I got what I wanted, after all. And what was that? I got what I wanted - to be alone. And here I sit on the bed in James’s guest room, alone with the eidolon who writes words into this online journal. He pops up from time to time, but not as frequently as I’d like. Of course, James is in the other room, so I am not as “alone” as I will be in less than a week when I move to my own flat, and if I really wanted to, I could walk over there and talk to him, but I don’t think it’d quell my mental storm. Or perhaps it would, but only for the instants the talk lasted. Then I’d be back here, sitting in the bed in James’s guest room, alone.

The primary question of interest is Was it worth it?

My talk to Marisa today was bewildering. It went against the resolutions I made to myself when I woke up on the morning of 28 March and quickly organised my things in anticipation of Dani’s arrival to whisk them and myself away.

What was that resolution? It was to never look backwards. It was to proceed from then on hour by hour facing forwards. Perhaps it was an idealistic outlook, denying my existence as an emotional beast. Emotional in part, though surely not as much as I was 20 years ago, but emotional in part. Or I have learned to manage my emotions more pragmatically. The end result is the same.

In any case, many conflicting emotions whorled during the conversation. They are still astir. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep later. This was the first time since my departure that she’s been genuinely angry. I suppose the ancient psychological thesis is right, in part. First disbelief and grief. Then comes anger. She claims I simply used her, from the beginning, to get European residency and to solve the many personal problems I had dragging behind me like anvils. I do admit that she helped cure me of a dire obsession with my interior life and the results of that obsession, including overindulging in the drink. I also know that were it not for the stability I had within the relationship and homespace, I would not have had the courage to begin composing and performing music again. The relationship brought myriad positive things.

Although we did many fantastic things together and I have numerous happy memories, in the end, as always, the stagnation crept in. Is it my eternal “curse”? Perhaps I’ll always feel stagnant no matter where I am or who I am with. As much as I’d like to be in complete control of the so-called modules that flow and interact within my headspace, I have never been in control of the one that feeds me the impulse to move on. So, I can honestly say that in the end, the fault is all mine. So when she called herself a victim during our conversation, or, rather, she said she felt like a victim, she is one. One could even say that she is a victim of caprice. That is a dire way to put it. She is a victim of my caprice. She is a victim of Sweet Entropy - that uncontrollable module hovering, flitting and all the while scheming in my headspace. So, consequently, Tony was right when he said it all those years ago. I am very capricious, not to mention selfish - at least in this context.

But if the alternative is lifelong deep inner dissatisfaction, what is one supposed to do?

I know what she would say.

Go to the psychiatrist and have them prescribe anti-depressants. Anti-depressants. And I also wrote her in a message a few days ago how afraid I am of such chemicals. I’ve seen how much Chris Bender has changed simply because of them. There are remnants of his creative, wacky and incisive self still, but they are subdued. And that is what anti-depressants do. They take the edge off. More specifically, they file down the edges of your personality. Oh, to be smooth! But I don’t want to be filed down. I don’t want to be smooth, nor do I want to be subdued. I want to be Bobbus.

And that means that I have to move forward. And that is what I am doing. And that is what I shall continue to do.

Fuck um.

Concerning Roger Trigaux’s death:

Alas, one of my favourite composers has died. His music has been an assuaging and alarming factor in my life since 1998. During the latter years of the 90s, what some would call the golden age of web pages, both Univers Zero and Present had crude websites up detailing this and that about each band and dubious information about current events. These sites also hosted samples of the music itself. I don’t recall actually listening to anything from the Present at the time, though surely I did, but I was captured by what I felt was mystical darkness in a fragment by Univers Zero. In particular, it was the bit of La Faulx as the chaos begins to subside at 8.50 and transforms into the beginnings of a theme on bassoon. Listening to that bit still takes me back to sitting at the antique computer that I STOLE from the Microsoft offices and being rapt by those sounds.

In my young mind, Univers Zero were not people, but wraiths incanting simultaneously forbidding and alluring rituals. The mystical darkness image muted itself over the decades, though it still lingers when I listen to Heresie. I ordered the CD from (probably) Wayside in the spring of 1998. I still have every motif of Jack the Ripper imprinted in my mind. Staying an entire night once at Microsoft to finish some forgotten task, I had it blasting from my office. I wasn’t the only night owl and got a few curiously alarmed looks from passers by. The last piece, Vous le Saurez en Temps Voulu, of which Roger was the sole composer, captivated me like the other two, and ESPECIALLY the ending bit. The instruments breathed like creeping things aurally surrounding me and exuding an exhausted refrain. I still love it. In fact, after the live version of Ersatz from the live disc of the 2014 release of Le Poison qui Rend Fou ends, I shall put it on.

I don’t remember actually acquiring a disc by Present until my visit to NYC with Magdalena in December 1999. At Downtown Music Gallery, after showing her of both Triskaidekaphobie / Le Poison Qui Rend Fou and Certitudes and asking her to choose based on the covers, I went back to Praha with Certitudes. Admittedly, it took me longer to get into the music than I first thought it would. And admittedly, the reason was the vocals. They were certainly difficult to digest. These days, though, Delusions blows me away every time, INCLUDING the lurching, rasping vocal saturated first half. I haven’t given the rest of the album as much time as Delusions, but will revisit the whole thing in the upcoming days.

