![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/tp-7.jpg\")
I haven't forgotten that I committed to making music last week! In fact, I've turned my synths on almost every day this week and noodled a little. I've rearranged things a few times and am probably not done rearranging but I feel good (and nervous) about playing some music live on the internet this Sunday! Probably around 7pm Pacific; I'll blog about it with a YouTube link when I confirm, later this week.
\nI'll play for about an hour, like I used to. I want to try to make something that doesn't sound like minor variations on a single four-bar loop the whole time, like I also used to, but I do want it to feel cohesive. I'm treating it like so many of the jazz and jazz-like live shows I've seen recently, where there is lots of improvisation but it's the same few players with their individual instruments the whole time.
\nThe specific "players" I've chosen are:
\nDigitakt II for drums. I'll set up about a dozen different organic-sounding samples and stick to them for the whole set, but try to introduce some of them later on to bring some interest and novelty. I am considering pre-writing a few patterns that I can flip between throughout the show, making heavy use of probability and the "Fill" feature for a lot of variation and surprises (for you and for me). I want this to not sound like house music, which means the bass drum will not be so prominent, and it probably won't be the lowest-frequency sound in the mix. (That'll be the bass.)
\nThe bass is set up right now with an Erica Synths DB-01, because it's very immediate and pleasantly limited and has a nice sequencer for quickly generating random patterns in a given scale. Those patterns are not super tweakable so I'm debating bringing in something different for this. I plan to not really mess with the timbre of the bass voice once I dial it in, much like how the timbre of an upright bass kind of just is what it is, so this whole voice might get relegated to one of the tracks on the Digitakt, maybe paired with an external sequencer. Maybe I'll write a little program on the Tulip?
\nThe lead/rhythm/pad voice is more loose. I'm using the Novation Peak into the Hologram Chroma Console into the Hologram Microcosm. That provides a lot a lot of different kinds of sounds and a lot of modulation, which is a little dizzying but should keep things fresh throughout. The Microcosm also has a looper, so I can layer some different ideas together. I'm debating adding another looper at the end of this chain (specifically the TC Electronic Ditto X4, which has dual stereo MIDI-syncable tracks, hell yeah) but that might get even more overwhelming. I'll play this voice with an Arturia Keystep mk2, which has a sequencer as well as some generative features to "mutate" a sequence randomly in scale.
\nA microphone (Shure SM58) into a vocal processor (TC-Helicon PERFORM-VE) into an Empress ZOIA Euroburo running the Loop Forest patch by Jeremy Blake. This is for vocals! I'm gonna sing maybe! I chose a poem from which I will recite excerpts and riff. The PERFORM-VE also has a looper so I can get some stuff going, and the ZOIA patch produces lots of unsynced micro-loops for texture. I might also use a trumpet! I haven't really played trumpet in decades but I exhumed mine yesterday and while my tone is not good, I definitely still remember how to play it, so that remains an option.
\nAnd that's it! It's kind of a lot to keep track of but for most of the performance I plan to be turning different drum voices on and off every few bars, fussing with the bass pattern also every few bars, humming or vocalizing kind of throughout hopefully without thinking too much about it, and then mainly messing with the lead voice. That should be where most of the "ear candy" is, lilting over the foundation of the rhythm section.
\nI didn't really plan to write this up in so much detail but that's blogs, baby. And that's all I'm gonna write this week! See you Sunday! I'll share the recording of that afterwards also in case I don't see you Sunday. Bye.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-16T01:58:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1776129360", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1776129360", "content_html": "20 years ago today I uploaded Capture to YouTube. At 38,000 views it is my most popular YouTube video by an extreme margin, but I think the only thing that is remarkable about it is that it has been around a long time!
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-14T01:16:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-14", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-14","title": "Week in Review #14: Project Roundup", "content_html": "It's Wednesday so I'm back on schedule! The last update was just a couple days ago but I kind of stagger the things I talk about week-to-week (strategically?) so there's plenty to fill in another entry in this old blog. Specifically, today I want to recap what I've got in progress. I'm constantly bouncing between projects and they rarely overlap at all, so it's easy to lose track of something that was all I could think about days earlier.
