here lie dragons and monsters

i do not lie, tho

hamac303 updates and ramblings

(no predetermined rhythm)

25-08-07 musical session log

i assembled the astrolab and started tinkering with it. A funny thing is there are audio inputs but they can't be used to passthrough, but just to feed sounds to synths so they can filter it.

i planned to use the ms-20 straightaway through that machine but because of that i'm going to do it differently and just add a mini stereo summing mixer if i really want to. Another thing i wanna do is record our sessions with my 2 keyboards improv project partner.

She told me to make an album entirely on that machine. i can't do exactly that but i can use it as the audio source for everything quite easily, and then record it to a DAW and play in loops, or directly build on top of a stereo looper with 4 tracks.

How's it gonna be? Let's try things.

As for the session itself, we initially planned to only do a quick thing but we ended up playing for one hour at loud volume. At some point my partner did a I-V-I cadence and we burst in laughter as if that had been a joke. Then we vibed on that for a while, and went full textural, looking to make screeching sounds out of our EPs, creating acoustic beats that let hair standing before breaking down to long-repeating modal patterns.

The end went tonal on my side, as i played a melodic pattern in D with the right hand as i put it in different harmonic contexts on the left hand, and then it broke down again as i collapsed and crunched and scrunched down the melodic pattern, making it more and more disharmonic, clustered, until only the rhythmic pattern remained.

In the end, we felt emotional and we went to bed happily, after exploring a bit more that synth and figuring we could use the expression pedal to create Chick Corea style slow tremolos.

25/08/06 open sourcing my template engine

Calling it a template engine is a bit of a joke. It's a shell script and a Makefile but is sure does the job. i grew tired of updating a single html page and especially i wanted to not write all HTML tags by hand like i used to. i constantly write using markdown, because it's useful and reminds me of Aaron Swartz, my sibling-in-heart who was murdered by the violence of a greedy system.

This templating system lets you include markdown files and CSS files. It could be used for more things. One thing i'd like to do is inline the images to reduce the number of http queries, as it's actually quite efficient when your payloads are small to limit the number of http headers exchanges. It reduces the overall protocol overhead.

Anyway. drop me a line

25/08/05 [2] guess going to the office

...sometimes sucks. i like speaking with my esteemed colleagues, but some of them are harder to be around to for me. it's not a bad thing in itself, but they speak, they talk together and i cannot tune out of their voice.

i'm aware it's a quirky me thing. i'm used to having the attention and quietness of a crowd that listens intently, and i don't like to speak over other people's voices.

i booked a room, solo, for the end of the day and i'm trying to refocus so that dayjob gets completed. bad luck, there's no nice comfy chair so i'm sitting on the floor leaning against the wall and i'm slowly feeling the focus come back. i killed the AC system so it doesn't blow in my ears or in my mind.

i gave up on masking long ago... i guess?

25/08/05 got an arturia astrolab 88

...and a pair of monitors.

scene piano with everything in a box. weighs 45lb but is a single thing to put in a flight case.

i decided to microblog too. sort of an antisocial network i guess? or rather it's me writing, not me fishing for reactions or anything.

if you want to receive updates, just put this as your homepage or whatever. visit it again, you may be in for a surprise :-)