My true obsession with the band came when I received the next album, No 6, in early summer 2000. My days became saturated with it. I imbibed and re-imbibed every phrase. It’s brilliant. I don’t go back to it as often as I should, and that’s most likely because the long pieces are cut up into parts. I have an assembled version that I made ages ago, 320 kb/s mp3s. So what I wrote isn’t really an excuse, is it? I’ll thurk it onto my phone now. Done. I saw them play Ceux D’en Bas at both shows I attended, and The Limping Little Girl at the first. I still remember Kerman yelling Didn’t you hear what your mother said?!? and Vesna looking at me with wild eyes. In fact, she loved the concert. Take THAT, all you other girlfriends / wives that have made me suffer through countless hours of mindless pop and classic rock.

Delusions from Certitudes reminds me of sitting on a couch in mine and Vesna’s flat in Mũnchen smoking pot along and listening … just listening. Vesna was out somewhere. Our relationship was in its final days, so I don’t think I was too bothered. In any case, I was stoned and listening to Present, so all was well. A few months earlier, we were in Würzburg at the Freak Show Festival seeing the band. I hung out with Dave Kerman during Magma, him notably telling me that Theusz Hamtaahk is his favourite because of its compositional curve. I spoke with Roger briefly about the opening band (Anekdoten) and near the end of the evening again when he signed my High Infidelity CD.

That gig was a long time coming, actually. In the frat house I lived in with Vesna during the early fall of 2000, I scoured the internet using Nataša’s bumbling PC (that’s Nataša of Linux is not so difficult. Actually, it’s the same, just in green fame) for where the purported concert was going to be held. As I noted earlier, their website at the time was sketchy. Dates and venues changed as frequently as Nataša changed boyfriends. The process continued until fruition in June of the following year.

The most fruitful event of the Freak Show Festival was meeting Frederick, however. Unfortunately, I lost touch with the blond, bearded Norwegian addict of Italian Prog Rock long ago. We took him back to München with us, and fed and housed him for a few days. I acted as tour guide of the city. Imagine that. He introduced me to Franco Battiato and Pharoah Sanders. I introduced him to After Crying. Hardly a fair trade, was it? Well, he had free food and shelter, so fuck um.

Returning to the subject of frequency of listening, Maloja tells me that Present has only been in my top fifty in 2011, 2014 and 2015. This could be because of the length of their pieces or simply that they demand attention when one listens. Most of the peasants I know who wander through local fields of existence usually throw on music (sometimes in the form of a pseudo-aleatory radio station) to fill up the space around them. It produces a sort of familiar clutter that lets one sit more comfortable amongst otherwise stark environs. Putting on Present instead produces circling, semi-sentient forms instead of familiar clutter. These forms poke and prod at you. Comfort was never the goal of Roger’s vision. A tenebrous solace, maybe, but never comfort.

Promenade au Fond D’un Canal begins it’s 20+ minute oppression regime and I again think back. The first time I listened was at John’s in Queens. And yes, Nataša was there. Well, it’s possible I have the years mixed, but according to a previous paragraph, I bought Certitudes on my Xmas 1999 NYC adventure, so I most likely grabbed Triskaidekaphobie & Le Poison Qui Rend Fou the following year. The wild part that just began parading from my speakers made John shout “23/16!” or some other absurd time signature. It’s not actually in 23/16. I’ll leave it up to the reader and future Present listener to figure out the actual time signature.

Mr Trigaux’s music is a passenger sitting at my side, poking and prodding, as I casually drift towards the place to which he’s recently gone. I’d like to think of that place as a sort of endless canal through which march fumbling forms who grunt and wail from time to time in 23/16. I look forward to it.

Lately, and possibly because I’ve been reading the book Sapiens, I’ve been musing over imagined social constructs and their different levels and interconnectedness. The books relates that all social constructs are birthed from human imagination. I’ve had this thought before, as well, and actually discussions with my long lost friend Jayson on the very topic. I’m unsure if we put it as succinctly as the book has, however. Congratulations to the author. In recent years, I have referred to the whole scumduggery as bubble-think and the bubble-think I’m most interested in now is that of family.

The shibboleths of large familial clans are, to me, the most dangerous. They tend to attempt to enforce their own bubble-think on anyone entering their realm, even temporarily. They come to believe their way of dealing with every day events is the norm for the rest of the next-level-up shibboleth (usually a political group such as city or state) and come to question why outsiders perform daily tasks in any way differently. In other words, they become their own fundamentalist bubble concerning daily routines. Those who try to escape from a familial bubble are questioned and sometimes castigated. They are certainly gossiped about. In fact, intra-bubble gossip is what most tightly holds a familial bubble together. Bonds are stronger when people have common negative views to “trade” with each other about others behind their backs. Assholes.

I put the word trade in quotes because what the intra-bubble denizens are doing is not actually trading, as they share the same negative views. Rather, they are mutually reinforcing them. It’s another feature of bubble communities (though not so much for the large familial clans type) that they contain mostly people with similar viewpoints and mutual reinforcement is a wheel.

Extended families are a problem for me not only because I’ve always pretty much rejected my own, but because the link that exists is such a transparent imaginary construct that at times I’m unbelieving that people choose family over others simply because they are family. The bond of blood or even adoption is so limp, in my mind, that I am even offended when it happens (even if it has nothing to do with me). I take offense at the stupidity. I can’t choose someone I have little or nothing in common with over a friend that shares common interests, motives and ideas for existence simply because the imaginary construct of family exists.

