I want to talk more about Agricultural Revelations. There are about 4 things still bugging me, but beyond that the music is ready.

Despite my best efforts (rather, despite not consciously trying), the tracks in Agricultural Revelations form a cycle. Here are some notes for each one:

1. Proscenium

Proscenium is the hot towel at the beginning of a meal, designed to clear the head. It features two of my favorite things, chimey things and warm gooey pads.

2. Crest

Fun! Shamelessly synthy, unabashedly optimistic, Crest is a little too sweet for its own good. Grabbing the motive from Procenium, it quickly makes it its own, hurtling towards a sunshiny place as fast as it can. There used to be a Yanni/Tesh type piano solo in here, but like a failed heart transplant, it was rejected by the host.

3. E.G.B.

This is a twisty piece. The title is a reference to Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. The main motive is an ascending minor triad, e-g-b. And in an allusion to Bach, the entire piece is done as an uninterrupted string of eighth notes. E.G.B. is performed by a sextet of oscillator synths, dovetailing in and out of each other as they play in unison. It’s a little stark.

4. Mouths of Babes

Mouths of Babes was a happy accident. I was laying down the bass for something when Chava sent me a recording of her daughter Isadora singing the “uh uh uh” song (her own composition). Her song lined up almost exactly with mine, and I took it from there. I can’t tell if this song is silly or creepy. Most of the time there are lines moving at different tempi, which creates the same hypnotic sensation I get when I watch my turn signal blink in a duet with that of the car in front. Dark and whispery, it also makes me giggle along with Isadora and her sister Rhiannon.

5. Mellow Vandal

I love this track. To me, Mellow Vandal was born a decade ago on the banks of the Danube in Vienna, where I used to walk listening to European ambient electronica. The way the pieces built up and broke down was so gradual, like the changing landscape on a hike. Every once in a while, one looks up and realizes they are somewhere else entirely. This is Mellow Vandal. It picks you up, takes you somewhere neat, and gently drops you off at your front door. It’s also the longest track at over 9 minutes – these things take time!

6. Meerkat

Meerkat is a song about meerkats, and is performed by a quartet of old school FM synths. If you’ve ever seen a meerkat, or even a picture of a meerkat, this piece is for you.

7. The Last Visible Dog

If you haven’t read Russel Hoban’s The Mouse And His Child, you really should. If you haven’t, this is the origin of the title of The Last Visible Dog; a dog on a can of dog food, holding a can of dog food with a picture of a dog on a can of dog food with a picture of a dog, and so forth ad finitum. Can you also hear the last visible dog? This track is slow and dreamy as it evaporates beyond sensation.

Taken by Chava near Tufts University. Yes, that’s Noam Chomsky.

Google Analytics is all the rage right now, and I’m not surprised. It’s a great tool, and is already telling me things I don’t know.

For the 35% of you viewing on IE* over the past weeks, I issue a mea culpa about the wacky sidebar placement on the front page. I’d fixed it a while back but the CSS regressed at some point. It means a lot to me that the site looks good at 800×600. Now Google Analytics tells me that only 6% of my viewers view in 800×600. But I won’t give up on you, my low resolution brethren.

In the murky world of web design, where every third sentence starts with “most people like” or “what people use is,” it’s good to have some numbers for comparison. It seems to me that no matter how empathic we start out, over time we drift, and what people want and use ends up being remarkably similar to what we as creators want and use. Tools like Analytics can hopefully help to correct that drift from time to time, and to make sure that the effort is commensurate with the need.

*If you are, please consider Firefox. I don’t evangelize often, but it’s a better browsing experience. And did I mention it’s free?

I don’t remember when Festive Season Penguin came into the house, but he’s here now. A plush,rotund penguin, wrapped in a tartan scarf to keep him warm, he practically brims with cheer.

Festive Season Penguin used to be called Christmas Penguin. He likes christmas; if you hold his flipper he exclaims “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas!” in a jovial voice and then plays a rendition of a well known Christmas Carol for you. He’s not a very good singer, but he can sing in two notes at once, so that’s worth something.

Once our first Christmas with him ended, we didn’t have the heart to put him away, and so we renamed him Festive Season Penguin, and to this day he sits in our living room, cheering up the place with his unquenchable holiday spirit.

He’ll sing “Jingle Bells” for you, if you click this link.

Varia points me to an article in the New York Times, in which a tale is told of a woman breaking up with her man via Powerpoint.

“Let’s end things now, tonight, while we’re a little buzzed and in good moods.”
He paled, straightened, slumped. “Why?”

I reached into my bag and, nodding somberly, pulled out my laptop, resting it on the bar in front of us. [...]

When the presentation ended (with a bulleted list enumerating the many good times we had had, to end on an up note), I snapped my laptop shut and turned to face him. “Well?”

He ordered another drink, and we sat in complete silence for as long as it took him to finish it. I slipped my laptop back into my bag, paid the tab and hailed myself a cab.

