Subscribe!Has it really been a whole five years since I fired up OBS and Twitch to livestream something from my freshly revamped home recording studio for the first time? Apparently, it is. At the time I had no idea that the refit would result in the seismic change to my creative life that it subsequently turned out to be. Since then, I've produced, mixed, mastered, and released thirty-six full-length albums as a solo artist and another three as part of ICH. And that's just the work I've published; there are dozens, if not hundreds of other pieces which I've written and recorded that have yet to see the light of day.
Given that the pandemic was such a big issue back then, I really didn't expect that I would find myself working with so many other people these days. Not just my friends in ICH, either; I took part in another remote recording session this week. I was using my Geddy Lee signature model Jazz Bass and the latest, beta version of the "Performer" end of Steinberg's VST Connect software and once I'd reset my MOTU audio interface to use a slightly larger buffer size, it worked flawlessly. My client was very happy with the results and so was I.
In the course of the past five years I've gone from being just another old duffer sitting under a cabin bed in his bedroom with a PC to a busy session bassist, jobbing music producer, and front-of-house sound engineer with a reputation that is building nicely (which is quite a surprise in itself, given that my first ever gig in that role only took place in January 2024). I'm not even slightly exaggerating when I say that my technical knowledge has gone through the roof since then. Practical experience has given me all sorts of very useful new skills—but it's also thanks in no small part to more than one stay at Real World Studios and seeing how the top-tier professionals go about doing things. And that is a part of my life which, five years ago, I would never have thought possible in my wildest dreams.
My capabilities have been significantly expanded. Last year I set about being able to offer bands the option of recording on location and as of now, I actually have two separate setups that can do that: one which runs entirely in the box with Ableton Live, and one that's resolutely old school and DAWless with my trusty Korg 32-track digital recorder. To support this, I've built up a collection of microphones that let me cover many more bases than I ever could in the past. I can mic a whole set of drums, and I've made some lovely stereo recordings with a decent Blumlein pair as well as an ORTF rig. I have a loft full of microphone stands and flight cases. But just having the gear is not going to make much of a difference to your skill set by itself, of course. You have to get out there and do the work to gain experience, and that's what I have been focussing on building up over the past two years. The fact that people ask me to do more work for them afterwards speaks for itself; I have another recording session coming up in a few weeks where I will be working on location with a local choir. I'm really looking forward to producing that, particularly as the end result will be used in a theatre in London's West End at Christmas.
Viewing all of this from my new-found perspective as someone who has struggled their entire life as an undiagnosed autistic person, it seems pretty obvious to me that I've finally found a niche in which I don't just fit in, I can actually thrive.
You wouldn't believe how good that feels.
It's Sunday morning, the sun is shining (the roof is kicking out more than 4 kW right now) and last night the clocks went back an hour. The UK is back on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and so is most of my house. Some of my devices update themselves, for which I'm very grateful, but most of them don't. I had to spend quite a bit of time this morning wandering from room to room and setting a selection of electronic and mechanical devices to the correct time: the cooker; the microwave; many clocks and cameras, my land-line telephone, and my synthesizers. I haven't bothered with the Nintendo GameCube in my bedroom yet and I'll probably just not bother changing that one. Even so, I'm quite sure I will have forgotten something and only discover it needs changing in a few month's time. Probably when the clocks go forwards again.
As winter approaches, the temperatures have started to drop noticeably. Even so, when I checked the max/min thermometer on Friday morning I was surprised to see it had been just 1°C (34° F) in the back garden in the wake of Storm Benjamin, which had blown through earlier that day. Last night was nearly as cold, with temperatures dropping to 2°C (36° F). I was glad I'd put a freshly-laundered, heavy blanket on the bed before I turned in.
Maybe it's time that I invested in a proper weighted blanket because more than one person has recommended them to me. Even with the generic, large fleece throw from Ikea that I used last night, I noticed how much easier it was to get to sleep with its weight pressing down on me like a hug. And it was lovely and warm, too...
Last night's Bandcamp listening party went very well. In fact it was the biggest online event that ICH have staged so far as a band. More than forty people had RSVP'd and almost all of them showed up!
