Thursday, April 24, 2003
Feels like I’ve been running around much more than normal this past week. Not fun-fun run-around (although there’s been some of that) — more task-completion run-around: Get the car inspected. Make sure the Presentation is ready to go. Fly back home from Pennsylvania. Pay the traffic ticket. Find time to get some work taken care of. Etc.
Now I’ve taken a few minutes to organize my room space: clearing the piles of dirty clothes away from the center of the room where they had been piled as part of the unpacking of my luggage, collecting the miscelleneous pieces of spare paper and trash that has been strewn across my desk onto one small corner of my desk, stacking the books and magazines that normally litter the area around my futon on the shelves. And I can relax. iTunes decided to play the Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Volume II” when I hit the “randomize” button. How apropos.
Jared took back the amplifier he had loaned me a few weeks ago, so I’m left to my headphones. I’ve decided that my ears get bored when they listen to music coming through one sound source all of the time. So the headphones are fine — a refreshing sonic space after listening to so much on the old Alesis Monitor Twos as powered by Jared’s amp. I have a crappy off-brand stereo on the other end of the room that I sometimes listen to, just because I sometimes do want to hear music through crappy speakers. Don’t know why. It’s just refreshing.
Anyway. Part of my decompression involved tinkering around with audio stuff. Before heading to Penna I recorded “Your Face Was Fireworks” into seperate tracks for each synth part. Tonight I took those recordings and plugged them into Ableton Live to see what new possibilities that might offer as far as live performance and expanding my pallette of available sounds. Took a bit of work. About a half-hour of not-so-fun processing audio files and getting crap set up. And the result sounded awful. Out of sync. Of lower sound quality than I’m used to. Ugh. Disappointing. So I fooled with it for about twenty minutes and then put it away. I’ll get back to it later, no doubt.
I think now I might do some stretching. Since the ankle-crutches incident I haven’t totally resumed the level of physical activity I had been enjoying beforehand. Haven’t played soccer once. I run once a week (or so), but that’s about it. Stretching feels so great, and energizes the body in such a mellow way — I need to take time to do it more often.
So what else? I think that about covers it.
