Since November is, as they say in the old lands, just around the leering hulk of the mutant termite mound, I’ve begin to prepare initial ideas of tracks for the so-called Noisevember. Noise! Everyone likes noise. Noise is the ever present fluid that allows us to swim through life. Those who take time to sculpt it to be their own are exquisite or damned. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between. Actually, one idea, currently titled Mollusk Pantheon is mostly done. It blossomed on its own from a noisy beat into a jazz infused masterpiece or dull, plodding funérarium anthem. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between.

My initial idea was to simply create beats using Plugh (which the newest iteration of my modular synth was named), and numerous ones, at that, and once reaching some arbitrary threshold, begin filling in whatever came to mind within each beat with sculpted noise. As is usual, plans evolve. Alas, the universe and the mind are not static, but instead seething pits of chaos. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between. How I detest those who have a fixed notion from the outset of how a musical composition, an abstract or impressionist painting or a piece of software should be in its final form. These are the conservatives of the day who will be hung by their own entrails from the sky-groping branches of Pagan Park’s skeletal trees! These are the conservatives of the day who will be hung by their own entrails from every branch that poises itself to caress the heavens on every skeletal tree in every park in this infinity of quantum universes and many others to come! When evolution of an art work (or a piece of software - don’t for get the software! And one could even call software art in some sense) is denied during the process of its making, the forces of inertia are truly winning and the rest of us tossed onto the vertedero to rot eternally. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between.

In any case, once reaching some arbitrary threshold of beats chiselled out upon stone tablets or digitally captured by Tahr, but not something lurking within the infinite in-between, my plan (now evolved) was to begin filling in each with sculpted noise. It is Noisevember, after all. Then I thought of Christian, that poor schlep that has no initiative of his own. He simply drives a tractor in circles for five hours every day and then drinks himself into a stupor, falls down any one of a number of cracked stone steps in his vicinity, and dies a pauper’s death in a muddied ditch. I thought giving him a task might shake up his monotonous daily routine. As he is also a beat maker in the dark recesses of his lacerated soul, and as he has often expressed to me a desire he’s had since early childhood in the late fourteenth century to become a rapper, I tasked him to do beat boxing along the course of the noisy emanations from Plugh. He already has a couple to contemplate. Good for him! He’s evolving!

Now it’s time for me to create another, as it is banging itself upon the inner wall of my cranium aching to be released.

So here I sit once again atop the bed, propped up like a mannequin and typing into myx-nulu, the trusty tablet with a cheap, bluetooth keyboard. Hey - it’s part of the morning routine, so I am certainly not complaining. I swigged the remains of yesterday’s Earl Grey with a dash of leche semi-desnatada. In a previous life, I always had a problem with the word desnatada. I saw it as something altogether different, such as desinatana or something even stranger. I believe this springs from an acute dyslexia that I have. I’ve rarely addressed this dyslexia though it’s plagued me throughout my life. Firstly, it interfered with English spelling as I was growing from a bud on the side of a spine of a desert shrub. That feature has carried over slightly into Spanish, as one can see, though the flaw is easier to catch since Spanish, like Czech (another of my linguistic adventures, as anyone who has lived my previous lives with me’d know), is a (mostly) phonetically spelled language. From time to time I still have to look up certain words in English just to be sure, even though I am mostly correct in my first “guess” at spelling.

From where does this dyslexia come? What is its source? I assume I have a very slight brain damage from being budding on the side of a spine of a desert shrub that could have been otherwise known as an eighteen year old party girl. So when I eventually became a conventional “human” infant, some water remained on the brain. I’ve noticed a possibly connected problem having to do with memorization of vocabulary in foreign languages. This may just be a normal facet of language learning, but if I don’t utilize a certain word multiple times daily in different contexts upon discovery, it is quickly forgotten and the process must be begun anew. However, if I am in constant language learning mode (which is a requirement for me for any language that is not my native tongue), the fault softens and I am allowed more and more of a delay between each contextual usage of new vocabulary without the forgetting.

