overall, this weekend really got away from me. whoever it actually is that is upstairs is acting like a child in their habits, whether they actually are one or not, so i've been forced to clean up after them every few hours - but it doesn't stay clean. so, i have to do it again...

they've very badly triggered my asthma, which is giving me heart palpitations and forcing me to sleep more than i normally would, as well. and, again, i feel like i'm being drugged, but i can't figure out the source of it to end it.

and, yes i know they're up there - i can hear them, i can smell them. it's obvious.

so, i've just been getting up, cleaning, eating, cleaning, sitting down to do something, having to get up to clean again, getting the smallest amount done, having to clean again, etc.

ultimately, no - it shouldn't take me 6-7 hours to prepare a meal and eat it, but that's life dealing with the effects of second-hand smoke by selfish, worthless neighbours - or their worthless children, as it may be.

i was going to go over the sealing i did with an exacto knife (it's a horrible mess, i'm not very good at stuff like that) tonight, but i realized pretty quickly that that's just going to undo it. and, ultimately, who cares? so, i did a second coat over a few spots, and i'm just going to scrub the floor for now, instead. i also want to put something over the space and see if it's comparably better and, looking into it, the best thing to use is probably a dollar store tarp. so, i'll need to go grab one of those as well, the next time i'm out.

but, i think the worst part of it was the bacteria and/or fungi coming in from the cracks, and i hope that sealing them resolves the primary problem.

i'm otherwise in need of doing that clean on the other side of the apartment that i keep putting off...

let me clear about this, though - don't connect your xp machine to the internet. ever.

at this point, i only have one controller with internet access that i take files off and with an external drive, and keep everything else off the intranet.

that's the one issue, but you don't want your recording machine online, anyways.

i will do things with 20 year-old gear that you will take 20 years to understand.

yes, i'm using cubase.

sx. 3.

on xp.

hey, it works; the only issue i've ever had with it is overloading due to the 4 gb ram limit in the 32 bit os. the new sample libraries simply need more ram. but, it's going to be matlab that is going to pull me in to the 64 bit os recording world, finally. it was actually matlab that forced me to upgrade from 98 to xp around 2005 - and while i've upgraded my hardware, i've stuck with 32-bit xp ever since.

i'm ultimately the type that likes a stable, steady daw over the newest bells and whistles. from the time i got my jx/ry30 combo in the late 90s (which would have been cutting edge ten years earlier, but was just high quality last gen by the time i snagged it), i've always been about making the most of the previous generation of gear - and you'll note that i tend to actually use the features in my gear, rather than just upgrade it every six weeks to look cool.

if you're getting good equipment, it should last twenty years before you exhaust it, by which time you have another generation of supposedly last-gen gear to actually understand and make actual use of.

i'd rather listen to a talented programmer on a 20 year old tower that really knows how to use the gear because they've spent the time with it than some talentlesss rich kid fucking around with the shiniest, newest toys.

so, i'll stick with sx 3 for now, thanks.

but it's almost time to upgrade to a system that would have been cutting edge around 2015 or so.

inri077

so, i actually ended up spending the morning digitizing the last old cassette i have so that i can put it away, along with this old portastudio i recorded it on, via the same alesis over asio connection i was using previously. i'll reinstall this afternoon. and, i've even uploaded it as a temp mix to the cassette demo ep, which is not closed but i think is now constructed.

i vaguely recall recording this in sarah's apartment as a starting point one night when she was out, and it's really the only way to make sense of it existing at all. i ended up living in sarah's space (which she shared with a friend named heather) for a few weeks because my retarded step-mother tossed me out of the house for correctly calling her delusional - because she was - and refusing to apologize - because it was true. you can claim that was foolish, but where do i get by denying the actual truth? she made an absurd accusation that can only be described by her deluding herself about reality. apologizing for pointing that out would be equivalent to also denying reality and being equally delusional. like, it wasn't an insult, it was a statement of fact! so, if i were to apologize for stating the truth, it would be equivalent to accepting her delusions as true, which would be a denial of reality, and for what? i can't sacrifice truth like that. i can't walk down this dystopic path. so, if you want to accuse me of foolishness, let's at least be accurate about it - the foolishness is actually rooted in an inability to interface with nonsense. this wasn't about my ego, it was about refusing to walk into a dystopia and refusing to separate myself from reality in the process. i'd read too much orwell, i just couldn't handle it. and i knew that the next step would be even worse - that accepting one nonsense as truth would merely lay a basis for accepting more nonsense as truth. it was a shitty outcome, no doubt, but i had to stick to the facts, here - i had to hold to my principles.

truth > family. you have to protect your brain, you have to protect your sanity, or you'll end up as fucked up as everybody else, in the end.

