i've been over this before. they expect me to show up dressed like a prostitute. and i think a part of it may be trying to get them to understand that i'm 35 years old. i don't look it. i get that. but the truth is that i'm old, and i dress like i'm old, which is to be expected. i don't have any patience with this "35 is the new 25" stuff, and this refusal to grow up. i don't want to be 25. i'm happy to be out of that headspace. i don't want to walk into a doctor's office and be analyzed like a piece of meat.

it's dehumanizing.

these doctors - they're creepy old men. i'd mostly rather they didn't touch me at all, kind of thing. to have them evaluate your gender based on whether they find you attractive is - there's something wrong with this. it's like, "i'm wearing a sweater because i don't want your creepy ass ogling me, you sonofabitch.".

they honestly seem to expect me to walk in in fishnets and heels and laugh provocatively when they speak. it's really disgusting.

it's this base archetype of patriarchally enforced "femininity" that they want reflected back at them.

i had one ask "what are you, some kind of lesbian?".

like as though that might disqualify me, if it were true. (i'm asexual. just no interest in sex.)

i had another frown and clearly write me off when i claimed i was a feminist. as though transwomen being feminists is some kind of contradiction, and disqualifying.

it's 2015, guys. i know you're in your 60s. but, you could try to keep up just a little.

that week just zoomed by...

i've had some running around to do with doctors. again. they're such assholes. and often surprisingly averse to evidence-based reasoning, in favour of rigidity to strict protocol. you'd think you're dealing with the military half the time...

they've got me in this ridiculous loop. the same people that just rediagnosed me with gender dysphoria want me to go through a training program in toronto for people that have yet been diagnosed. this is ridiculous; i could be teaching the program. but, i'd do it if it's a day program and there's an easy end to it. but, it's a months long program with a year long waiting list. and, here's the bizarre part: there's an open letter on their web page requesting that doctors do not send people through this program and just assign hormones themselves.

so, they won't represcribe until they send me through a program that is telling them to go ahead and prescribe already. it's just rigidity to a set of protocols, oblivious of anything resembling independent thought or adherence to logic.

you can imagine a far side cartoon at a school for the gifted with a star on the floor beside a christmas tree and a child frowning - because there's no instruction manual.

so, i'm calling more doctors. and more doctors. until i can find one with some common fucking sense. surely, it's inevitable, right?

i mean, it's not an option to go off hormones. i can't detransition. i'm already done. i'd sooner kill myself than put myself in that kind of state. and, if i do, it will be in their front office.

i've got some things done, though, and am ready to sit down for a few days.

i'm going to take a shower this afternoon and should hopefully get some more troubleshooting in tonight.

there's my quarterly stomach ace.....

it's officially fall in windsor.

i need to crash, but at least the driver reinstall got it back to sounding right. like, pristinely right - as good as last night and this morning. that seems to indicate that fixing the phones at least got me to a situation where the driver breaks are reversible. and it really isolates it to the clock.

my guess is that launching cubase is telling it to count differently somehow. what happens is that a code 19 shows up in the device manager. i expect the drivers to break again when i launch cubase, and i'll have to try a few things, then probably reinstall the drivers again. i'm just not sure if i want the clock drivers or not. i mean, it sounds ideal without anything trying to launch them. but, i need to see what happens by installing the clock, first.

i've already been over this, but the changes i made had side effects so i'm kind of back at square one. again: knowing that getting back to a clean signal seems to be reversible is kind of key.

fuck...

opened up cubase, and it lost the highs. that's definitely driver, which takes me back to the headphone issues ultimately being secondary.

i'm very convinced that there was cause and effect on opening cubase. what i've done for the moment is reinstall the drivers. i'll have to see if that's enough to get me back to the sweet spot.

obviously, i need to be able to open cubase....

if it falls back in place, i'm going to try reinstalling the streaming proxy first and then disabling it second. if it doesn't, i'm going to skip to disabling it.

yup. i'm good to go. finally.

and, it's been so long that i've half lost track of what i was even doing.

i think i can probably get this remix project done in a few days; it's just a question of making sure the mixes actually sound good, and i think they will. i've decided the best thing to do is to swing right back and fine tooth everything from the start.

i do remember that i was in the process of finalizing several stages, so i'd might as well just fine tooth it all, as this is the last time i'm touching a wide swath of it, from 1996-2003. when i get through this, i'll have a number of archive discs ready.