More than one person in the chat used the word "epic" to describe how they felt about what they were hearing last night, and that sums up my own feelings about this work perfectly. I don't think Ingrid or Henry expected to end up with something as powerful as what we ended up with; I know I certainly didn't! As I listened to the entire thing once again, I found myself wondering how on Earth I'd managed to help bring about a composition that was so striking and immersive.
Henry asked me yesterday how we could possibly top this as a release. My response was simple, and I truly believe it: we're only just getting started.
Twenty years ago I was blogging about installing the DVD of the Encyclopedia Britannica's 2006 "Ultimate Reference Suite" on my computer, which back then would have been running Windows XP. I never throw anything away, so just now I decided to dig out the box and try installing it on my office machine, which is running Windows 10 (I'm signed up for Microsoft's ESU program, so I won't be installing Linux Mint on it just yet).
To my utter astonishment, the Britannica disc still runs fine (although the text is a bit small now that I'm using dual 4K displays).
I'm going to keep it installed. As AI continues to pollute the Internet it's likely to be increasingly useful to have a reference source which predates ChatGPT rather than placing any reliance on modern search engines, which are becoming increasingly compromised to a quite terrifying degree. Forget asking Google for anything useful; at the moment I find that DuckDuckGo is my best bet when I want to find something, but I wouldn't exactly say I'm particularly confident about the results it returns and whenever I look for an answer to a technical question, the first few web pages I visit are invariably ones which have been generated by AI. They're garbage. The World Wide Web has come to the point—surprisingly rapidly, in my opinion—where you can't trust anything you read on it any more.
As you can see from Henry's cover art at the top of the page, ICH (the ambient supergroup I'm part of) recently released our third album and Ingrid, Henry, and I will be hosting a listening party for it TONIGHT, at 20:00 British Summer Time over on Bandcamp. It would be lovely if you could join us for seventy-six minutes of epic soundscapes featuring gongs, flute, trumpet, Warr guitar, synths and much, much more. It's totally free; all you have to do is click here.
I really pushed the boat out with the production on this album. I was doing things with Ableton Live I've never attempted before and I was able to use an array of fresh mixing techniques that I was privileged to learn first-hand at Real World from masters like Hans-Martin Buff and Tchad Blake.
I might be biased, but I think it paid off. I'd be very interested to know what you think, though. Come and join us this evening!
I'm still testing negative for covid but I'm still under the weather and sticking a test swab up my nose this morning triggered a sneezing fit so intense that my sinuses now feel like somebody's punched me in the face.
Why do we get sick so much more frequently at this time of year? One of most significant reasons is that as the weather deteriorates we don't spend as much time outside and by October in the UK we tend not to have the windows open any more. So I've been breathing dry, unfiltered air and it gets even drier when I blip the central heating system on for an hour or so, as I've done a few times in the last week.
The schools and universities have gone back, too—so viruses can spread across the country more rapidly. As any teacher will tell you, kids are basically just ambulatory disease vectors at this time of the year. I was at a birthday party with lots of them at the weekend, so if one attendee had a cold, they'll have generously shared it with everyone else by now. How kind of them.
The latest edition of the village newsletter just landed on my doormat. It's the 200th issue that CHADRA (the Charfield and District Residents' Association) has published. I've been receiving copies (published quarterly) since I moved here more than thirty years ago and because I'm me, I still have all of mine collected together in a box file in the conservatory. The first issue I have is number 78, which is dated "Winter 1995" and has a message at the foot of the front page wishing everyone a happy new year, but the first edition came out fifty years ago, way back in September 1975.
The village website has a text archive of all the old issues and for me at least, it gives a fascinating glimpse of what the main issues on residents' minds were, all those years ago.
Amazingly, after thirty years the cost of a copy has only doubled: from 25p back in January 1995 to 50p today.
I didn't get any of the things I'd planned to do yesterday done. That sense of "feeling like crap" I mentioned on Sunday morning had blossomed into a full-blown cold by Monday afternoon. I took a COVID test which came back negative, but by teatime I was feeling absolutely miserable: tired, grumpy, and having a sneezing fit every couple of minutes.
Despite this, I was still awake at three o'clock this morning as I got out of bed to find some fresh handkerchiefs and ended up in the kitchen making myself a mug of Lemsip with honey. That seemed to do the trick, and the next thing I remember it was half-past eight. I'm still feeling rubbish, but not as badly as I did yesterday.
