exploring a little closer to home (math rock bands on crooked floors)

well, i've either got a mosquito bite on my forehead or i'm developing a third eye. want to take bets on that?

i didn't get any cleaning done the other day; i got stuck in an algorithm on youtube, which ended up crashing the browser. 2500 open tabs. in hindsight, i suppose it's not possible to watch all of youtube. i hope to get that done with the rest of today, and get back at it tomorrow. i'm feeling rejuvenated and eager to move forwards.

i hit a house show last night with two mildly interesting acts, both of which demonstrated some potential, but neither of which held up as well as they could have. reviews in the comments.

in two years here, it was actually the first time i've taken a walk away from downtown after dark. i knew i was going to be walking through the wealthy part of the downtown core, but it took on a different feeling in the moonlight due to how clear it is that i was walking through a neighbourhood built by very old money. the churches, the collegiates, the mansions - these are all still standing, and all still in use. i suppose that it's only different from what i'm used to in ottawa in terms of how explicit it is; it may have been similar to walking through the glebe thirty or forty years ago, but i'm not old enough to remember what that may have been like.

the key thing you notice when you cross the street into the old money is how dark the neighbourhood is. the houses are old, but taken care of - likely professionally. they're dark because they're empty. one imagines widowers living off investments made by ancestors they've never met; sum totals of labour that exist of shuffling portfolios. these ten or fifteen room houses were built for families, and were no doubt once inhabited, but today they are merely equity passed down through generations. you'll see a jogger here and there; a dog walker, a couple. but, these are not castles, not sanctuaries to escape from the blood-thirsty masses. rather, they're empty relics of the past.

and, one exits this space as quickly as one enters it: a highway appears, and once one crosses it they are back to the normalcy of post-industrial decay. buildings that, though a quarter the age, are falling apart due to low maintenance. the whiff of marijuana replaces the soft background scent of professional gardens. but, i am crossing to the right side of the road, not the wrong side of it.

the show was outside, in a large lot (perhaps originally two) that's been split into three: a small house faces the street, with an equally sized secondary bungalow right behind it, that must be accessed via a path along the first one. you could spit from the back deck of the first to the front porch of the other. it seems almost as though the back house was moved in from somewhere else. an empty lot of the same size exists next door, apparently reclaimed by these inhabitants for events, although if the city were to appear out of the bushes with an ordinance, they would no doubt be told to exit the empty and adjacent lot. mosquitoes are endemic; in addition to the bite on my forehead, i've got a dozen on my unshielded arms. should have worn a long sleeve t-shirt...

sly why was up first (after a short set by some kind of radio show). i've seen sly why before, but with a band; i initially thought this was a dj set. rather, it was the front person for the band doing a solo set that integrated live keyboard playing & rhyming over some drum & bass machine work. the sum total was likely meant to exist in a flying lotus type space, but with a heavier emphasis on hip-hop and quite a bit more of a chick corea feel. in principle, this is an excellent idea. unfortunately, the execution was a little off.

the chick corea sound (i'm talking more about miles davis than return to forever) is two things: it's an aesthetic and it's a playing style. related things, but they're different. the aesthetic was pulled off very well, but a musician listening in would be unimpressed by the actual playing. he seemed to want to go into long interludes of piano work; these were effective when they were focused, but often sounded aimless and improvised. it's one thing to try and get the corea aesthetic; it's another to think you seriously actually have the talent to try and pull off that kind of improv. i think he needs to kind of make a choice on that: be more focused and drop the solos, or work on his improv skills.

he's definitely not chick corea.

as i believe i said last time, it's a good proof of concept with a lot of potential but it needs some work to actually come together.

this is similar:

 
this was the first time i've seen noxious foxes, but i remember their early records as being more dynamic than what i got last night. more live playing, intersecting harmonies, leads - less loops. my memory may be skewed; i may go back and listen to their first two records and realize they're more loop-based than i thought. but, it ended up with a pretty strong ian williams feel that really needs to be broken up a bit.

it was fun. i'd pay the $5 a second time. but, they need to be thinking about ways to get out of the box created by writing solely around loop pedals.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2015/09/28.html

rap news 35

who created the internet, and why?

the narrative is about stopping certain forces from taking control, as though the internet came to us free of corruption and we need to prevent it from falling into the hands of darkness.

maybe it ought to be about taking control of a system that was handed to us with a precise function that it took some time for us to become aware of.

well, i didn't get much listening done this week, but my mind was elsewhere, so that's ok; i got plenty of thinking done, and feel nicely rebooted. that's the real purpose, that reboot.

the weather was unseasonably nice here this week, and that helped.

i'm going to push my monthly cleaning forward a little this month and do it tomorrow. i plan to hit a math rock band called noxious foxes on monday. i'll also need to make some calls on thursday. but, i'm transferring into a new normal this week and should be back and focused at some point during it.

you can imagine that all this bullshit with the gear has been a force towards apathy. it's just a process of seriously convincing myself it's good now and plowing on with it.