Now it is time to get some TEA.

Actually, I was incorrect. NOW is the time to get some tea.

I’ve consumed over half of the mug of tea even before typing these words. What gluttony! Does the word gluttony apply to liquids, as well? I’d think so. For example - Christian is considered a glutton by his familial bubble for his consumption of uncountable light beers every evening. They don’t relate this opinion to him, however, but only to each other behind his back, as that is how the bubble-gossip works. Because of their shared opinions of Christian’s light beer gluttony, they are bound closer. The bubble walls thicken. Opacity threatens!

My dead cousin Amy once related an anecdote from my own familial bubble to me in 2002 or so (I’m assuming the date). We were possibly listening to Porcupine Tree. One never knows. She was 10 years my elder and therefore closer to the so-called adult circles. Adult circles are simply other bubbles, still translucent, but always with a share of opacity, of course, within the familial bubble. Bubbles within bubbles. Bubbles like Venn Diagrams. All sorts of bubbles exist. She’d be allowed to sit with my mother and her mother (otherwise known as my aunt) as they gossiped about the wild girls in high school and how their corrupting influence, being against the gossiping Christian ethic, should be stopped. The distaste for those completely outside the bubble strengthens bonds within the bubble even more. It’s exponential and built of hearsay and imagined situations and is the source of all prejudice and, on a large scale, war. I suppose Amy was in high school at the time and probably knew more intimately the goings on of her peers. She became accustomed to the negative bonds and began unknowingly (or not) doing it herself later in life, relating to me what she didn’t like about some collection of agents outside our personal bubble as we drove around Dallas listening to Porcupine Tree and stopping from time to time at the Hare Krishna commune to gobble down tasty cuisine. Was I surprised that she was doing the very thing that she complained to me about, making her a hypocrite? No - I wasn’t surprised.

People love to use the word hypocrite as a derogatory term labelling others, but excuse their own actions that could fall under the same label. I term it disassociation by abstraction. Since the number of connections one makes on higher and higher levels of abstraction are limited, the stopping point usually doesn’t envelop one’s own deeds. Ie, talking shit about peer groups behind their back can be viewed as slightly “wrong” (there’s those quotes again) because they are people who one spends time with frequently, but talking shit about random groups of people on the streets obviously behind their backs is okay because one rarely if ever associates with them. On some level of abstraction, of course, it’s the same.

Fuck um.

This morning, I mailed a box full of guitar pedals to James. Along with giving boxes and suitcases of things to Dani, it is one of the first tangible steps towards freedom from my current emotional stagnation. The impact on my local environs will be substantial. In fact, it already is. It keeps me awake. I’ve practised mental isolation enough that I can usually push the thoughts of how Marisa is going to feel aside, but I am still vulnerable, especially during times of food coma duress. Why food coma duress? I think my mental state weakens when I am in digestive mode. As I wrote recently, food coma duress is a phenomenon I did not experience in past epochs. Or, alternatively, perhaps I just didn’t eat as much. I don’t think that’s the case, however, as I don’t gorge myself like my poor, slothful friend Christian does. Since I do not breakfast, I am far more happy about my decision to depart from this narrowing ravine during the morning hours. I am free of digestive moods and mentally acute. Though when I suck down too much caffeine, I become slightly dizzy. I suppose that is normal.

Digitizing all of these old Sir Alfred IV tapes is also assisting me to loose myself from my semi-rooted Spanish years. As diversely bad as they may be, they pull at me from epochs past and their aleatory days. Idealising such times is probably a mistake, as I was mostly miserable during the 90s, or lonely. Maybe pining is a better word. Now that I’ve experienced the relationship trap time and again, I should divorce the 90s from their suffering and imbibe the memory of complete freedom that I had. I’m excluding the time with Brynn, of course, though there were moments, especially at Microsoft, that I was floating in the arms of Sweet Entropy.

Soon I’ll be floating in the arms of Sweet Entropy again.

So, pragmatic steps:

• Progressively send guitar pedals to James. If any of them are needed for Cupboard of Moors, use them immediately in every required place. Put them in a box and mail them. I think the Mel9 and the Ditto x4 Looper will go first, as well as perhaps the Red Mountain Tremolo. Within 10 days, I can downsize to the main pedalboard and its supplementary THURK.
• Everything that is not out in the open in my room goes in a box for Dani. He arrives tomorrow at 11. I have two boxes that I’ll build in the morning and then fill. There are cables, cassettes, a book or seven and other sundries that can be packed.
• Repeat until the bare essentials remain.

I must defecate.

James is searching for logistic companies that will get my boxes from here to Prague as cheaply as possible. I know it is possible do ship items this way, though I’ve never had the connections to do it before. Shall I trust James? Shall I simply murder him? Shall I trust him before murdering him? Should I pretend that I’m trusting him and then later pretend that I’m murdering him? The solution eludes me. Perhaps I should simply make a sandwich, enter a food coma, give up my aspirations and metaphorically DIE.

Anything is possible!

