Sockpuppet Blog.

Happy 10th, Refactor

10 years ago to this day, on my 37th birthday, I released Refactor, which I still consider to be my definitive album.

You can still access its old microsite. (Be sure to click the “play” button in the corner.)

Happy birthday!

Furality is gonna be amazing!

Furality is an annual virtual furry conference that takes place entirely in VRChat. I have a dealer’s den booth this year, booth 816 (second level of the 2D Art + Miscellaneous) section, and I’m super excited!

Last night Furality opened up a dealer’s den preview so that we could check that our booths are set up correctly, and as a treat we got to see a decent chunk of the world and the overall style of the show, and I gotta say, it’s incredible. The Furality team have knocked it out of the park this year, and have really outdone themselves. From what I’ve seen this isn’t just going to be an incredible con, it’s going to be an amazing VRChat experience, and I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of it.

If you’re at all in VRChat (even if you aren’t at all interested in furry stuff), or heck, even if you’ve been thinking of trying VRChat out, I highly recommend coming to Furality Somna so that you can experience the joy. Also, you don’t need a VR setup to use VRChat! it just helps with the immersion (although just a warning, if you play it on desktop or cellphone you’ll probably end up really wanting to get a headset anyway).

Also, I plan on doing various impromptu shows at various places throughout the con, and if you see me wandering around, feel free to come up and say “hi!”

Some thoughts on Bandcamp Friday

Bandcamp Friday is a thing that Bandcamp started in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, primarily to help out performing musicians who no longer had access to live performance venues due to the COVID lockdowns. It was a very nice gesture on their part, to help offset some of the suck of the world affecting musicians by waiving their cut of the purchase price.

As someone who wasn’t a performing musician at the time, I still benefitted from it, as it gave me an occasional tiny boost to my (already tiny) music income.

But at this point it’s an entrenched tradition and it’s actually causing more harm than good. It might be time for it to end, or at least be reconsidered.

Read more...

Bandcamp Friday, May 2025 edition

Hey y'all! It is Bandcamp Friday once again. Today is the best day to support musicians on Bandcamp (including myself) as Bandcamp waives their cut of the sale price of all music for this day only.

Bandcamp have recently made some default pricing changes and based on their reasoning I have opted to change my own pricing strategy (as hinted at previously). Previously I had a kind of complicated and largely vibes-based approach to pricing, but it was doing me no favors. From now on, all of my albums will be $1/track up to $9, and individual songs will be $1.50/track, with occasional exceptions for certain considerations.

Anyway, for this Bandcamp Friday, you can get 25% off anything in my catalog (including my full discography, which is also always discounted) with the discount code “MAYDAY25.”

Also, as usual, here’s some of the stuff I’ll be buying this month:

And here’s some of my other recommendations for things I already own:

Upcoming shows and appearances

Hey y'all, I’m a very busy bee, with a lot of stuff happening all at once over the next couple months.

This weekend, on Saturay, May 3, my real-life choir is doing a fundraiser show. I will be performing in two pieces, singing tenor in a rendition of Vienna Teng’s The Hymn of Axciom and doing a minimal jazz piano rendition of my own song Repair My Heart.

Then in June, I have a whole bunch of stuff going on:

  • Furality is taking place from June 5-8, and I have a booth in the dealer’s den, where I plan on having some small impromptu performances; you might also find me out and about throughout the rest of the convention, in which case, feel free to come by and say “hi!”
  • My choir will be performing with Rainbow City on June 6 (which I may or may not be a part of, depending on how badly this conflicts with Furality)
  • I will be performing a Pride show with Refraction VR on June 7 May 31!
  • The choir will be doing a preview of our pride show on Vashon Island on June 13 (which I will be a part of)
  • We are also doing our full pride show on June 20 and 21 in Seattle

And I may have another concert happening in June as well! Watch this space! (or better yet, my show calendar)

Bulk-editing Bandcamp per-track pricing

Bandcamp recently rolled out bulk editing for albums, but unfortunately it only lets you bulk-edit album prices, rather than the prices of individual tracks within an album. Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to do this with a little Javascript.

For each album that you want to change the prices on:

  1. Open up your album’s editor

  2. Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)

  3. Paste in this bit of code (assuming you want to set the price to 1.50 per track in your local currency; change the '1.50' to whatever value you want it to be otherwise) and press Enter:

    document.querySelectorAll('input.price[name^="track.price"]')
    .forEach(e=>{e.value='1.50';e.dispatchEvent(new Event('change'))})

  4. Verify that the prices are the way you want them and then click “update album”

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Bandcamp Friday for March 2025

Today, March 7, 2025, is Bandcamp Friday! That means that for the next 23.5 hours as of the time of this posting, Bandcamp waives their cut of the purchase price. So if you have any music you want to buy on Bandcamp, today is the best day to do it.