\nI should give this thing a name. I talk about it a lot, almost every week, and it's taking up most of my idle imagination time. I think that's because it's so open-ended, which is fun, but I'm also kind of running out of patience for just idly thinking about what this could be. I need to focus it down a little, probably specifically on the music performance part.
\nThere was a time a few years ago where I was improvising live music on YouTube for an hour almost every week! I miss that a lot. This could be a natural evolution of that practice if I steer it that way. Let's say that blogging about it like this is me setting an intention to do so. In fact, let's say that next weekend, some time in the range of April 17–19, I'll make music live on the internet! Yeah!!! See you there!
\nI usually think of this as "The Kid," which is nice because it reminds me of the Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith album of the same name. You've seen the 3D mockup for this. I could just start building it. I think it won't be my favorite piece of installation art in my portfolio but since I started doing this kind of thing in 2016, I've been aching to make more than than one thing a year. I'm committed to Halloween in the yard annually, so this could be number two. (Technically last year I did actually do two things if you count the window displays I made for my friends' shop, and I think you should.)
\nThis has a light deadline associated with it. If it's going up this year, ideally it happens at the end of April, which is halfway to Halloween. I wouldn't want to be working on this past the end of May at the very latest, because I've got some other plans this Summer and then that starts to dig in to Halloween production time!
\nI don't talk about this much but it's ever-present, not least because I'm logging into it at least once a week to update my blog. This is my CMS, which has been pretty stable for a while and at least one person who isn't me is regularly using it to update his website without my assistance, which totally rules. Because the project is pretty mature, my work on it has slowed down, but I can't really say it's "launched" because it's not open to the public. There are fewer things to do and the things that are left are pretty big and challenging and need a lot of thinking.
\nMy vision for this project also changes from time to time and I know that once I invite a lot of people in, I'm going to need to be a lot more careful. I upended things with a pretty big transformation a few months ago that was a big improvement, and I think it's due for one more big disruptive change. No timeline for this, but it would be satisfying to finish it. (If you want to try Clear Label, email me! I'll let you in. Just know it's still rough.)
\nThere are lots of other projects that are technically "in progress," but these are the ones that seem to stick from week-to-week. Surely this list will change at some point before I know it, and it likely won't be because one of these things is finished, but that's okay.
\nI didn't plan it this way but it's neat that these three ongoing projects map to my big three areas of interest—music, themed entertainment, and websites. That's nice.
\nHere's hoping I don't forget that I committed to streaming music next weekend!
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T19:50:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-13", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-13","title": "Week in Review #13: Last week, this week", "content_html": "I am still committed to a reliable weekly Wednesday cadence for these reviews even if sometimes they are late. This one is so late that it's almost time for the next one. I was sick! I had some kind of stomach thing and was glued to the sofa and/or bed for days and days. I'm feeling mostly back to normal now, so don't even worry about it.
\nLet's talk about Graham Dunning. I watched hours and hours of Graham's musical performances while I was sick. If you're not familiar with his work, his most recent video (published six hours ago as I write this!) is a great introduction:
\nMechanical Techno Live - Iklectik Peckham Levels - 7 March 2026
\nGraham makes what he calls "mechanical techno," playing vinyl records that have been physically altered to play fragments of sound that loop through constrained tone arms, but also using the rotation of the turntable to trigger physical switches and create synchronized musical sequences on the fly. It's hard to imagine something that is more my shit.
\nOne week ago today he posted this video that is a more clinical exploration of some of the techniques he's developed:
\nMechanical Techno 6.1 Technical Developments (PhD documentation)
\nI was absolutely geeked the entire time I watched this. Every new idea he introduces is a surprise in some way, a creative departure from the work it's building upon. Every once in a while I realize I'm observing something that could only exist because someone focused and thought really hard about one thing for a really long time. I'm envious of the discipline. (Makes me want to pursue a degree.)
\nSpeaking of me, this has all got me thinking a whole lot about my still-very-unknown live show idea. In that document I actually link to one of Graham's very very early videos. I think at the time I had no clue how far he had come. My theoretical show is quite different from Graham's work, but it feels really closely related.