Currently, the four track tape that I used to record Stone Calendar is being digitised. Excellent. As I was practising guitar “along” with it for a bit, it seems that it is exactly half speed. Exactly is probably a vague term when I’m speaking of a 20 year old tape, but that is neither here nor there, everywhere or consuming commodious pears. We’ll see what the result is when I mix the four tracks together. I’ve wanted to finish Stone Calendar for epochs. Perhaps the time to do so is soon. That begs the question - on which album will you place it, vole? Well - I’m partially of the opinion that I can work on the Songs album and another album in tandem. What is this other album, you ask? It’s the one that originally was going to house Sketch #1, Sketch #3 and Sketch #4 (and at one time, Drtič). Instead, what about the three sketches and Stone Calendar? Every piece will exceed ten minutes, so the resultant length should be about right.

Ok - so what do we place onto the Songs album? No, I’m not going to suddenly become John Greaves and actually name the album Songs. How about Canciones? Ha! Písničky. Ha ha! By moving the Sketches to another album, I’ll have far more space.

• The Penultimatum
• Union
• Pony Ride
• Fool Fancying Cliches (lyrics rewritten in Lakife?)
• Get Away

That’s not enough. Other contenders could be:

• Write a new song! Ha!
• Cover of a Tony-era Alfred song
• Early Morning Madrigal
• Another Lee song (Running Circles?)

A problem with doing many more early Alfred songs would be that I’d feel weird not asking Tone-tone to do bass and him playing bass would probably break up the album’s continuity. Possibly in the future, Tone-tone and I can actually do a Re-Alfred album, sort of like Albert Bouchard’s Re-imaginos, without the pun, of course, though I’m sure Tone-tone would come up with an appropriate pun. It’s his gift and curse.

Also, there is Test Tube Conceived. I already mentioned the idea to Tony, so I’d presumably ask him to do bass and possibly vocals. I’ll place that project a bit apart from other Flavigula stuff for the moment, even though I need to keep it in mind and from time to time work towards its realisation.

Oh, and the electro-acoustic album!

Fuck um.

I’m digitising a cassette that I recall nothing about. It’s something Tony sent me ~20 years ago, possibly slightly less. The first piece is simply bass punctuations over a warbly synth. In fact, I like it. The stark minimalism is appealing. Funnily enough, were I to do this sort of thing, I believe it would get approval from the crowd. Not that I’m necessarily looking for approval, but I have found that the more minimalistic my output is, the more (at least immediate) positive feedback I get. This makes sense on one level because minimalism is initially easier to digest. Jēmeraz had a lot going on in the backdroop. Most people in this epoch of miniscule attention spans don’t have attentive energy enough to pay active mind to pieces of music multiple times. In fact, most people in this epoch of miniscule attention spans don’t have enough attentive energy to pay active mind to pieces of music ONE time. I hope I am wrong, but most just put on music as a backdroop to other activities unless attending a concert or, in the current plague epoch, a live event.

The cassette and its minimalism continues. I wonder what it would take for me to get back to so-called basics like this. Simple themes, weird experimentations in the backdroop, no thought of what anyone would THINK about it. Those were the days of Sir Alfred IV and the cassettes. No matter what I say to myself and others, of course it is true that at least a few of my mental modules consider the opinions of others when I am creating music. Well, perhaps the ones that might consider others’ opinions are shut down when writing the music itself, but certainly they are in a semi-wakeful state whilst I am manipulating the sonic space inhabited by the music. This is commonly called mixing and mastering, for those of you stuck in the Pleistocene, better known as the age of four track cassette recorders and an attitude that didn’t extend to caring about what any part of the populace might think. Pure experimentation, honeybuničko.

It’s still within my capabilities. For the “next” album, of course. How many “next” albums are there, anyway? Let’s add one highly experimental one to the list that will not take into account the hypothetical thoughts of any part of the populace, including anyone close to me. I’ll designate this to the purely electronic album I was considering the other day. Let’s say it’ll turn out to be a combination of electronic and electro-acoustic. Ah, but now I’m giving it labels! That’s already a trap! Fuck um. Let’s say that it’ll just be experimental. Whatever gushes from my hara will be the result, and I’m not talking about improvisations, which seem lately to take on a sheen of produced ambience. Listening to Tony’s cassette, I hear unbridled creativity. He did whatever the fuck he wanted to do. What I end up doing will sound nothing like this, of course, but I want the wraith of the cassette age to be in evidence.

On a tangential topic:

I don’t want to leave albums in the queue forever. The so-called songs grouping of pieces should be next, including Sketch #s 1, 3 and 4 along with recreations of Union, The Penultimatum and Pony Ride. My notes call attention to A Fool Fancying Cliches and Get Away, as well. Let’s leave those two for a future album.

What about Drtič? I’ll continue with the idea of “releasing” it with Cycle. I also toyed with the idea, and actually went as far as to query Kris about is drummer compañero kapely, of having a real drummer. If so, I’ll likely have to pay Martin. That’s cool, of course, but the bulk of the two pieces should be recorded in a form that doesn’t suck before I do that. At one point, I envisioned this being complete in 2020. Ha! One eternal rule is that all creative efforts take longer than planned, especially if Christian is involved.

As the cassette continues, I must think about my way to achieve experimentation without expectation. A good starting point is, of course, Supercollider, as well as manipulated samples and unorthodox (for me) use of SBUP. Another consideration is listenability for me in the future. After all, in the end, all of this music I’m committing to digital media is for my own perusal when I am decrepit, drunk and dying in a pool of my own vomit in the distant future. It’s the perfect way to ride out my final days in the hovel I dig for myself in Ulaanbaatar. Who needs love and affection when one has dulcet (and clashing) musical hovno to caress one’s ears? Eh?