and, i'm thinking about my issues with eye contact. it was what i initially wanted to talk to a psychiatrist about, before i got diagnosed with...well, i guess they got me to social anxiety disorder in the end, which is more along the right lines. but, i never expected it to be declared a disability and to entitle me to a monthly check; i was thinking it was something i could get some therapy regarding.

part of the argument i used to get my extension, which i haven't posted anywhere yet, was a cost-benefit analysis of treatment v. acceptance. it was a catch-22 themed essay that argued that i might seem perfectly ok right now, but if you take me off the odsp then i won't seem ok anymore. i concluded that i ought to be grounded. but, i acknowledged that a significant investment with morally questionable techniques could resolve the issue - even if you had to chain me down and lock me up to administer it.

what i'm wondering right now is whether that's really true.

i avoid almost all eye contact. it's really only when i want somebody to do something for me that i can muster up the courage to look somebody in the eye; it's that aggressive of a gesture, for me. it's clearly not such an aggressive gesture for others.

is that learned, or instinctual?

the earliest memories i have with eye contact are feelings of almost panic due to a desire to avoid confrontation. so, i don't have memories of any theoretical causes, but only memories of effects. the thing is that it goes back very far, to that murky early grade school period; it could be because i changed schools in grade 3, or because i had a concussion shortly afterwards, but i would be almost hopeless in differentiating between events that happened between when i was four and when i was 7. it's quite young, though.

i remember that when people looked at me in the eye, i would become fearful that an argument or fight was about to start. it was just an act of pure aggression. so, i found myself avoiding eye contact both to counter the aggression of others and to prevent others from thinking i was behaving aggressively.

it sounds like i'm talking about an antelope. and, maybe i am in the sense that i have some native american genes. i'm exhibiting behaviour regarding eye contact that is normal in some indigenous cultures, but i haven't been conditioned into any of those cultures. perhaps therapy may be less effective then i'd like to think.

i've liked to think i'm not irreversibly broken; that i could be fixed, but that the investment would be at a loss. and maybe what i'm pointing to only necessitates therapy, rather than negates it's use. but maybe i'm uncovering somewhat of an unrealized truth, whatever it's scale.

i'm starting to become more cognizant of this strange tick in my neck. now, what i'm going to say may seem unscientific, and would probably be rejected by most doctors, but if you ask them to provide a better explanation, you'll be disappointed in their responses. i'm grasping the situation through experiencing it; i'm carrying out the experiment. and, while i may not be the person best positioned to measure my own behaviour, my notes should be analyzed for a mechanism rather than discarded as "impossible".

i seem to have developed too much control over my autonomous nervous system. seems ridiculous, i know. but, can you point me to studies that prove it impossible to gain control over the autonomous nervous system? because i bet i could find some studies that blur the lines pretty substantially.

i seem to have developed a fear of swallowing. that's at the crux of it. due to throat inflammation for various reasons, but one obvious, i may have nearly choked once or twice. i suppose we all cough something up once in a while, and it's a lesson to be more careful when you're eating. but, we mostly tend to shrug it off after a day or two, right? instead, i seem to have internalized it to the point that i'm not able to open my throat to let liquids in. i find myself fighting a battle against my own throat.

that might seem to indicate a loss of control, but not if it's thought about more carefully. if everything was firing correctly, i'd expect my throat would open when i pick up a glass of water. instead, it shuts and i have to consciously struggle with myself to open it. if i were in full conscious control, i would not have to struggle; if it were truly autonomous, it would not close at all. that indicates that it's my subconscious that must be interfering and shutting it out of a repressed fear of choking, which indicates too much control - but not consciously.

i understand i'm not likely to convince anybody with a doctorate in anything of this. but, i believe it's what's actually happening. in theory, the solution should be in the realm of mental health. but, even if i could convince somebody to take me seriously, i'm skeptical that they'd have any good ideas. it's maybe the kind of thing something like yoga might fix, without as of yet understanding the mechanism.

i don't think i actually need to go to a yoga studio. but, the answer may be spending a little bit of time sitting and breathing. i've spent most of my time recently fighting with a computer, and most of my time before that mixing and mastering. maybe i need to spend a little time with the guitar.

i'm not as dismissive of hypnotism as you might suspect i am, i just wish we could get a better handle of the mechanism.

i mean, you have to wonder if that's what demons are - repressed fears - and if that's what an exorcism really is - hypnosis to escape a repressed memory, fear or other such thing. we can do without the spells and religious mumbo jumbo, no doubt. but, it might be getting at stimulating a condition that allows for erasure.

my understanding is that there are actually experimental techniques underway that can erase undesirable memories using electronic equipment. that could be demon removal, on demand.

perhaps certain systems of eastern mysticism may have thrived for the reason that they minimize the onsets of these sorts of stresses.

and, if that's true, the mechanism would be in stimulating the hormonal condition that allows for stress release (jumbled language, it's still sort of magic at this point).

which, i believe - through direct personal experience and the observations of others regarding how i appear when i play the instrument - i can stimulate by expression on the guitar.

when you live in a basement, outside lawn mowers can make some rather gorgeous ambient music.