\nThis blog post from Brian inspired me to order a Tulip Creative Computer while I was bopping around New York. It arrived a couple days after we got home and I've been messing with it. It's fussy but it's fun! Physically it's a pretty generously-sized touch screen with USB and MIDI ports; inside it's an ESP32 with a MicroPython REPL and a really powerful synth engine. It feels like exactly the right vehicle for a piece of music gear I've wanted to make for a long time, a novel sort of MIDI sequencer with some unusual controls and interaction schemes. Having this big touch screen means I can build in a lot of visual feedback and experiment with different control layouts, and the MIDI ports mean I can quickly add some more tactile controls too. (Also it's all standalone. I could even install a battery in this thing.) The coolest part to me is that if I come up with something compelling that I think other people might enjoy, I can direct them to pick up one of these cheap pre-made kits rather than having to instruct them on how to manufacture something from lower-level components or (gasp) make something myself. More on this pretty soon, I think.
\nThat's all for now. Weird little organic looping sequences. That's last week's theme. The jasmine is in bloom so I'm going to go smell it. See you in a couple days!
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T20:31:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-12", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-12","title": "Week in Review #12: The Blog Apple", "content_html": "Hello Blog. I've been in New York as you know. We got to the airport very early in case the TSA situation was too bad, and it was bad but not as bad as we planned, so I've got some time to talk to you now. I am not going to recap the whole trip simply because I don't feel like doing so but I will share two places I visited, both on Thursday!
\n
In the morning I went to Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum on the Upper East Side, for Art of Noise. It's a showcase of the history of how we experience music through design both graphic (show posters, album covers) and industrial (stereos, Walksmanses). The exhibit was designed by Teenage Engineering, which meant that there was a large seating area with bright blue benches and built-in TP-7s, each inflated to an aluminum chunk about the size of an LP cover. The motorized platter and controls were still itty-bitty, just anchored in a big metal slab. I've seen demos of these on YouTube but I'd never played with one myself. The vinyl-like playback controls are a fun gimmick.
\n![\"Eight](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/choir.jpg\")
Also on display was the full cast of Teenage Engineering's Choir series, which are abstract wooden figures depicting various cultural stereotypes that sign and improvise together, allegedly. They sounded like glorious shit, a step or two less sophisticated than HAL 9000's singing voice or Apple's singing text-to-speech voices from the 90s (or earlier?). I walked into their little room as another patron was reassuring the choir, unconvincingly: "Hey, you guys are great!"
\n![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/time-flies.jpg\")
Perhaps the most interesting part of the exhibition was this thing I'd never seen that I guess Teenage Engineering built for Virgil Abloh for a Coachella DJ set called "Time Flies." It looks totally custom and the surface certainly is, but it includes consumer-level products embedded in chunks of aluminum, not unlike those special TP-7s installed a few feet away. On the far left you can see a POM-400; indeed on the far right there are four TP-7s lined up in a row; in the center is a two-channel DJ mixer of some sort, and flanking it are halves of a pair of CDJs. I say "halves" because most of the space is taken up by what I think are custom jog wheels, and the screens are cleverly (but not-ergonomically) off to the right side in their own panel.
\nI swear there was stuff in this exhibit that wasn't just Teenage Engineering products but you're not gonna learn about them on this blog!!
\n![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/listening-room.jpg\")
The real highlight for me was two floors below: HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, a specially treated room in the historic mansion featuring "a large-scale, handmade audio system by multi-disciplinary artist Devon Turnbull." There were maybe a dozen seats in front of these enormous, enormous speakers, and it sounded amazing. Some of the music sounded like no recorded music I've ever heard, like the sounds from individual parts of a drum kit were originating from different places in the room. I spent an hour and a half just listening to records in here. Of particular note was Jeff Parker's Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, which I realized at some point was recorded at a jazz bar about fifteen minutes from my house. Those pseudo-multi-channel drums were being drummed by a drummer I've seen drum his drums in person many times before! I've blogged about him! I'm no audiophile but this room is worth the price of admission, I think.
\nLater that same night was a very different kind of multisensory experience as Amy and I attended Masquerade, the new immersive re-mount of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. It's good!