I turn over the cassette and am presented with a sound collage - another staple in electroacoustic music and therefore another idea. As much as I despise multi-tasking, it may be worth it to write the experimental album over a long period, adding things from time to time to compositions and letting them take shape more or less themselves during my nightly listening sessions. These listening sessions usually bear as much or at times more fruit than actually sitting with my guitar and looper writing.

Time to sign off for now.

I’ve started a new project. One might ask what that project is. One would get a reply immediately. At the end of each endless, torturous day I sit down with my trusty log-book and pen a few items that resonate most clearly in my mind from throughout the day. One can substitute Fairphone for log-book and virtual keypad for pen. Further, one can substitute agonizingly brief and routine, but far from painful, unless one counts metaphorically for endless, torturous.

Paying attention to my surroundings at as many moments as possible has been one of my lifelong goals - a hard won goal - one I’ve actually not even come close to “attaining”. It’s an objective in progress, then. If I have to train my log-book to signal me reminders to do so multiple times during each agonizingly brief and routine day then so be it - I shall do so. Remind Bobbus to be mindful of his environment - to be WITHIN his environment - not lost in some dreamland. I could have been a dreamer! Ha. I want to be as far away from a dreamer as possible. Soak up the atmosphere of each moment, vole, no matter how mundane!

What has initially shocked me about this new project is how little I can remember every evening. Let me be more clear. What has initially shocked me about this new project is how many stand-alone lucid moments I can remember each evening. Of course, I remember swaths of events in general and how they proceeded, and even my general feelings about them at the time they occurred. When I have my trusty log-book in hand, these feelings and event sequences resonate. These are not my concern. I want stand-alone lucid moments. Stills. I want mental photographs. These can include aural-graphs.

For example, two late evenings ago, I scribed:

• The eighth dotted quarter repeat bird call as I was sitting on the balcony with Marisa. She preferred another bird, who made a single “more clear” ptweet.

This instant is important. Its clarity is still with me now. I hope it will be in the epochs to come. These footholds into that day bring greater clarity to the remainder of the vague sequence of events that surrounded them. As I said, I remember swaths of events, but without the central foci I am attempting to capture, the swaths will eventually, usually sooner than in some distant time, dissolve in the undulating ocean of my mind. Any impressions of them will be combined with multitudinous others. I can compare such designated daily foci with the motifs of a piece of music. As much as I enjoy ambient music, endless blasts of white noise and improvisatory tomfoolery, music needs motifs for me to truly be inside of it. They let me step onto a platform, no matter how tiny, so that the rest of the entorno musicál can whorl around me. They let me be a part - to live within.

So am I saying I want to relive each of these days I’m obtaining foci from? Well, yes - every bit of my past that I can grok clearly gives me more insight into being alive knowledgeably. They will also give me ideas for future meanderings in the Martenblog, for the mind’s landscape is never quite completely explored. The more I remain a mystery to myself, the less I feel like I’m actually living. That brings me to another topic always hovering in the backdroop.

Depression.

Depression has cradled me in its niggardly arms, blocking out the rest of the known multiverse, from time to time throughout my existence. That’s fine. I’ve accepted it. But I do kick and poke and whack the beast with my personal sorts of offenses. One of these personal sorts of offenses is the foci I just explained. Letting the cradle of depression be my default place is equal to living any number of aforementioned swath of events again and again without the foci. The foci undermine depression’s grip. They are the islands in my mind’s undulating ocean. Similarly, making music, writing in Martenblog and worshipping goats are all other methods of spitting in depression’s face.

Other people I’ve known have succumbed to medication to make the beast vanish. I argue that while these medications may make the beast vanish, it is still there, cradling. After medicating, it is simply not perceivable. A numbness arises and therefore the daily foci, the music-making, the writing and the worshipping goats are no longer necessary. I’ve tried the pills and related strategies. Fuck um.

One conclusion is that depression, at least for me, is actually productive. Or, rather, the battle against it is productive. I have no hard evidence that I’d not make music, write or worship goats if the beast did not exist. I can’t currently think of any other factors, but that’s probably because I need tea. I need tea badly.

I enjoyed thoroughly one of my favourite pieces of music last night. Soubresauts by Univers Zero from the fantastic album Clivages. I invited my friend to listen, as well. His opinion of the piece differed drastically from my own. Initially he queried if it was made in a DAW. He seemed shocked that it was a band. He said the recorded suffered from sounding like banging on cardboard boxes and called one part American, pathetic like 80s or 90s rock fusion. Now, I respect his opinion greatly, but I’ve never heard any of these facets in Soubresauts. But, in the end, that’s fine. I listened to the parts he pointed out again trying to discern what he was hearing. I failed. Why? The reason could be that I have heard the piece multitudinous times, but I don’t think so. I believe it is the approach with which each of us listens to something - at least initially.