To that end, I have a new album out, which you might be interested in if you’re seeing this post.

Other than that, there’s what I’ll be buying today:

  • The entire discography of Vulthra
  • I’ll be doing catchup on err:Rawr’s discography
  • And the entire discography of Balance Lost, a Song Fight!er of note

Sharing is caring!

Fixed some template stuff

For folks who follow this site directly on bluesky you might have noticed that the view there has… problems. I’m mostly posting this to see if some of those problems have been resolved.

Unfortunately, as things stand, bluesky is really just not a great substitute for a proper feed reader, so I’d suggest getting one of those instead rather than trying to have a single social feed be your one view to the universe.

(Following my actual bluesky profile probably is a better experience overall, anyway.)

A new ambient experiment fixation

Convolution reverbs are pretty neat. Basically you take a recording of a space’s acoustics and then the reverb characteristics of that space can then be applied to any audio signal. I usually use convolution reverbs for most of my music, since it’s a lot easier for me to use someone’s recorded impulse response of, say, the Ulm chapel than to fly to Germany to record there in person.

You can also use recordings of things other than acoustic spaces for interesting effects; Logic’s Space Designer comes with a whole bunch of impulse responses that are used for various effects, including drum transformers, ghost rhythms, and other such things. A lot of my more sound designy stuff makes heavy use of this.

But what if you use whole songs as an impulse response?

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Minimal listens for January 11-17

Gosh, I almost forgot to post this, but that’s because I haven’t actually listened to much music this week. Dunno why. But here’s some things I heard:

  • The We ♥ Katamari soundtrack; specifically I have an old gamerip that unfortunately has the full per-level runtime tracks which get kind of old after a while, but it was surprisingly fun to listen to while driving for some errands
  • Psychic Realty (Revisited): An amazing remix album of one of Jeremy Blake’s already-amazing albums
  • … and that’s it, that’s everything I listened to this week

Sometimes I just gotta give my ears a break, I guess.

Music listens for January 4-10

I didn’t listen to much music this week, but here’s some stuff I enjoyed:

  • Benny Benassi - Electroman: I bought this because “Good Girl” was on Lumines Electric Symphony for the PS Vita, pretty much the only game that I spent any significant amount of time playing on that doomed system. The album as a whole seems like it’s a lighthearted parody/homage of all of the dance music styles that were popular in 2011. Or at least I found a lot of humor in it.
  • Disappear by Revengeday
  • The Rainbow Disconnection by Sad Kermit: I absolutely cannot believe that this album is allowed to continue to exist. I could have sworn it was DMCAed at one point. Also back when I got it, it was a free download from the artist’s website, I think. There’s more tracks that have been added since my acquisition.
  • The Weekend EP by This Mess is Mine
  • A Certain Distance by Lusine: some amazingly lush electronica that makes my ears very happy
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What I’m listening to

I feel like doing these approximately once a week is a pretty nice cadence. So I think I’ll start scheduling these to go up every, say, Saturday. Yes, that sounds good.

Here’s some musical-listening highlights since the last one:

  • two months of moments by glaciaere: some really nice heartfelt FM synthy stuff that spans a bunch of different genres
  • Six Foot Moon by Distractor: 80s nu-wave for the modern era
  • Full Of It by Summer Cannibals: Some great female-led power punk rock, I’m totally here for it
  • Black Box of Jazz: This is an amazing compilation of some of the best music that jazz has had to offer. I happened upon this collection when I was visiting Hong Kong back in 2000, and it’s an essential for anyone who has any interest in the genre.
  • The Great Concert of Charles Mingus: Speaking of jazz, this one is also particularly amazing, although it probably helps to be familiar with a bunch of jazz already to fully appreciate some of the musical humor in it. Mingus is one of the jazz greats.
  • Pivot by Amoeba (one of the many projects of Robert Rich): I’m not sure how to describe this as anything other than “experimental rock.” There’s some great grooves in this accompanying some great noises. I’m not sure how I ended up with this in my collection (way back in 2019 if my file timestamps are to be believed) but I’m glad I did.
  • Duo de Bois: Six Sonatas for Flute and Violin: It’s a shame Magnatune has ceased operations because they had some really excellent classical music on offer. This is an excellent recording of a great classical work. I can only seem to find it for sale on Apple Music these days but it’s licensed CC by-nc-sa so it should be possible to obtain freely. If only there were a way.
  • Drum Machine Dreams by Stevia Sphere: Nice lush ambient music to fill your ears to
  • Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths: This album was the big hotness when it first came out a couple years ago, and it’s well-deserved.
  • FREQUENCY gift by glitched puppet: Really awesome lo-fi abstract ambient chillwave groove things.
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Music (re)discoveries

It’s been a week since the last one of these, and I figure I should post some more albums that I’ve listened to recently.