Perry Bamonte

The first person was Perry Bamonte of The Cure – not someone I personally knew. Bamonte played on five of The Cure's studio albums, and especially on Wish, which I consider to be The Cure's best album, and a release of formative importance for me.

I'm less into The Cure's music released after Wish. Bamonte had been playing with them for years before he "joined" the band. Specifically on Wish, his presence can be felt, not just heard, on tracks like High, and Friday I'm in Love. The whole album sounds so different than its predecessor (itself also among The Cure's best).

Ken Downie

Just days earlier, the news about Ken Downie's passing had made the rounds and it made me deeply sad. Bamonte's death added to the sadness, but Downie's felt shocking.

I did not know him either. I knew his work on The Black Dog's "Spanners" album. That felt a bit like knowing him through his music. It's a beautiful, humorous, playful, at times weird, record. When Plaid later split out, their music never went to the places, nor did the things that made Spanners (or Bytes) bear repeated listening and going back to, over the years. Plaid's music is exquisite, but the soul of Spanners, the sound bits, the flavours, that must have come from what Downie was bringing to The Black Dog at the time. (His later work lost that too.)

Downie meant to me the humour, the inventiveness, the not-taking-yourself-too-seriously, that can be heard not just on Black Dog's early work, but also on electronic albums by KLF, Orb, BoC, FSOL – bands who would make something new and truly original, containing beautifully reinterpreted bits of prior art, and manage to carry it lightly, as if it was easy to do, simple to make of that quality. Downie was that.

The death of Andy Hughes (The Orb) in 2009 felt somewhat similar.

On whatever this is

It took me months afterwards, my mind endlessly distracted by the wars of mad kings, plus the flood of AI on top, to realise that I am mourning.

This must have started back in 2023 when I suddenly lost my mother. I've not got over that. Then, somewhat unexpected, whenever I've had to say goodbye to a colleague, it'd get to me in the form of profound disappointment, sometimes anger. Then people responsible for art that has become part of my own identity kept dying, and I felt terrible, having never personally known them. And more recently, AI has taken over many things the making of which used to bring joy (still does), and replaced the process with a slot machine loop, and the results – with a bland soup of bits, a reflection of something that "isn't it", but is accepted as it. The slop culture rapidly emerging around it is repulsive.

And so I mourn all that loss: of family, of people I looked up to, of people caught in tragedies in faraway lands, of people caught in the churn, and of things that give us true meaning, like making, connecting, experiencing. Feels like the opposite of togetherness.

I had to join all these dots first, before knowing what to change.

It has been a strange year, dominated by generative AI, politics, value extraction, and much obliteration of the applied arts – all things I'd rather not write about.

And we lost a few people along the way, about whom I'd like to write separately later, even if that comes too late.

I have not been recording any of my music practice. I've not been practicing much. My brain is still trying to process all the change, and my instinct is not to assume one kind of posture or another, until I have a better understanding of what's happening. A lot is going on in the music industry. Very little of note is going on in the art. This is OK. Wherever I look I don't see much support for the art. I see much about the industry.

I dialled down how much I watch BBC, or Sky, or consume trad news altogether. I started trying to feel for myself every outlet's bias – especially for those not supposed to have bias. I muted more keywords from my social media. I kept a 3 minute daily limit on one of the apps. I'm re-learning how to be more offline, 30 years after I first dialled up into the gateway BBS-es of the past, and which instantaneously became a nightly habit.

In December I spent a good while listening to random radio transmissions – as in on actual air – during the day, and at night. I learned more than I need to know about antennas, propagation, interference, toroid materials, protocols, obscure software. In some way this activity made me aware of the mundane everyday things that happen all the time which aren't in the news – completely normal stuff, fascinating things nonetheless, but things that fail to register. There's so much human connection on radio, it's ridiculous. What gets amplified and fed to us online and in broadcast is so extraordinarily different, it's simply not representative anymore.

