Some rain families:

• Bowed strings
• Chromatic free reeds
• Feedback resonators
• Tubular blown resonators

(Figuring through forces...)

Maybe a project for this summer should be to organize my record collection again, the shelves and the files. I can never seem to find anything. (Serendipity is nice, but I also often reach for something just because I know where to find it!)

MIMEO & john tilbury - the hands of caravaggio

So much wiring to do! This is a sidecar for the feedback resonator guitar thing which holds the battery and power supply, the amplifier, and an esp32 to send the buttons and switches and etc over wifi. One of the knobs (in blue) is the amplifier gain, and the four grey ones...

jandek - ready for the house

aerosol - all that is solid melts into air

just there, thanks

trash instruments are personal

Oh, nice! Modern versions of tar can just take `xf` arguments and figure out the compression format for you. I don't have to remember if it's z or j or some other incantation anymore. :-)

jim o'rourke - so you want to write a fugue

It's bandcamp Friday, and we've put a single on the new Cedar AV bandcamp page:

<a href="https://cedarav.bandcamp.com/track/houseboat-piano-version" target="_blank" rel="external noopener">Houseboat Piano Version by Cedar AV</a>

We actually finished an album this year, somehow! Recorded on a houseboat on the mississippi river last year, we finished mixing and doing overdubs at Nick's wonderful new studio over the winter.

The creatively titled Houseboat Piano Version is Nate doing a solo piano version of one of the songs from the album. LuvSound is doing a small edition of the album later this year after we re-launch sometime this summer.

Keeping the wood glue next to the coffee mug maybe isn't the best way to organize a desk? Thank you glue bottle safety cap.

Blu and co-host otherseas have started a midwest themed radio program called loisirs distribués on Chicago-based internet station Redux. They are exploring a certain midwest sound and I'm listening with interest. It's also not your typical internet radio playlist mix-dump -- it's real radio with mic breaks and stuff! :-) The second episode features an old He Can Jog track.

Tune in here.

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Log April 2025

Log March 2025

Log February 2025

Log January 2025

2024 and earlier

david first - droneworks 1996-2009

I'm becoming very inspired by Uli Wahl's wonderful site on kite and aeolian harp-building this morning. Amazingly, it also includes pages on instruments which can be worn by pigeons, as pictured above.

His tin can kite design seems like a perfect starting point for this year's LOSST event. The site looks like a labyrinth of cool and weird ways to activate sound with the wind and I want to hear it all.

The glue is drying on a reinforcement board for the feedback resonator thing. When the strings can be properly tensioned and the pickups are in place the feedback can begin!

Update: the glue is dry, and I wired up one of the pickups after work. They'll need a house that puts them pretty close to the strings, but I think that's doable. Sounds pretty clean with just a 9v battery and going direct to the amp!

It really does like to be close to the string...

Now coming to you served from a raspberry pi in my apartment

The tuners are in the right position now, and I think I'm ready to wire up the electronics next. The end board where the strings terminate is already buckling a little and I haven't used a lot of tension yet, will need to add another board there at the end! It sounds pretty goofy unamplified with random banjo and acoustic strings I had laying around. It'll be fun to find out how the four pickups and exciter/string feedback will sound when the electronics are all wired up.

AE_LIVE_ZAGREB_061116

The tuners arrived! They needed a little shim piece to fit on the end board, but they're on there snugly now.

Edit: if you play guitar or have built one you may have noticed I installed the tuners in such a way that the strings won't wind around them properly... lol. I guess I was thinking I could just wrap them somehow, but I wasn't really thinking. It's salvageable though! Slotting the tuner piece into the top seems to work.

Oops, lol, the record's been paused since yesterday. The poor turntable has been spinning dutifully away waiting for the needle to drop on the last few minutes of the record.

This is a sketch for a balsa feedback resonator. The cylinder thing is meant to be an exciter attached to a piece of thick paper/cardboard, sitting on top of four balsa struts attached to the inner corners of the resonator. Above the cardboard membrane is a (balsa? pcb?) b...

the heavenly sounds of 'bells on high' -- a document of a really really very big carillon at the world's fair 1962 -- 538 bells! heard from the space needle!

I switched everything over to caddy last night... it was kind of easy? I figured it would take forever, but everything I'm hosting is very simple now.

Pepper, the grumpy kitty of the shampoo horn, used to make her rounds studio to studio

christian mcbride doing just the two of us on the way out of the philadelphia experiment LP

I'm essentially done with this rather large and presumptuous set of changes to astrid's inter-process communication plumbing. Four months in the making, I guess? I lost track. There's at least still some issue with trigger generation, and I'm surprised my shared memory pickl...

radboud mens and matthijs kouw - a / b

erik bünger - variations on a theme by lou reed

the probative recalcitrance of confusing models for reality

coffee shop playlist going from Hanson's Mm-bop to Boards of Canada's Campfire Headphase... um