I can't remember the last time I came down with a cold. I guess that's one advantage of no longer having to work in an office, where I'd get exposed to everyone else's bugs. Or, indeed, no longer having to work, full stop; my immune system is nowhere near as stressed out as it used to be. But this month I've been out and about a lot more than usual, so it's not really much of a surprise that I've ended up coming down with something.
It's Sunday afternoon. It's a grey, dreich day outside (after a week of consistently high pressure my barometer has plummeted today and it's sitting below 992 hPa right now) and I've just blipped the central heating on for an hour. I've been sitting at this keyboard for the best part of four hours straight (hyperfocus, much?) but I just remembered that I really ought to take a break, so there's a pot of tea brewing in the kitchen. I've had a busy couple of days, but I'm taking things easy today. Read this post, and you'll see why!
On Friday night I drove up to Stroud to catch a performance of an immersive music composition by Adrian Utley called Flow which was being played back through the forty-speaker system in the Brunel Goods Shed—which you may remember I was very taken with last November when I went to see Robin Ince, Clare Ferguson-Walker, and Johnny Fluffypunk do a show there.
While I was queing up to get in, I got chatting to a young singer called Mia (hello!) and she introduced me to a music producer by the name of Mark. We had a really cool conversation about sampling and Mark talked about how he had worked on a track which used the same Isaac Hayes sample as Portishead had done on Glory Box and both he and Geoff Barrow had had the same idea: to spin in another section of Ike's Rap II to stop the vocals coming in—at which point I finally cottoned on to the fact that I was talking to Mark Saunders, and the track he was talking about was Tricky's hit Hell Is Around The Corner off Maxinquaye. Mark also produced Wish for The Cure, Homebrew for Neneh Cherry, and Hat Full Of Stars for Cyndi Lauper, amongst many other fine recordings...
When I got inside I caught up briefly with Adrian and Hans-Martin Buff, chatted some more with Mia and Mark, and then spotted a small gaggle of Real World folks: Faye, Tim and York all said hello and I got a hug from my pal (and Flow's project manager) Katie May.
Flow was intense. In turns dark and mysterious, vivid and rocking, and ominous and even a little bit angry, it seemed to be much shorter than its actual thirty-minute running time. But as people chatted all around me and the bar staff clattered away at the back of the venue, I ended up wishing that I'd be able to get an Atmos mix of the piece to listen to on my home system so that I could hear it as it was meant to be heard. Adrian told me afterwards that he'd pushed for it to be played back at much greater volume (at the desk, levels were sitting around 100 dB) and I totally agreed with him. I really enjoyed the experience, though. The way that certain sounds (such as some absolutely gorgeous saxophone playing) bounced around the hall never felt like in-your-face showing off; rather, it was entertainingly playful. The highlight of the piece for me (and judging by the response in the question and answer session afterwards, the audience felt the same way) was the spoken word section from Dean McCaffrey.
After the Q&A it was time for a beautifully chilled set from the Malian singer Rokia Koné. She was accompanied by the Malian guitarist Salif Koné (a maestro of the loop pedal, whose virtuosic and flawless fingerstyle playing would make Robert Fripp weep with envy) and the Mandé percussionist Yahael Camara Onono from the Balimaya Project who also acted as MC for the night, and who really got the crowd moving. It was a great show from start to finish and I had a lovely time. Special thanks to 'oggie and the team from D&B Audiotechnik for indulging an enthusiastic audio nerd by answering lots of questions about what their system was doing and how it was doing it.
After a lie-in on Saturday morning and a very laid-back afternoon, I was collected by bass player Robin and he drove vocalist Mic and I down to the sports centre in Yate. I was handling front of house sound for their band Function 246 once again, which has become a regular (and very enjoyable) gig for me. Last night they provided the entertainment for Milly's 21st birthday party, and it was a fantastic affair with everyone having fun in fancy dress (I counted three Freddie Mercurys and there was also a very impressive Elton John as well as a Mr Bean, a Tellytubby, an Ali G, and the birthday girl herself had come as Amy Winehouse). There were one or two weird technical issues (such as isolated pieces of gear only making themselves known to the PA on the left-hand channel, even though the mixer clearly thought both channels were in use) and those stressed me out a lot. It took the audience most of the band's first set to warm up and start enjoying themselves, and that threw the band off a little bit but once the second set started, they really found their groove, the dancefloor filled up, and it all came together very nicely. The clients were delighted with the band, so I'm going to count that as a job well done!