The distractions every day, the endless flood of content, plus the weird "what's the point"-ness of genAI, call for more discipline in response, than I've ever had to have, just to sit down and practice, even to do anything more meaningful than just hopping from one passive activity to the next.

I'll be spending 2026 dealing with that.

To you I wish focus, kindness, agency, and joy.

♪♫

To install it on your OXI One:

• download this file and unzip it
• open the Oxi App (not Oxi Desktop)
• go to Instruments → On Computer → Edit (═)
• click on Import → OXI instrument → select the file you unzipped ("NTS-1 mk2.oxiindef")
• click on OXI One at the top → then Instruments
• drag "Korg - NTS-1 mk2" from "On Computer" to "On Device"

Enjoy!

Yesterday I spent 8+ hours trying to reopen Σym – a track from five years ago. The plugins I had used in that project had had new versions released under the same product numbers, with the old versions no longer available.

Running oldish Intel audiounits on Apple Silicon macOS is really painful. It requires restarts between installation or other changes, and if Logic would see them at all, let alone load them, is a throw of the dice. Most often they simply don't work.

There is a lot that goes wrong in New Sonic Arts' plugins. It is not limited to their plugins, but theirs is a great example of not sweating some very important details:

• Vice 2 won't load a preset saved from Vice
• Nuance 2 loads presets saved from Nuance but loses the multichannel mapping (I could even hack my project to use the v2 plugin, using a hex editor)
• but Nuance 2 renames its multichannel outs to include a space and Logic then can't remap aux busses automatically.
• Nuance—the plugin—shows as version 1.0.0 in the Finder, regardless of its exact version (e.g. 1.6.522), so I can't know what version I'm even looking at, or for.
• Nuance is not available to download. Neither is Vice. Only versions 2 and newer.
• When Nuance and Vice ask for authorisation, and I authorise them with my own email and serial number, that zaps my Nuance 2 and Vice 2 authorisation. When I authorise V2, the V1 plugins ask for auth again on next open.
• All New Sonic Arts plugins open in low resolution on my retina display, unless I fully disconnect my secondary non-retina display.
• And last but not least: cracks – yes, I searched – won't read the data saved with the official versions. I had last seen this in... Reaktor 3 encrypting its ensembles with some forsaken key that would have absolutely stopped working down the line (it did).

Alas, these are not just bugs.

Here's what the plugins look like in auval -l, where Apple's spec allows 4 characters (bytes) for Manufacturer ID, and another 4 for the Product ID.

type subtype  manufacturer
aumu 000C240A NSA_      -  New Sonic Arts: Nuance   (unknown URL) [AUv2]
aumu 000CB881 NSA_      -  New Sonic Arts: Vice     (unknown URL) [AUv2]
aumu nuan     NSA_      -  New Sonic Arts: Nuance 2 (file://…/Nuance%202.component/) [AUv2]
aumu vice     NSA_      -  New Sonic Arts: Vice 2   (file://…/Vice%202.component/) [AUv2]
aumu NSA0     NSA_      -  New Sonic Arts: Granite  (file://…/Granite.component/) [AUv2]

Not even a readable 4-byte ID.
And that NSA0, You know who else does this? Native Instruments

type subt     manu
aufx Ni$I     -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Choral   (file://…/Choral.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$J     -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Phasis   (file://…/Phasis.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$K     -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Flair    (file://…/Flair.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$L     -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Dirt     (file://…/Dirt.component/) [AUv2]

Yep, $1, $2, $3,... all the way till the alphabet runs out.

Which brings me to the main points:

Longevity

If I sit down at a piano today, it has likely existed for a while, and it's a good bet that it will continue for a while, and it's basically a given that it will play, and – when looked after – it will play the same. Pick up a tambourine, guitar, bass, flute, much more fragile stuff like a trumpet or a violin, they work. Same for an electric piano, a Novation synth, M8 tracker, heck even an OP1 will likely function. Maybe swap a battery.