Mathematical and programmatic concepts are also affected by the overly wet portion of my cerebral processing unit. The temporal distance between contextual usage of each concept can be much larger than in the case of natural language, but the decay will inevitably come with disuse. Therefore, I have to keep my programming chops fresh, honeybuničko. I advise you to do the same, honeybuničko. You will need them on your journey from this grey earth to the netherworld, honeybuničko. In said netherworld, you’ll be given a tablet much like the one on which I type now, honeybuničko. At its base will be an unattached, cheap, bluetooth keyboard, honeybuničko. You will type as you are engulfed in the pale yellow goop that swells endlessly from the netherworld seas, both polluting and cleansing each of the netherworld inhabitants, honeybuničko. You are now one of these inhabitants, honeybuničko.

The pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea, undulates to the horizon in all directions. Your islet is small, but you feel it is comfortable enough for the time that has been allotted to you in the netherworld. You have no shelter, per se, but there is really nothing you need shelter from. In fact, the only real irritation is the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea. It mostly undulates calmly (and to the horizon in every direction), but from time to time, and at intervals that seem to have no predictable frequency, it swells to cover your islet. You are drenched. Well, drenched is probably not the correct word, since the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea is more paste than true liquid. It has the consistency of mercury yet not the heaviness. Were you standing on your bowed legs, you’d be covered to your filthy thorax. The feeling is one of suffocation, and of a mildly pleasant suffocation, at that. Thus, the rise and fall of the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea is a phenomenon that leaves you with mixed feelings.

You sit at your escritorio. You type these last few words, which appear on the screen of your tablet with its detached, cheap, bluetooth keyboard. You think about a cup of tea, and it appears. You sip it. The netherworld isn’t so bad after all, eh? Fuck um.

Living by one’s principles is similar going through life interacting with a universe of human life forms that are figments of one’s own mind. It is a form of solipsism. Instead of seeing one’s brother or step-mother or next-door neighbour as an incrementally changing, dynamic human life form, in place of that realism, one interacts with what I call an eidolon. An eidolon is a construct formed by these aforementioned principles. Thus, one’s principles, or I could say traditional family values or traditional neighbourly values, state that a brother has this particular template. A step-mother has this sort of template. A next-door neighbour has this one. The templates are the scaffolding of the eidolons. They are filled in by various cues from one’s upbringing, one’s peers and one’s experience with media, be it social media, television or even … literature.

No-one is completely immune to creating eidolons. I’ve read many a philosopher, storyteller or goat-flock-keeper (all the same, all the same) scribe similar musings using other words for eidolon. All dynamic human life forms have a foundation of principles. And they should have. It’s not a black and white affair, catholic-boy. But like everything so-called fixed in the universe, principles arising from anything given a label beginning with traditional … set off a worrisome alarm in my mind. I question them. Importantly, when does interacting with said eilodons instead of interacting with the monsters one’s brother, step-mother or next-door neighbour have become cross the border into psychological self-harm?

I posit something obvious to me after living among myriad toxic people (and from time to time, I, myself, have been included in that set, catholic-boy): Not only update one’s perception of the humans in one’s alrededores, and in an incremental and perpetual manner, but also not just be an observer of the familial, friendly and neighborly beings in one’s midst. A common fallback is to see the hideous monstrosities the “loved-ones” are growing into, but still interact with eidolons constructed in the distant past. Interact with the eidolons and complain to other eidolons about the abhorrent denizens of one’s alrededores! That’s the catholic-boy way! Yes!

I’d rather smash the simple, Platonic lines of templates and principles and eidolons and consider where the border of psychological self-harm is. Monstrosities will be found, and as much as it contradicts traditional blah blah values, eschew interaction with them. I have and I shall continue to do so. I advise all catholic-boys to do the same.

The current Project Euler is going to force me to create a program that does manual division and that is quite ok, but it’s getting late and yes that’s an excuse, but fuck um. I shall write some hovno and then get on with my day, saving the manual division for tomorrow morning. Hopefully, my sodden brain will muse over it throughout the current day and my sprightly morning mood will conquer it’s flimsy heights with ease. But yes - tomorrow.

