“

4/1

What to say about the past few weeks; unprecedented times, and staying home and close to/with my family feels like the right choice. A few lights out of this darkness though:
”

“

3/10

CDR is up on BC; so far, so good. I’ve been listening back to many of the other Redaction studio & performance recordings & I think this will be at the core of my recorded output this year; it’s reaching its 5-year anniversary, and seeing as this whole system was revamped significantly over the holidays, I’m eager to get out & play it live more than I am talking about it, making mixes for websites around it, etc. Music-making & performance is so direct & entails so much trust between an artist, promoter, and audience; releasing it like the stone-ages in comparison - everything gets reset back to zero and you find yourself have these absurdly banal entry-level conversations about your approach, every time you put something out in a mass-market way. I think, in a nutshell, this energy has been what’s kept me away from pursuing putting out another record; I dread the press cycle, severely. ”

“

3/9

Woke up this morning with a bad cold, which, considering everything going on around here right now, is incredibly disheartening. A few stray cough sent echoing through the park were met with dead-eye stares a good 50 yards off, which sets the tone for the next few days/weeks.

Had a good hard listen back to the “Contemporary Drummer” Redactions performance in Chicago; this was one of the things I put up for Peter to hear, but I think I’m going to remove it from the possible album pool & make it a BandCamp thing; very happy with it as a one-off performance (it keeps & conveys the free-for-all form of a drum solo, which was the intent), but a studio version of the same approach would be so much more reigned-in & refined. ”

“

3/5

I stayed up last night doing a bunch of things, including having an in-depth chat w/ Bruce Adams for his forthcoming book on the Chicago music scene in the 90s. Looking forward to that; curiously, Peter Margasak is also writing one, but I’m sure their respective remit(s) will be completely different. ”

“

3/4

Ran into Kamran Sadeghi while out getting groceries & he invited me on the spot to play a concert in Williamsburg in a few weeks with Daniel Neumann & Jim Toth’s sound-system, set up in an octal formation. I met Jim briefly during the Guggenheim Tarek Atoui project, and had to actually do a bit of research. Fascinating guy; brilliant speakers, very curious to try my hand at performing on them. ”

“

3/3

Finally put up a selection of recent masters for Peter Rehberg to check out; of course I regretted this instantly, but so much of my thought-process around the music I makes these days stays in my head that it’s occasionally great to just hear what anyone else has to say about it directly. I’ve trusted Peter for maybe 20 years now to deal the straight dope, fully expecting a dressing-down. ”

“

3/2

In the process of regrouping from the Chicago trip, I thought about a few minor revisions & replacements in the Euro setup I’ve been massaging for at least the last 3 months. Got in touch with the Leipzig West folks about one of their Grunau combined WK2/WK1 Aroom tiles, and was delighted to hear back instantly from Kay that this wasn’t vapor/a one-off & was in production. Similarly, Andrew at NonLinearCircuits in Perth is sending over a couple of Sloth 1u Tiles & their new PLL tile, very curious to put these through their paces; the LPZW as a master offset for the negative envelopes the Plankton ENVF spits out, the Sloths as chaotic/aperiodic voltage sources to feed waveshapes in the SMR & Knit, and the PLL for pure audio decimation. ”

“

3/1

Woke up bleary but in tact; had a nice wander around the neighborhood, which I don’t really ever need to go back to. The recording turned out great, can’t wait to massage into something; it was a great encapsulation of where the Redactions are heading, and a great first concert with (half of, anyways) the new setup. ”

“

2/29

Woke up early & had the complementary donut at Stan’s, walked around that upwardly blighted intersection of nightline & commerce that is Lincoln Park. Brett Naucke got in touch, so we met up for brunch.& walked around Wicker Park, very much still alive with the spirit that drew so many towards it & it’s interiors in the 90s.

Managed to get up to ESS in time to catch both a good 45 minutes of Annea Lockwood’s Danube River Map installation (gorgeous, and very well considered & documented) & her talk with Nate Wooley, which was convivial and complementary in the nicest possible way. Annea has an unbelievably great outlook & speaking voice; I could literally listen to her read the phone-book. After the first hour there I had to head back to the hotel then to soundcheck, which was slow, patient, and just right.

