alter-reality update:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-3WJVCvsk&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

i've recently received several requests for collaboration, which i've turned down because i'm a control freak. it's just a legitimate lack of interest in the idea of collaboration. i need to be in control of my art. sorry.

but i'm going to try to work with the idea. maybe i'm teasing you. but, if we're having fun that's what's important, right?

i'm going to start uploading rough ideas to my google drive space. those ideas will disappear as they mutate. but, i'm going to post them here and ask for input on them, and ideas that you think could better them.

i need to be up front: i'm probably going to ignore you. so, it's just like the democracy we have in real life. i mean, don't start thinking you have any kind of actual power, but it's always fun to pretend you do.

so, this is my messy industrial jazz catastrophe that i've been playing with for the last month and is about to go into what i call "post-production". what that means, to me, is that i'm going to listen to it dozens and dozens of times - until my mind starts to mutate it. then, i'm going to start trying to find ways to synthesize those mutated sounds my brain creates.

put another way, this is when the track goes through it's atmospheric industrial phase, and picks up car doors slamming and hammers hitting glass windows and noise generators squelching out strange pitches and weird scifi effects and etc.

i've got some ideas, i just need my brain to solidify them for me. but if it were up to you, how would you warp the fuck out of this?

https://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

also, the temp mix is done, i'm into building overdubs and doing post-production.

i just want to get the point across, so the word gets out.

i need to reiterate that i post a lot at rt, al jazeera and other global intersections. that's how i'm getting traffic from across the world.

unfortunately, the google algorithms are interpreting that as bought views, and while, again, i'll state that buying views wouldn't get me anything besides a lot of confused sheep, it's obvious that i'm not buying 4 views from south korea or whatever else.

what's setting the trigger off is the ratio. less than half of my views over the year are from the united states (although us + uk + can make up a bit more than half). according to google's filters, that's impossible without buying views.

and i claim that's blatantly racist.

what's going to happen over time is that google is going to slowly delete most of these views - most zealously the ones from southeast asia, russia, the middle east and africa.

what has to happen is that youtube needs to change how it tries to catch bought views, because what it's doing right now is just erasing 80% of the planet from it's watch stats.

more to the point, i guess, is that i'm *not* advertising to an american-centric audience, but largely to one outside the united states. my views would not be popular in that country.

....and, i mean, i'm not even from the united states. it's sort of ridiculous to expect me to get mostly american traffic when i neither live there nor am interested in their culture, but rather rant a whole lot about how evil they are.

google is notoriously difficult to contact, but they do react to negative information when they hear it, so talk amongst yourselves. it'll get back to them.

the reality is that a canadian news analyst commenting heavily over global news sources should expect to generate a global audience, and google has their head in their ass about it if their algorithm interprets that as fraudulent due to the views being less than 50% american.

i need to stop thinking about it, though. it really doesn't matter. it's just pissing me off on the principle of it.

i always have a helluva time mixing down power chords because i want a wall of sound through a complicated mess of multiple distortions, each mixed to hone in on it's own frequency. i can usually settle for a basic bass/mid/treble split, through three differently equalized distortions.

it took me all night to get those three tracks set up, but i think it's done. i'll have to double check in the morning. needs time to set.

so, i'm done for the night. i should hopefully be able to start on some final overdubs tomorrow.

getting there.

i'm going to try a different approach in the mix. i spent years and years working in cool edit. not audition. and not the multitrack version. just basic, audacity style cool edit. what i'd do is i'd just paste tracks on top of each other. it's a subtle difference in algorithm between "mixing" and "synthesizing". it's this production trick that makes some of my ambient pieces sound so thick and lush through a set of good headphones.

the reality is just that it was a function of what i had available. i couldn't run multitrack software well with the hardware i had, and my four-track tape recorder was just too noisy for me. so, if i wanted 8 or 16 or more tracks, that was the only way to really do it.

when i finally pried myself away from this and forced myself to figure out a modern recording interface, i kind of lost the open intuition of the wave editor. when you use the recording studio as a creative tool, the linear nature of recording into a wave editor v building tracks up in the normal way affects the construction process. there's this absolute free reign in overdubs, because you're zooming in to a specific time coordinate and pasting it over, rather than dealing with this structure broken into bars and notes. and, if an idea extends beyond it's bounds, the bounds merely extend the idea; that's how six minute tracks became half hour ones.

