listen to me:
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woke this morning early, too early, so i read a few chapters of New Grub Street. chapters i read were oddly similar to… okay, so everybody reads some book and totally, like, identifies with the lead character, you know? i know.
but seriously now, here’s a married couple. he’s shows some real talent for writing, but doesn’t make any money at it because he just can’t/won’t create “marketable” fluff for the masses, no matter how much money it could bring home. i can’t wait to finish the book to find him wasting away from starvation in obscurity. she’ll have long since left him and taken the kids, too.
i hope i’m wrong about the book, because i don’t buy it. i’ve got faith that if you do things right, do things well, do what you know, do what you love, don’t hurt nobody, and don’t go smoking no crack, good things will come.
take the example of hans-joachim roedelius of kluster, cluster, harmonia, and solo fame (he also collaborated with/influenced brian eno a great deal). stephen illife has written an engrossing biography full of glossy photographs and a complete discography (with album cover art!) of the man’s work called Painting with Sound. read it, please. not only did achim (yes, i feel close enough to call him by his familiar nickname) make some of the most amazing recorded music of the last century, but he’s lived a life worthy of being made an example to follow for anybody artistically inclined. read. learn. think hard, always.
at this moment, bradley is playing with a sample of piano sustain (hold the attack, please) on the yamaha vss-30. have you seen this machine? this little keyboard (circa 1987ish maybe, same general time as the echo plus and quadraverb gt we so love… can you believe that the first consumer-grade digital effects can now be considered “vintage”?) has an 8-bit sampler (crunch!) with, at most, 4 seconds of sample time.
but, and it’s a big but, you can adjust all kinds of parameters: attack time, sustain time, frequency, amplitude and envelope. and you can use a slew of effects like reverse, u-turn, echo, fuzz, et al. you can loop your sample. you can overdub several times. and play four keys at once.
several boolar tracks that you may already know and love were made exclusively with this machine. it is the main instrument on “the village dream.”
new subject: bradley expressed concern over my placement of the period in that last sentence. inside the quotation marks or outside, i ask you?
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