A few assorted thoughts from this week! That's all we can ask for.
I was planning to do some 3D modeling this past weekend as mentioned in last week's week in review but that simply didn't happen. We saw Sirāt on Saturday afternoon which was very good but also bummed me the hell out for the next couple days! I still want to work on that project, I just haven't yet.
Some of my friends were playing PEAK the other day and I got FOMO so I ordered a gaming PC lol. I'd been thinking about getting a Steam Deck for a long time, but I really don't have any interest in the handheld part of it, and a refurbished desktop Windows computer with similar specs was cheaper, so I just bought one. I never want to think about graphics cards or RAM or whatever (I have been a Mac user for almost 20 years) but I like the idea that I could theoretically upgrade this in the future as well. I don't really have any interest in any cutting-edge games but I'm excited to finally make time for like A Short Hike and Return of the Obra Dinn and uhhh Half-Life.
I also bought a "string trimmer," more commonly known as a weed whacker [By Whom?]. We hired some landscapers to xeriscape our front and back yards a few years ago but the weeds still come in and they've frankly been out of control! I finally realized that a basic corded-electric weed whacker was $30 at Harbor Freight. My arms are really tired.
I've seen the guitarist Dave Harrington perform with a few different combos over the last couple years, mostly at Club Tee Gee and mostly with bassist Billy Mohler and drummer Jay Bellerose. They have one official release together which you can listen to if you want and I frankly think you should. They call their music "jazz" and who am I to say it's not but it was not at all what I expected the first time I heard it. They improvise every time and there's not a ton of song structure as a result, it's more about call and response and trying things and expanding things and…yeah that's jazz, baby. Anyway, this trio was booked to play on Monday night but Dave was sick, so saxophonist Ben Spokes sat in, and it was a revelation. Dave is great and I love the stuff his does with his millions of effects pedals, but hearing just a plain saxophone making every kind of sound it can make was such a joy. I had previously assumed that a sax-bass-drums trio just wasn't enough for a satisfyingly full sound, particularly after hearing this exact combination played by different people a few weeks earlier and feeling like it didn't really hit. I'm sure there are already lots and lots of examples out there that squarely proved me wrong, but it was so so cool to hear one live and up close.
Focusing in on the way the bass parts worked in the aforementioned performance gave me a new idea for performing electronic music, or at least an idea that I haven't tried before: Writing a couple short looping sequences and swapping between them or layering them on the fly, so I can add fills or variations without having to actually play them live, but I still get to make those in-the-moment choices. It's something I can probably do continuously with one hand over the course of a tune without too much physical or mental dexterity, leaving my other hand to play a melody. This technique would surely work for percussion too. I've also been thinking about all the varieties of timbres one can get out of a wind instrument and am again/continuously/always thinking about how one can approximate that expression with electronic music. MIDI breath controllers exist, but one answer might be using my voice as a modulation source, sort of like a vocoder but even more abstract. Maybe.
Eleventy is now Build Awesome and is teasing some kind of forthcoming live editing and publishing platform. I've written about how my platform compares to Eleventy, and one of the big differences I tout is that I offer a nice in-browser editing experience. Their approach seems totally different and I'll be watching it very closely.
I thought this one was going to be short, oops. See you next time!