now that i've got my drivers clean, i'm back to the issue with the eqs.

to recall: there seems to be a programming error in cubase (a truncation error, it seems) that corrupts mixer settings on the first save. it's something i'm going to have to fine tooth everything over. i wasn't previously able to tell the difference on a/bs, but i can now. so, i may have to re-upload some of those files one last time.

my fears were unfounded - the machine booted up to a perfectly clean sound. i am finally confident that the machine is fixed.

all i've done since the last reboot is reinstall the operating system firewire drivers. i didn't even swap them, i just disabled them and rebooted, which forced me to also reinstall the mixer drivers. that seems to be the only thing i needed to do (besides locking the drivers).

it might seem like something i should have never overlooked; that it should have been one of the first trouble-shooting steps. but, i've got all my driver installs sequenced in an install script, so when i reinstall the machine i'm dealing with fresh, updated driver installs for every device in the machine. it's reasonable that it never crossed my mind to reinstall drivers for a system device immediately on a clean boot.

but, there's some evidence that it may actually be the registry wipe i run post-install.

before i run the script, i can uninstall the firewire drivers through device manager. after i run the script, it tells me i can't uninstall them because they're locked by a parent driver required for start-up. that sounds wrong - as though i've crossed something during the registry wipe. what i have to do, instead, is disable them first and then uninstall them.

what i've got back now is the "sound stage" - i can hear the reverb in proper stereo and all the effects have their decay back. it's the reversal of that compressed sound that i was associating with bad conversion. so, i have to conclude that the firewire port was somehow truncating the stream. when i put it into the context of the files always nulling when output to disc, it does, in hindsight, make sense to tie the issue entirely to the firewire streaming, as the issue was purely playback related.

that was a long, difficult process for what in the end was a triviality. but, i really think it's figured out now, and i should be able to get some listening in this week and back to mixing next week.

well, i got my forms mailed today. that's to cancel my student loan.

i can't be certain what the bureaucracy will do, but my understanding is that they basically can't overrule the doctor.

so, i'm celebrating this week. which means listening, but carefully - i know i can't mix when i'm celebrating.

and, it means making some different lifestyle choices starting next week.

i suppose i should be happy that i'm healthy enough that my lungs are still able to go into overdrive whenever i quit smoking. i've been through this often enough to know that this is the last phase before normalcy: the white blood cells start coming out in a quantity that sometimes makes me feel like i'm choking. i can literally stand over the sink and watch a connected gob of slimy goop fall out of my throat for upwards of a minute at a time. it only lasts a day or two. rather than clear my lungs slowly, my body seems to want to go into hyperdrive and flush it all out as soon as it can...

i'm actually scarily healthy. i tell people i won't live to 50. the reality is that if i can cut the smoking out now, otherwise keep my lifestyle (healthy eating, but more importantly no car) similar and get a little luck on inheriting dna from my mom's side, i'll probably make it to 90.

and i can't help but feel that this exaggerated response i always get when i quit is a function of being as healthy as i am.

i made a point of not getting anything done today, because i was expecting to pass out. i've actually been awake for a normal 17 hour day at this point and i'm feeling very alert. but, i'm still not doing anything...

tomorrow, i think, will be time to start again.

i determined yesterday, briefly, that the primary problem was, in fact, the firewire driver. i'm expecting it to boot up to a clean signal. perhaps another reason i didn't do anything today is fear that it won't.

not quite.

...what day is it?

i think i'm out of the haze and ready to finish troubleshooting.

so, after caving into various self-rationalizations over the first half of september, i've been de-nicing the last few days and have every intention to stick with it this time. i've said that for a long time. but, i've got my income stable for the next five years, i'm no longer in a hurry to do much of anything and i'm very much intent on getting over this. i had a little heatstroke when i got back on tuesday night and have been sleeping that off as well, but i think i'm alert enough now to at least try and get the machine back up.

i turned it off tuesday morning right before the script runs. i'm going to want to make sure i can get the firewire drivers correctly working before i run the script.

i didn't get my forms on tuesday. it turns out that the psychiatrist has to fill them out, and i'll have to wait until monday. nor does it seem as though the nurse practitioner is going to carry through with my prescriptions. he claims he'll work as a go between if i can find an endocrinologist, but he won't work with the guy from london because he claims he's unprofessional, which i think is a cop out - i think it's a religious thing, again. he said he put out a referral, but i'm kind of sketchy on it. i'm not convinced it's even a real person. but we'll find out. if i don't have an answer by monday, i'm going to have to get in contact with the guy in london.

i can't think of any reason why i should need to actually go to london and physically speak with him. i'm just asking for a refill of something i've been on for years and will be on for the rest of my life. it should be a five minute conversation, and it's not really necessary. and, if he insists on a blood test or something, i don't see any reason why i can't just get the blood test here and have the results sent to him.

the ideal remains trying to get the guy in windsor to see me because then i can indulge whatever silliness he wants at essentially no cost to me.

i'll find out these things in a few days.

and i think i should have the machine up in a few hours, even if i need to spend a few more days sleeping to finish the detox.