Teardown took a while and I didn't get home until well after midnight; I got to bed at around 1 am, but even though I felt shattered I was flying from the adrenalin which had flooded my system as a result of having to work hard all night to control the mix. That really didn't wear off until around 07:00 this morning, so I gave up on the idea of getting up at a reasonable time, turned over in bed, and promptly fell asleep again. I eventually crawled out of bed at around quarter to twelve, feeling like crap.
My watch was not impressed, to put it mildly. All that adrenalin meant that my pulse hadn't dropped below 70 beats per minute all night (it usually sits at around 55 to 60 bpm when I'm asleep) and I didn't get much in the way of restorative NREM sleep. My "sleep score" was a woeful 67. And today, I feel like I've been hit by a truck.
Other than hosting a listening party for the new ICH album on Bandcamp at 20:00 BST on Wednesday night (and I hope you'll be able to join me as the band and I play through the album's entire seventy-six minutes of music) I have no plans for the next week whatsoever. And after the amount of stuff I've been up to so far this month, I'm really happy about that. I need a rest!
I've just given the website's home page a fresh lick of paint and shuffled things around so that it more accurately reflects the material that's available here; what I've written about my personal interests and more than twenty years of blogging now rather overshadows the site's original purpose, which was to act as a resource for skiers.
As I clattered away in Netbeans at my keyboard, I started idly wondering just how much "content" (oh, how I hate that word) I have written since the site first appeared way back in 1996. After a few minutes with DuckDuckGo I discovered a handy little website called weglot.com which will audit your entire website for free, so I typed in my URL and sat back to see what it made of everything.
Oh. Oh my.
The word count was truncated before it had finished, because the counter had reached its upper limit. Which was set at one million words.
I know I've written a lot of stuff here over the decades, but even so, that was a shock. I guess that makes me a proper writer, right?
Right, it's now almost seven hours since I sat down at this desk. Hyperfocus might be a useful trait occasionally, but this is getting ridiculous. Enough's enough. It's well past time for me to have some pizza. I also declare that a glass of Côtes du Rhône or two might be in order as well...
Just not the whole bottle...
I've definitely been feeling the effects of Tuesday's vaccination. My right bicep feels like I've been punched. It's been a lot more painful than it was after the two shots I had last week (I had one in each arm), although I guess the effects could be cumulative. Getting a good night's sleep has been a problem, because lying down hurts.
So today I'm sore and achy and creaky and generally feeling more than a little bit "meh" and I don't think I'm going to be getting up to very much. In fact I plan on doing as little as possible for the rest of the day beyond playing with a few things in my home studio. I'm very grateful that I've reached the point in my life where I'm totally cool with just writing off the day as a non-starter but I should have done so much more frequently back when I was younger.
I had another great time at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Sunday evening. I attended Shirley Halse's Alternative Book Club at the Parabola Arts Centre, where Shirley introduced Jamie D'Souza (who gave a very funny talk about stats), Leena Normington (who extolled the virtues of half-arsing it) and Robin Ince, who was reading poems from his new book Ice Cream For A Broken Tooth. I bought a copy of Leena's book and Robin's as well, and got him to sign my copy of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, which he managed to do without dislodging the many post-it tabs which I'd been using to annotate passages in it that I'd found particularly meaningful. It's an extraordinary book.
I caught up with Robin afterwards. He was in fine fettle—or at least as fine as one can be when the world is in the state it's in these days. And I was able to express my gratitude for a book which has quite literally changed my life.
And then I rejoined my friends Sam, Nick, and Angie for a very nice pizza (and a cheeky negroni) in a nearby establishment. It was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday evening.
I'm getting a new bathroom fitted next month. I can't wait. My current acrylic bath, which is the original one from when the house was built thirty-five years ago, is well past its sell-by date. Recently I've noticed that it flexes when I stand in it to take a shower, and over the past month it's been doing so a lot more than it did back in the summer. The crack that I noticed back then hasn't got any bigger, but I hadn't realised just how badly the bath needs replacing until last night, when I took the side panel off the bath to check. The crack has evidently been leaking, and the sheet of MDF which the bath rests on had become waterlogged to the point where it had broken in the middle.
