Resumption
The Past Year
It has been many moons since my last update of substance. This post constitutes a resumption of sorts. It is not an exhuastive record of everything that happened this year.
Time has grown thin, warbling, strange.
I think it is partially a function of turbulence. Partially a function of lack of discipline.
I broke up with my partner of fifteen years. It has been difficult. Afterwards I got a neck piece and my knuckles done. Also snake bites. Some might call this a midlife crisis but my whole life has sorta been a crisis so... whatever. I love myself and I love how I look.
We finished Continuum Hack and premiered it at several festivals and online. That film was about four years in the making.
I moved. Moving is tiring and expensive. I haven't really written any music in the new studio yet. I don't exactly have guilt about that, but I also feel like the volume of original output is a good indicator of my health.
On the other hand, I've produced about a dozen mixes this year which I am supremely proud of. STUXNET has also released several major arcana. There turned out to be no They Became What They Beheld which surprised me. There was, however, a Northern Information release which really surprised me. I also helped get several other musician's records over the line such as This had better be part of some grand occult process.
𝔡𝔞𝔲𝔫𝔱𝔩𝔢𝔰𝔰 𝔠𝔥𝔬𝔦𝔯, the Northern Information Discord server, was a joy. In particular the bookclub. We read Walkaway, The Mushroom at the End of the World, and a "simultaneous read" of Blood Meridian and Moby Dick.
When asked for feedback about the community a close friend shared:
You're a lodestone for a particular meta-ideology. People who get along with Tyler are looking deeper into things. They're leading with empathy. They have a specific communication style, or native aesthetic, but are also committed to pushing beyond those things, to avoiding the typical pitfalls of myopic individualism. They can rely on themselves, sure, but don't feel masochistically married to self-reliance as an end in itself, and would like to collaborate wherever possible. There's no gatekeeping, and the stakes are whatever you want them to be, but the company itself will push you to execute to the fullest.
I found this beautiful and I'm posting it here in hopes my future self will find it on a rainy day.
Truth be told most of my energy is going into Circular Ruin DSP. We're building what I think to be the world's first neural network saturation plugin, among many other things. The learning curve is steeper than anything I've previously encountered but I find immense satisfaction in the work.
My new studio is comfortable. Well organized. Well lit. Plenty of plants. But my mind just hasn't been in the sonic realm. It's been deep in TypeScript and JUCE. It is a strange thing, making instruments and tools for others. You have to put your own id aside and think about the user, the musician, the producer. I think this is one of the best things I can be doing with my time as it aligns with my mission of inspiring with music, not giving up, and helping others not give up.
Circular Ruin DSP scratches a very particular itch I've had for several years. Truth be told my biggest grievence with the arcologies project is accessibility: the entry fee is a both a norns and a grid (and - optionally - an arc) which is quite steep. It favors a certain class of folk and I don't like that. (If I had a wooden nickel for everytime someone asked me if they could try it and I explained said entry fee... I'd have a lot of wooden nickels. It made me not want to talk about the project.)
Moving into the word of macOS/Win/Linux && VST/AU/AAX/CLAP makes my work wildly more accessible and democratized.
My albums of the year in no particular order are:
My songs of the year in thematic order are:
- Torukia by Gabriela Robin, Yoko Kanno
- Belurat, Tower Settlement by Shoi Miyazawa
- Vengeance. (feat. Graham Style) by Rainy Miller
- You and Me by skeler.
- Get Together by Madonna
- Air For Life by Above & Beyond
- The Realm by Charlotte de Witte
- CONCRETE JUNGLE by Bad Omens
- Like Love by The Amity Affliction
- Hostage by Fit for An Autopsy
- L'exquisite Douleur by Being As An Ocean
- No Sleep in Medan by Celer
- Ancient Sanctuary - Megabot#33 by Lorien Testard
Now
I spent the morning working on a combination CDN / licensing system named Minotaur for Circular Ruin DSP. It is nearly finished.
Other than that I'm going about my usual end of year digital gardening ritual of archiving work on external drives, cleaning up the studio, doing admin work, deleting old todos, writing this blog post...
Also, I've exhumed and made available the phantom mk racks, a collection of Ableton Live FX racks I made for the #shadow_fi trilogy back around 2013.
The Next Year
Circular Ruin DSP will release at least Torus.
I will continue to learn Japanese.
I will likely be moving again.
I will try to be kinder each day, to both myself and others.