yeah, i think it's partly related to the operating system's firewire driver, strangely enough. at the least, this seems to be *one*of the things - and it's pretty pronounced. it seems to be reversing the compressed sound that i was associating with kmixer sample rate conversion and giving it back it's fullness. but, it's still fading...

i ended up breaking the audio in the machine pretty badly before i got there (i wanted to completely isolate the asio, so i did crazy things like delete the windows audio service, purge the registry of all mentions to all drivers, delete the system audio files, etc), so i'm going to have to reinstall again. like, i can't get it to pick up the directsound out on the m-audio card - which is what i wanted to isolate the asio, but now i need it back. so, i just don't really have a clean system to test with. the fading had stopped before i busted it, so i want to get back to where i was, do the firewire reinstall and see what happens.

it's been the same thing almost every day for weeks now. months, even.

i find some fix. it seems like it worked. i go to sleep. i wake up and it's back to where it was.

i dunno. am i playing tricks on myself? the truth is everything is nulling, so i'm not looking for changes in the actual waveform, i'm looking for changes in playback. is it possible that i'm getting used to the sound every night, only to have to start again the next day? are my headphones or my amp warming up overnight, then cooling down?

this morning's apparent fix was deleting the operating system's firewire drivers and replacing them with drivers from a firewire card i have in the other machine. it sort of makes sense relative to the weird tone issues, insofar as it seems bandwidth related. i'm taking guesses. i've been taking guesses for a while.

and, like so many of these steps, it seems vaguely familiar.

we'll see tomorrow if it's the same thing yet again, or if it's actually a meaningful fix, this time.

is it even the coffee?

there's a little box called "direct monitoring" in the cubase vst panel. unclicking this seems to have FINALLY broken through the sample rate issue and given me the sound i remember. that means i'm going to have to go back over this one more time. but it seems to be the answer i've been trying to figure out.

i'm not entirely clear on what this does. it appears to be related to whether i can hear files coming in from the mixer or not. if i was running an input driver all the time, i may have screwed up the output driver. i dunno, that's a guess.

but, i'm feeling good about this. now, though, is sleep...

if i go back to this feeling i was having that i was being eavesdropped on, it kind of adds up. it's probably obvious that i have unusually sensitive ears. the direct monitoring takes the input from the mixer and sends it to the output. just the bandwidth could have been bothering me.

there's been nothing attached to the input the whole time, of course - i've been mixing old four track parts. so, if that's what it was, it's, like, a virtual ground loop on the signal.

false update on just say no to mood altering prescription drugs

this has been updated.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/just-say-no-to-mood-altering-prescription-drugs
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/nope

on second thought, i slept a little later than i planned and i'm not going to be able to hit the show unless i decide not to eat, which i'm not keen on. and, i'm not really up for sitting in that ice cream shop overnight; it's going to be relatively cold. cold snap had to hit tonight, huh? i was a big sonic youth fan years ago, and i'd certainly go if it was across the street but i'm really more focused on what i'm doing...

so, i'm staying in tonight.

i think the mix for nine is done; i was actually fighting with the drivers again last night, as it's fading again. i made the error of accidentally uninstalling the underlying windows drivers, and it seems to have screwed up the asio. i'm going to try to avoid reinstalling, but i may have to. now that i've got asio connected directly to foobar, i have tested it with the windows driver completely uninstalled and it does seem to be stable - lthough i'd like to be able to bring these back in. for now, it seems like i can get the drivers to stay put for a while before i have to reinstall them....it's workable, but i'm still tinkering because i'm still not clear exactly what is causing it to randomly resample...

i think 09 should be up pretty soon.

that was trivial to fix, actually. and i even remember...

at some point, i brought in the original 1998 mix to do a compare, which meant i had to take the effect off the master (otherwise it would run through the effect) and set the rest of the tracks up to their own fader. i seem to have never put the effect back. i must have accidentally saved this, then forgot about it. those vague memories, right?

putting the effect back on the master got me back where i want to be. i will need to replace this file.

track 09 is just sounding funny one way or the other; i remember it having a nice compressed punch, and instead it's sounding very digital. i dunno.

but, i hope to get a bit done tonight.

i'm going to hit thurston moore tomorrow night, and use it as sort of a head clearing. i got almost nothing done this summer, which is disappointing. and, i have what is hopefully my last appointment for a while on tuesday. so, hopefully, i can get this past me and start refocusing on wednesday.

expect sporadic uploads over the next few days; hopefully, i can be almost done cleaning this up by wednesday.

i just got an email...

i want to be clear.

i will never, ever, ever press anything on vinyl. you could say i'm boycotting the technology.

there's two reasons:

1) it's terrible, obsolete, shitty sounding technology that should be rounded up and bunker bombed.
2) i record everything using digital technology. even if you want to pull some wrong argument out of your ass about "tape saturation" or something, transferring material that is recorded over digital technology at a relatively low bit rate on to vinyl can never have any possible result but sound degradation.

i will not degrade the sound quality. i will not sell you garbage. i will not press vinyl.

if you want a crappy sounding but nice looking commodity, you'll have to look elsewhere.

vinyl sounds like shit.

it's never happening.

