I was interested in re-engaging with my prior Twitter habit without falling down a rabbit hole every time I went to post something. Since I’m trying to blog more, I figured I could send summaries of my posts to Bluesky.

Bluesky has an easy-to-use API with good documentation. It doesn’t even require registering an OAuth app – you just login with your username and password - which reminds me of how simple it was to make Twitter bots back in the day.

Building upon the CMS I built for this blog, I added a script to post my most-recent entry to Bluesky. The script keeps track of which posts are already on Bluesky by adding a “bsky_uri” parameter to the post’s front matter. I used Python’s schedule library to run it every hour.

Over the last month, I borrowed the excellent MFB-522 Drumcomputer from the Synth Library. The MFB-522 is an all-analogue drum machine that’s quite similar to the Roland TR-808 except I’ve always thought the hi-hats sounded better.

I previously owned this unit, but felt more people would get use out of it if I gave it to the Synth Library. However, I always regretted not recording its sounds before I did. So when I saw it was available last month, I took to the opportunity to check it out :).

I ran the samples through a SoundCraft mixer with a bus that included a Warm Audio WA273-EQ Pre-amp (basically a Neve 1073 clone) and a FMR Audio RNC1773 compressor, which served mostly as a limiter. The samples were recorded in stereo but also exported in mono.

You can download the resulting sample pack from my new samples page. I plan on sporadically adding more in the future.

Speaking of the Synth Library, I’ll be hosting another Floating Synth Room later this month featuring the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. Hope to see you there!

Light and Sound Design is a treasure. One of the few remaining DIY spaces in the city, it features a vintage sound system sourced in part from Magick City (RIP) and custom light installations built by the volunteers that run the space. Ascending the LED strip-lit stairs last night, Amanda and I came to see Ayanna Heaven, a local DJ and radio host on WKCR who I booked last summer to play Solar System.

LS&D is a communal effort and their Thursday shows - Present Sounds - feature meals made by volunteers for purchase on an honor system. Last night, Kim made an excellent Kimchi stew sourced from homemade Kimchi to which he added sunflower seeds because he “likes the crunch.” While Present Sounds tends to highlight experimental and ambient artists, Ayanna focused on Dub, Reggae, Funk, R&B, and Soul. I was surprised that many people fell asleep on the mattresses laid out on the floor, as my head was continually nodding throughout the set.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

• Bobby Hutcherson - Montara (The Roots Remix)
• Dorothy Ashby - Come Live With Me
• Hiatus Kaiyote - Sparkle Tape Break Up (Mndsgn Remix)
• Augustus Pablo - Say So
• Nu Genea - Stasis (Calm Before the Storm) [feat. Tony Allen]

This year, I’m going to try to use this blog more. Inspired by Simon Willison’s daily link blog, I’m going to try to at least post one thing here a day. It may be a link, it may be a song, it may be a movie or book. It probably won’t involve much introspection or analysis. The point, as Simon puts it, is that:

the value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).

Watching: Perfect Blue

Listening: John Beltran - Ten Days of Blue

Seeing: Ayanna Heaven and Loum Present Sounds

Reading: Kaliane Bradley - The Ministry of Time

I was first introduced to Raven Chacon at Dronefest last year when he performed a transfixing three hour noise set involving hyper-directional speakers. By manually adjusting their position, often at high speeds, he created disorienting effects of laser beams or overdriven insects buzzing around the circular space. I had never seen or heard anything like it and instantly became a fan.

I’ve since seen one other of his compositions performed in which a quartet soundtracked one of his graphical scores for which he is well known.

This piece, currently on display at the Swiss Institute in NYC, trades a graphical score for the shapes of the rolling hills surrounding the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, which was formed 1.25 million years ago when a Volcano erupted (it’s also 15 miles from the location of the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the Atomic Bomb was developed).

In the piece, four singers are positioned around a small pond, each facing in a different direction. The “singers slowly rotate and while scanning the horizon line, singing the contour of the landscape.” The resulting sounds are haunting and beautiful, as the overlapping voices gradually shift between harmony and dissonance, evoking the tension between the tranquility of the landscape and the violence of the forces that created it.

Joe Delon included John and I’s release last year in his 2023 roundup and gave us a kind writeup. Always nice to be included in the same breath with anything Davis Galvin does.

A nice review of Castle in the Sky was published in The Fader earlier this month:

With enough curated cheeriness and kitschy synth work, any artist worth their salt can emulate an ’80s sound. But Castles In the Sky takes on the much trickier task of blending the era’s capitalist excesses with its radical elements — art that arose as a response to the brutal injustices of austerity and imperialism masked as American exceptionalism — and projecting the whole mess onto our current technocratic dystopia. Jennifer Vanilla’s dimension of origin is an eternal ’80s, one in which the decade’s false promises are suspended in midair like floating castles. But Grant’s critical eye complicates the premise, letting the weight of the future seep ever so slightly into their avatar’s perpetual daydream.

Walking through Highland Park, a flock of starlings swarmed overhead.

Caught a replay of this mix on The Lot Radio this afternoon and noting it here for the archive :)

I’ve been trying to use social media less and this site more. The hope is to keep a more thorough, short-form log of stuff I’ve read, watched, made, eaten, thought about, etc. However, since the site is a Jeykll-backed static site, I previously had to be at my laptop to post a new entry.

While there are more sophisticated options for managing Jekyll sites, I really just wanted to simple webform to post a new entry which I could access from my phone.

After a few hours of hacking, I put together a simple FastAPI endpoint which performs the following operations:

• Accepts a title, list of categories, post body, an image or video, and an API key for security.
• Pulls the latest version of this site’s repo from GitLab.
• Resizes the image and/or video using ffmpeg
• Generates a jekyll-formatted markdown file and writes it to the appropriate directory.
• Commits the changes and pushes them back to GitLab.

Since this site uses GitLab CI to publish new changes, the new post shows up in 1-2 minutes.

Some things I’d like to add in the future:

• Auto-dithering of images to reduce page size like lowtech magazine. (On the note of reducing page size, there’s some pretty minimal Javascript running that uses JQuery which I could probably scrap).
• Add an “edit” button to each log entry so I can fix typos, or even have log entries that grow over time.
• Some sort of comment-via-email functionality? (this is half-baked).

Here are links to the form and the source code.