Kattefjaes

My strange obsession with live, improvised modular jungle persists. This was 100% modular, recorded straight from the rack, one take, so please excuse it being a little.. ruff 😎

It ate itself. Nothing to see here.

Laid back south american surf rockish vibes- the groove is powerful!

Who doesn't love a little bit of minimal ambient?

Some quality bleeps, bloops and west coast shenanigans:

RIP Andrew goddamned Weatherall

The.. and I love being able to say this... new Squarepusher album! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lb3RkVZOSxQTx1XBHQ7PeAIzQ_Jd8AAjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlhV-OKHecI ..is particularly nuts. It runs the gamut, quite a lot of nice mellow stuff on there too. Due to his broken arm and inability to let rip on "real" instruments, it has a very electronic feel, very Hard Normal Daddy-ish. Very happy with that.

No "Upright"? That seems like a huge oversight.

Hard to be definitive, but SAW2 is some of my favourite RDJ too. It's a perfect enveloping soundtrack to weird urban commutes and moonlit nights- he could have stopped there. Of course, I'm delighted he didn't, as he continues to make loads of really enjoyable music to this day (with a break of some years because he was sure no-one was interested), but god damn, SAW2 is gorgeous. Meanwhile, I can't remember if I linked this before and I just finished off the Laphroig, so do cut me some slack, but I do love:

Ok, still not strictly music, but I am having waaaaaaaaaaay too much fun with the TD-3. I wanted to try my hand at some stinky oldskool jungle on the Digitakt and the TD-3. Guess who bit off more than they could chew? The DT is very realtime, so keeping up with 170 bpm with the knob-twiddling and button mashing was challenging. The result isn't really music per se, but it's loud and angry and was fun as hell to do: I apologise to anyone who needs therapy as a result.

Oh my goodness, at this rate, Uli is going to have a brainfart and clone the Neutron. Is there no end to it?

Sorrynotsorry.. it's small, it's cheap, it's cryptic and unruly and it offers serendipity/instant gratification. Of course you want one - (smiley is so apropos there) Yeah, that's exactly what I was having too. The grinning and bouncing around was real. So much fun. Serious Jeff Mills/Plastikman flashbacks all over the place.

That's a Digitakt - I feel like I've barely scratched the surface so far but it feels like a fun machine. It sounds surprisingly giant too. Lots of fun to be had with conditional trigs and lots of realtime control, I suspect. I pre-ordered the TD-3 from thomann.de within hours of the story breaking, as I suspected they'd have it first. I was right, looks like UK dealers won't have it until late January. It's.. well, it's fun. It sounds a lot like a 303 - maybe a bit brighter, and without the characteristic slightly sloppy timing of the original, but surprisingly close. The onboard DS-1-alike works quite well, too. I've found it to be a tiny bit temperamental with regard to stuff like writing track sequences, and also selecting them for playback on the fly. You sometimes seem to not always get the pattern you're expecting - possibly it reads the selector input slightly before the last step of the pattern? It has been too many years since I touched a real 303, so I can't honestly remember if this crankiness is normal, or if it's something in Behringer's implementation and potentially fixed in a firmware update. On the upside, MIDI seems to work without much hassle, and the "synthtool" software gives you simple pattern editing on a computer for those rare times where you decide that you don't want to wrestle with the delightfully weird and intractable 303 UI. Unlike the original, there's no battery option- but it still runs from 9V negative centre, so you can power it from a guitar pedal supply. Fundamentally, it sounds and feels a lot like a 303, so it's as fun as shit. I was like a little kid once I got it running. If you want to hear it for yourself, here's a bit of audio, just some simple patterns over simple 4/4 "unf unf" drums from the Digitakt. 303.mp4 (Yes, I realise that the drums are REALLY LOUD, it was more an end-to-end test of connections than an attempt to do actual sequencing or mixing too precisely )

You're not helping! I'm currently gathering patch cables and software and trying to get running again- I have a weakness for small, quirky machines, I admit. My Sunday was a bit:

This, right here. Gorgeous, like ambient Bach from space.

Ooh, a Deluge, I always thought they looked like fun..

Holy. Crap.

Well, it took a while, but this thread delivered. Surely, there's also a risk of totalling the amp if you get a brownout or a power cut, if you're driving it from a PSU with deeper reserves, too?

Best off MAC locking, as you can't spoof that on a non-jailbroken iOS device any more. Most other approaches can be defeated, leading to a war of countermeasures, e.g.: Ha ha! DNS blocking! - stops accepting DNS server config from DHCP, moves to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. Have at ye! Egress blocking on port 53 udp/tcp - moves to DNS-over-HTTP client ..and so on. Though maybe it could be fun. Spending all that time working out how to defeat it rather than playing games could even be educational ? (I mean, you could have an openBSD box running without IPs as an invisible bridge, with all the network's traffic flowing through it, and then progressively clamp down on things via PF, that'd be hilarious.. ) Using an AP that lets you define hours of operation per-MAC or per SSID might be a good and painless start.

As a slight (and obviously extremely exciting) update.. Due to life happening, I didn't get to swap the headband back when we discussed it. Happily, in the interim, the death grip seems to have settled down as have the L-300-LE in general. They're a lot more comfy now, and I could swear they're also sounding a bit better- more interesting down low, some action below the mid-bass. I'm quite pleased with how they perform, they punch well above their weight in combination with my little amp. There are no glaring sins in the sound, at least for someone like me who doesn't necessarily crave the "impact" of heavier drivers with more excursion.

Obviously, it depends which aspect of Tim Powers piqued your interest, I wouldn't dare to claim they're clones. "Angelmaker" and "Gnomon" are pretty good, for example (the latter is significantly weirder, mind). Obviously, it depends which aspect of Tim Powers you like. Nick Harkaway runs the gamut a bit- "The Gone-Away World" is full of mimes, ninjas and monsters, for example. Very silly. (I love how no-one has told me off for suddenly reacting to a post from 12 years ago.. because BOOKS, I get excited, sorry.)

I enjoyed "Declare" - how's that one? (Also, if you like that sort of writing, do you know Nick Harkaway?) I just finished: Nothing that anyone with a general grounding in infosec and computing will find surprising, but a fair survey of the landscape and some crystal ball gazing that makes sense. I don't agree with every word of it, but it seems fairly sensible.

Early ears on these (outside of the Cult Of Dan) were far from complimentary. I am horribly fascinated to see a) the pics b) your conclusions.