Oops.
No wonder the bath was sagging underneath me. The MDF is damp, but not soggy; I've not been using the bath very much over the past month so I guess it's dried out somewhat, and the floor below the bath is bone dry. But I guess bathtime—or even taking a shower—is going to be off the agenda for the next few weeks. I'm just glad I discovered this before anything catastrophic happened...
Over the summer a lot of audio files and emails have been flying through the ether as Ingrid, Henry and I worked carefully and diligently on the third album from our ambient supergroup, ICH. Today we've let the results out into the world in the shape of our new album, Alchemy of Differences,
As well as making musical contributions, I also act as ICH's producer, mixer, and mastering engineer. When I got Ingrid and Henry's recordings for the album, I immediately knew that I'd have to be far more ambitious about what we were doing. My editing skills were let loose as I heard how some events which originally occurred at different times could fit together in new contexts. I knew, too, that this piece would need to breathe, allowing time for contemplation and recapitulation. As a result, the final release is nearly twice as long as those original files that Ingrid and Henry sent me.
One of my friends just messaged me saying how much he likes the album, and then asked: "How on Earth did you keep track of a mix when one track is fifty-three minutes long?" but honestly, it never became a problem. Working on music like this is one of those situations where being neurodivergent was a considerable advantage. Hyperfocus kicked in and a six-hour session at the studio desk doesn't just happen, I'll actively enjoy the work of digging down into the sonic weeds. I spent a frightening amount of time getting things just right because I wasn't prepared to declare this one finished until I'd listened to it from start to finish on the big system in the living room and then again on headphones without hearing a single thing that stuck out when it shouldn't have—and the album is almost seventy-six minutes long.
All that effort paid off, though. I'm delighted with how it sounds, and it's already selling nicely!
It's very definitely vaccine season. Today I had yet another one; this one was for shingles.
Get your shots, folks. Don't be an idiot.
If you encounter me socially at any point in the next few months, please understand that I'm in a weird frame of mind at the moment. On the one hand, I guess that this is understandable, given the shaking up my sense of self has been given in the course of the last six months or so, but there also seems to be something else happening that I can't quite put my finger on. This blog post (which, you may have noticed, I've already returned to and expanded several times) is me trying to figure out what it is, and what I can do about it. But let's add a proviso in the form of a random factoid: the brain is said to be the most complex structure in the known Universe so assuming that I can figure out anything meaningful about mine smacks of a considerable amount of hubris and even if I manage that, how can I be sure that there is anything I can do in response which would help? I hate that thought, but I've ploughed on regardless.
I don't feel particularly depressed or unsettled—at least not in any way that feels familiar. I wouldn't consider myself off my game as far as making music is concerned. I'm struggling to find my focus, but it's not quite your typical brain fog, either—although there might well be an element of that involved. "Emotional instability" is probably the best way of putting it, I think. I'm all over the place. I'm still having a lot of difficulty sleeping through the night, and my idea yesterday evening that it might help if I drank an entire bottle of Rioja before bedtime turned out to be a lot less helpful than I thought it would be. I'm struggling with something, but I don't know if it's the same old, same old depression reasserting itself after taking a break for a few months, or if there's something new that's appearing because now I'm more aware of how autism manifests from person to person.
The weird feeling intensified when a strange connection with my old life cropped up on Friday night. I went to see Mark Kermode and Jenny Nelson talk about their new book Surround Sound at Cheltenham Town Hall and while talking to them afterwards as they signed my copy, I discovered that the producer of the movie music show they used to present for Scala Radio was a certain Rik Blaxill, vocalist of a band called the Sound Service which I occasionally used to play keys for, forty years ago...
Yes, that's me on the left, in the red trousers. That band was an aspect of a life which I left behind for good more than thirty years ago. I still have a lot of conflicting emotions about those days but the predominant ones are still grief and pain. The behaviour of one band member in particular is not something I'm ready to forgive, even now; probably not ever. And in writing that, it's pretty bloody obvious that I'm still having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with my life back then. My recent discovery that I spent all of it navigating through the world with the wrong map turns out not to be any sort of consolation. I was struggling so badly but I didn't even know it—I had no idea I had PTSD or ADHD, let alone that I was autistic, so how could I have known I could have asked for help, let alone found somebody to provide it?
