I'm sitting here uploading audio from a minidisc to Bandcamp. You have to do that in real time. (What have I done to myself that I'm doing that?) So I've got nothing to do but write some weeknotes. Which, includes a few other weeks since we've been on holiday.
Things that have happened.
We went to Ireland and, coincidentally, saw a Pope.
We also saw lovely beaches, a model village and some nice art. We ate a lot of seafood.
We came across a classic Things That Have Happened:
People bought some of my music. One of them is someone I don't know! It does feel very much like people are being subjected to my rehearsals, but I guess that's the thing with improvising, it's never finished. I also think I'm getting a little better. Finding different, more stimulating sources and getting more fluent at making them interesting more quickly.
My latest experiment is with typing words into YouTube and making tracks out of the video that plays. This, for instance, is Deep State. It works quite well. There's a few moments in the middle where the bass disappears for no good reason, but most of it is almost like music.
This could be an interesting way to do this live. Ask people for keywords and produce music out of the resulting videos. Or maybe ones YouTube search history (and the resultant recommended videos) could be a musical/acoustic resource like Philip Jeck's dusty old records or Kate Carr's field recordings. I'm also starting to wonder if somehow some visuals could be created in the same way, at the same time.
Speaking of music, I went to Cafe Oto last night to see Sarah Angliss et al performing (as?) Air Loom. It was excellent. She balances digital and analogue sounds, techniques and attitudes in a magical way.
I was supposed to be going to Sheffield yesterday for the Livecoding Festival but the logistics proved impossible and, well, frankly, I'm a bit too shy, so instead I spent the rest of the day making a new batch of 41256s. It's labour intensive but fun. And it's good for me, it makes me listen outside my usual range of stuff.
I've done one a week for two thirds of the year now, so it seems likely I'll get to the end of 2018. Who knows whether I'll then keep going or stop? It seems there's no good reason to do either.
I have no sense that anyone's listening to it, but, equally, if it suddenly got popular it would have to end, because, like Speechification, it's built out of other people's stuff. Anyway. You can listen on Soundcloud.