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i suppose, in hindsight, that this is the beginning of the radiohead that most people know, isn't it? at the time, it was just dark. i've never been able to find a mix that sounds like i remember first hearing it, with a really pounding bottom end. it might have been a bad realaudio encoding that muddied up the bottom. you don't want to know what realaudio is, if you don't know. but, it came out as the weirdest funk i'd ever heard - because it was both dirty and reflecting; it was like shaking your booty on the floor and hiding and crying in the corner at the same time. but, all in your head. of course.

(relevant tracks: thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i just remember dark rides on the bus; stuff passing by outside the windows, humans i couldn't care less about all around me and wishing they'd just go away (although i should have been trying to communicate with them), self-consumed introverted thoughts that i have no recollection of...

it's the harmonies. through a good pair of headphones, and sufficiently disconnected from the things around you, it's a lift-off. a little cliched, if you demand to over-analyze it. but it's incredibly effective.

(relevant tracks: thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down.)

not updating i still don’t fully understand this

so, i've convinced myself that the version of this that is already uploaded is superior to anything i could reset with the eqs, and that i probably initially outed it post-save in the first place.

i know i re-opened it and re-rendered on the 12th of july, but i think i even vaguely recall that the file nulled, but i replaced it anyways thinking the initial was corrupted in metadata or something. this was when i didn't yet realize the cards were misbehaving...

this needs to be blared at almost dangerous levels to get the effect of it. that's generally true - it's all headphone music. but, it's especially true with this. the layers of distortion need to cascade at high volume; at low volumes, it's going to sound compressed.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this

switching to skaters in the alter-reality

alter-reality update tonight at midnight.

i'm certain that my computer is working again. i've worked my way back to where i was when i left off, and am playing with options on the 8th track for inriclaimed. it's passing an a/b with a full reset of the eq settings, but not passing an a/b with more subtle changes. and, i'm feeling the bass is not defined enough on either, so i'm essentially remixing it. i should have some uploads before the next sleep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9L98As4DjE

aha!

if you go to device manager, right click on the driver, select properties, and then select the properties tab there is an option to disable the mixer for each device. this appears to have stopped all windows fuckery and given me a clean stream through directsound. it has the strange effect of no longer launching sndvol32, and claiming i have no audio devices installed when i launch mmsys.cpl. but, that's a minor annoyance if it's giving me a clean stream. and, it's actually also uninstalled the wdm device from the device manager altogether.

i've got it set up to play through asio now, and i don't see any value in disabling it. but, it's useful to have the reference of checking to see what it sounds like through a clean directsound out.

i vaguely recall doing this, and vaguely recalling undoing it to access the midi out on the soundblaster. it's the only thing i've done so far that seems to actually turn off the windows interference.

the closer it gets, the further it remains...

but, i've found a workaround. the problem is now solved. i will be cleaning up this morning and back at it tomorrow, after groceries.

i've been operating under the assumption that there's a solution. the truth is that i can't state with any certainty that all of it ever sounded right through foobar at the same time. i was always mixing through cubase. there were always subtle differences. when i get one track to sound better through the kmixer, another sounds worse.

it kind of struck me this morning that even if i can get an ideal answer, it's not worth any more time - because this is just a playback issue. playback is very important, of course, for sequencing - and for what i'm doing right now. but, i've kind of spun myself around in a hole - i'm fixing the playback to get on to the task at hand, but it's only the task at hand because it was broken in the first place.

so, what i've done instead is upgrade foobar so that i can use the asio plugin. playback is now over asio, completely bypassing the kmixer and any resampling it was doing.

again: it's not that the results were terrible across the board. i kept saying it felt like i was close, but it was just not quite right. some of the tracks were sounding absolutely perfectly - others were sounding flat. fixing the buffer size, or unlocking the sampling rate on the device, or 100 other things would fix one song and break another. and, so i just can't be certain there is an across the board answer. and am really leaning to the idea that there isn't. that is, if i want the tracks to sound as they were mixed, i may have to switch buffer sizes mid-record, or some other crazy thing. i may be partly at fault for not standardizing things, but as i mentioned in the last post, it shouldn't be happening anyways; i think i'm trying to create something that never existed, and am exposing the flows in the windows sound architecture in the process.

moving to asio just throws the whole problem out the window. i get everything i want. it's technically superior, even. and, i can move on.

i can state for certain that i did move buffer sizes around from song to song on playback through foobar, because i had to to get the sound right. given that truth, i probably shouldn't have expected a stable set-up in the first place. that is, the culmination of the last year of work has created a playback mess over that system.

but it's done now...

i'm almost certain it's good to go. the last thing had to do with setting the buffer sizes, and this isn't supposed to make any difference on playback, but it definitely does. i can't really explain it, but it seems to be the last piece.

