Ponderment

Warning: boring drivel ahead

As I fired up the laptop this morning, I was struck by a very real sense that all the tabs on my browser take me to places of no value at all. The various forums I read and very occasionally interact with have no information of value to me. The new gear talk is pointless and ill-informed, the speculation even worse. As for news, please nooooooo! I've refined my Twitter now to a list of discussions that either bore or annoy me, an endless loop of the same point being made, the same arguments trotted out. I plan to cut that back drastically.
This feels almost like a post-addiction phase, one in which you suddenly see your own past behavior as totally without merit. I think it's possible to have a worthwhile online life, but perhaps only if you use it to learn, to educate yourself, to be inspired - and those types of activities aren't as easy to isolate as the mindless pit of social media, clickbait, cognitive bias feed.
Got an email from an old friend who, for a change, opened up to me about her troubles. I now feel bad because I'd recently dropped her an email which essentially went on about how great my retired life is.

Spent Saturday afternoon initially painting (an alien landscape of indifferent quality) then recording an ambient track after grabbing samples from the Virus, layering them and adding some MIDI overdubs.
https://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/biosphere (I did another version later but this isn't it).
I now have a LOT of new material done on the minimal setup. I should maybe sort through, master a few of them, see which, if any, deserve to hit bandcamp.

Pestered Korg again, just to try and find out whether they had verified my bug report and passed it on to Japan. Got a one line answer telling me very little other than: It's golden week in Japan, the office is closed until next week. I have another bug too but it's starting to feel that they're falling on stony ground, at least if they originate with me. So much for making an instrument to be the best possible.

Today (Monday) was a very lazy day for me. I didn't go to the gym, I didn't power up the studio, I mostly read, had a pleasant walk, pottered in the garden. This type of thing could be the gist of all future blog entries, at least in this phase, so if I still have any readers today, goodbye then - have fun! I may have said this before but there's no purpose to this blog, I don't reference it myself, I simply do occasional brain dumps as typing practice when time allows, which is becoming all the time.

Tuesday I did go to the gym and I did power up the studio. See, it's no more interesting that way. Probably the day's highlight was at 5am when the blackbird woke me up so I could remove a prowling cat. The blackbirds in our garden seem to have me sussed and anyway, there are chicks hopping about and what seems to be an injured older female also struggling to fly. I think we'll go out to tea, just to give the day a bit of zing.
Made some nice drones on the Virus and Minilogue xd. I should probably shop for some Minilogue user FX to see if there are some harmonizers and spooky delays, perhaps a high pass filter would be good too. Just a pain getting them in with the crappy app - hence I haven't updated my 'pluck' oscillator yet. May try older laptop with larger screen, lower resolution and maybe more reliable drag and drop.

An excellent and completely typical Friday. Started with an Odyssey drone and ended up with 12 min live piece (my mix cocked a bit cos I need 'passthru' mode for sliders to avoid big jumps when you select the 3 sets of 8 tracks). Most splendid. Not sure it needed to break into a groove at the end though, that possibly something for ANT. It was only 30BPM and most tracks at at least half speed to give it that properly ponderous quality.

I'd post it but it's a bit long for Soundcloud.
Oh what the heck, I'll delete some stuff. The string part in this needs trimming back, cheese starts to get a bit pong and I need to look for a 'passthru' mode.

https://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/forest-lube