Ate at the same Cuban restaurant as the last few times I was here, and had enough time to chat up John McCowen for a while, who is essentially a neighbor & who delivered an absolutely gorgeous, heavily amplified bass clarinet overtone-series piece which completely defied the Wandelweiser-lineage framing that had been supplied to me regarding his work; was reminded of an amplified version of Evan Parker’s circular breathing solos, mixed with the wave-geometries of Lucier, Radigue, et.al. Super nice.

The show went well; I could have taken a more patient & less chaotic approach, but all considered a great first stab at the second real iteration of the Redactions piece, and the multi-channel worked beautifully. Had the usual throng up close afterwards; got a great Zlob random-source module & ended up going out with Brett & his partner & Nick “BrownShoesOnly” Ciontea to Hideout, where Woody was playing, and had several great conversations with them & Max from Hausu Mountain until the early hours. Very nice night.”

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2/28

Long lapse there; apologies, domestic life has been a handful for the past week or two. Heading to Chicago tonight for the concert at Constellation, which will be my third performance there. The first was the Neon Marshmallow festival when it was still the Viaduct Theater; someone reminded me the other day that I sat in w/ both TV Pow AND Caboladies, which I don’t remember - the second was that ill-fated show as part of the Kranky 20th Anniversary celebration, looking forward to at least atoning for that w/ a proper lighting spec.

Anyways, it will be the debut of the 2020 traveling “Redactions” setup, and despite being less of a carry-on burden (just half of the full 14u 104jp comes on the plane as a carry-on; a smaller Palette 62 & a 42hp case stay inside the checked bag, safely nestled in their nice pouches). ”

“

2/26

Brian Foote forwarded me a link that the “Resonators Mix” was, surprisingly, “Mix of the Day” over at Resident Advisor. So glad that series is starting to have a lifespan. I’ll probably put up on Bandcamp as people have definitely been asking; TBH the “Greatest Hits” have been up there for ages & no one has shut them down (yet) so I don’t think there will be an issue. Hell, I’ve seen Pink Floyd live bootlegs on there; people are definitely utilizing it as their own personal audio Dropbox. ”

“

2/26

In a cruel twist of fate, at perhaps my brokest, Pete Swanson got me in touch with Jed Bindeman from Little Axe, who has a spare copy of the Cildo Mereiles LP for sale. This record (and the precursor 45) has eluded me endlessly; came so close in Rio during Novas Frequencias, but the seller wouldn’t budge on the price, which was maybe double the top-end of what I’ve ever paid for a Creel Pone master-disc. Hadn’t looked in a while, but sure enough the whole thing is now on YouTube, which maybe dampens my sails a little bit about getting the CP works back up & running just for this, plus it’s not exactly the barn-burner I was hoping it would be, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. Let’s see what Jed says. ”

“

2/23

Met Oren & crys & we went over the Graham Lambkin show at Blank Forms which I still hadn’t seen; the new gallery space is beautiful, and has a few adjoining offices which they’ve set up with archving stations. Andrew Lampert came by, as did Randall Dunn, who has just finally set up his own studio in Williamsburg. Back in 2018 I had come close to hiring Randall to help mix down the Silo record; I met him while he was doing sound at a O’Malley/Tim Hecker concert & was impressed with how he got it all to sound. ”

“

2/22

C & I had a nice morning at Fort Greene Park, then met Oren & crys at Colonia Verde for Brunch, which was perfect in every respect. Sarah & Brian ended up going to the concert while I stayed home in Dad mode.”

“

2/21

Oren Ambarchi & crys cole got to town; they’re staying at the house for a couple of days around a duo concert at Public Records. We had just enough time after they landed to make the Lucier / Charles Curtis at Issue, which I spent the majority in the hallway stifling coughs. Went out for a drink with them & Cam Scott; after being bounced around we ended up at Gambrinus, which was less than ideal but we made the best of it. Lawrence Kumpf & his wife made perhaps their first appearance at Issue since the split, and met us along with Charles for a round, which was a nice surprise. ”

“

2/18

The Seedbox I had set up a few weeks back to host my digital music collection off-shore finally finished populating via an EPIC Resilio Sync (20 days! Albeit close to 2TB) & went “live” via a dedicated Plex server. Can’t stress how powerful a notion of having your critical data live elsewhere is right now, and it feels good to choose the third-party/illicit channel over the mass-market one; it’s not like Apple is going to host & seed my .torrents going forward.”