when you hear the term "streaming audio", it gives the impression of audio flowing from start to finish with no interference. that's what the language is meant to invoke. but, it's a digital process, so of course it's not true. rather, there's a continual process of small amounts of data moving into buffers, and the buffers moving forward like a conveyor belt. the buffer size is how big those chunks of data are, measured in samples or seconds or bytes. this is user configurable for largely historical reasons.

the conventional wisdom is that this shouldn't matter because it's just a determination of how big the copy operation is. it's broadly seen as a largely legacy issue, mostly to do with processor speed. older processors had to take larger buffers because they couldn't work as fast. what that would create is choppy playback, rather than differences in tone, because it was struggling to process fast enough to put the stream together in real time. but, modern processors don't have that problem, so it's supposed to be that it doesn't really matter.

but, that's not happening. i'm noticing that i need to get the buffer size to a certain minimum point in order to maintain tonal integrity, which is sort of weird. sometimes it's the bass that sounds a little thin, other times it's the higher parts - but mostly sustained parts. it's almost more like it's a reverb issue. and, this is known in some sense. if you put a reverb plugin on an out, then the reverb calculation will be different if it takes the stream in in small chunks than it will be if it takes it in in large chunks - because it's reverberating over different lengths. but, that only makes sense on playback if windows is interfering somewhere along the way.

in fact, i have noticed this previously, so reducing the issue back to an issue i've dealt with on a functioning system indicates i'm back in functional territory.

i need to eat. but, i think i'm very close.

this is also from before, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here:

this isn't just bowie's best record, it's one of the decade's best records. that little comeback stint in the 90s was his most interesting period, musically. but, will we ever hear it in it's initial and intended form?

(relevant file: schizoid, confused, on sexual confusion in adolescence)

obligatory influential post.
 

the last thing i need to point to for this feature is socal punk. my entry point was ultimately nirvana, but the real entry point was the offspring. i probably wouldn't agree much with gurewitz if we were to order his catalog; the offspring and bad religion are really the only two pop punk bands i'd bother with, because they have that higher level of harmonic complexity. and, coming out of the grunge collapse, it was increasingly socal punk that i turned to for my rock kicks. as a guitarist, the guitar style in those offspring and bad religion records up to about 97 had a big effect on me that you can hear for years afterwards in the fast, dissonant chord work - and often in more subtle ways, as well. and, if you've been reading my rambling, this should not surprise you, either.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, to spin inside dull aberrations, anything with a guitar, really)

this is a post from about a year ago, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here again:

this more or less replaced fixed as my go-to nin record for busing and had a big influence on me in terms of rhythms slowly developing over time. it's something that mostly comes out in the remixes, this sort of evolving, mutating thing...it's very much process music....

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, symphonies 4 & 5, teenage jesus (suicide), others)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i often describe what i was doing in this period as synth pop, and tend to point to a lot of industrial influences, but there's also a large gaze component coming from bands like curve, garbage, mbv, the cure and (ultimately) the smashing pumpkins. it's just that it's a lot more subtle and kind of buried in the production. it's the flange on the guitar, the gate on the snare. for this particular feature track, though, you can really hear it - i'm just pulling this curve track out of a hat, though. this is a strong disc, but a lot of this music is very stylistically similar and i could point to virtually any of it as influential in the context i'm constructing it in.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, virtually anything after 1998)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

it's sampled. in a sarcastic song about necrophilia. hey spidey, what are you doing out all night by yourself, anyways?

(relevant track: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

the prodigy kind of hit be my surprise in 1997. i don't know if the kids realize it, but 1997 was the year that techno really broke. there was that huge daft punk record. the chemical brothers. and, the fat of the land.

i was veering in this direction, but i was following more of an underground path, through offshoots of 80s industrial, which i'd been set on by a mild obsession with a couple of nine inch nails remix discs released before 1996, and a beginning exploration of the warp records catalog. research was largely done over the internet, and through conversations with people 5-10 years older than i was. i was aware of the raver kids around me, but i didn't really understand what they were. my intuition was that a rave was really just another kind of high school dance, and my punk instincts put me squarely against it as a consequence of it. looking back, i regret keeping an arm's distance from it - in hindsight, i understand that this was a very wrong perspective and that the truth is that if i was looking for punks in the mid to late 90s then the place i'd be most likely to find them at was actually a rave. i never really came face-to-face with the prodigy until they were roaring at me over muchmusic.

this isn't a record i've come back to much over the years. the fact that i was exploring much more abstract types of electronic music should say a little bit about where my head was always really at in relation to the genre, and what i'm really looking for; even jilted doesn't really hold up well, despite it's importance. but, the fact that something comparable to what i was searching out over usenet was coming at me from mainstream media was exciting to me for a little while, and it coerced me into biting into this disc pretty hard, for a little while. you can hear little bits of it all over the discography.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, evil is a human construction, subtle nods elsewhere)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i came at the aphex twin from a different angle. i do wonder if he's ever bothered to listen to a nine inch nails record, all these years later. but, reznor was a hell of a gateway to a fifteen year old in the mid 90s, and the aphex twin wasn't the first thing i delved into - it actually came at me via a roundabout way, through the skinny puppy side project called download, which is what really branched me out into the warp sound. i was initially more attracted to the more chaotic reaches of industrial music - i was a punk. and, as a "rock fan", i largely self-segregated myself from music in the electronic sphere. so, it took several years of easing into it before i could handle listening to "techno music". these mental shackles did of course eventually lift themselves, and i am certainly better off for it.