\nWe are both big fans of immersive theater: we saw Sleep No More like twelve times (or more?) before it finally closed and Life and Trust, the unofficial sequel, twice before it also closed without ceremony. (We happened to be in town the week it suddenly disappeared about a year ago; our second and last visit was just a couple days earlier.) Masquerade is pretty clearly trying to fill the void these shows left, and it's frankly not really like either one of them in any way except the most superficial: audience members mostly stand for the duration of the show and move from room to room while wearing masks. It's "on rails," not unlike Then She Fell, perhaps the third most notable long-running immersive production in NYC (which we sadly only saw once), meaning there's only one way to experience it, and that one way is carefully guided by ushers throughout, compared to the free-roaming, open-ended nature of the other immersive shows I mentioned.
\nThis is also still The Phantom of the Opera. Imagine that each scene change includes walking up or down a flight of stairs as a shambling group and you've basically got it. This adds a little visceral extrasensory experience but some parts fall a little flat as they seem to struggle between making the audience feel cool and making the audience understand the plot of the musical. I can understand not wanting to stray too far from the source material but I think Masquerade would be stronger creatively if it took some bigger risks.
\nThe sets are exciting, the performances are pretty great (it's a lot of the same cast from the Broadway run of the original show), the music is good if you like the music of The Phantom of the Opera (I mostly do), and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I hope they make some tweaks before I do. (Smaller audiences would help the flow a lot. Rearranging some of the sets in physical space would also help but that's not really possible lol).
\nAnyway time to get on a plane! Bye for now!
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-29T23:00:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1774026060", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1774026060", "content_html": "I saved and formatted all my blog posts from 2003-2005 and feel weird after having read them. There's not much of value there but it would be funny to put them back on my site. Also realized I could still get a copy of my Xanga archive from Xanga before realizing I had already downloaded this 10 years ago. From my own website to Xanga to Livejournal to Facebook to Tumblr to my own website again, I've been blogging pretty continuously since 2003. And it's been mostly garbage!
\nI started writing this in my journal but decided to publish it here for the love of blogging. (As I write this, "here" is still Obsidian, but now I am going to paste all of this into my CMS.)
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-20T17:01:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-11", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-11","title": "Week in Review #11: A little plastic guy","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/plastic-guy.jpg", "content_html": "One of the next things to do for my diorama, and like the main thing to do, is build the characters. I've been debating different techniques and materials and knew I wanted to make use of my 3D printer to fabricate joints for their knees and elbows and hips and shoulders and wrists and necks and ankles and so on. They're basically really articulated actions figures, so I was looking around at the state of the art for this and found this model and just sent it to my printer without thinking too much about it. It was only going to take 90 minutes but I started it just before bed, kind of expecting something would go wrong because I haven't turned the printer on since October. I woke up to this:
\n![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/photos/plastic-guy.jpg\")
Wow! This came right off the print bed like so, in two parts. I needed to snap the head onto the body but everything else was designed to be "print-in-place," meaning there's no assembly required there are some tiny tiny bits of plastic between the moving parts that are designed to break away the first time they're stressed, so after a satisfying series of pop-pop-pops you've just got a little guy. It reminds me of STIKFAS and the figure I had in high school that lived atop the hulking CRT monitor of the family computer.
\nSeeing how easy this was, I'm thinking I need to seriously think about how much functionality the printer can afford me for this project. I know I don't want any visible 3D-printed parts, but I ought to consider modeling and printing whole armatures for each figure. An alternative I had been considering is using rope or fabric for the joints, like a cloth doll or a marionette, and obviously that would still work, but this technique gives me something precise and repeatable, with a range of motion that is easier to control and limit in realistic ways.
\nThe ratings for the Bigmode Game Jam have been revealed. Here's what people thought of Loose Leaf, my open world rhythm game walking simulator:
\nVery original, not very fun. Considering how long I struggled to land on a satisfying concept and how little time I left to develop that concept into a proper game, this feels very fair! I still want to revisit this game at some point and/or something like it, probably with real 3D graphics. But still programming it from scratch without and engine, that part was too much fun.
\nI spent more time thinking about my musical performance idea over the weekend and recorded a little song. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it represents a successful experiment in balancing composition and music-playing that I will try to explain forthwith:
\n![\"A](\"/assets/images/dark-green.png\")
I created seven tracks in Ableton Live each with at least two clips: one totally silent, then variations of a rhythm or melody, generally organized from more sparse to busier. Live's Clips are mutually exclusive within a track, so starting one will stop another one that's already playing. Playing a clip on a track doesn't affect clips playing on any other tracks, so different parts of a song can ebb and flow independently. Each clip was set to legato with no quantization, meaning that it can be triggered at any moment and launch immediately, but it'll stay in time with the previously-playing clip—triggering the clip on the third beat of a bar, for example, means the clip will start playing from the third beat of its first bar.