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2/17

C is off of school this week & it’s going to be mostly fairly domestic w/ him, but I did manage to resume listing records up for sale on Discogs, which has been slow & steady, as always. I’m almost to the end of the CP duplicate run, which people have been snapping up.

Cycling ‘74 went way out of their way to promote (both on Twitter AND Facebook) the fact that I’d uploaded the “Travel/Phase” film to YT™ & that led to some nice conversations with people about that moment in time. No lie, I teared up a few times while going through the main 2-hour edit with C (who asked tons of questions); too many extremely great memories of people I no longer talk on the regular (for whatever reason) & great memories that I would otherwise not have were it not for the stills that make up the film. Working this way during the early 2000s (an extremely messy in no way lucid time) was a great idea, and I’ll remember this going forward. ”

“

2/14

I can’t seem to stay off of YouTube™, and after a chance, umpteenth attempt to mount an old corrupted hard drive full of my video projects suddenly succeeded, I went ahead and managed to get mid-res masters of a few long-term visual projects such as the “Phase/Travel” film, the two jellyfish films, “Blue” & “Red”, the “Feedback” film (finally have both soundtracks as well), the video I made for “Modena”, and a bunch of related stop-time & temporally expanded/contracted films of similar origin.

To do this, I forced myself to learn DaVinci Resolve, and I have no idea why I put this off for so long - it’s incredibly intuitive & has crashed but once. I managed to finally process the Brighton Beach underwater film, “Coastline”, as well & put that up on YT as well, which felt great; thought I’d lost that footage for good!”

“

2/13

A nice fellow named Asher got in touch about writing liner notes for a forthcoming reissue of Bengt Hambraeus’ “Concrète & Synthesizer Music” LP, which should be an easy one - I’ve traditionally shied away from writing liners of any kind (too much permanency; opinions on most music tends to stay fluid) but in this case I feel that its prior semi-canonization as part of CP excludes any temporary feeling about it; amazing record & I’ll be glad to see it out in record-shop racks once again.”

“

2/12

The Red Bull/Out.Ra/Fest team got in touch to send links the finished documentary about the “Olaias” quartet project. Busy week! The film turned out beautifully & really captures the considered chaos of that ensemble. Hopefully the doc will get out there a bit & will lead to further opportunities with that group.”

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2/11

Noticed that people (the ever-observant Robert Beatty, natch) had been slowly discovering the CP YT cache, so it felt a good time to start telling people about via Twitter, etc. Amazing reaction, nice to hear how much the news affected people, positively. A couple of moaners about everything being unavailable in an offline way, but that’s to be expected. Kenneth Goldsmith got in touch about hosting said on Ubu, which is a nice idea I may explore later on, and several (Rui Miguel Abreu, Peter Kirn) wrote in about press surrounding it, which is kind of amazing.

Finally located, buried deep in a recovered hard drive, the masters for several videos, including all of the original 2011 GRM footage (inc. the Coupigny & Publison takes) and the masters for the “Phase/Travel” and “Feedback” films, so I put those up on YT (I know, I know) as well, made a page here.

The remaining tile from Intellijel finally arrived, looking forward to spending the day tomorrow getting reacquainted with my Euro setup. Heard from Brian Foote that he’ll be airing my “Resonators” mix on the Kranky NTS show tomorrow, looking forward to seeing how people react there. ”

“

2/10

Finished the CP YT run, which was cathartic. People already seem to be finding them, which has been great to witness. I think I’ll take a little break from the video-generation & focus on getting the new, Intellijel-centric configuration of my live-performance instrument up & running as I’m a bit overdue there. ”

“

2/7

Finally added a Creel Pone page to the site here, wrote a bit about the history & origins of the series for its 15th anniversary. Closing in on 200 videos in the YouTube™ playlist, no signs of slowing down, will likely sprint through the home-stretch.

Peter Rehberg wrote back asking to send him music for a possible Editions Mego release this year, which I’m naturally excited about; I went from having virtually no prospects for a physical release in 2020 to having 3 in the space of a few weeks, which is often how it goes. Wrestling with the idea of a “Redactions” 2LP, although I might try to whittle the “Acid Causality” pieces down into a single LP. ”

“

2/6

Continuing w/ the CP YT bulk upload process. It could be subliminal, but I’ve noticed that neglecting to give the videos titles until after they’ve been fully uploaded, processed, and scraped by their back-end DMCA analysis engines is yielding far less copyright strikes. I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that part of this was textual, but then on Soundcloud when I’ve uploaded Greatest Hits as “063. [REDACTED], “[REDACTED]” (1984)” they’ve still been analyzed & flagged all the same.