anybody coming from a multidisciplinary background and claiming rdj as an influence is going to be expected to point mostly to the breakbeats, and there's a few in there, but he was actually just as much of a compositional influence for me, as i moved on. i think we share a big influence from coil in that respect - although he's got about ten years on me. but, the orchestrated soft synths coming from rdj are what really defines him differently, and something i've made various attempts to emulate.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, clarity, the time machine, untitled; pretty much everything from 1998 on)

i've pointed out here a few times that my soundcards have been behaving poorly, and that i've isolated it, only to realize i hadn't.

i'm not sure what happened near the end of june, but it seems to have undone things in a way that i wasn't fully aware of. i'm running a very stripped down version of xp on my recording pc that cuts a large amount of the operating system out. in the process of trying to fix the problem, i seem to have put in place problems related to the windows xp sound mixer, which is known to be not very good for audio processing due to the way that it interferes with audio streaming. i think my initial script had broken the kmixer, and i had reinstalled it in an attempt to fix the problem, which created a whole other slew of problems.

i think i've fixed it in a two step process:

1) lock all sample rate conversion in the drivers.
2) delete the streaming drivers (mskssrv, mspclock, mspqm), which seem to be involved in conversion.

my initial script had deleted the streaming drivers, but not locked the sample rate. the result was that if i deleted the streaming drivers, i'd end up with fading because something was moving back and forth in the drivers. but, if i left the drivers in place, i'd get bad results from the windows conversion process.

locking the audio drivers without deleting the streaming drivers resulted in the files playing at the wrong speed, which seems to have been a consequence of an incomplete conversion process. but deleting the streaming drivers with the audio drivers locked in place seems to have resolved the issue.

i'm still testing, but i think i've got it figured out.

in the meantime, the alter-reality has caught up with me, and is now entering the synth-pop phase of my musical career (which was all of 1998 and early 1999). the catalyst was a four-track recorded that i got for christmas at the end of 1997. it's january 8th in the alter-reality; my first completed, uploaded track is dated to january 9th and will be featured tonight at midnight.

the featured tracks will now begin to change more frequently, which means i'll be posting more influences. there will not be any more lengthy pauses in this process for several years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0&t=15m50s

shifting to period 1.2 in the alter-reality

i ended up losing yesterday after all in a haze of election ramblings. it's another six weeks still. but i'm going to do some listening this evening, and think i'll quick lose myself back in it as soon as i'm sure it's actually fixed.

the alter-reality updates tonight at midnight, which is the long awaited movement directly into the synth pop phase. the updates will be more frequent moving forwards, as the lull over late 97 has come to an end.

i made a decision last year to upload pieces from this period in larger segments, so the updates are going to be a little strange, with tracks moving in and out until the period closes a little over a year from now. this video has the first six songs from the first demo, but i'm really drawing attention to fourth track, which starts at 15:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0

i've been kind of moping around the last few days, wanting to keep my distance and my mind elsewhere, but i came back to it last thing tonight and i think i've finally got it.

locking the sample rate ended up consistently playing the files too quickly through wdm - a clock issue. again - sort of, maybe. so, i broke it again. and, this time, it seems to have come out ideally.

i've noticed that the streaming device is not reappearing. that suggests to me that it's part of the sample rate conversion. this may be the combination i had previous stumbled upon which broke the kmixer in the right way: it both locks the rate on the device and uninstalls the conversion driver, leading to a straight stream. or so it seems...

i have a little more testing to do, but it's a big shot of hope. best it's sounded in some time. i will get right to this in the morning, as i've got my focus and drive back.

well, this is hilarious - setting it to "headphones" seems to have made a rather dramatic difference.

i....think...i..

i can't remember.

that's some hope. i'll try it again when i wake up. i think it's another step to it, anyways.

not ants, but water

hi.

i've been checking for ants periodically, and it seems to be ok for right now. but i've noticed that some of the drywall in that enclave is rotting. it's over in the corner, pretty much directly underneath where the water from the air conditioner is constantly falling off the porch. i haven't touched it, but it's pretty obvious from looking at it that if i were to touch it, it would cave right in.

now, i don't know for sure that the reason the drywall is rotting through is water from the air conditioner. it's been humid, then cold, then humid, then cold, then humid. but, it *is* directly under where the water is coming down.

and, i don't know how substantial a problem it is - i just don't know.

but, i thought i should let you know that it appears to be rotting and that a good guess is that the water is dripping into there.

j

yeah, no, it's gotta be that fucking sample conversion - even on seven. because now that i've played it through bandcamp, it sounds better through youtube and locally through foobar. fuck. it's set up right. there has to be a way to stop it.

i'm going to see what happens if i just completely disable the entire wdm architecture and force it to play through directsound. will that even work?