\nThe final important part of this is using a Launchpad, which is a grid of buttons that correspond to the clips in Live. This way I can really quickly skip back and forth between clips on multiple tracks at the same time, writing a song from individual parts on the fly.
\nThe next thing to try is composing these clips on the fly, while the song is playing, so I can transition from one "song" to another seamlessly without knowing what that second song will be until it begins. There are lots of different ways to approach this and I think the easiest option for me might require moving to hardware. I'm particularly thinking about how track mutes work on the Pyramid. (If you're thinking about my stage show and wondering how this applies, imagine that instead of a Launchpad button it's, I don't know, Chuck E. Cheese's nose.)
\nYesterday I visited House of Kong, the Gorillaz immersive walkthrough. I was delighted by it; it felt really lush and expensive. The sets were great, and seeing how all the illustrated costumes and props from the Gorillaz universe translated to the real world was fun, but I think they overdid it with the headphones! The whole thing is on-rails and guests are guided from room to room by an apparatus not unlike what you might borrow for a museum audio tour. It sounded very good throughout, but more than any other critique I might have, I wanted more diegetic sound.
\nThere's one really clever part where Murdoc is pacing behind us and we hear him talking but can't see him, because the lights went out but also because we're kneeling at an altar and physically can't turn around. There's a panning effect on the headphones track, and it works, but if his voice was from a speaker in the room—even from a speaker that was moving in the room, back and forth, maybe accompanied by a second speaker closer to the floor playing footsteps—it would have felt so much more real. Overall the experience really teases the idea that the members of the band are just out of sight at all times, but that idea often felt like it was being undercut by the technical choices, and it required a little more suspension of disbelief than I hoped.
\nNow that I think about it, I don't think there was a single moving effect in the whole thing. Lots of light cues and videos, and the sync was pretty perfect as far as I could tell, but no motorized props or anything. So what I'm suggesting would have been a huge departure, not to mention that speakers require soundproofing and most of the walls between rooms were just curtains, but what's my $49.50 for if not some precarious mechanical contraptions?
\nAnother lasting effect of the show was the smell. I think maybe three of the scenes had a unique scent in them, and by the end they all kind of mixed together on my hair and skin and clothes into something I can only describe as haunted house. It made me nostalgic for Halloween Horror Nights and reminded me that I gotta get a ticket for Fan Fest Nights which is about a month away!
\nWe're going to New York City, New York for one week starting Monday and have lots of theater lined up. Everything we've already booked is actually happening after next week's blog post so you'll hear about it in two weeks, but I will surely have already spent a day at The Met so I can tell you about that, maybe. The temperature in LA as I write this is 93°F; the temperature in NYC is 32°F. Uh oh!
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-19T00:15:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-10", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-10","title": "Week in Review #10: Causing a Scene","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/attractions/kid-render-03.jpg", "content_html": "I was going to make a joke in this week's Week in Review about it being Friday but I ended up not even writing this until Friday so it's not a joke anymore. It's real life.
\nThe new Gaming PC is kinda cool, I got to play PEAK as foretold and had a good time! I'll do it some more! I am sorry to see that the Windows/PC ecosystem has not really improved in the twenty years since I've engaged with it and in many ways has gotten worse. Why are all the Windows card games now bundled into one program with microtransactions? Why would I want to log in to Minesweeper with my Xbox account? What have you done?
\nAs far what I've done, here's the latest render of my 3D model:
\n![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/attractions/kid-render-03.jpg\")
As a reminder (or for the first time if I didn't adequately describe this before), this will be an animated diorama that sits in my front yard for a few weeks after I build it. It's designed as part of a larger story but I want to present it on its own as a kind of still life, like a living genre painting.
\nI made this in Blender using a couple free models, namely this human and this dog. I started modeling a human myself and it wasn't going well and that's not really the point of this exercise. The real characters will be a little more interesting and unique and I'll sculpt them by hand.