i'll probably never break with that entirely. if you listen to the segues in the first movement of the proverbs symphony, you can hear that they're cut up and fucked with. i'm likely to get more freaky with this, not less freaky with it.

the drawback of working in linear editors is that it's mostly destructive, in the sense that it's difficult to go back to a previous point in time unless you take very close notes and are sort of neurotic about putting everything aside, incrementally. that's the reason i forced myself to get out of it.

so, i don't really want to go back to that, but i do want to implement some open editing strategies into the standard multitrack recording approach. all the time i spent listening to the old stuff over the last few months has me remembering how useful it can be in getting certain raw sounds and effects across.

so, i'm going to start taking some of the sounds out, warping them in editors, and pasting them back in where they were. that will allow me to utilize some of those synthesis techniques without losing the flexibility of cubase.

i just hope it actually sounds the way i expect it to. if not, the good old wave editor could get a bit of a return to heavier and more central usage.

that being said, i'm not dealing with 8s or 16s or even 32s anymore. i just passed 70 tracks. it'll be over 100 when i'm done, i'm sure. that's on a piece under ten minutes and is about average over the last little while.

and it's not hard to understand why it takes so long, when i explain it like that i guess. that's not five people doing 100 tracks in parallel, it's one person slowly building up 100 tracks over ten minutes. and, in a longer piece of 20-30 minutes, that's pushing more like 300.

the older editor-based stuff would rarely get over 100 tracks on a half hour piece, although i'd bet a few got close to it. i had real limitations on hard drive space. remember when 20 gb was a big hard drive? it didn't seem so big, not even then. but, now there's really no limits...and i'm not about to impose artificial ones.

i lost a few days due to a nasty neck ache that required a lot of sleeping. i'm still not really clear on what happened, but i've narrowed it down to either:

a) i picked up a virus from not using soap to wash my hands while making eggs. we all do this, because we're all lazy. i need to be more careful.

b) multiple sclerosis. this isn't random. i've been hearing about being high risk since i was a toddler, and i do get weird facial tics and random muscle spasms rather regularly. where the pain is (where my spine meets my brain) could very well be a lesion. but, if true, existing medical science couldn't actually do anything about it except waste a lot of my time. so, whatever. it's mostly gone away. good enough for now....

i'm feeling alert enough at this point to get back to it tonight. i think i'm still on course to finish the track by the first.

you know, something else that happened right before my back went up in flames was that i switched from folgers to maxwell house. and i drink around a pot of extremely strong coffee a day, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. pot two is coming up, we'll have to see how that works out...

but, what i wanted to post was this:

<phil hartman>

MAXWELL HOUSE! COFFEE SO STRONG, IT WILL MAKE YOUR NECK HURT SO BADLY, THAT YOU'LL BE COMPLETELY CONVINCED YOU HAVE M.S.

</phil hartman>

also, why isn't there a "bill clinton killed phil hartman" conspiracy theory?

weird that i can hear this tonight but couldn't hear it last night or the night before. it's richie hawtin, specifically. he'll be on another hour.

at first, i thought it was a house party, so i took a walk around the neighbourhood planning to crash it. yeah, i'll do that. well, listen, if you're going to turn the music up loud enough that i can hear it in my apartment, i'll interpret that as an invite; if i'm listening to your music anyways, i'd like to come in and dance, thank you.

but, as i started walking around, i started realizing it was coming from a rather large distance away because i could hear cheering in the background. it was the cheering that dissuaded me; must be a hefty cover. the bass seemed rather close, though. i guess it was roaring in between the houses...

i also realized that the dj actually wasn't very interesting, and it wasn't worth stumbling around trying to find.

i assumed it was probably the casino in downtown windsor, not across the river in detroit. that is really ridiculously loud....

http://www.movement.us/

yeah. i'll be ok. hopefully it goes away soon, though.

it hasn't really improved, but i've gotten used to it. also, i'm developing a sore throat, which leads me to conclude that i've picked up a virus. this is pretty intense for the flu, though....

