Portal

I used to play Portal on my Commodore 64 as a child. It was a unique game. There were 12 different dataspaces that the player navigated between in order to expose the story.

You play a space traveler who has returned to an empty Earth after being away for decades. This was the perfect game for a lonely only child to play. The game was all mental, took a long time to play, and involved doing a lot of reading.

Apparently, it was set up so that eventually you would "win", no matter what, but it didn't really seem that way. You had to navigate to the right dataspaces in order to unlock new information at other dataspaces.

Anyway, I'm about to read this website for a little bit.

Vectors

I'm working on the idea of using vectors in a composition. I'll try to make another post once the ideas are a little more hashed out.

Tangents I and II

I created two graphic scores recently, entitled Tangents I and II. Each is a response to a work of visual art. The process was fairly simple. I laid a white sheet of paper over top of the artwork, and then drew tangent lines on certain curves. Only certain details made it through the white sheet of paper, and I was not able to even begin to respond to every curve, shape, and line in the artwork. But I feel I stripped these works down to a certain bare essence that was my own.

I then superimposed an X-Y coordinate system, and predictably, made X equal time and Y equal pitch. After that, I created a composition in Csound that performed the data using sine waves.

I found it a bit lacking!

After that, I thought about thickening up the synthesis aspect. I haven't tried it yet (and it doesn't help that my Csound is a bit rusty), but I am not even sure if that is the answer.

What I think could work, using the graphic score as a guideline for a composition for human musicians. Thinking about this, and music writing in general, has made me ask bigger questions that I've usually avoided.

My music compositions tend to be rigorously organized, and the results are usually fantastic. But I never take into account much beyond the actual notes. I'm so busy trying to make them fit the right way, and thinking that if they do fit, everything else will work. I still believe that. But I think that future compositions could speak even stronger to the human spirit if I was able to really think about *how* these notes are played. The how will breathe a whole new life into the music.

Confession

I've barely practiced in the last month.
In early January I did a gig with Pandelis Karayorgis, Dave Rempis, and Luther Gray. The gig was recorded, two sets.
I got my copies in the mail, listened to the first set, and was pretty disappointed in myself.
Ever since, I've been in a bit of a limbo.
Pandelis emailed me recently and asked me if I wanted to proceed on mixing with the project. I told him that I didn't like the way I sounded at all on the first disc, but that I'd listen to the 2nd disc and let him know.

I'm only four minutes in, but at least from my angle, it's a lot better. My contribution is stronger and I do feel like I can hear some sort of connection between myself and the other players.

This quartet is without bass, and Pandelis picks up the slack. But there's a sort of sparseness, a vulnerableness, that's there.

Before I put this disc in today, I did practice. And it was good practicing (I think anyway).

I've got to get back to practicing daily, because this is what I do. I should do it.

Cute and cuddly demon

One night, I was walking home and in
my mind
I saw a demon sitting on a
car.
It had black skin and eyes
like milk, wide
and quite puppy like.
I was not afraid, but still
I ran the rest.

Meditations on space - 1

From this vantage
A plane, a line, just that is my view
Reduced
due to the vantage, beyond it
I
hover in space, bereft
of any
Form, I am apart
from this vantage, I see none.