so, i ended up without anywhere to sleep - something i'd never dealt with before (except on the trip to bc i'd just come back from) and wasn't actually taking seriously. in addition to learning that my stepmother was retarded, i learned a little bit about how to fend for myself. but, in the end, i decided i'd rather stay with sarah for a bit, anyways. 

but, i lost access to my computer and recording interface...

as such, i called up my friend greg, who had been using the tascam. i mean, i didn't need it - i had the soundblaster live interface. but, now i did. proto-anarchist jessica knew how to distribute property efficiently. the only reasonable timeframe when i would have made this recording is therefore when i was staying with sarah, after i picked up the item from greg (who got a little bit annoyed about it) - which would have been the fall of 2003.

in the end, i just forgot about this recording, and am kind of wondering where the tape with "like divine amoebas" went, as i have more developed memories around recording that track than this one. i mean, this doesn't actually go anywhere just quite yet, even if the dual guitars are kind of harmonically interesting as intertwined sections. that said, this is my next major recording project, as well, and it will form the missing piece of my 8th record (a massive 2xlp set of lengthy pieces, all four of them labeled as symphonies) when it's done.

i will probably do something further with this exact recording, though, as i finally work out the lost symphony. as it is, as rough and unfinished as it is, it's easy enough to extrapolate my mindset at the time, in this kind of dour gira-influenced dirge through this dissonant harmonic cycle of down strokes.

if this is from late 2003 as it must be then it is by far the earliest recording of it that i have. i tried to record it in late 2004 and over 2005, but got distracted and ended up writing xenophanes, instead. so, this comes in last in the sequence of four intertwined symphonic works, but it was actually meant to be the third piece, before xenophanes interjected itself in between. and, that's why it got lost - i pivoted out of the trivial group before i finished it, as i so often did back then. and so often do still now....

are there further demos? well, i can't answer that question thoroughly until i'm sure what happened to the other tape. i digitized it in early 2004, so i haven't lost anything in being unable to locate it. but, i'm sort of sure that it was actually around, too.

for now, these are the only two tracks i have from that brief phase, both demoes of songs that would be completed later and elsewhere, and this is the document i can construct.

by my count, this should end up as inri077 and is essentially now done - along with inri075, inri078, inri079, inri080, inri081, inri082, inri084 and inri085. it is inri076 that will need the attention and could take me most of the summer to complete. and, that will take me up to the summer of 2004. inri083 (impressionist jazz punk, first take) and inri086 (cycles per second lp) will then require some thought as to how to approach.

new upload:


full ep, so far:

this is going to be a temp install because i'm still testing the ram - which seems to be fine, so far. i think the board was just dusty...

alright, so i got through one stack of cds and all of the cassettes, save one, and i'm deciding to go ahead and reinstall rather than continue filing because i have to to archive the cassette. there have been some minor hardware changes that will require updating the script, but i guess i'll have to just deal with it.

this machine has been in a broken state for years, as i spent a very long time troubleshooting what i decided in the end was an environmental signals problem. so, i ripped everything to do with the windows xp subsystem out and just finished the last mixes i was dealing with over asio drivers. and want to put it back, now.

i simply don't know what the signals are like down here, and am long overdue to find out.

the install is automated but it's lengthy so that's likely the morning.

hey, we spent some time a little earlier setting up my maxxed out windows 98 pc, on a psb-f from 1998 that  i got for christmas in 1999. i've had to swap out everything except the board, power supply and case, but it still runs.

i have a 64-bit pc in a box that i haven't built yet and really need to soon....

...but, i fully expect that this 32-bit machine will last another 10 years, at least.

so, i'm pretty sure about the known good gb of ram in the suspected bad slot - that's been stable.

i'm going to try a second gb of suspected good ram in parallel, to close off the first two slots.

this board can take 8 gb of ram, but it's running a 32-bit os (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future), so i put 4x1 gb sticks of gold-plated ocz in there, but i built it in 2007, so it's getting a little bit old.

i've had to rescue it several times, and i've put a bd-r in it and swapped a few things around, but i've only ever had to replace one of the four hard drives in the machine over the last fourteen years. that's it. so, let's hope the ram is fine, after all.

i tend to like the stuff that's less pompous, and more focused on songwriting, in whatever abstraction - or more psychedelic. so, i like genesis, crimson, floyd - although i actually prefer oldfield, or tangerine dream, to the bulk of it.

i tend not to like the geekier or more randian stuff, like rush or elp or zeppelin.

and, when you bring the macho poseurism or show-offism that is more indicative of metal than prog in, i just tune out altogether. so, i just can't get into stuff like dream theatre or slayer for that reason, although the major problem with later dream theatre is less that it's too metal and more that the singer just ruins it. there's a short time window of dream theatre stuff that i've found instrumental japanese imports of, that i can actually get into.