i had a thought process, but it's gone now, so the best way to make sure i don't miss anything is to just do it methodically. but, i mean....everything is done. i just need to tie it all together.

hopefully, i should get back to finishing some actual recordings by the end of the month, but that's maybe a tad optimistic. it won't be too much longer than that, anyways.

i think it should mostly come back in terms of logic.

i was compiling end of period 2 compilations. which meant i had to go back and finalize the aleph-discs. but i wasn't sure of space issues, so i had to go back and actually build them. so i decided to start with period 1. which meant i had to finish the remixes of the inri material to finish period 1.

so, when i finish these mixes, i can finish the period 1 disc. then, i can finalize the remaining material. which will let me build the rest of the aleph discs. and let me build the compilations in the process.

and, then i'm back to starting on period 3, which runs from roughly 2003-2007.

so, i'm starting to get notifications on status updates, and it's pissing me off, so i'm just unfriending everybody.

the reality is that i don't read my news feed. if you want to follow me, go ahead.

this gentle dreamer v. hopeless cynic thing has always bothered me. you just need to throw a little realism in there to break the false dichotomy.

gentle dreamer + empirical analysis = hopeless cynic.

i'm a cynic *because* i'm a dreamer.

there's no contradiction in dreaming of things that never were and asking why not, and being realistic about what the answer actually is.

well, i can't state for certain what it is that happened this evening, but i am certain the signal is now correct. previous times, it was always a little ambiguous. it's not this time - it's completely clear. clear highs. clear lows.

it was actually great tonight to be able to hear these tunes as they're supposed to sound. it's been a while.

while i do think that some of the other fixes were a part of the problem, it turns out that the major problem was some kind of a gain issue. i spent the afternoon fiddling with cables, and it did sort of just magically click all of a sudden. i may have bent something back into shape, and if that's true then it suggests that i need to be a little careful when i'm taking the contacts in and out.

but, the more i listened the more i became convinced that it's a power issue. i lost all of july, august and september to this. is it a coincidence that the air conditioner upstairs turned off this weekend and it turned on when the problem started? it almost makes sense that the mixer and/or amp wasn't drawing enough power. that's a good way to explain what i was hearing, anyways. better than magnetic interference, anyways.

right now i'm just glad it's fixed. and i suppose i have something to be thankful for this weekend.

i should finally get back to where i was in the morning. seriously, this time. and i'm going to freak out if it doesn't sound right when i wake up.

obligatory influential post.

well, there's some backwards guitar work, and the accompanying forwards guitar work. i'd actually like to post to castles made of sand, but it's not available on youtube, apparently. nor is merman. ugh. but, it's not just that. i grew up listening to and learning how to play hendrix, so i very quickly fall back into the old pentatonics when left to my own devices...

as for the song. umm.

(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)

obligatory influential on post.

i'm pushing it a little. this was released the same week as i did the track. but, yield got some pretty heavy play from me, and there's a kind of pearl jam flavour to the track, so it's fair. if i was going to pick a pearl jam track most similar to try and denote the flavour in it, it would be this one rather than something on vitalogy, even if the latter is technically more accurate.

these lyrics are awesome. as a lyricist, vedder is frustrating. but, the tunes he clicks on can be pretty inspiring. i've always dug that beatnik beach bum pothead ocean mysticism.

(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)

obligatory influential on post.

there's really a wide variety of key/goettel productions [and no doubt lpd productions, although i'm less familiar with their work] that make creative use of time reversal, but i'm pulling this one out because i know i was listening to it a lot at the time, and it's kind of conceptually relevant.

(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is evil and must be destroyed)

deathtokoalas
obligatory influential post.

well, it was actually the ry30 that is the influence; this was right at about the same time as i was just getting into autechre, and the fact that i was already familiar with the ry30 is perhaps a part of the reason i was more easily able to delve into autechre than a lot of other techno. autechre would gradually become a larger influence after 1998, but i was only just getting into them when the track was being recorded. what i'm getting at is that i'm kind of trying to downplay the actual artistic influence; it's more like i had this machine, and i was looking for examples of people that wrote music with tools like it (i didn't realize at the time that autechre were literally using an ry30, themselves). i'd then take some of those ideas and try and port them to the punk songs i was re-recording.