When you have PTSD, any random event in your present life can trigger flashbacks of the past, which are described here as "involuntary, intense and often distressing memories of the traumatic event" which is why I wince when people compliment me on having such a great memory. Having exceptional recall is not always fun because it makes you just as good (if not better) at remembering really bad things as it does the good ones. And you don't get to choose which memories are going to pop randomly back into your head, uninvited.
I've spent a lot of time this summer thinking about thinking (a.k.a. metacognition) and the flashbacks have been coming thick and fast as a result; much more often than they normally do. The word "involuntary" in that definition of PTSD packs a hefty punch; I don't have any control over them, and they can hit at any time. It's been exhausting. Oh, and it also turns out that that people with ADHD can suffer from a condition called Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD. This magnifies the distress that most people feel to some extent when they experience rejection to a stupidly intense degree and oh boy, don't I know it. Now imagine combining those two things and watch how they feed off each other. Fun times, eh? Understanding what's going on doesn't help to alleviate the emotional turmoil. The only strategy I've discovered that helps is to not think about the past at all, but those flashbacks make that impossible (as Friday night's experience showed).
You're probably wondering how I managed to make it to the age of 65 without realising what was going on inside my own head. I think the answer is that my experience of autism isn't anything like how it's portrayed in popular media. I'm nothing like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man. And I don't just mean that you won't find me sitting in the car muttering "Definitely not wearing my underwear" to myself. Autism doesn't always give you a random bunch of cognitive superpowers like Raymond's. Instead, it can render you unable to cope with everyday scenarios that "normal" people wouldn't even pay conscious attention to as they navigate their way through them, effortlessly. It's taken me until now to understand why day to day social life is hard for me. I used to think everyone felt like that; they must just be better at coping.
Yes, I'm socially awkward. Although I've learned (through painful experience) to mask my enthusiasms or obsessions in polite company I'm much too fond of info dumping on people once I relax. It's how my mind likes to show someone I like them; it used to be the only way I knew of trying to establish a connection with people. And because it throws people off guard, I alienate them and that makes me feel terrible afterwards. So these days I just don't loosen up at all. Being the authentic version of me in public just doesn't work out. That's sad, yes—but it's only one of the many ways in which my autism affects the way I live. That's why people like me have to resort to masking; we can't be ourselves if we want to fit in. Nowadays, my autism experience is as much about masking who I am from others as it is about coping with being overwhelmed; everything is always turned up to eleven, including the hypervigilance resulting from my PTSD. It becomes ever so tempting to just shut everything down and go and hide, because just dealing with life is exhausting.
I think the calmness I was feeling back in the summer happened in part because I'd finally managed to figure out something I should have learned a long time ago: I don't have to live like this. When I find myself in situations which everyone else thinks of as mundane and run-of-the-mill but which I find baffling and incredibly stressful, I can just tell people what's going on. I don't have to suffer in silence, and there are alternatives to just panicking and leaving. I shouldn't be making myself ill by pretending to be the same as everyone else, which is what I have always done in the past (it's that thing about fitting in; challenging what's expected of me isn't seen as polite). Rather than suffering silently as things push the VU meters on my emotional inputs hard against the stops (even when the situation I'm experiencing ought to be an enjoyable one), I need to be open about how I'm being affected. So far, the few occasions when I've had the courage to do this have had positive outcomes, but speaking up and unmasking is terrifying. If all else fails, I can just walk away but yes, that realisation feels every bit as bleak as it sounds. That's what I'm dealing with, here.
So I understand, finally, why my default state has always been to be hurt and confused and profoundly alone. While I've been in relationships since the 90s which all ended in lasting friendship, there have been many times recently when I've found myself thinking that I simply can't live the sort of life I crave. I don't want to be an outsider. I want to be able to relate to other people in meaningful ways. I desperately want to belong but instead, it looks like my best option will be to live alone, away from the rest of the world. Which is not the happiest of thoughts, believe me.
I think that's why I've been feeling so weird.
I've been out and about a lot this month, so it might simply be that I'm getting overwhelmed by too much stuff going on and I'm just too tired to regulate my emotions so that I can keep on top of—well, I'm never going to manage dealing with everything, but on a good day I can process enough to get by. I have noticed that I'm less able (or perhaps I'm simply less prepared) to "mask" at the moment so I might need to switch back to hermit mode for a few weeks and see if that helps. But I've already made very sure to take "drinking an entire bottle of red wine in one go" off my list of effective coping strategies...