so, i made fun of him for listening to hair metal, too. i didn't just take that shit.

i think i got him a little into tortoise, which is the kind of thing he ought to have liked, although he seemed to prefer mcentire's work with the sea and cake, and i know he enjoyed tool when given the opportunity to, as well.

but, i never saw him play. not even once. rather, it was myself that ended up playing these kits that were always sitting around...

where did i learn about sound recording?

i have taken a handful of courses both in high school and at carleton, but i don't think it helped much, and both were after i'd been recording for years. the actual truth is that my dad was a useful resource, here.

i actually wish he'd have written some kind of biography, so i could order his own life a little better; i wasn't born yet when he was in his early 20s, and he seemed to view that period of his life as something to take a bit of a step away from. but, what i was able to piece together is that he spent some time in the late 70s as a drummer and sound engineer, mostly dealing with local metal bands in and around ottawa.

now, he was a prog guy - his drum heroes were like terry bozio, bill bruford, phil collins, neil peart, that kind of thing. he was a big mike portnoy fan later in life. and, he had this kind of zappaesque disdain for punk rock as overly simplistic, although i think i was able to help him understand a little later on that the point of punk was political rather than musical. it was actually on his suggestion that i check out the dead kennedys, after i brought home a new offspring record, at the age of 13 - although he then made fun of me for listening to it.

i think this fundamentally warped his concept of punk rock for life:

...and he would constantly reference it in making fun of me for recording by myself, something that shows up here and there, tongue-in-cheek, if you look for it.

but, he wasn't exactly an expert or a working musician, either - he often insisted on owning a drum kit, but i never saw him actually play it, so i can't offer any kind of informed opinion about what he could actually do on it. i saw him noodle around on a bass a few times, and it was clear to me (as a seasoned guitarist, even at age 15) that he had no idea what he was doing. but, he fancied himself a drummer in his mind, anyways - and those were the musicians he followed, drummers in prog bands. 

but, it was enough to get me started, and that's really the most important thing, right? my concepts about microphones, about room acoustics, about equalization, about recording gear and even about guitar effects are rooted primarily in questions i asked in my mid to early teens, and while i know today that he was actually even flat out wrong about a number of things, that starting point was really invaluable.

......but, only up to a point.

i'm not a digital native, but i'm the very last gen xer and i had a computer with (dial-up) internet access in my bedroom before i turned 17. so, i'm not a digital native, i had a learning curve, but i'm just about at the end of the cusp of it - there are no doubt even people my age that would consider themselves digital natives. so, i was able to take these basic things i learned from my dad, and this glossary of language i understood, and just yahoo search it. this was before google, actually.

i toyed with going to school to be a sound engineer, and in hindsight i sort of wish i did, but my dad's apprehension about that period in his own life meant he wasn't going to pay for it, and the student loan system in ontario wouldn't cover it. these were expensive programs, too - $10,000/yr on base tuition, compared to around $1,500/yr at the local university (this was still the late 90s). so, i ended up stumbling through a math degree, instead, just due to the realities around me...

i don't think i'd have ended up working in a studio, though. i fundamentally can't deal with other people, and it sort of doesn't matter what my education is or might have been - i would have run up against this same brick wall of social awkwardness, regardless. it took me a long time to kind of figure that out. i would have enjoyed it a lot more, though, and i would have no doubt walked down a very different path and had a very different journey, even if i ended up in the same place, in the end. and, we're all dead, in the long run.

but, as a path, that's not something that was available to me, due to finances and the sort of societal perspective that it's not a vocation of much actual value. i was born poor and raised poor and found myself middle class due to marriages in my middle to late teens; regardless of where i started, the government will send poor kids to school to be doctors or lawyers or professors, but they won't send them to school to be sound engineers. you need substantive capital to invest up front if you really want to do that, and it just wasn't available to me.

so, i often sound like i have a fancy sound design degree, but i actually don't - what i actually have is a math degree, although i studied physics for a while, i took a handful of sound design courses and i went deep into the computer science and law programs, too. it's more that i grew up around gear, and learned about it by actually using it, and by asking functional questions, as a child does, to my dad, who owned the bulk of it.

alright, so we've got up until the end of july done, now. i need to eat.

this is intended to be a dirty run through, remember.

unfortunately, i can't read this external drive in xp and the chromebook can't read the codecs used by the camera. so, i can either copy the data from the external to a usb key and put it on the xp machine, or i can just upload it to youtube.

i need to reimage my busted up windows 7 laptop before i can even consider repurposing it. so, i'm just uploading it as a playlist to youtube..