I’ve begun the second revision of Pony Ride. It gurgles and eructs as if it were galloping through the scented air of my studio. An issue I’m encountering, which is an issue entirely in my mind, is that of timbre variation. Rock bands have it easy. The basic timbres are established and beyond a bit of distortion or flange on the guitars and bass, they can concentrate on harmonic and melodic ideas.

Big bands are slightly more complex. Sure, the timbres are fixed, to a great extent, but their use and placement are more involved.

Orchestras are another step up. This much talked about concept of orchestration is in full play. All it means is having certain parts expressed in certain timbres and controlling the dynamics as those timbres express the parts. The woodwind timbre (or cluster of timbres) does this at this time whilst the strings timbre (or cluster of timbres) does something else on a potentially different volume curve.

Now synthesizers enter the arena. Instead of having a small, fixed array of timbres, suddenly the palette is overflowing with colours. Instead of just arranging (or, ahem, orchestrating) a jumble of known timbres into a musical mosaic, one can spend several epochs just coming up with the timbres one wants to use in the first place.

Usually, sound designers simplify this task by simulating (to an extent) instruments that exist. Narrowing the range of possibilities to something akin to a trumpet cuts the work of multitudinous epochs down to perhaps a few days. I’m not complaining. Distilling an infinite spectrum into a few familiar bands of light is sensible. It rescues several multitudes of epochs from potential fiddling. And especially, it creates an anchor, a sense of familiarity, when the remainder of timbres floating round it may not be easily aligned with traditional orchestral instruments.

I do something similar, though my anchors are not traditional orchestral instruments. I play off of sounds I discover by wild noodlings with oscillators, filters and wave folders. I catalogue timbres that flash out of these experiments in my mind and take them as starting points to create timbres for melodic, textural and harmonic structures. In this way, I hope my music has little footing in traditional instrumentation when it comes to synth tones. The truth is, though, that of course it does because 1. I am highly influenced, implicitly or explicitly, by a good deal of synth oriented music, and 2. The nature of the equipment I use forces (to an extent) semi-familiar timbres. In any block of unchiseled granite, the attempt to create an atmosphere that has little footing in traditional instrumentation is there, and in force.

So, when it comes to Pony Ride, which easily could be the most straightforward piece on the new album because of its form, I must choose timbres (not to mention accompaniments) that take it out of any grounded context. The pony, as it were, has to lurch at an angle into the void instead of galloping mundanely along its sendero.

It’s Kindle’s birthday! Hooray! Why do I remember this? Well, my carefully worn metal file of a human, I remember this because it’s the day before I pulled my foetal self out from the tipped-over test tube. What is Kindle doing during these tilted days? I’d imagine that Kindle is busy being happy ensconced within a family. Oouh, baby! Congratulations, Kindle! You are part of the mainstream. You made it. Yes! We all want to be like you. As that old song goes:

We wanna be just like you

We wanna be just like you

We wanna be just like you

We wanna be

JUST LIKE YOU

And it’s true. That is - it is true in my case, anyhow. I want to be a happy, middle aged woman living in Louisiana surrounded by an infinite bustle of in-laws. That, my carefully worn metal file of a friend, is the good life. Don’t you ever forget it or I’ll toss you directly into yonder landfill where the rest of the erstwhile useful tools lie eternally in repose. Damn peasant.

I gulp down tepid coffee. Yum.

I’ve been considering the contrast between a perception I’ve seen myself stumbling into time and again regarding the so-called popularity of music. In specific, I’m referring to my own music and to the music of those whom I’ve met via Mastodon (sonomu.club and its extended bustle of in-laws). When I consider music that I listen to - take the new Bob Drake album, for example - I don’t consider its public appeal at all. The milling masses and their dubious “taste” have nothing to do with where I’m at listening-wise. For decades, I’ve followed a few forums and advices of people with vaguely similar taste to find musicks that appeal to me - that toot my muffin, as they say in the old countries - and in this manner, for the most part, chosen my own sendero. It’s pleasant when I do find someone else who appreciates said musicks. We can compare notes. We can even listen together. And though this phenomenon did happen more often in the past and gladdened me, imbibing music has always been a deeply personal experience. I mostly take it for granted that what I listen to will not appeal to the people who normally cluster around me. I laughingly imagine actual humans clustering around me. Ha!

