This is the fifth year I've done Looptober, a Fediverse exercise where you post a little track every day for all of October. Last year I did as much as I could with the Arduino which made it a bit musically uninteresting. My technical constraint this year was that I …

Fedivision is an annual song contest held around the same time as Eurovision on the Fediverse. I entered an instrumental in 2022 but this year I wanted to actually write a song with lyrics and vocals. I've tried songwriting many times over the years but have always gotten too shy …

Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with …

Books

• Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• Boswell's Life of Johnson
• In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis
• The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
• Letters from Amherst, Samuel R Delany

I read …

The second half of 2023 was pretty hectic, between work and health issues, but I did get a chance to play with the synths: this is my first stab at a sequencer running on an Arduino Uno and sending out control voltages through an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC.

I also …

I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around …

Early this year I finally got weary of dragging my collection of mp3s from one iTunes installation to the next. I'd worked out a fairly nice solution where I had the library on a 2TB SSD connected to my laptop's dock, so the music collection didn't take up any space …

I picked this up from the music store this afternoon and discovered that I don't have the right kind of USB cable to plug my keyboards into it, but I have managed to get one (1) annoying buzz out of it.

The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012

John Higgs

I went into this book feeling a bit cocky, like, how much is it going to surprise me? But it did. Quite a lot. I don't want to say which bits surprised …