But the issue we have with software plugins, and this I have seen with big names like Waldorf (3E00 ?), or Air Music (AIRm and Wzoo), to obscure unmaintained plugins like The Mangle, the big issue is that these all come across as software first, and musical instruments second. UX basics like longevity and reliability go missing, not to mention continuity. There are exceptions: small like dBlue Glitch, bigger like Valhalla and PSP Audioware, or not to mention huge names like Waves or Universal Audio.

For a terrific example, look at ES1 in Logic Pro itself: As of Logic 11, ES1 is as old as Logic 5, it doesn't even have retina graphics, it has never "improved" its sound, or changed its UI. It has been superseded by Retro Synth. But, in my experience, projects from way back that use it still open and the tracks sound the same.

NI Battery 4 and 3 both add a ton of features and feel like complex software applications that I need to allow patience for, somehow forgetting that they're merely plugins that play existing sounds from my drive.

Continuity

This is the second biggest problem but the number one most frustrating thing of all:

aumu Ni$D -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Kontakt     (file://.../Kontakt.component/) [AUv2]
aumu NiK7 -NI-  -  Native Instruments: Kontakt 7   (file://…/Kontakt%207.component/) [AUv2]

Why‽ Imagine modifying something as complex as a Kontakt patch and then only saving the patch with the project. I do it all the time. And if you use Kontakt, you'd know the relentless march of Kontakt versions. What is a stray version 7 doing even?

iZotope Ozone 9 (iZtp Zn09) is not the same plugin as Ozone 10 (iZtp ZnOZ). RX 9 plugins.. you get the idea.

Waldorf Attack (Windows VST) simply wouldn't save any presets, and Attack (Mac Audiounit), when it finally came out, simply wouldn't read Windows version projects.

And then there's the software that was too hard/expensive/complicated to maintain, of which there are too many examples to mention. And then there's macOS itself (and sometimes Windows), marching forward and removing compatibility from previous OS versions.

So how are we meant to open old projects tomorrow, without obsessively "printing" everything to inert audio tracks today?

For how it should be done, look to Synplant 2, which replaces version 1 (same IDs), and not only loads old data, but is nice enough to prompt you to update the patch to use its newer engine. FabFilter – one of the best – install new plugin versions side by side, but theirs do read old presets, and the legacy installers are available on their website.

Bugs

And then there are the bugs. If you're putting a brand new plugin out there, but didn't bother testing that it actually works with something as basic as DAW presets, then what exactly is it you're offering me other than distraction and to do your beta testing for you? I don't want a free new exciting (buggy) thing for a few months. I'd gladly take a costly thing that I will have in my life for years going forward.

To Air Music's credit, Loom 2 overtakes Loom, but before releasing an Apple Silicon beta, Loom 2 would fail validation on ARM, and 1 didn't even work. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Music

It's about making music. It's about picking up a thing, and playing it, and having fun, and decorating a piece of time. It's about not feeling frustrated. These are musical instruments. The same goes for the effects.

When stored in projects, plugin settings uses are archived, but not for days or months. Sometimes we reopen these works years later to search for a specific patch, to extract a track, or a sound, to answer the question "how did I do this?". These archived representations should just work.

Successors should provide continuity.

The paid ones especially simply don't get to draw a bridge or shut a door without causing massive frustration or, worse, breaking trust.

But it happens. All the time. And the time that we have for making music is spent on IT maintenance. And this needs change.

The problem

Generally speaking, DriverKit has a kernel part (provided by Apple) and a client part (provided by each vendor) that, taken together, handle audio. But there seem to be issues with the CPU scheduling of these components, and so DriverKit USB audio may stutter whenever a fast device ends up saturating i/o (relative to audio). On my Mac, there are audio dropouts, and RME's driver reports buffer underruns in its panel and in logs.

USB

Long story short, USB2's timing stability leaves a lot to be desired due to things like polling, and CPU dependency. It's probably fine for 2 or 4 channels, but my Fireface has 36 and they're all transferred all the time. I like this. If I had my way, audio would be synchronous, full-duplex, all the bandwidth all the time. Alas.