I’m fascinated by harmonic and rhythmic interactions. The “presence” of the recording in reference to it sounding like it’s in a room, a hall, a vacuum chamber or a foreign star system is immaterial initially to me. I ignore it. This may stem from the fact that I’ve spent epochs of my life listening to “badly” recorded music, not to mention bootlegs of live recordings. The “presence” of the recording comes to me later usually, after I’ve absorbed the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic details. I posit that it is similar to the fact that the weather doesn’t affect me at all. Sure, I sense and know that it’s hot, tepid, cold, freezing, raining, sleeting, slowing, howling with demonic winds, etc., but the sensation and knowledge do not change the way I go about my day. They colour the way I go about my day, maybe, but overtly change it, no. I’ll incorporate my sense and knowledge of the weather, if only subtly, in what I do. The “presence” of a recording is much the same. I sense the way something is recorded, but it rarely affects how I approach the music. Or, using the weather analogy further, I may move through the music slightly differently depending on the “presence”, but I carry on through it, regardless.

One could then ask - Bobbus, why don’t you just listen to midi files run through a generic synth to grok these things? Well, the timbrel variety that comes with wielding an actual instrument interests me greatly, as well, and thereupon creates the fourth facet of music that fascinates me: texture. I understand that texture can be closely related to the aforementioned “presence” or production value of a recording. Narcissist assholes speak of using the studio as an “instrument”. I get it. But back to the original theme.

My friend and I obviously differ in our approach to listening and I believe we also differ in our expectations during a listening session. Despite what myriad of my friends, ex-friends, lovers, ex-lovers, family members, ex-family members and always present bacterial colonies think, I don’t require music to be completely bizarre for my enjoyment. I seek the middle path in all things. I don’t need something to be overtly avant-garde to be thrilling. I derive joy from jazz standards, string quartets, progressive rock epics and folk ditties alike. Well, I derive joy from selections that fit into each of those categories, of course, and obviously not EVERYTHING. The point is that I don’t openly reject something just because it seems to be “fitting in” to a specific genre. And so - it bothered me when my friend claimed that a section in Soubresauts was American, pathetic, blah blah blah. The section is question brings me joy and even if it DOES evoke to someone 80s American rock or whatnot (I personally don’t hear it), I highly doubt Daniel Denis planned the piece out so that those phrases would FIT that template. No. I’m not saying that said friend necessarily asks for something ‘avant’ every time he listens. It’s doubtful that anyone is so extreme. Approaching any art with expectations is a danger.

I’ve encountered a certain point of view especially with other musicians many a time during my patchy existence. Immediately these people will latch onto a phrase or even a sound, timbre or single chord and pinpoint where they have heard it before. The rest of the piece, especially the context, is then abandoned. And in most music, excepting pastiches and satires, these connections are incidental. When I’m composing something, I don’t sit back and re-analyze - does this sound like such and such or such and such that has already been done in the past. Hm - maybe this sounds too American or Ukrainian. Should I change it to create something more original? Being that the point of my music to to compose and record something that I’d personally like to listen to, I don’t see the point of such analyses. In any case, if one fights ANY sort of conformity (especially incidental conformity) in every step of the process of creation, it’s basically doing the same as conforming in every step of the process of creation. You’ve just done the opposite. You’ve made a sort of conceptual mirror image.

I re-listened to Soubresauts a number of times trying to discern everything that pertained to our conversation last night. I guess i can see where my friend is coming from in places concerning the “presence”, but none of that changes the overall sensation, ebb and rush of the piece for me. It’s brilliant. In the end, opinions differ.

One thing that we do agree about, and is reserved as a topic for wholly separate Martenblog entry, is that when something is strikingly different about a recording - in its “presence”, it makes us take notice, probably him more immediately than me, but still. Whether that difference is something I would incorporate into my own work is another matter entirely.

I don’t want to come off as creating a critique of my friend’s critique. I will incorporate his opinions in how I listen to music in the future. Sure. I’m forever changed! Every conversation should forever change me, actually. I do think I should let the “presence” of a recording affect me more and not just let it “exist” as I do the weather, oblivious of the toll it takes on its environment. These considerations are especially important when they concern the music that I write and record, as I am still in a constant state of learning when it comes to mixing and mastering.

The manifestation of peasantry comes in many forms. It is impossible to avoid completely. It’s the tacit acceptance of the same five or six meals one dubs favourites. It’s the same radio station every day on the way to and from work. It’s watching the same several of genres of TV shows every evening before sleep. It is closely related to comfort. In a way, being a peasant is conforming to comfort or, better, conforming to a comforting routine. Reticence to breaking out of so-called comfort zones is what it means to be a peasant.

The English Breakfast is most likely steeped. My peasantry has me drinking it every morning these days. Or is simply drinking the same beverage (tea, in this case) every morning peasantry? Should I break from it and drink coffee or vodka some mornings? I’ll stretch my idea a bit and state that simply ordering different TYPES of teas each time I’m running low will absolve me of peasantry, at least in the tea zone. Logistical means have to be taken into account. I could, however, order a menagerie of teas and have a different one every day, chosen at random from a twenty sided die. It’s not a bad idea, actually. At what point would I be completely dissolving what I term as “peasantry”? I can spike the teas every morning with pinches of different spices. I can use different cups or indeed other types of containers - bowls, flasks, or rectangular lasagna dishes. At what point does fleeing from the concept of peasantry become another sort of obsessive-compulsive peasantry?

