the world lingers
Back to making digital things again. This month it's a VST3 audio plugin; a fairly straightforward granulator effect.
I made this one because I wanted a decent granulator that I could use for making music, and I just couldn't find one that 1.) did what I needed, and 2.) was not covered in hundreds of unnecessary knobs and sliders.
If you're not familiar with granulator effects, they basically work by recording their input into a buffer, and then playing back small chunks of that buffer as individual grains. Most granulators (including this one) make heavy use of randomness; grains are triggered at random based on a density parameter, and individual grains have their own parameters that can be randomised whenever a new grain is generated.
I feel like granulators are seriously underrated; I find them incredibly useful for adding a high shimmer to pad or drone sounds. If you turn up the Speed (which is equivalent to pitch) to 2.0 or 4.0, the generated grains will play back at one or two octaves above the original sound. Coupled with a nice long reverb you can create some wonderful ambient swells and textures. Here's a short demo of that exact process.
Download the world lingers
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (2/3/24).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable (in this case a VST3 plugin).
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL.
- As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
A couple of heartbreaking poems by Omar Sakr:
Similarly heartbreaking, from Em Berry: Because Of Us (shamefully, I never realised 'gauze' is derived from Ghazza)
A calligraphic representation of a handful of the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages in existence before 1948, before they were forcibly depopulated.
(apologies for the twitter links. I've used nitter.net in the past for these, but it seems to be down now)
I think there are already a few tools designed to defend against artists having their work stolen by AI models. Nightshade is maybe the first tool that allows artists to go on the offensive, and actively poison data sets when their work is stolen.
In a similar vein, this is an excellent vision/shitpost of the AI-dominated future.
In wrestling the news coming out of WWE this month has been absolutely horrifying (this one needs a massive CW for sexual abuse and trafficking). In the far smaller scale outfit Ring of Honor though, the feud between Dalton Castle and Johnny TV & Taya Valkyrie has been one of my favourite things. Just wonderful absurd comedy, with Lexy Nair playing an excellent straight woman caught in the middle. I reckon ROH are putting out the best promos right now. See also Nyla Rose's hilarious heel work.
From Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, via Devine Lu Linvega:
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day and form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it:
- The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.
- The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Cat and Girl's 4,000 of my closest friends got shared everywhere this month, so you've probably already seen it, but I find I'm increasingly using here and then gone as a memory aid when I'm trying to find a link I remember from a while back. So I've included it in this month's list where I can find it again in the future.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò with an excellent explanation of standpoint epistemology and how it can work against folk from marginalised backgrounds, especially within elite spaces.
From the SCP wiki, a wonderfully non-anomalous tale of two men and the life they made together (it's a bit of an offshoot from one of the main SCP articles, but I reckon the offshoot tale is stronger than the main article).
My friend Ren with a beautiful tale playing off the fact that birds can see magnetic fields, and use them to find their way home.
"I don’t think great art can coexist with fear of the unknown or fear of purposelessness."
"It shits itself in fear of the future (1973) and stinks of living death."
Neil Kulkarni passed away this month, and I've found myself re-reading a lot of his writing. In hindsight, I think a lot of how I understand music and art can be traced back to my encounters with his words in Melody Maker as a teenager. He was a ferocious, incandescent writer. His passing is a real loss. It's almost impossible to imagine encountering writing like that in a mass market context today, but at the time Melody Maker was available from pretty much every newsagent in the UK. I don't think there are any spaces left for writers like Kulkarni to develop their voices today.
The other thing I've realised with hindsight though is that Kulkarni's writing - and specifically his demands for music to matter, to be worthy of his/your/our time - messed me up a bit. I stopped making music years ago because I felt like I couldn't reach the heights I was aiming for, and that nothing less than perfection mattered. I think part of that comes from me internalising Kulkarni's furious takedowns of mediocre bands. But the thing is, perfection is a trap. You don't get good by aiming for perfection. You get good by doing the thing, and doing it repeatedly, with as many different variations as you can conjure. You get good by paying attention, by seeing what works and what doesn't, what possibilities it suggests, what directions you've not yet taken. You get good by keeping your eyes and heart open to the world, and what other people are doing.
It's not really fair to lay all of that on Kulkarni's shoulders; he clearly kept his eyes and heart open till the end. But I think I did internalise a lot of that performative critical attitude in a way that was not particularly healthy for me.
Anyway, here's Kieron Gillen on a writer he is clearly hugely indebted to: The attack and the empathy, the open heart and closed fist
And a beautiful piece by Kulkarni on the nostalgia of kids' TV that sought to challenge and not coddle:
"feel free to chortle but know amidst those chuckles you are hiding something, know you are humming away the heartache, running scared of the fact that you never grew up, are still afraid, still unsure, still just as prone to the bliss and blisters this music leaves on your skin, in your veins, in your expectations. Kid/kidult/adult, you are still you, still hurt by elders, beat by peers, and you are still cut apart & engulfed by what your life might mean, still under the hill waiting to see the sky, innards as soft and perishable as ever even if you’ve buffed your hard shell to a presentably sacrificial shine by now, that shine that gets you work and feeds your belly and keeps your demise nicely ticking over. You might be all made up of lies now, but this music did not lie to you."
Afraid I spoke too soon when I said I'd gotten lucky re: covid last month. The chest pain that was my primary symptom came back shortly after I wrote last month's newsletter, and hasn't really left since. I think what's happened is that covid has reduced my body's tolerance of stress. Things that really wouldn't have bothered me before, now bring about that tightness in the chest. Which is something that prior to covid I'd only really experienced when I was under extreme stress. Hoping that it's not a permanent change, and will gradually fade over time.