RME

For some reason, RME haven't convinced Apple to keep supporting the much more stable FireWire bus for DriverKit, or to schedule everything audio always on performance cores (or whatever it is they need to do for scheduling, I can't be bothered to know all the tech details anymore). So we're stuck with USB and crap DriverKit audio performance.

The Fix, For Now

Although Apple have deprecated Kernel Extensions, they haven't removed support for them, and as of macOS Sequoia and M4, kexts continue to work. macOS Tahoe drops FireWire support.

You'll need to relax SIP (System Integrity Protection). Obvs do this at your own risk.

With the disclaimer out of the way, here's what works on my Mac Studio M2 Max:

Firewire kext

This is not supported in macOS Tahoe.

Mac usb-c port 
  → Apple USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 adapter 
    → Apple TB2 to Firewire 800 adapter 
      → FW 800–400 cable 
        → RME Fireface UCX. 

Uninstall every other RME driver, and install the Fireface FireWire 3.41 or newer driver.

This setup may be unstable. It may work for you, depending on what software you have, your system load, restart habits, and other variables. I rarely turn off my Mac, instead letting it go to sleep, and switch between audio interfaces often. Sometimes the Fireface starts experiencing dropouts with Firewire, but it's hard to say why. More so, the USB kext sometimes does too.

USB kext

Mac usb-c port 
  → USB-C to USB-2 cable 
    → RME Fireface UCX. 

Uninstall every other RME driver, and install the Fireface USB Kernel Extension driver.

Notes

• In addition to SIP, macOS blocks the driver straight away so, before rebooting, navigate to System Settings, and allow the kernel extension to execute
• The safety buffer and offset are slightly larger with FireWire (as per UCX manual), equivalent to USB's "Normal" setting.
• Lastly, pick a USB-C port that isn't shared, e.g. with internal devices or other USB ports. On my mac, the back USB-A ports are shared with the front USB-C ports. This is important if you're going for USB kext. If you can, go for Firewire

(No) Support

Please don't email me with questions about your hardware. I've tried to put above what worked for me, after being on the RME forums for over a year, and banging my head against the wall with DriverKit, and then holding my nose and using USB audio until I ran out of patience and bought the silly dongles required.

Is macOS likely to remove support for kernel extensions? I think it's not there yet. Sonoma and Sequoia both continue to support them.

Performance

I am able to take Bitwig's buffer down to 32 samples - a low value I never need. RME and Apple components add another 56 or so samples to output latency (as reported by Bitwig), so effectively it's never below 96. I have settled on 128 samples buffer which is less than what I used with my old Hackintosh (2013). Do expect another 128 samples of total i/o buffer for macOS/driver alone (50-something for output alone). Find more specific timings in Dawbench and your RME manual.

Good luck!

P.S

With the odd dropouts using Firewire, eventually the audio subsystem got bogged down until no more audio came out of the RME interface. It did not need a restart, the interface did not need rebooting (good sign!), but I had to unplug all cables and adapters, quit Safari (which freed up 20GB RAM), then plug the cables and adapters back in.

If you need to diagnose coreaudio overload errors, I've found that this command does a decent job:

log show --predicate '(process == "coreaudiod") && (sender == "CoreAudio")' --last 60m

also this one:

log show --predicate '(sender == "IOAudioFamily")' --last 60m

Perfect Fit Content

Back at the start of the year, I wrote about devaluing art and corporate greed. I'm glad professional media have picked up on the issue, with some evidence to prove it, and there's now some evidence of e.g. Spotify being terrible (the data is ridiculous). Frankly, streaming platforms aren't good. The model is dysfunctional, it's unsustainable and requires injecting unrealistic amounts of energy/resource. Content ID makes things worse.

Slop

I keep thinking about AI. I'm not particularly mystified by it. I use enough LM Studio to have a decent feel for smaller models and what to expect. I also use AI in limited quantities at work (I've seen some good stuff, some useless stuff). I dislike that the UK government wants us to shrug and give corporations boundless access to train their models. It worries me that AI is being used to pump "content" all over platforms, who have no issues filling our feeds with it: Spotify's background listening playlists, Instagram's derivative reels, etc. This is fast going nowhere, but not going away either, and the collateral damage absolutely is / will be the output and livelihood of independent artists. This should need no evidencing, unless you've missed the whole of last year.