Finally picked up the CalSynth 16n Faderbank from the Post Office yesterday & have been inspecting it today. Extremely nice project, great build; the intent is to use it w/ the ER-301 in a small, dedicated guitar-processing setup via I2C, but I was surprised to find that my remote web-image sight-math had it at 48hp; it’s 50hp & won’t fit in the 4ms Pod48x I picked up at Control the other week, so I’ll have to upgrade to a Pod60 (slimline).

News from Danjel Van Tijn that the rest of my 1u tiles are en route; this is everything I need (save for the dedicated 12hp Stereo Input 1u) to get both of the 104hp Performance Cases up & running; just in time for the Frequency Festival at Constellation in Chicago in a few weeks.”

“

2/5

By the end of the day, the Creel Pone YouTube™ playlist will be updated to cover the first half of the catalogue, give or take. Made a little watermark graphic to float over the lower right corner of each video urging folks to subscribe; this was originally a big dollar sign ($) to point out the humility/futility of this concept (esp. when approximately 50% of everything is, apparently, owned by either The Orchard or a similar copyright troll) but this was changed to a big interlaced “K”, then to a nice Unicode bell before resting at the eye-catching tiny blue reel-to-reel tape machine you see there now.”

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2/4

Someone had requested that the long-serving Greatest Hits Soundcloud playlist also be updated, so everything up to #160 was added there as well. Listenership of these on SC has been extremely high, with something like 2M plays across the 111 or so (minus the ones by Prince taken down by DMCA initiatives) that have been up there since the early 2010s. Obviously many of these are people simply looking for the original songs, which is part of the whole grey-area of it. Plenty of great comments on SC, although I’ll be very curious to read the comments on YT as the participatory culture there is far greater. ”

“

2/3

The YouTube™ bug has officially been caught, largely due to the seamless & semi-automatic nature of creating individual video files via Movavi Slideshow Maker 3 (and not a successive version, all of which are somehow worse!) Next up this week is the processing of the entire “Creel Pone” catalogue as a series of single-file full-album uploads; there was a botched attempt in prior years for a complete CP YT run, albeit as individual songs, via a dedicated account, but the steam ran out somewhere in the 30s (it was an immense amount of work, getting a bit too clever w/ the transitions). Made it up to #50 or so then, but I think it’ll be all the way up to #250 by the end of the month.

As an aside; It’s fascinating how the copyright on many of these illicit/grey-market titles has been scooped up by The Orchard, who seemingly have full ownership of many of the otherwise commercially unavailable titles; incredible trolling on their part. Curious where they even acquired the audio data of most Creel Pone titles to scrape! For all of our moral failings on this project to date, I think The Orchard now capitalizing on the click-through monetizations of the YT videos is much, much worse. ”

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1/31

Finished up the Greatest Hits YouTube flood (up to #160); what an incredible slog, but definitely a fun process. People appear to be discovering these anew, which has been fascinating & maybe makes me a bit nostalgic for my early 30s when all of this seemed like a good idea/insomnia treatment. I’m sleeping much better these days, but I might try my hand at making a few new ones, as a treat.”

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1/30

Spent the day rendering YouTube videos of the “Greatest Hits” series, then making a playlist there; all of which was fairly seamless, and dareisay enjoyable. All of this to put the “Resonators” in context; looking forward to the Kranky NTS show airing next month.”

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1/29

Started working on a mix/writing project for Synth Hero around recent post-Creel Pone Early Electronic Music research & listening specific to synth-centric pieces.

Began Discussions with Jon Brien of Important Records about a 2LP pressing of “Heritage” to be followed by the “Generatorss” material in three separate installments. This is a really nice prospect and hopefully there will be news/movement shortly.”

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1/27

Created graphics & videos, then uploaded the first 20 “Resonators” to YouTube, created a playlist, created the project page here on the site, finished the surrounding text.”

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1/1

Memory problems, mostly. Here is an attempt to at least document progress and opportunities taken & ignored, lest the year seem lifeless & free of activity at the end.”