And while we're on the subject of lasting friendship: Rob and Ruth celebrated their birthdays yesterday. I'm not going to tell you how old they are now, because I can't believe it myself. I still remember them turning sixteen, and that really doesn't seem very long ago at all.
Happy birthday, you two!
I had my annual flu shot yesterday. As I'm now 65 years old (and how did that happen, eh?) I was also eligible for a pneumococcal infection vaccination, so I had that as well. Not only does it protect against some very nasty diseases like sepsis and meningitis, it also helps to prevent some types of ear infections, and I really hate getting those. Next week, I'm having the first of a pair of vaccinations for shingles (I'll be getting the second one early in the new year). This month is very definitely vaccination season and I'm totally on board with that because I'm not a fucking moron.
I'd also like to get vaccinated against Covid again, but our stupid government doesn't take the risks of the disease seriously enough to make that available on the NHS. I'll have to take my chances with everyone else.
I felt hot and a little bit groggy yesterday afternoon and I didn't have a particularly good night last night, but this morning other than both my biceps feeling sore (I had one shot in each arm) I feel absolutely fine.
Has it really been an entire decade since I started work on converting the whole of this website to CSS from the basic HTML layout I'd first created it with, way back in the last century? If you'd asked me before I'd noticed that fact earlier this morning, I'd have told you that it couldn't possibly have been that long ago, but apparently, it is.
The site was in dire need of a facelift. When I first put everything together I'd used tables to respond to every single design challenge I encountered and while that worked, it felt clumsy. And it looked clumsy, too. It was completely unresponsive to different platforms; pages didn't scale at all, which was unforgivable. So I taught myself the basics of CSS after buying a couple of books and anything I couldn't figure out from those was usually explained on the extremely helpful website run by W3Schools.
Since 2015 I've made occasional tweaks to the site to further improve scaling on mobile devices and as I learn more about what I'm doing I've identified and fixed some of the sillier mistakes I'd made earlier. There are still a few pages built around HTML tables which I'm loath to change, but the code still runs on the skeleton framework I chose back then and I'm still using Netbeans to edit it all.
And I still enjoy doing this, which is kind of the point.
Last week Henry sent me some more recordings for the next ICH album, and I've been working on the mix this weekend. I picked up a few bargain VST plugins from AudioThing a few days ago, so I played with adding their Things: Texture granular reverb to the new audio and it was just what was needed. I love it when that happens.
I gave the entire album another listen yesterday afternoon. Unlike last time, when I used my immersive audio system to check out the emotional impact of the work, this was a forensic listen with headphones, checking out the fine detail of the mix and the good news is that I think it's pretty much there. Once I've made a few very minor tweaks to the volume levels of a couple of things, I'll be sending the completed mix off to Henry and Ingrid for their comments. After I've addressed those, we should be ready to release it on Bandcamp and we'll organise a listening party for it, too.
At over 75 minutes, it's turned into quite an epic. I think you're going to be very surprised by how it's turned out.
I've had a lousy few nights recently. I was still awake at 4 am this morning because I just couldn't find a sleeping position where I wasn't in pain. My hips might not be giving me problems any more, but my lower back appears to have decided that it's its turn to take centre stage.
Eventually I gave up, and went downstairs to take a couple of ibuprofen tablets. That did the trick, and the next thing I knew it was quarter to ten this morning. But right now I feel exhausted. Even my morning coffee hasn't been able to shift the lethargy that seems to have taken hold.
Let's see if another mixing session can blow the cobwebs away.
It's Bandcamp Friday once again, and my new album has already been uploaded and is ready for you to give it a listen. This one is called Paradigm Shift.
I suspect that this one will become known as my autism album; I know I keep going on about my recent discovery, but when something completely turns both your identity and your ideas about how you relate to the rest of the universe upside down, then sets them on fire and throws them out of the window, it does rather tend to dominate your attention, you know what I mean?
