Embarrassing admissions about luxury items

I am normally given to enjoying and admiring those small and perfect things that the world presents to us free of charge or those things which are the gifts of attention. While I'm sure that insanely expensive hotel room on the shores of Lake Locarno is very nice, this cup of coffee has its charms, too.

Having said that, It gives me some vaguely guilty pleasure to type the following phrase:

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There. I've done it. Move along, nothing to see here.

Spark trio performance now online

It's taken me a few days to get around to getting it up, but an MP3 version of the trio performance with my pals Brad Garton and Terry Pender at the 2007 Spark Festival is now online and available on my new and expanded MP3 downloads page.

Part 1 (15:25)
Part 2 (12:39)

Reasons for a lack of stardom...

...a lack of talent? Possibly, but that's not what I wanted to say.

I am in the process of working on some new material and patchery, and I have realized what one of my problems is; I spend too much time listening to things in their raw state. This week, it's been revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Nathan Wolek's granular toolkit for MSP, reminding myself that the whole granular thing may well appear to be "overused" because people only opt for a tiny subset of what's possible [as Marcel Wierckx' work suggests, which was always my view of FM synthesis in earlier times]. To that end, I'mve been taking materials I'm really familiar with and rather exhaustively tweaking parameters very slowly in various combinations, and spending a good amount of time living inside/alongside the results. For hours and days.

I expect that by the time I think I've got it figured out, some part of me thinks that no one else will be interested; my inner midwesterner shows up, pronounces the results "nothin' special," and moves on. This "slow preparation, fast execution" stuff is tricky.