...and the truth is the only vector i can conceive of over the last week would be those eggs. so, bird flu? maybe....

i'll see what i feel like when the sun comes up.

my neck needs rest, but my brain is wide awake. so, read.

i'm finding myself in far greater agreement with hobbes than i ever thought i would be, and am actually seeing him produce a lot of the same sorts of arguments i'm always throwing at ancaps. hobbes would agree that a society based around markets and contracts would require a state to enforce those markets and contracts, rendering the vision of classical liberalism (today pushed by anarcho-capitalists) a sort of contradiction in terms - precisely agreeing with myself and other anarchists, who don't think anarchy and capitalism are compatible with each other.

of course, hobbes would not conclude that markets and contracts (and property and currency) should be abolished, as i would. instead, he'd argue in favour of a totalitarian state that forces actors to carry out their promises.

but i'm a little surprised how much i'm actually identifying with somebody that's always been presented to me as the exact opposite of everything i've ever believed in or stood for.

these are the existing stats on my top video. i've pointed out repeatedly that buying views would not help me, due to the fact that i'm an abstract artist and have no commercial potential or potential to herd a flock. but these stats make it clear they aren't bought. you'd think it would make more sense to run it against poisson or something (perhaps some research is necessary to get the right distribution, poisson strikes me as useful in finding the rare event of a full play) to determine if the data fits a reasonable shape, rather than to just be all racist about it.

it's that one algerian hit i want, not the hundreds of dumb americans that get confused after 0:07. i'd rather they delete the american hits, and let me keep the algerian one.

we'll have to see what they do or don't do with this, but it seems like all those hits outside of the first world - in turkey and south africa and elsewhere - will be declared fake.

because they don't actually exist.

i'm noticing that the youtube algorithm is basically racist, in that it rejects any hits from outside of the "first world".

sorry, white men from california. i post regularly on videos discussing global affairs. those hits from russia are legit.

in your world, nobody in russia actually uses the internet, i guess.

i ultimately don't really care. youtube views are not a meaningful currency to an obscure artist that is about substance over style. like anybody else, it makes sense for me to maximize the potential audience. but, i'd rather have one quality hit than ten thousand people that listen for five seconds. see, the unfortunate reality, though, is that the latter is necessary to get the former.

but, people should be aware that youtube isn't actually really cracking down on fake hits, it's just applying a type of racial profiling, and it's going to negatively affect people with an actual global reach, by turning audiences outside of the first world into non-entities.

in a sense, it's sort of what we all already knew: the tech industry doesn't think the rest of the world actually exists.

ouch.

neck is very stiff. has me paranoid about paralysis. but i'm hoping i just leaned on it the wrong way. will give it a few hours to heal before i freak out.

i took a break from mixing this morning to make some eggs, which gave me some heartburn and forced me to lie down. i woke up a few hours later barely able to move, with difficulty swallowing & etc.

see, it's been suggested to me more than once that i'm high risk for developing MS. i've had these periodic facial tics for as long as i can remember, but it's on the other side of the neck. i'm a little worried that something "broke" on the other side.

for now, i'm going to try to breathe slowly and just basically not move for a few hours.

so, i've become convinced that i will eventually snap my own sternum in the process of stretching, the blood splinters will travel to my heart and i'll die on the floor in a pool of my own blood. things are constantly snapping in there. it's just a matter of time.

but i can't just not stretch. no, really. try it some time. nobody can accomplish this task.

so, i've resigned myself to my own frailty, and patiently await the outcome.

hey, i always said i wouldn't make it to 25.

i was shocked when i made it to 30.

i suppose my track record on this prediction is not good, but i consider it exceedingly unlikely that i'll get to 40.

in some imaginary state of nature that never actually existed, i would have been eaten by lions before i turned ten. no, really, i would have. so, i'm already way ahead, thanks to the technology.

better to quit when i'm ahead. wait.

uploading first movement (demo) to soundcloud

this is the guitar run through of the first movement of the proverbs symphony, as it was initially written (and demoed in early 2007). note that this version is less than seven minutes and is written to be performed live, whereas the completed movement is over seventeen minutes and would be impossible to reproduce without an orchestra of guitarists.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movement-1-winter-2007

...and the memories come back: it was written as a synth-guitar part, in the sense of being meant to be played over a keyboard. so, i'll have to put the sequencer section back in.

that means i'm moving to a temporary mixing stage for the day. the remainder of the track is basically production & vocals. that may mean adding some extra tracks, but it's flourishes.

i might have it done by the weekend. the 1st, for sure. the next track is going to be a process as well, before i rapidly shoot through the rest of '01.

the last prewritten section isn't playable. i'd have to split it into multiple tracks, then use weird tunings on all of them.

the awkward moment when you realize you read your own sheet music wrong.

hey, it was 15 years ago.