This album came about as a result of thinking about the experiences I've had during the summer. I found myself making an unexpected, metaphorical journey through my psyche. Metaphors are always creatively interesting, particularly when you attempt to set them to music, so I asked myself: what would an ADHD mind sound like? I reluctantly rejected my initial concept, which would have consisted of constant buzzing together with loud, incoherent screaming, interrupted by occasional explosions, as having limited commercial appeal. Instead, I expanded my meditation on the subject so that it didn't just cover the revelatory aspects, or the profound change I've had to make in the way I think about myself. I ended up examining how I've interacted with people (for good or bad) during my life from childhood onwards. It was a challenging exercise and it gave me new insights into whatever it is that makes me tick. The album's called Paradigm Shift for good reasons. The world might be going to going to hell in a hand basket, but these days I'm dealing with it on my terms.
And it's also been a great opportunity to mangle sounds with my new Hologram Electronics Microcosm which I bought last month, of course. The glitchy, chaotic nature of its effects fitted my plans (and my feelings) perfectly.
My hips have been aching a lot in recent months. Well, if I'm honest about it, everything aches a lot these days. But lately I've noticed that the pain gets worse after I've spent a long session in the green chair in what passes for my "office" downstairs in the living room. If, instead, I spend the day in my home recording studio I'm fine, because I treated myself to a Herman Miller Aeron chair for it a couple of years ago (you may remember me getting annoyed after the "heavy use" chair I'd been using up until that point literally disintegrated on me). The Aeron has been a godsend and despite it being ridiculously expensive, I haven't regretted buying it for a single moment.
Life is too short to spend much of it sitting in a chair that makes you feel like someone's put your legs on backwards. And as I mentioned last month, after spending time sitting on one of Herman Miller's other chair designs this summer at a certain well-known recording studio near Bath and really being impressed by how comfortable it was, and then finding out that Herman Miller had a sale on with hefty discounts, I couldn't resist. Yesterday the new chair was delivered so I've moved the Aeron downstairs and installed this baby in the back bedroom:
Yes, my home recording studio now has the same chairs as Peter Gabriel's does. God, I'm such a fanboy.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon sitting in it as I prepared the new album for release, and I think it might actually be even more comfortable than the Aeron is. My hips don't hurt at all.
Once I started looking for interesting links to add to the post above about my new chair that weren't just a link to the manufacturer's web page for it, I soon realised that a lot of the pages I visited weren't very well written. Some, like this one, which tells us it was written by a "weekly contributor" to the site it's published on, read as if they'd been written by a kid who hadn't done the reading for his homework assignment until the deadline and had then hastily thrown any old garbage together. For a start, the picture that's being used at the top of the article—which is about the Aeron chair made by Herman Miller—shows chairs that not only aren't Aerons, they aren't even made by the right manufacturer. They're Herman Miller wannabes.
Was this an example of LLM bullshit, or AI slop, as it's become widely known? It certainly felt like it. I got curious, so I put a chunk of text from that article through a couple of AI checking websites. GPTZero was 72% confident that the text was generated by AI; ZeroGPT was 79% sure.
Compare the inept writing style and the lack of any original-seeming thinking on display in that article, with this one written by Beren Neale. Even before GPTZero and ZeroGPT both told me that was entirely human-generated (with results of 0% AI) I knew that it had been written by a real person. It just lands differently, somehow. LLMs tend to have distinctive tells in the way that they construct things, at least for the time being. The biggest, of course, is that what they produce is very often wrong, and occasionally completely nonsensical. The more you start examining text for these habits and clichés, the better you'll get at spotting them and quite frankly, you can't start soon enough.
And just so you know, I would never use AI to generate anything on this website and I will proudly continue to use em-dashes with wild abandon.
I spent yesterday working on my next solo album, and I think it's done.
Which is rather convenient, because it's Bandcamp Friday once again this week! I've got ten tracks completed, lasting fifty-two minutes. And I decided to take a different approach for this one so not only are there no vocals, there are also no drums on any track.
Today I'm doing some more session work and it feels like there aren't enough hours in the day any more. How did I get this busy?
Rather than demonstrating penitence over their recent treatment of Jimmy Kimmel, Disney+ have obviously decided they're too big to give a toss. Yesterday I got an email from them informing me that the cost of my monthly subscription would be rising to £15 from the beginning of November.
Stuff that. I'm out. Feckin' Nazis.
I've cancelled my subscription and removed their app from my TV and my computer. And I feel much better.