the result is pretty weird. i suspect most people would find something unsettling, perhaps even frightening, at the idea of autechre remixing punk rock. but, it's kind of what i was aiming for. sort of. it's mildly revisionist, but it gets the idea across.

this disc would grow into one of my favourite techno discs, and deserves the acclaim it gets. years later, jim thirlwell would use the term "ethnic music for future cultures that do not yet exist" to describe some of his own music, but i think it's a pretty striking analysis of this. whether the stories of gear stolen as looting during riots are true or not, i think the claims of musical illiteracy are accurate and i think that's a part of the reason that so much of their work has this kind of dark, celtic tonality. i think that's an under explored slant in trying to get your ahead around the abstraction. it's as tied to the island's distant past as much as it is to it's present, or future. there's a digital tribalism to it that is very idiosyncratically british.

(relevant track: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed, thug culture, confused, wish, nope, ignorance is bliss, anything with a drum machine, really, which is most of the stuff after 1998)

Antonio Schacht
I am not sure who you are, this is an interesting comment

deathtokoalas
i'm running through years of old recordings in real time on my youtube channel. i started in late 1996 about a year and a half ago, and have worked my way up to 1998. that means i'll get around to 2015 some time around the year 2032. i wasn't sure how to approach uploading 17 years of music, and decided this was the most comprehensive way, even if it takes forever. and, it allows me to present myself in terms of how i developed.

i do these "obligatory influentials" whenever i completed a new track, 17 years ago.

i guess it made more sense when google+ was cross-linked to youtube.

Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
That's why i saw you on SDRE's Diary and Weezer's Pinkerton. I'm listening to all kinds of music since 2010, and I think the the six thousand albums I listened aren't enough.

deathtokoalas
that would have been lp2 for the obligatory influential post; didn't get as much into diary. and i think i've cited the blue album, but wouldn't really cite pinkerton. i would have been commenting on those records in my music critic's hat :)

i mean, i try to put a synopsis of the disc in, too, so i'm not just spamming.

Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
Have you listened to Amon Tobin's 1997 album?

deathtokoalas
no, he's a bit of a black hole for me. i've always found him a little too conventional, but it's not like i've spent a lot of time listening, either. you have to keep in mind that i'm coming at this from an industrial/noise perspective, so i'm interpreting autechre through the filter of acts like coil and skinny puppy. i mostly restricted my delves into 90s electronic music to the warp records spectrum, just because it was really the only stuff that i could find that was really only techno in an aesthetic sense.

i'd put amon tobin in a list of stuff that includes dj shadow, daft punk, chemical brothers - it's just too close to dancefloor techno, and not experimental enough to hold my interest. but i again need to temper that with the caveat that i've only really scratched the surface of it.

Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
Your comments are pretty interesting. It's like talking with a music critic who knows what he's talking about. I never saw Amon Tobin like that, and maybe I need to stop listening to mainstream hardcore punk and focus on more stuff that I missed and it's the wide electronic/experimental genre.

deathtokoalas
the warp stuff was really always head and shoulders above, and they all had their idiosyncratic slants that could separate them out: autechre with the experimental parts, aphex with a kind of chamber music approach, squarepusher with the insane jazz leanings, plaid with the lush ambience. i really haven't heard much since that isn't in some way just a rehashing of what was really an explosion of creativity in the mid-to-late 90s.

regarding north america, skinny puppy morphed into a band called download that released two remarkable records, but they're quite noisy. most of the 90s stuff on the subconscious communications label is worth exploring. there was some interesting stuff on invisible records, but it's a lower signal-to-noise. dead voices on air jumps out immediately.

when you get out of the warp sphere and these kind of remnant strains of industrial music, though, you start getting bigger influences from hip-hop, from house music, from pop music. it becomes more oriented for dance parties and less oriented for headphone listening. that's what made the warp stuff so refreshing: it was really absolute listening music. even the ninja tune stuff is mostly party-focused. that's fine, it has it's role and everything, but it sounds a lot more dated by nature of what it is and is, frankly, just a lot less serious by nature of what it is, too.

obligatory influential post.

i don't want to say it was conscious, but it's almost a remix. you can it hear in the song structure, the way the chords cycle around and then in the collapse in the middle (i'm trying to avoid using the term "breakdown"). you listen to something so often, it just sort of assimilates itself, and you don't realize you're doing it; that's the truth with this. the second half of nevermind was always really just one song, because i always listened to it in transit.

but, i've always like these kinds of longwinded chord progressions that take a nice trip around the world before they get back to the cadence. i'm in absolute solidarity with ludwig, here; fuck you, amadeus.

