for Pamela's New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. "rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face" also describes a PCB
a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them
this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay
i have a new line manager
and it's Alice! hello Alice. you're fantastic already
i'm feeling a lot better. here's another web page that makes pretty sounds:
it's a mesh of evenly-spaced random dots (poisson-disc sampled). they're connected by very loose springs in a Delaunay triangulation. a handful of dots are picked to each play one note of a stacked A minor 11th chord.
if a dot moves, its note gets quieter. and the dots are always moving: every 0.4 seconds, a random dot gets thrown in a random direction, and that ripples across the whole mesh, causing unpredictable pings and dynamics effects in every note. you can also drag dots around.
i've promised myself i won't write a library for common things i end up building for these until i've done at least five of them, which is very much playing against type for me. guess i've got more to do
