oftentimes construction is literally a practice of figuring out how to live with past mistakes and assumptions
the walk from the house to the barn is just long enough to begin daydreaming, upon arrival invariably i will ask myself: why am i here
"To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether of marsh or marketplace, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."
mondo grosso - labyrinth (2017)
olof dreijer - hazel (2024)
billie eilish - everything i wanted (2019)
[mp3] - 18:42
in celebration of big round numbers, cleanly quantifying time which actually feels infinitely far away through a haze of recollections. twenty years ago i finished this short record and recently i agonized over pretending to be one of those important bands that reissue their twenty year old record, all remastered and include extra bits that somehow accumulated significance while hiding somewhere for so long. i present to you, none of that. these are the original mp3 files encoded however people did things in 2004. perhaps, the burning hills imparted some spark or sparkle, difficult to recreate, time and place never the same.
aphex twin - sekonda e,+2 (1995)
broadcast - follow the light (2006)
ro - senescence (2009)
[mp3] - 15:23
the phone battery was swollen
so we removed it
like bad lunch meat on a sandwich
and then proceeded to eat the
circuit board and screen and case as
the bad battery juice didn't touch those parts
so they were still good
satoshi and makoto - crepuscule leger (1991)
germaine tailleferre - nocturne (~1927)
the drums - searching for heaven (2011)
[mp3] - 12:40
on a shared computer that we all log into at once, maybe we don't need complex chat applications. how about two one-liners?
tehn@kaatsk:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/say
echo -e $(date +'%m/%d %H:%M') - $(whoami) - $@ >> /home/kaatsk/said
tehn@kaatsk:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/what
tail -n 10 /home/kaatsk/said
say adds a line. what shows the last ten entries.
since kaatsk is our shared folder (where we all can also edit the website) the said file is just a log of our chatter. when logging into the system we are shown recent messages.
it ends up looking something like:
02/29/2024 19:35 - tehn - new things
02/29/2024 19:35 - gavin - toosick
02/29/2024 19:35 - palomakop - hi this is a test
02/29/2024 19:36 - davek - yowhat
02/29/2024 19:37 - graham - i have not read the book
02/29/2024 20:05:14 - burnheart - last
03/01/2024 10:05:02 - darwin - it was a really fun meeting last night!
03/02 19:50 - tehn - i removed the second, and the year. we are losing control.
blonde redhead - in particular (2000)
kali malone - moving forward (2024)
ellen arkbro and johan graden - love you, bye (2022)
[mp3] - 17:10
hesitation
cocteau twins - it's all but an ark lark (1982)
mj lallo - buddhas 2nd coming (1982)
thom yorke - cymbal rush (2006)
[mp3] - 18:30
you encounter (technology). what will you do next?
farthest skies is a new collection of music.
"In the earlier days people where first referring to amazing music and much less to aspects of production. Nowadays music production became more and more an element of creating music and 'good production' is often seen as being more important than a musical idea. People are overwhelmed by the possibilities and by the results they can achieve with very little effort, because the tools they have at hand give them overwhelming results with very little knowledge.
The initiative for making music has been shifted to the production side and so did the perception of the process. The colour of the composition, musical inspiration and decisions, all these aspects have been shrunken a little bit perceptional in favour of the production."
on the temporality of obsolescence: forgotten computers reanimate when industry abandons a physical connector or physical media, when file formats drift, when operating systems or system architectures render software inoperable.
we experienced this recently while attempting to retrieve video footage from a MiniDV tape. we have the same DV camera which works fine, but it uses firewire, a port standard which quietly went away over the decades. i assumed there'd be a cheap firewire to usb C or whatever dongle but for some reason it's either more complicated than that or search engines have gotten so terrible that i am no longer adept at using the internet.
as a result, the computer from the same era as the camera (almost two decades old) became suddenly invaluable: it was the only way for us to retrieve the footage. of course, this old computer can longer meaningfully connect to the internet (due to apple abandoning the OS amidst ever-accelerating web standards) so we transfer files the old fashioned way with thumb drives.
surely this happens constantly with all sorts of physical media, but also file formats. i can't imagine going through the complexity of assembling a virtual machine emulating my early 2000's music studio setup and expect abandoned DAW sessions to function.
the celebration of each innovation obfuscates the coincident impediment to preserving what came before. it's only after some time has elapsed that we suddenly realize that our previous tools and collections of work are no longer accessible: we'd already moved on to shinier tools and continued to generate more work, both of which will surely meet the same fate as those who came before.
these machines that we stopped using, kept for perhaps sentimental reasons or simply because our barn accepts everyone and all, these machines are alive again as portals to past work. these are not new ideas, but my curiosity lies in the timeframes: identifying the vanishing and reemergence of relevance.
"It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
the great thing about improvising is you don't need to follow a score
the great thing about following a score is you don't need to improvise
"Today's crisis of freedom stems from the fact that the operative technology of power does not negate or repress freedom so much as exploit it. Free choice is eliminated to make way for a free selection from among the items on offer."
yukihiro takahashi – drip dry eyes (1984)
this mortal coil - another day (1984)
ryuichi sakamoto - prototype (1987)
[mp3] - 12:17
behold, we are feeling through a less mono-spaced world, guided by this excellent open-source font, inter.
hickory has dropped. sleep well.
white sky
rainbow mountain
"Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros, a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract, objective language-- and I with my splendid Eastern-women's-college training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going for the kill-- to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, 'Offer your experience as your truth.' There was a short silence. When we started talking again we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with one another, which involves listening. We tried to offer our experiences to one another. Not claiming something: offering something."
"AI’s automated forms of decision making, regardless of their specific instantiation or situational impact, all contribute to a general understanding that non-datafied forms of experience are not relevant. They are ineffective: They are not part of the formula and have no hold on the world. Converting experience into data, abstracting away from any situated perspective, is what makes an experience real, consequential."
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co