DMT 42
This song has been stuck in my head for days:
Here is the great version by Ry Cooder and Manuel Gaban:
Here is a solo guitar version:
If you don’t have Apple Music you should be able to find these recordings on any other service.
Quiet Sounds
When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.
— John Cage
This quote resonates with me. When times are loud and big we need to create soft and small.
These days a ton of ambient and drone music is released. That’s great but some of it sounds like the sound of a refrigerator put through a granular synth, with lots of delay added. I think there is room for a melodic sort of ambient sound, by which I mean slow and contemplative music, which I think what happened with the one guitar two – Big Cave Versions. (LINK to one of the pieces)
Now I would like to pare that down even more… Either the next album will be very quiet or upbeat or perhaps a surprise mix of the two that resembles a journey.
Telephone
Kraftwerk’s legendary Kling Klang studio was famous for containing many weird and wonderful electronic instruments, but one of the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the telephone. In order to avoid any irritating disturbances when the band were at work, it didn’t have a ringer. Occasionally, the story goes, a journalist with the rare opportunity of interviewing the band over the phone would be given a precise time to call, and at that moment one of the band, usually co-founder Ralf Hütter, would pick up the receiver. If there was no one there, he put it down again. That was it. You’d missed your chance. You could try calling as many times as you’d like, but no one would hear you.
Moka + Saudade
I am sitting at my table, next to a fan because we have a heatwave, and am having my morning coffee. I followed Matt’s suggestion (in the comment section of this post) and boiled the water before adding it to the Moka pot. I think the purpose of this may be to make the extraction happen more quickly. What it made me realize is why the original design has those edges. I believe they make the pot more grippy. What I found was that I could not tighten my round pot enough while holding it with a towel and when pressure started to build up vapor escaped where the top and the bottom are screwed together. It is interesting that the designers of newer and stainless Moka pots didn’t figure this out! The coffee was good though and maybe I’ll try again with a silicon hot pad that affords more grip. For now I will switch back to adding room temp water.
Today the second single from “Bare Wood 2” was released on all streaming services and digital outlets. I use UnitedMasters for the digital distribution of my music. For each album or single UM autogenerate what they call a Master Link, which is supposed to make it easy for people to click on the logo of service they subscribe to and listen to the music right away. I guess it is considered too labor and time intensive to use the search function of any streaming service to find the piece. Okay. This is the master link for the new single “Saudade”. You will notice that there is a pop up that declares “I wanna get to know my fans better. Shoot me your info and I’ll add you to my contacts.”
Pause. Well, that’s not something I would ever say, is it. And I can’t figure out whether I can kill the pop-up altogether. It’s the reason I have never used the master link before. I did figure out that I can change the wording of the pop-up – but what should it say? (It’s probably also why I am not good at social media or promotion… most of the tools make me cringe…)
Let me know what you think of the master link. Useful? Bogus? Honestly, I don’t even know where that info goes, should you add your name and email to the pop-up. UnitedMasters database? Go ahead, I dare you! Also cookies… don’t you hate THOSE pop-ups? We don’t use them on this website. However, we will have to use them to make a subscription platform work better… so you don’t have to sign in every time you visit the page.