The indomitable Lisa Firke talks tapes in Musing on the Mix. She’s references a Chicago Tribune article discussing the mixtape and lamenting as its shiny and convenient cousin, the Mix CD, takes over. With a quote from Nick Hornby, the literary father of all things musical.
Much of the argument against poor Mix CD follows the usual “if it’s easier, it can’t mean as much” line, ignoring the equally vibrant “if it’s easier, it frees up time and energy to do more creative things!” It also can fall quickly into the absurd: Stockhausen used to take an entire day to create about a second of electronic music, so painstaking was it. Does that mean more, or does it make what is done today mean less?
The rest of the article is mighty interesting though, and probably worth the free registration. And if you haven’t made a mix CD recently, or ever, I highly recommend it. Make one for someone you love, or hate (though I wouldn’t send it). Make one for me, if you’d like. Take your time; find just the right songs, pay attention to the flow. There is creative genius and unbounded expression in the act, no matter what the medium.

Now we’re cooking! The EP, named through bibliomancy from the reliable 1066 and All That, is officially Agricultural Revelations. Seven entirely new songs, and they’re pretty good.

Here’s the track listing in tentative order:

1. Proscenium
2. Crest
3. E.G.B.
4. Mouths of Babes
5. Mellow Vandal
6. Meerkat
7. The Last Visible Dog

Composition continues, though I’m cramming more than I’d like. I’m a bit over halfway through my goal of 30 minutes, and have a few more things to bang out. If I get too far behind, I’ll just slow everything down.

I’m not sure how I’m going to distribute the EP, and am still wrangling with things like balancing listeners and potential sales. I’ve had 1019(!) downloads of Tango Heaven this month alone, but only one person bought a CD. Art is hard!

No matter what I end up doing, people who bought a copy of Travelog will be able to download the new tunes first, for free.

Yesterday’s meal was a great success, in terms of both food and company. With the turkey, Alton Brown (with some help from peanut) continued on his streak to deliver solid recipes. The yeast rolls survived a whole lot of rising and managed to stay fluffy. Varia produced cheese sticks, tartlets, potatoes, and some impressive semi-freddo.

Now everything has been cleaned up, and all that remains are the memories and a vast quantity of leftovers. The post-holiday day contains a bit of work and a bit of play. I’m doing some entirely personal tech fiddling, and am enjoying it immensely.

The turkey is roasting, and the rest of the meal in hand. To demonstrate my nerdiness, all one needs is the Gantt-style chart I drew up to make sure that we knew what needed to be done when. Rocking indeed!

Today has not been the best of days, and I’m not able to get much clarity as to what exactly is bothering me. It’s rarely what I think it is; the real workings of emotion seem to me like a Goldbergian contraption, and tracing the mechanics from the end to the impetus is exhausting, when it’s possible.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and it’s well timed. Groceries were put off to nearly the last minute. Shopping in bulk is hard without a car; last night I hauled a turkey back 2 miles from Porter Square and today Sue made a rare, well-timed appearance, helping ferry beer and wine back to the apartment. Tonight, Varia and I polished off the grocery list with a trip to the nearby Wild Oats. On the way out, the rubbish bin outside the store caught fire and started smoking. Being the civic minded gent that I am, I went back into the store and had the delight of delivering the news to a cashier: “Excuse me sir, your trash can is on fire.” By the time I got back outside another customer had sprung into action and tried to smother the blaze, and fire extinguishers were forthcoming as we hauled our sweet potatoes and vegetable stock into the crisp night.

There will be food tomorrow!

I may or may not be a lazy manager, but I am most assuredly a lazy programmer. I don’t want to work on a problem longer than I have to. Bis das si cito das and all that, though I’d argue that one might end up hacking away at a problem for even longer. And not hacking in a good way.
To further my laziness I’m re-embarking on a tour of my workflow, doing some study, gazing at my navel, et cetera. Process doesn’t mean much at all unless the end results sparkle appropriately, but it doesn’t hurt to see if there are ways to do things better. I don’t know if the end always justifies the means, but the means enable the end, and the means are rarely an end in themselves. If you take my meaning, I’m at an end.

I’ve got a case of the Mondays, just a little out of focus. Nevertheless, bug fixing progresses apace. I do love my job, especially when I’m not dealing with coupons.

Thanksgiving has snuck up on me (pardon the titular pun), which is extra important this year as Varia and I are going to put on the full Turkey & Co. spread for the very first time. The wonderful world of cooking meat is still a bit unfamiliar to me, but I’ve been getting up to speed and look forward to taking part in creating a meal for the ages. I’ve got a basting wand, and I don’t know how to use it. Fear me!

Yesterday was a walking tour of Back Bay. Goodness knows I’ve been there enough, but the tour was a good one, and attention was brought to many things of historical and architectural significance. I took my camera, and with it some 150 pictures. Note that I am well on the path to turning into my mother.

In attempts to not have an entire memory card full of odd bits of buildings, I shot as many animals as I could. I found a more accommodating squirrel, a preening hawk, and a dog in a sweater. The bottom left image is from the famous Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Boston Public Garden; up close the mother duck looks like someone you’d not like to mess with. Sinister, even.