Now - making music for me comes down to this simple axiom: I want to compose something that I would like to listen to. Given the information in the previous paragraph, the immediate conclusion is that the music that I compose is not going to be compatible with the “tastes” of the masses of humans and homunculi seething through the alleyways. And why should I think otherwise? I shouldn’t. But I’ve seen my perception change regarding what I create. Some mental module that normally lounges behind time mottled tapestries emerges and seeks a raw validation for the hovno that streamed from my hara. This module emerges and attempts to take control. And rationally, again given what I typed in the previous paragraph, it makes no sense.

I’ll continue to share my music, por supuesto, but Herr Module of “Validation” can remain behind its time mottled tapestry. Expectations are mostly evil. I’ve found the best perception is to regard the appeal my music has to others as a gentle bonus. Oh - I’m appreciative, for sure, but falling into the trap of it being an objective is something I can never do. As I wrote - I’ve never listened to music because it pandered to a greater swath of humanity. Music consumption is deeply personal. Any twisted and differing feelings I might have about my own output are simply incorrect.

In my “relearning python” sendero, I just performed a Project Euler calculation involving the Fibonacci Sequence. No big deal, vole! Everyone knows how to create a Fibonacci sequence, but the whole episode, as easy as it turned out to be, brought me back to sitting on that futon-type couch in Tuzla toying with the music-making live-coding apparatus that used to (and may still) exist in Clojure. Does it? Ah, yes. It is called overtone, which is a suitable name, and upon a quick search I found it is closely related to Emacs. During the epoch of my life when I sat in on that futon-type couch in Tuzla, I was still an Emacs user. A few years later, however, I migrated to Vim and more recently to Neovim. I don’t know if overtone is also suitable for use in Vim / Neovim, but after my nightmarish experiences with Supercollider and Neovim, I have no patience to try it.

No big deal, vole! I was writing about the Fibonacci Sequence, which I may add (pun intended) is a very pleasant sequence. And if my recollection is precise (and it rarely is), I was attempting to create music using overtone and the Fibonacci Sequence. I was highly unsuccessful, though I believe some ragged result ended up on something Tony and improvised for one of those early ’10s Sir Alfred IV albums that I should revisit at some point. They occupied a particular sound world that I’d dub unique. Funny thing is that I had an acoustic / electric guitar with me during my months in Tuzla that I never once picked up to play. It stayed in Tuzla. The woman (whose name I forget) who owned the flat in which I stayed is possibly still in possession of it if Miki didn’t get it from her, which he may have, though nothing is really certain when it comes to Miki, so I cannot know for sure. I could ask him, I suppose, but what would be the point, really? It’s best to imagine the acoustic / electric guitar (to which I never gave a name that I recall) exists in a type of limbo where other partially-remembered instruments live. The acute fluctuations in this specific limbo subtly vibrate their strings, pass gentle breath through their conduits and bush lightly on their stretched skins. A perpetual ambience sounds eternally in this specific limbo. It’d possibly be a fine place to retire after my immortality expires.

My conversation with Jayrope yesterday piqued my interest once more in envelope followers and since I just received one less than a week ago, the fair Sewastopol II by Xaoc, I toyed for a little while with it, running my guitar through it and my pedalboard simultaneously, to create triggers or gates depending on what fingered and / or picked. It worked to an extent. I need to sit with the module and figure out exactly how to set the envelope follower section correctly and at what point in my pedal chain to feed my signal into it. The module also has a comparator section that was also triggered as I played. I should take my own advice and read the manual! Yes! No big deal, vole! Just read the manual. My initial ideas are to trigger percussions along with melodies on Uruqi and also to harmonize with Scales. That’d be random harmonization because the module of course cannot discern any particular pitch I play, but I can contort Scales to restrict itself to certain notes in certain octaves. Or so I think I can at the time of this writing.