(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)

i'm throwing a challenge out there. i'd do it, but i've got other things to do.

somebody needs to notate this record (and the green record; it won't work for pinkerton, or the later material) with a scorewriter with the aim of using baroque instrumentation: organ, bass, lute, harpsichord, cello, trumpet, some horns in the background. you need to make sure you get the vocal melodies & harmonies down. maybe have a little fun with the bass, but i don't think it'll be necessary to modify it much to get the effect i'm thinking.

i think it might provide a little more appreciation for how well written this record is.

on second thought, it seems - seems - to have clicked into place.

that only makes sense if the problem was in the left ear, and my fiddling around with the short managed to fix the connection.

i'm running with it, anyways. let's see if i can get through both records without pulling out a glaring "muffle".

switching to hey, god in the alter-reality

yeah, i'm swapping out various plugs and, while they all sound a little different, there's a consistency: the working cord is muffled across the board. i'm going to continue testing for the night, but i'm pretty much convinced that i need a new cord.

i'll probably buy three of them. they're like $10 each. in the mean time, i *think* i can finish mixing.

there's an alter-reality update tonight, which means i'm very far behind where i wanted to be right now, but i just need to keep plugging away at it. at least i've got some daylight to an answer, now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBvkURqZ9F8

ok, i'm finally psyched back into it.

laptop lid now closed.

well, how's this for out there? but i think i got it.

the short in the phones was worse than i thought, so i started tying to figure out some other cause - dirt, maybe?

the cords are an 1/8th inch. all the outs in the room are 1/4 inch. so, i need an adapter. i started playing with the connection to see if i could isolate it to one side of the cord, maybe.

what i began to realize is that i could get a fuller sound if i pulled the tip out just a bit. but, i couldn't get it back again after. and then it clicked.

what i'm thinking is that it isn't the cord, but the tip - that is, that this particular tip seems to have a microscopic defect on it that is not connecting properly in the adapter, but the other one doesn't. it's something most people probably wouldn't notice, but apparent on the high and low end; i think i'm getting a reduced signal due to the contact not snapping into place properly.

i happen to have a dozen of those adapters, somehow; i don't know how. but, i've experimented with a few and i'm getting closer to the proper "boom".

you can hear what i mean if you check out the first few seconds of the attached track. a drum-bass-guitar crash comes in after the arpeggio. through a good set of phones, it should get that "crush" effect on the bottom end. i was getting that through the shorted phones, but not getting it through the working ones; when i swapped the adapter out, i started getting it through the working ones.

it's a little different through each of the adapters, which just upholds the idea that there's some kind of mild contact problem.



you can hear it here, too, with the rising bass parts. that bass should saturate the mix - "BOOM". but, i wasn't getting the volume spikes - as though it was through a limiter.

well...

i'm pretty much convinced that i'm getting different results out of the different headphone cords, with the functioning pair sounding like it's through a limiter and the shorted pair sound a lot more full and open, like it's meant to.

i suppose it could be an impedance issue. a factory defect. that's so remarkably obscure. but i've been saying forever that it sounds like the signal is being obstructed, somehow, and swapping the cables seems to have fixed it.

i'm normally one to pretty loudly poo-poo audiophile claims of impedance making a difference, and i'm not exactly going to say my ears don't lie (although i can't double blind this...), but it seems to be a difference.

with all the randomness, i don't know - maybe the signal is warming up the phones, and it's warping it? i think i'm in the realm of science fiction.

i'm trying to think back to when i switched cables and don't recall exactly. i actually wasn't even sure that i had switched cables at all until i went and looked. it could have been when i swapped braces, back around new year's. but, i'm pretty sure it was working fine until a few months ago. and, again - the randomness. how does impedance "break"?

i'm going to keep testing overnight. but it honestly seems to me like it sounds right through the shorted cable.

they're usable, for now. the short is intermittent. but, i'll need to swap them. so, if i can convince myself of as much, i'll just order another cable. maybe two...

for now, i'm just excited to get a breakthrough. although, this doesn't really add up to me. how is it that other measures seemed to make a difference, if it was the headphone cord?

for now, i'll just keep listening. and if it keeps sounding good, i'll have to accept it.