and, i can start setting up the production machine for typing, while i'm waiting.

regarding the ram/board issue on the 32-bit system...

i took a known good stick and tried it in all four slots, and there was one that took a few tries, which isn't entirely unusual with old boards - they even just get dusty, sometimes. so, i'm going to try to leave it on with just the known good in the dusty slot and see if it halts or not.

these asus boards don't die (i have one from 1998 and one from 2006 that are both still running, and a third in a box from 2016), but they do get dusty and need to be reseated. let's hope it's that easy.

and, i'm going to have to start typing on the production machine, instead.

so, my 32-bit recording pc (which i'm still filing, periodically) has developed some kind of ram and/or board issue that i'm also troubleshooting this week. it just freezes randomly.

these asus boards just don't die, so it has to be the ram, or something else plugged into it.

i've unplugged some of the front panel connectors and, now, it seems to be stable with one stick of ram, so i'm going to rotate a different stick into the slot i took out and try it from there... 

i guess my system started collapsing in mid 2015, and i've long concluded that i only have marginal control over it - that somebody basically doesn't want me on the internet, and doesn't care if they have to ruin my tools in order to do it. i mean, i'd guess i'm dealing with the kind of people that reject the concept of art as vocation. the idea that i'm just an artist seems incomprehensible to them - i must be working for somebody. so, they just want me offline, and all they interpret this gear as is as a means to corrupt the youth. and, they just want to listen in, and they don't care how badly they have to screw all the signals up in order to do it.

have i shaken them yet? i might never....

but, it means i have this giant pile of electronics that the cia has rendered inoperable in a flatly stupid attempt to shut me down and that i'm going to have to slowly try to salvage.

one thing at a time. i can connect to the internet using the chromebook, and i need to get the recording pc up. i'm minus a stick of ram and will want to replace it soonish; it looks like concerts are probably cancelled for the year, so the next thing to spend money on is replacement parts for all the gear that was broken. the windows 98 pc is working, as well. and, finally building the 64-bit pc is no longer a distant task, but coming up when i work on the matlab project.

i'm not going to replace the backlight on the laptop as it's too risky, but i'll need to reimage the laptop with a customized windows 7 to rip out all of the networking apps, so they can't slave the machine.

slowly. slowly....

i'm less sleepy tonight, and making progress on the filing.

let's remember why i'm doing this.

so, i finished the july, 2013 archive and went to file it, but realized i couldn't do it because my filing apparatus was all in disorder. i then realized that in order to get the filing apparatus back in order, i'd have to get the laptop back up, but i can't do that until i get the filing apparatus back in order. ack.

so, i went through all of the loose media i have, copied it all over to the music pc and now need to put it all where i needs to be. then, i can build a copy of the laptop's backup drive, and then i can file the july archive and move on to the august one.

in the process, i should be able to build the alter-reality as well as get the machine in order for inri075.

...which means a reinstalll of the disc is imminent.

if i can sort through and finalize the material from mid 2003 to mid 2006 before i face another disruption, that's serious progress.

alright, so i've got all of the takeout stuff dealt with, and even organized my google drive shares a little.

in the process, i'm realizing that somebody may have hacked an address i use only rarely: jessicaambermurray@gmail.com. this person seems to be using the fake identity of "rosalie walker". as one example, they set up a fake kickstarter account that i've since deleted. they also set up an account at academia.edu that i've deleted. and, they subscribed to ezra levant, which is sort of embarrassing - that's not something i'd subscribe to. at all.

i had to change the password.

i have no evidence that this person is doing anything damaging to me, or any clues as to what the point of hacking into my email address might have been. that address is not associated with my bank account, for example...and, it's not as though there's much in there. this only seems to have started happening about september of last year.

in fact, that address is associated with my facebook account, only - an account i basically don't use anymore, and may end up deleting. i got off facebook because the ui was awful, and it's just gone from bad to horrendous.

the one extra thing i want to check is my carleton accounts.

ok, so i got through the contents of the second drive and ultimately put it away for now as an extraneous backup. i have something like ten snapshots of a 300 gb drive scattered across a dozen different types of media, some local and some not. this is partly why i'm convinced i probably haven't lost anything - it would just be hard to delete everything. and, if i catch them...

i haven't effectively caught them yet, though - i don't have that smoking gun.

but, that means i need to put it all together, now.

the other thing i spent the night doing was a takeout snapshot, and i'll have to consolidate that, as well.

while i still have a few external drives to sort through, that means i've gotten most of what i wanted to pull down off the internet for archiving and have gone through a couple of the external drives. another day or two and i'll be focused strictly on local filing, and then i think it'll pick up a lot.