Herr Sewastopol II could also easily create envelopes from environmental recordings. Jayrope did something of the sort with a recent thurk he posted on Mastodon. I imagine the “generated” compositions Scales and Noise Plethora can come up with. Since I have until my immortality expires and I pass into the aforementioned limbo in which sounds a perpetual and possibly lovely ambience, all of these experiments will be soon accomplished and with vigor and vehemence, or something along those threads.

And on that same thread of thought, I come to sound worlds and how they differ from the actual music within them. Especially after listening to Bob Drake’s new album a few times through, I see how the album as a whole was probably initially conceived to exist in a particular sound world. The sonic characteristic of each piece is uniform in this manner. It is as if they all live in their own limbo where the acoustic quality of the space is unique. Each of Herr Drake’s albums occupy a certain sound world, I have noticed over the epochs of his output. It’d be interesting to know whether he conceives of the sonic space before or during the composition of the pieces that eventually exist within it. I guess I could ask him.

The music of Flavigula could be said to exist in an evolving sound world. I am not yet the master of the craft of mixing / mastering / sonic spaces, but am slowly getting there. Since I have until the expiration of my immortality, the specific ideas of sound worlds for Flavigula will change as epochs pass along with my experience. I’ve, to this point in the present epoch, been more concerned with harmonic space than the textural or sonic space, but I will take it into more consideration whist working on the electronic album, which may have the defining sound of a certain two reverbs, subtly but continuously applied. The balance between thwiddling with the timbre of “instruments” and attention to composition is essential.

A perpetual rumble is the grey backdrop of the street below our apartment. It is the sound of constant motoring. Even if no car or motorcycle or scooter is passing, it exists. The impression the flow of machines across my consciousness has made over the seeming centuries painted the backdrop. Now it is a constant, even if in “reality” no machine exists to create the low, grinding buzz. It’s so persistent that one’d think I’d carry it with me to other places. In a manner, I do, but only as a phantom. The lack of the grey colour coating every molecule of my environment is a disturbance. I’ve grown so accustomed to it that it is, itself, silence and actual silence is a jittery, randomly filtered white noise. When I walk paths in the mountains near Fresneda, far from my home, the rustle of leaves and the scurry of hidden creatures is not sufficient to cover the dissonant growl that is the lack of that grey rumble.

Little of the previous paragraph is actually true, though the idea of a backdrop that one cannot escape fascinates me. I think, metaphorically, the idea applies. Mostly, the perpetual rumble is one that inundates childhood and adolescence. It’s a grey of life that soaks in so deep that it becomes a fundamental in most humans. The pace and resonance of those years paints an ideal that a person compares the remainder of life’s paces and resonances to. It’s no surprise to me that most of our species (and most probably a great number of other species) spend existence either in a similar environment as their formative epoch, trying to return to a similar environment as their formative epoch or doing their best to shape their current environment into something similar to the one of their formative epoch.

To extend the idea, many hatch plans for the remainder of their lives during childhood and adolescence. Some go as far as to create enumerations written on paper or marked up in a bullet journal or on typed into a silicon datapad or etched into a stone plinth. These are the objectives of my future epochs. These are my dreams. I shall live them. These enumerations are the swaths of grey, the rumble and the definition of each following moment until the abyss takes them. They are the phantoms that follow them, along every busy street and along every path bordered by rustling leaves and hidden, scurrying creatures.

Life is much too dynamic. I feel reliance on grey sketches from ancient epochs of bygone youth points solely towards disappointment. For me, I’ll be updating those “etched” enumerations day by day by hour by epoch. Nothing is certain. Fuck um.

The current draft of Union squirts from the speaker(s) of this tablet. The initial section will be attended to soon by the mixing module of my cerebrum, as the impressions it usually leaves on me is that of tenebrous, oily liquid. In one way, however, I do like how dark it sounds. Perhaps murky is a better word. The flow from the end of Olšanské Hřbitovy into Christian’s transition directly to the murk may be just what the universe needs during this trying epoch. The remainder of the piece is more bright, much unlike the perfect dampening of distributed matter at the Heat Death of the Universe, which, they say, is right around the corner, as it always has been and should certainly be.