Perhaps the most important to me, besides absurd digressions concerning tea, are variations, even ever so slight, in all things. I once wrote in my ancient but still partially pertinent 100 Things About Me:

22. Changes (even small, seemingly superficial ones) in my lifestyle invigorate me.

I still subscribe to this “philosophy”. If routine is peasantry to me, then deviations, even ever so slight, abolish the peasantry. A routine of constant, subtle deviation. I chuckle at myself. Speaking of which, it’s time to fill my cup with tea, or, rather, abandon the filthy cup I’ve been using for epochs on end and choose another, fresh cup, of a colour that invigorates my imagination, and fill it with tea. I shall do so now.

I chose a red cup. The colour is not a brilliant red, but slightly washed out, like blood on the white tile spilled from a sample taken from an animal - a small animal, most likely a mink. I spiked the tea with Goat Milk, so my variance today is only in the form of a container. I shall do better, I promise.

I’m listening to an improvisation done by a fellow sonomu-mate known as June. It’s an exploratory jam, an improvisation, to get to know a new case and / or modules and / or configuration of modules. I’m not clear on that part. Last night, I performed my first ambient guitar improvisation in epochs. Long, dark epochs. Endless, droning epochs! I began with no expectations at all, but given the simplicity of my form, it came out fantastically. I concentrated on timbres between my two pedalboards, morphing long loops and listening to how they interacted. I even imposed a bit of harmony on the admittedly lugubrious result: I began firmly using C# melodic minor, centering on the augmented triad of E - G# - C, then slowly took the music into a more pure C# aeolean, changed the flat 6 (A) (again, very slowly) to an A# to create a sense of B major. From there, the drift was towards D major, or B minor, though it’s up to the judgement of outer entities whether I ever arrived.

June’s exploratory improvisation has ended. I enjoyed it immensely and need to force myself to create something frequently on my boxes full of modules. All creation, no matter how infrequently, is deviation from peasantry. Also, improvising is a deviation from another routine of late - composition. I’ve immersed myself in work on the new album and perhaps the rigidity of specifying part after part, detail upon detail weighs on me. I propose to myself a balance between the freedom of exploratory improvisation and the strictness of composition. Where is the middle ground, one asks? That’s a good question. Truly, I used to take ideas from past improvisations and incorporate them into what became composed pieces. Eg, Nomenclature and Una Palma De Barro. And, again truly and lately, I’ve found myself doing something I promised myself I’d never do again - bang out parts without having heard the numerous contexts they could simmer in. Is it impatience? Is it peasantry?

Take each idea and at least use it as a vehicle for short, exploratory improvisations. This is harder on SBUP, but doable with sequencing. We’ll see if I follow my own advice today.

My father phoned yesterday to inform me that my cousin, Amy, had perished in her sleep the previous night. Having stated that, I shall go make tea.

I have returned. I walked to the kitchen, found the water in the kettle not yet to the point of boiling, so I did not linger. Soon, I shall check it again and achieve my momentary goal of beginning the process of creating tea.

So, my father phoned yesterday to inform me that my cousin, Amy, had departed the entorno of the living the previous night. Before I elaborate on my feelings concerning this, I shall check the tea-water again.

I found that the tea-water had just finished reaching 100C, the adequate temperature for steeping English Breakfast tea. Thus, English Breakfast tea is now steeping.

In any case, my father phoned yesterday to tell me that my cousin, the oldest cousin I had, had become a corpse during the previous night. The last time I recall spending time with Amy was March 2013. I could be wrong about this date, but that detail isn’t very important, so I’ll leave it at March 2013. I spent the night at her place on the way, driving, from Seminole to visit Victor in some backwoods pseudo-city in east Texas. From there, I’d go on to Nashville to spend a month in Lisa’s apartment whilst she cared for her terminally ill mother. Amy and I drank whiskey and watched The Departed. I also recall making her listen to Present, which I am incidentally listening to right now. She claimed it gave her a headache or somesuch, which is perfectly understandable given the music’s relation to all things “contemporary” and even given Amy’s experience with 70s classic rock and even with a bit of weirdness. I don’t remember much else from the evening. The whiskey did its job well.

It strikes me that since that evening, Amy has already been metaphorically dead for me in the sense that I have had absolutely no communication with her since. My parents mentioned things about her from time to time, but nothing stands out in my memory. Basically, the entity that was Amy “stopped” after that evening with Present, whiskey and The Departed. So do I mourn her departure (pun certainly intended) at this moment? No. I felt nothing upon hearing the news from my father. Nigh-eight years of absence had already released whatever feelings I had for her.

Of my cousins, she was the one I could relate to most, for sure. She was the most direct, the most “present” (pun certainly intended). This is in contrast to her sister, Emily, who was pretentious, backstabbing, passive-aggressive and scurrilous in general. From what I hear from my parents, still is. I still have psychological scars from relations with Emily during my childhood. Thusly, she’s been metaphorically dead much longer than Amy. I suppose the conclusion is that looking back, Amy was a positive influence in my life. I could relate many nostalgic anecdotes, but I’m sure most already exist elsewhere in this or some other journalling apparatus.

I shall detail a single episode, actually. I had just purchased In Absentia by Porcupine Tree and Happy With What You Have to be Happy With by King Crimson earlier in the day. Amy and I were doing various errands around the Dallas area and we were stopped at a strip mall where I had run in to snatch something. I was re-entering the passenger’s compartment of Amy’s car. She was listening to the first of the two mentioned albums. We had been listening to it during the drive. As I sat beside her, Prodigal was in progress. She told me she was glad I had got back in time as I was going to like the song. That was December 2002.

Now I shall pour myself a cup of English Breakfast.