i am so remarkably discouraged right now. literally nothing sounds right, and i don't have the slightest understanding as to why.

i have five years, now.

i'm considering putting it down for a few weeks and focusing on some reading, instead. the closest i can get to a decent sound is through bandcamp, which is a streaming mp3 at 128kbps. everything else through every other combination is completely wrong.

i dunno. like, if somebody wants me to give up on this, they might be disappointed at what i do instead. it's not going to be more productive. it's going to be writing essays of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and posting them to a website nobody reads.

yeah. i think i got it.

the sound architecture in xp is much maligned. it's one of those examples of microsoft taking too much control over something that ought to have minimal operating system interference. they never *really* fixed this, but it changed a lot in vista.

i've known this the whole time but it was never really a problem before, so why would it be a problem now? well, i may have changed a few settings at some time in the past and forgotten...

the kmixer seeks to resample everything, in ways that often make little sense. it seems like the people that designed it didn't really know a lot about audio, they just figured that upsampling everything to the highest formats possible would be a best practice strategy across the board. that's not true, for reasons i won't get into.

both the m-audio and the alesis come with lock settings that prevent any modification of the sample rate from outside sources. locking the devices to 44.1 had a big effect on the wdm driver outs for both devices, presumably because it's stopping any sample rate conversion. an a/b with the asio outs through cubase actually suggest that this minor fix creates an inaudible difference through wdm and a larger difference through directsound. before i locked them, it was directsound that clearly sounded better. so, this is a big difference.

i want to draw attention to this, though. because i had both outs to 44.1. why would windows upsample a stream when the source and hardware are set to the same value? that is entirely absurd. and, who would think you need to lock the rate in place to prevent the operating system from interfering? it's utter madness, truly.

but, i think this is at least a partial fix. i'll need to do more testing over night to determine if it's fully fixed or only half fixed. but, the difference is quite positive and quite obvious, so i think this is the solution to the bulk of the problem.

the problem was less fixing the problem once i figured out what it was and more trying to figure out what it was.

and, the reason the soundblaster stayed stable was because 44.1 was the max - which was also the reason that switching from the soundblaster to the m-audio fixed the m-audio [it went back to 44.1, until it was re-opened].

what i'm leaning towards with the sound issue is that the windows kmixer is resampling and the directsound isn't; that is, that by playing through directsound, i'm avoiding resampling. so, i'm going to play with some things to see if i can try and lock it in at 44.1.

the m-audio and alesis can both stream at over 200K. but i don't want windows doing conversions on the fly, dithering, etc.

when i brought in the student loan forms, the psychiatrist and nurse practitioner got into an argument as to who ought to fill them out.

i don't blame them. the language is over the top. i would have a hard time declaring myself "severely permanently disabled", as well. the truth is that i'm really just an anarchist.

i left them with the forms. i have no idea if they'll fill them out. and, to be frank, i would not begrudge them for refusing to.

i may have to get used to living on $60/month less. if i'm not smoking, that's entirely feasible.

i called the student loan people today and they extended the waiver, meaning i'm good for another two months, anyways.

the psychiatrist also claims that he can't fill out hormone prescriptions - i don't think that's actually true. the nurse practitioner will do it, but only on the instruction of an endocrinologist. and, i don't think i'm likely to get through to this guy in london again. he's going to look into it. i don't want to go to toronto, but if i have to...

i was hoping this would just be dealt with yesterday, i'll be back on the 15th and have to make decisions about things as they come up.

as i've posted here before, the feminizing hormones are kind of secondary to me at this point. the more important thing is that i'm able to keep taking the testosterone suppressors. i'm more into rejecting sexual identity altogether. it's not that the identification has changed, i will continue to identify as mentally female whether i'm on the hormones or not, it's more that i'm at a point in my life where i've accepted that my gender identity is almost entirely irrelevant, because i'm going to spend the rest of my life by myself in my bedroom. it's hard to care about how you present yourself when you're not presenting yourself anywhere. but, the testosterone reduction is very intellectually liberating and of extreme importance. i never, ever think about sex anymore. i'd like to maintain that. i'm not a sexual creature. returning testosterone levels are just likely to be an annoyance and a distraction.

worst case scenario, i could probably get the testosterone suppressors prescribed by carrying out some kind of deviant sex act, like hanging out downtown naked for as long as it takes to get arrested. it would of course be a non-aggressive act. just enough to get the prescription.

it turns out that directsound is just a layer on wdm since 2000. weird. can't explain this, but it's clear...

so, the reason it sounded correctly through smplayer and poorly through foobar is that i was accessing devices in smplayer through the directsound interface and devices in foobar through the wdm interface. there is a workaround to this: i can set the device to default and then set foobar to the primary sound driver. this gets around the wdm kmixer and doesn't merely sound clean but sounds far superior..

kmixer is known to be crappy in certain circumstances, but what i'm experiencing over and over is far worse than anything i was experiencing previously.

i need to play with some things still, but it's now clear - seriously this time - that it's a windows/wdm thing. i just don't know if i can fix this, or if i should be working around it.