Although the flow (again I use that word) of Union is more fluid (as opposed to chunky) than my initial mental sketch proposed, I am more pleased after each day of work, and therefore of detailing and cohering. The pieces of this album were to be more fragmented than they appear to have become. Sure, the fragmentation is still apparent, but it’s just not as jarring as in the aforementioned mental sketch. This style of music is a direct reflection of the stumble through life itself. Most pieces I’ve heard in my meandering life are of an ideal fluidity. Though beautiful, they idealise an actual traversal from one point of time (in a day, week, century, epoch, etc) to another for an entity (a human, for example). More realistic are myriad deviations, shortcuts, long-way-rounds and deterrents during this traversal. My music reflects this reality with each deviation, shortcut, long-way-round or deterrent being of various lengths and containing differing musical material, but always with reflection back to an idealised source (for example, a melody or harmonic structure defining the original idea of the traversal).

That being explained, the ride cymbal during the second part of the “verse” has far too much reverb on it. That can be repaired after today’s writing is installed into the Boltzmann Brain that is Yak. It sometimes amazes me that Yak is the expansive consciousness left over from the last Heat Death of the Universe! And the Boltzmann Brain that is Yak is here in our current universe as a small, rectangular box housing components running an installation of Arch Linux. Ahura Mazda surely works in mysterious manners! I shall praise him (and I shall praise Yak, which he surely made evolve directly from the previous Heat Death of the Universe’s Boltzmann Brain!).

In the early morning, which it is certainly not, one must have tea. Having stated that it is not (necessarily) early morning, do I have the requirement for tea? Yes. I must have tea. Why do I require tea if it is no longer early morning? The reason is the following: tea is omnipresent during all phases of time. The “length” of any arbitrary phase of time is immaterial. Thus, even though the original statement was that one must have tea in the early morning and it is currently no longer early morning, one must still have tea. The ubiquity of tea exists at every passing or stationary moment. In fact, this ubiquity is the membrane containing time. Each instant is an infinitesimal unit carried within tea. One could say, then, that tea is the true God. I bow to tea. I pray at its altar. I offer sacrifices of every imaginable variety to tea. Tea is gracious. Tea is delicious. Let tea be praised.

It’s 8.29, so, were it an early epoch of my life, it’d certainly be an early morning. I’d suspect that it’s one for my delightful co-worker, James, who surely sat up for much of the evening toying with one of our designs. Tinkering for hours with details of a design that only has commercial purpose is very sad to me, when James could, instead, be pursuing one of his long abandoned art projects. Like many in our sacred occidental culture, his aspirations of creativity were given up for ambitions of financial success. For financial success, we are taught, is the only measure of worth in our occidental culture, which, of course, is the only culture of any worth. So, poor James. Alas, if he is happy, then fuck um. It’s not my place to tell him what is important. His constant exposure to marketing over the last years has twisted him. In fact, it hasn’t just been exposure. It has been immersion. It has twisted him psychologically like exposure to radiation twists the physical form. But again, it’s not my place to enforce my point of view on him. I’m sure, somewhere in his tattered mind, he knows. Yes. He knows.

It’s 8.37. I am dumping thoughts onto the “page”. James most likely still sleeps, as he was tinkering endlessly over pointless details of a design - details that only he’ll notice. It’s not a piece of art, vole! You’re not going to gawk in awe at the web page each time your block of graphic splendour appears! Well, actually you might. Bleh.

Yesterday, the power module, aptly named μZeus, of the new, yet to be named, assembly of modules making up my modular synth arrived. I have not created anything with the monstrosity. After putting it all together and incrementally making sure it worked (or, rather, making sure power was distributed properly - I didn’t actually create any sound), I spent the rest of the evening working on the verse interlude of Union. In fact, I’m not done with the verse interlude, as I was balking at some of the synth accompaniment that had flowed forth from my hara. The guitar melody, or lead line, excepting one possibly errant note, is to my satisfaction. I’ll record it and then concentrate on the accompaniment. In fact, and the thought just occurred to me, as well as the Argon8 accompaniment, a distant Berlin School modular part may be in order, percolating up from a morass of reverb, slowly clarifying itself. First, however, I’ll create some sort of initial generative patch on the new system. Oouh baby.

