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From: Making Music Your Own -
NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD
Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a new album this fall, and it’s already playing on continuous repeat in my office. This album is surprisingly positive in tone, covering a range between melancholy and upbeat. While still the kings of crescendo-core, this album feels a bit more fast paced with transitions flowing faster than previous albums and more time spent on triumphant riffs.
My favourite song so far is BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD, which starts with some simple guitar and reverb washes before picking up to their trademark guitar, bass, and string based chamber rock. From there it quickly settles into a reflective interlude before building up to a stronger riff then coming back down. This song feels like an encapsulation of Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their finest.
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N.T. Wright on the Lord’s Prayer
If we are truly praying this prayer to God’s honour, we can never simply pray for food for ourselves. We must pray for the needs of the whole world, where millions go hungry and many starve. And already we may sense, bubbling up out of the prayer, the realization that if we truly pray it we might also have to do something about it, to become part of God’s answer to our praying.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1 -
Bryan Jarrell on Self Care
The whole concept of self-care puts the onus of stress management on the individual when the problem is living in a stressful world … Self-care can be a sort of social gaslighting, where we blame humans for struggling in the midst of inhumane conditions. Sometimes, the problem isn’t our inability to measure up to life’s demands: often, it’s the demands of society that should be changed.
Bryan Jarrell, Help Beyond Self Care -
Don Hertzfeldt on Hunting vs Being Fed
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done – it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. “Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you.” No wonder everyone’s depressed.
Don Hertzfeldt, interview with Slate -
Reverb
Status: Built
The key to making great ambient music appears to be drenching the sound in reverb. Based on this, reverb ranked highly for effects modules that I want to build. The design I settled on is Music Thing Modulars Reverb, although I omitted the analog spring reverb circuit and simply built the digital circuit.
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Hildegard of Bingen, The Enlightened Heart
Holy Spirit,
Hildegard of Bingen, The Enlightened Heart
Giving life to all life,
Moving all creatures,
Root of all things,
Washing them clean,
Wiping out their mistakes,
Healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
Luminous, wonderful,
Awakening the heart from its ancient sleep. -
Peter Zimon
Peter Zimon is making some downright beautiful all in one analog syntheizers by combining basic designs from a number of sources. The level of polish on all his projects is astounding, the first version of his Shmoergh project lived in a Ikea flower pot and didn’t look any worse for it.
Peter ZimonZimo’s personal websiteShmøerghFucking cool electronic instruments -
Speaker
Since I enjoy taking my synthesizer out of the house and outdoors, it would be nice to have a speaker module so I can listen to it without headphones.
Clacktronics has a straightforward and simple speaker module which I think I could build off of.
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Remembrance Day in Bankhead
Today I took Dima to see Banff’s ghost town: Bankhead. Through some odd coincidence, we arrived just as a Remembrance Day ceremony was starting at a nearby monument to the residents of Bankhead who lost their lives in war.
It made for a surreal experience, walking through the foundations of old buildings, in the middle of the woods, with a bugle sounding through the trees.