So, I received my Fairphone 3 yesterday. Sure, I could have bought a Fairphone 3 Plus, but I decided I’ll grab the camera and audio upgrades a bit later and install them myself. Why? Well - to get into the spirit of Fairphone! Open hardware! Imagine that! Fuck Samsung.

The first thing I did was unlock its bootloader. This essential part of removing stock Android and placing a Google-less system on the phone is detailed here¹. However, once I enabled developer tools, entered into developer tools, selected USB debugging and OEM unlocking, and navigated to the page² describing how to get a so-called unlock code, I encountered a problem. You may have already guessed what he problem was. The unlock code I received after inputting my IMEI1 and Serial Number did not work. The next three I tried also did not work. I was not deterred. Well, I would have been deterred had not I rooted around a bit on the web and discovered that the unlock codes were generated by an algorithm that can be downloaded (a PERL script!). Additionally, a kind soul put a webified version here³. The unlock code it generated worked.

I followed this⁴ up until the last instruction of step 2 in the section Installing /e/ from the bootloader. I did not re-lock the bootloader. The reason will become clear soon. Anyone who is reading this and wants to go ahead and install Magisk (and TWRP) to root the phone will have to go through the whole ordeal of unlocking the bootloader once again IF said human bought a phone with /e/os pre-installed or used the Easy Installer provided by the e Foundation. Unlocking the bootloader will erase the accumulated narrative of said human’s existence, or possibly only the data on said human’s phone. Be warned! But - unfortunately, to continue, it is mandatory.

So, I performed everything up to the command that should not be entered:

fastboot flashing lock

(prosím, do not execute this command because it will re-lock the bootloader)

In continuation - I booted into /e/os. No problem!

I grabbed the newest Magisk⁵, which actually isn’t the absolute newest, but peasants can’t be philosophers, can they? I also grabbed TWRP⁶ for Fairphone 3. Whilst in normal /e/os operation, I plugged the phone via usb (implying that I did not use a DB-25 over RS-232, for example) into my PC (Arch Linux). I pulled down the overlay menu from the top of the screen and at the bottom of the notifications, I was notified Android System - Charging this device via USB. Tapping on the notification, I was told Tap for more options, which I did. To be able to transfer the Magisk zip and the TWRP img to the phone using adb, I changed the USB preferences to File Transfer.

At this point, I assume that whichever human is reading this is already aware of adb and fastboot. Of course, this is most likely a faulty assumption. So, depending on platform, download and install these two tools. They are part of the Android SDK. On Arch Linux and its derivatives, they can be obtained with the android-tools package. The commands I used to transfer the two files to my phone were:

adb push twrp-3.5.0_9-0-FP3.img /storage/emulated/0/Download
adb push Magisk-v21.1.zip /storage/emulated/0/Download

The steps for getting TWRP⁷ onto the phone were clear, but I read them through twice before starting because of problems I’d had in the past with bootloops. Ironically, the only part that seemed to go awry was when I got to the paragraphs that read:

Once booted, navigate to the Advanced > Install Recovery Ramdisk option. This will ask you to select the image you want to install TWRP from. Select the TWRP image you just downloaded and copied into device storage. Proceed to install this image.

You also need to use the “Fix Recovery Bootloop” option present in the same Advanced Tab. Use that option after you have installed the recovery ramdisk successfully to avoid boot loops happening from installing TWRP Permanently.

I did both after performing a temporary boot into TWRP, but the second one - specifically about bootloops - gave me an error. But that did not matter. Everything worked. So don’t worry!

I backed out until I saw the Install option in the upper left corner and pressed it. I then found the Magisk zip and installed it.

Rebooting the phone, I was back in normal /e/os operation. Magisk Manager was installed, rather magically, so I opened it, updated the manager, but NOT Magisk itself. At this point, I installed all my banking apps. I have two, specificaly - Revolut and CaixaBankNow. Neither would get past an opening screen without the following steps:

• Install both apps but DO NOT OPEN THEM
• Open Magisk Manager
• Tap on the cogwheel in the upper right
• Find Magisk Hide and activate it
• Immediately above this item is Hide Magisk Manager or something similar
• Activate it and choose the new “name” of the app (just accept the default Manager)
• Back out and select the shield from the floating rectangle at the bottom
• Tap MagiskHide and find my banking apps
• Tap um

Bliss was achieved.

My adventure yesterday with my Galaxy m30s ended in disaster! Yes! I didn’t even get to the “installing TWRP” part. Because said phone is famous for being difficult to modify and even though the bootloader has been unlocked since the dawn of the multiverse, flashing it was obviously not a good idea. I used these¹ instructions to patch the latest m30s firmware with Magisk so that Magisk could live in the recovery partition on the phone. On this magical Samsung device, Magisk can ONLY live in the recovery partition. And perhaps Magisk now DOES live within the recovery partition, but I’ll never know, will I? Why will I never know? Because the magical Samsung device is more concerned with bootlooping than what resides in its recovery partition! Yes! I followed instructions magnanimously, using the quaint heimdall to do the flashing itself. No dice, as my mother would say. No puréed peanut butter and nanner sandwich, as erstwhile Scott Lentz would say. No heat death of the universe for you, as Shambal Brambel would say.

I ordered a Fairphone 3. It arrives soon and whereupon I’ll begin a /e/os adventure. Fuck um.