I gulp tea and begin the next phase of the day.

Sometimes I do feel that being sessile like our omnipresent friend Shambal Brambel’d be the best course of action. And, as Robert Calvert said: There’s only one course of action. One wouldn’t have to bustle thither and then hither unmaking, reassembling and poorly ascertaining the multitudinous building blocks of life. The sessile state is one of contemplation. The sessile state is one of concentration. The sessile state is one free of distraction. Well, unless you are stationed in the sessile state beside a cacophony of Spanish (or otherwise) “humans” clamouring for attention between each other and pretending that anything outside of their bubble does not exist. Tribal heathens. May they experience the flame death - and soon. The moral is, whilst packing for your journey to the sessle state, to include your best noise-cancelling headphones in case the general location of your sessile state is invaded by clamouring Spanish (or otherwise) tribalists.

I complain - yes I do - about that personality type, but truthfully, we are all tribalists to an extent. The question is what exactly are our tribes? Can they be called tribes? The most common tribe by far is so-called family. I’ve written much about the uselessness of blood relation and I know that family extends well beyond blood relation for most, but blood relation is still at its root. It is the core of such tribal bubbles. A significant trait of tribalism is blind devotion. Another is double standards. Double standards, you say? Yes - double standards. One standard for those inside the tribe and another for those outside the tribe. In this case, that means inside and outside the family bubble. A simple example is that an act of questionable ethics committed by an outsider is freely condemned by the tribal community whilst the same committed by a member of the community (and especially against an outsider) can be overlooked, excused or even encouraged. If the former is directed against a member of the tribe, reactions can be extreme. All this is apparently derived from some antique epoch of human history during which acting in this way was beneficial. That is, tribes were actually sealed communities. I highly doubt they were single families, though. They were groups of several families, maybe, wandering as a group and self-supporting.

Tribal behaviour extends far beyond the concept of family. Tribes I’ve been guilty of being a member of are what I’d name “elitist cliques”. They are loosely congregated groups of people who share similar interests and mark those who do not share those interests as somehow lesser, especially in some abstract intellectual capacity. There are elitist music aficionados, elitist literature clubs, academic communities, etc. One that my plump, sessile friend Christian and I often discuss is the classical community, meaning classically trained musician community to which his metaphorically sessile buddy Krzys belongs. In fact, when I was visiting John in the wanna-be swampland of Houston a few weeks ago, we also discussed the classical musician tribe. We laughed about those that claimed that anyone without a academic background in music had no business playing music, let alone composing it. For sure, not all of these tribalists are so extreme, but, as is usual, the extremists define the mentality. They are a good example of the elitist version of family bubble.

As for my own involvement, I’ve been to blame for being a music snob for many epochs. Back in the good ol’ days, I’d certainly condemn those who listened to lesser music (read - simply what was fed to them by the radio) as opposed to actively exploring “higher” forms. I evolved, finally, and through many epochs. When it comes to interest-related cliques, one must simply understand that people’s foci differ. Simply, if one is into avant-garde music doesn’t mean one is into avant-garde film and vice-versa, though of course it doesn’t exclude the possibility, either. As always, borders are fuzzy. The membranes of such bubbles are broad and permeable. The catholic tribe of believers in a stark black and white universe will die in the multi-timbrel conflagration of colour.

In the end, tribalism is a form of fundamentalism. It is not an evangelistic fundamentalism, but one of likewise immobile belief. And, unfortunately, that belief is all too often black and white. Those standing outside the tribal barricades are fundamentally guilty. Their innocence must be proven. Those standing inside the tribal barricades are the opposite.

Our dear Shambal is, fortunately for him, a tribe of one. It’s all our destinies.