\nI'm going to continue to fuss with this model a while, take some virtual reference photos of it in the yard to confirm what size it should be, and then start fabricating! I'm scared of that part but I think it will be fun. (I was scared of this part too and it's been really fun.)
\nDo you remember my idea for a new show? I mentioned it in my very first Week in Review, nine long weeks ago. I have nothing new to share about it but I haven't stopped thinking about it. This week I pitched it to the Elysian Theater's Spaghetti Festival! I don't expect anything to come of that, it's just not enough of an idea to really be viable yet, but thinking through it enough to explain it on the form got me excited about the concept again. I really really love the Elysian Theater and I feel so lucky to live near it!
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-13T18:19:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1772818980", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1772818980", "content_html": "Dog walking around outside alone: Oh no! Lost dog! Come here buddy, do you have tags? Let me call your owner
\nCat walking around outside alone: That’s an Outside Cat
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T17:43:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-9", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-9","title": "Week in Review #9: The One Where Not Much Happened", "content_html": "A few assorted thoughts from this week! That's all we can ask for.
\nI was planning to do some 3D modeling this past weekend as mentioned in last week's week in review but that simply didn't happen. We saw Sirāt on Saturday afternoon which was very good but also bummed me the hell out for the next couple days! I still want to work on that project, I just haven't yet.
\nSome of my friends were playing PEAK the other day and I got FOMO so I ordered a gaming PC lol. I'd been thinking about getting a Steam Deck for a long time, but I really don't have any interest in the handheld part of it, and a refurbished desktop Windows computer with similar specs was cheaper, so I just bought one. I never want to think about graphics cards or RAM or whatever (I have been a Mac user for almost 20 years) but I like the idea that I could theoretically upgrade this in the future as well. I don't really have any interest in any cutting-edge games but I'm excited to finally make time for like A Short Hike and Return of the Obra Dinn and uhhh Half-Life.
\nI also bought a "string trimmer," more commonly known as a weed whacker [By Whom?]. We hired some landscapers to xeriscape our front and back yards a few years ago but the weeds still come in and they've frankly been out of control! I finally realized that a basic corded-electric weed whacker was $30 at Harbor Freight. My arms are really tired.
\nI've seen the guitarist Dave Harrington perform with a few different combos over the last couple years, mostly at Club Tee Gee and mostly with bassist Billy Mohler and drummer Jay Bellerose. They have one official release together which you can listen to if you want and I frankly think you should. They call their music "jazz" and who am I to say it's not but it was not at all what I expected the first time I heard it. They improvise every time and there's not a ton of song structure as a result, it's more about call and response and trying things and expanding things and…yeah that's jazz, baby. Anyway, this trio was booked to play on Monday night but Dave was sick, so saxophonist Ben Spokes sat in, and it was a revelation. Dave is great and I love the stuff his does with his millions of effects pedals, but hearing just a plain saxophone making every kind of sound it can make was such a joy. I had previously assumed that a sax-bass-drums trio just wasn't enough for a satisfyingly full sound, particularly after hearing this exact combination played by different people a few weeks earlier and feeling like it didn't really hit. I'm sure there are already lots and lots of examples out there that squarely proved me wrong, but it was so so cool to hear one live and up close.
\nFocusing in on the way the bass parts worked in the aforementioned performance gave me a new idea for performing electronic music, or at least an idea that I haven't tried before: Writing a couple short looping sequences and swapping between them or layering them on the fly, so I can add fills or variations without having to actually play them live, but I still get to make those in-the-moment choices. It's something I can probably do continuously with one hand over the course of a tune without too much physical or mental dexterity, leaving my other hand to play a melody. This technique would surely work for percussion too. I've also been thinking about all the varieties of timbres one can get out of a wind instrument and am again/continuously/always thinking about how one can approximate that expression with electronic music. MIDI breath controllers exist, but one answer might be using my voice as a modulation source, sort of like a vocoder but even more abstract. Maybe.
\nEleventy is now Build Awesome and is teasing some kind of forthcoming live editing and publishing platform. I've written about how my platform compares to Eleventy, and one of the big differences I tout is that I offer a nice in-browser editing experience. Their approach seems totally different and I'll be watching it very closely.
\nI thought this one was going to be short, oops. See you next time!
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-05T07:59:00+00:00" } ] }