I will be performing a song or two at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

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!

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.)

Music done for Strawberry Jam 9 and a couple other things.

More info

• Track: Time’s Running Out
• Track: Chilling
• Track: Die, Walküre, Die
• Track: Kairo
• Track: Worrying
• Track: Wandering
• Track: The Advice
• Track: Pull Yourself Together
• Track: Spycraft
• Track: Gone Fishin'
• Track: Rossini Al Dente
• Track: Sex in the Closet
• Track: Sexy Funtimes
• Track: Rumination
• Track: Synthcraft
• Track: Armored Combat
• Track: Women Fear Me, Fish Love Me
• Track: Fishing Is My Cardio
• Track: Diegetic Potato
• Track: A Night on the Town

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Set list:

• 120 MPH
• Safety In Numbers

I will be once again performing at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, this time for the European time slot. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

I will be performing a song or two, depending on avalable time.

Scheduled time is approximate and subject to change.

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?

Here’s some results I got while messing around with it just now:

The way I did these in logic:

1. Create an audio track with the source audio
2. Add a Space Designer plugin, and drag the convolution audio onto it
3. Set the “dry” level to Mute, and the “wet” level to 0
4. Create an empty instrument track, and make an empty region that’s roughly the length of the convolution audio that starts at the end of your source audio (to give it a proper reverb tail)
5. Apply the Mastering Assistant
6. Bounce!

This seems like a really good framework for experimentation, especially for drone tones and ambient soundscapes. I’d be super interested to see what other people come up with!

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Tentative set list:

• Fool in the Middle
• Paper Cuts

• 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.

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Set list:

• Better Than Before
• Comandante C40 with some special mashup fun :)

• 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

Also, I’ve gone ahead and enabled webmention on this site in lieu of comments. The layout is just the defaults from webmention.js. Someday I’ll get around to building a proper comment system instead.

I will be once again performing the song Everybody Calm Down at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, this time for the North America time slot. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

This will be the last time I can perform at Trans Academy Moonlit NA for a while.

• Recreational Love by The Bird and the Bee: Not Bird and the Bee’s best album, but also not their worst. And even their worst album is still pretty darn good!
• The Caribbean: I seem to have gotten some of their music from the various SXSW Emerging Artists collections and it’s all pretty good. Guess I’m going to have to add some of their albums to my wishlist. Conveniently enough they have a discography purchase option, as all Bandcamp musicians should.
• Hotel Valentine by Cibo Matto: I used to be super into Cibo Matto in the late 90s. Viva! La Woman and Stereo Type A were both amazing, genre-defining experiences for me, and I saw them perform live in 1999 which was super amazing. So when Hotel Valentine came out, I bought it immediately, and then proceeded to not get around to listening to it until just now. It’s pretty okay, I guess.
• Warp20 (Chosen): As far as best-of collections of the state of electronic music in 2009 go, this one is super great.

Also, I want to ramble a little bit about the Last.fm yearly wrapup. It’s cool that it tells me my top listens in terms of artists and albums, but it’s a bit annoying that it doesn’t do anything to normalize albums based on their track count. Like, yes, I listened to all 100 tracks from Song Fight!’s A Grand Parade but that doesn’t mean I listened to it 100 times. There’s just 100 scrobbles from it due to my single listen of it.

I wish I could get counts of just albums, not individual tracks, so that I could better figure out which artists I listened to.

I definitely listened to a lot of Green Day, ambienteer, Benn Jordan (particularly the stuff he put in his massive Gumroad drop), and Jeremy Blake. But that’s also because those are artists I happen to own a lot of music of.

For much of the year I didn’t have AudioScrobbler running or forgot to sync play stats from my phone before they got lost forever (although now that I use PlexAmp as my primary mobile player that shouldn’t be a concern going forward), but I also know that I didn’t listen to music for much of it because I was so busy making it. For me, music has historically been what I listen to while working on other things, but since I’m basically full-time as a musician now, that doesn’t leave me a lot of time to listen to stuff, and after a day of working in the studio the last thing my ears need is to keep the fatigue going. So as of late I mostly just listen to music when I’m driving, and I don’t do a lot of that either.

It’s also a shame that the amazing music I heard on the now-departed Radio Free Fedi didn’t make it into AudioScrobbler either. There were some absolute bangers there. RFF was also a great place to get discovered in general. I hope more projects like it emerge and find a more sustainable path forward.

But in the meantime, sharing music discoveries is a big part of why I blog about what I listen to.

I will be performing the song Everybody Calm Down at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

We’re back with one of VRChat’s biggest events throughout the year, and the Furry Hideout’s most important piece of yearly media Dec 29-31!

The regular Furry Hideout will have a portal to the event space, and we hope to see you and your friends in the group instances in VRChat.… pic.twitter.com/GKkwYYa1nx

— Furryhideout (@furryhideout) December 26, 2024

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.

My scrobbles don’t reflect all of this, unfortunately, as I have upgraded my office computer and the last.fm scrobbler wasn’t properly autostarting. I’ve (hopefully) fixed it going forward, at least.

• little fires by miscellaneous owl: Lots of great earnest indie music in various genres
• Heartbreak on Vinyl by Blake Lewis: The sophmore album of my favorite American Idol finalist, with some pretty nice lush electropop/dance vibes on this one
• Fly! by The Flashbulb
• Rock!!!!! by The Violent Femmes
• Verve//Unmixed vol. 3: Some really great jazz classics on this one (and on the whole Verve//Remixed and Verve//Unmixed series, for that matter)
• Song Fight!: Her: This is one of those fights from the era when a lot of folks were bringing their A-game, and there’s some great songs in this one

Thanks!