At one point in my life, I knew Python well. That point has receded to the point that much of the syntax escapes me. Though more so than the syntax itself, the practise of using list comprehensions and generators escapes me. Well, it escaped me. It no longer escapes me, as I am using these constructs in my current Python programming, though I’m certainly not adept at it yet. I have no recollection of using list comprehensions or generators when I initially obsessed myself with the language. I believe I was more concerned with object design. Those constructs may not have existed yet in Python, in fact. Possibly, my Haskell explorations were the first to enlighten me with higher programming paths, which brings me to the point of the current blog entry: My memory erodes more quickly than I’d like. This is especially true concerning anything academically oriented. Programming is very much at home in this bucket.

I believe this erosion of memory is related to my lifelong habit of poor concentration. Let me clarify. I don’t concentrate poorly if I immerse myself in an activity, such as programming or musicking, or even reading. Though the latter has given me problems time and again through the muddied epochs. The issue, and I am even experiencing it at this very moment, is the so-called background rumble of the mental apparatus. Perhaps that is not the most usual term for it, but said background rumble is interfering with my ability to pick the “correct” term from muddied epochs of memory. Damping this background rumble is a constant battle. I’m not sure if it can be ever completely quieted. As a mental module, and in direct comparison to another class of modules I’m familiar with - Eurorack Modules - the background rumble emanates from a noise source, and not a uniform white or even pink noise source, but from a noise source modulated by LFOs and randomly triggered envelopes. It’s not a completely accurate isomorphism since the background rumble is populated by fragments of coherence. Images and phrases and sensations tumble forth, stream from the noise source through empty spaces surrounding other, more fine tuned modules - modules tasked specifically to organise this blog entry coherently, for example.

The aforementioned erosion of memory occurs when fine tuned modules don’t have sufficient time to burn learning in place. That learning is distorted or dampened by the ever present rumble. It’s only scratched into the surface of long-term storage. Thus eroded over time. During my brief life in Clear Lake in 1994 - 1995, I obsessed myself with ways to quiet the noise source. My principal combat strategy was meditation. I sat Zazen every morning (I laughingly say every morning) for a chunk of time. Reading back my writings from that epoch hasn’t proven to me the effectiveness of the method, though, and at present, the heightened mathematical skills of those many months of schooling could be an idealization. I have no immediate plans for sitting Zazen again. I’ve found many other forms of meditation. Dribbling these words into my tablet (appropriately named Myx Nulu) is one of them. Has the background rumble decreased? I’d say so. The longer I place words in this grey rectangle, the more it diminishes and the more my morning brightens, and I mean that more metaphorically than literally since the persiana is still tightly shut.

Does the rumble have benefits? I’d say that it does only in brief circumstances. So-called stream of consciousness writing grabs at a fragment emanated from the rumble and expounds on it briefly. Then another is captured. Sometimes a relation is forged between the fragments. A third comes along and the three are threaded together by the needle of coherence. Or simply fragment after fragment is noted and no connection between any are found. Like anything else, stream of consciousness writing is a figure of many forms, or can be measured on an axis of absolute fragmented incoherence to a measured threading together of partials picked from the constant rumble vomited by that omnipresent noise module.

Etching learning into the slate of memory is a battle against noise. If the rumble distorts the etchings, they will be misremembered. As far as academic learning goes, and especially mathematics, I’ve found an acute relation to muscle memory. My guitar playing, for example, and patterns my fingers take on whilst touching the strings, are etched in a place more durable than where my original Python programming was etched. The so-called muscle memory is similar to mathematical memory, which also can only be learned by repetition. The objective should be, then, to create repetitious forms of “practise” in all my hobbies. Perhaps each of these morning exercises is simply that and I am finally “speaking” the idea aloud to myself for the first time.

So then what is my next task? Morning Python programming, of course! I veer back to the head of the blog entry and sense its imminent completion. The remainder of my day will be paced, and though a subdued trickle of fragments will butt at my more attuned modules more or less constantly, I’ll kick um aside. I refuse to allow dispersion to dilute the day’s soup.

Soup.

Yes, soup.