Grift Growth

One long-standing nit: Bing continues to refuse to index this site. Whatever it is they don't like in my robots.txt, I'm not sure. Apparently I need more inbound links from high-quality domains (yea, that's how the small internet works). Like all things Microsoft, it's an asymmetrical relationship, and one I'm not sure I can be bothered to maintain, through whatever SEO intel it requires me to invest in. Everything is broken – this is fine.

Books and Music

I've been reading more than before. Mostly fiction, mostly sci-fi: Mountain in the Sea, Termination Shock, Anathem, but also other atmospheric works that have nourished my soul like no online article or lo-fi beat has. I liked a lot of new music: by Arushi Jain, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, The Black Dog, The Cure, Ezra Collective, Svaneborg Kardyb, plus Phexioenesystems, Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer, Skee Mask, the list goes on.

Esem.music

I streamed eight times on Twitch, 14 hours of hardly coherent sound/noise - some of it was OK. None was archived. I've been organising my studio. I'm moving away from Logic Pro, to Bitwig (big DAW change for me after 25 years of using Logic). I'm getting more in the habit of just jamming, like long ago in lockdown times but, you know, in non-lockdown present days. In my mind this is long leading up to recording some new work in 2025. Or later, who knows, this is not an announcement of any kind.

So it's been an OK-ish year, all things considered. Except in politics. Stay away from politics.

Happy next year! 🎄♪♫

Watching it, I remembered how thoughts about the industry began displacing those about music on my own site. If you're into analysis, you'll like many of Benn Jordan's videos.

But if you're into music, not grift, there are so many interesting lines in the video about AI copyright I could quote, demonstrating the current borkened mechanic of copyright claims. It's all quite intricate, quite special - empirical approach and explanation.

(I think the world of literature has it even worse)

Then, at the end, there's this:

"You should not ever stop making the art or music, or stories, or videos, or whatever it is you love to make, because of this whole situation and these stupid AI companies that – let's be real – are probably just some kind of complicated VC money laundering scheme we'll find out about five years from now; because one day you're gonna die and if this is what you gave up doing the things you love over, you're gonna look back on your life and die with a whole bunch of regret."

It hits hardest to think that we have cooled down in our joy of making music, but the sentiment is in the air. We have come to realise that we're sort of alone in our pursuit of art (more so than artists have historically been). Right now, it feels impossible to sit down and just create, unburdened by doubt or adjacent technological, legal, aesthetic, existential, questions. Maybe except when creating ephemeral work with zero commitment to it being recorded, let alone released. Because releasing means trouble.

I don't think this is the endgame, or the end. It's just really tiring to have to rethink or reinvent your own art for reasons that have to do with the content industry.

Like every sane person these days, I surf with additional extensions to block unwanted content like videos following me as I scroll, hide various nags and stuff getting in my face like Google login, popups, etc., basically "fix the internet". On any new platform, I switch off algorithmic suggestions, where I can.

This is what my Youtube homepage looks like:

This solves the problem of algorithmic noise and distractions for me personally, but it doesn't solve it for people I'd like to connect to, who end up seeing some of their favourite things plus all the algorithmic garbage, i.e. less of their favourite things, and, in this day, increasingly more algorithmic garbage.

My Instagram (hard to leave, I know) has a similar issue. Leaving Facebook and Twitter solved a mental bandwidth issue for me alone. None of these did anything for my audience – for the people I'd like to connect with. They, You, are still subjected to the same barrage of suggestions, distractions, adverts, and other general direct or side effects of what is pure product enshittification, the algorithms aggressively inserted between us, installed by people who have nothing to do with art, or with human connection for that matter.

I don't think this needs to stop, because I think that's an unrealistic goal or notion, one that is too late, and that is not desired anyway. But if one person reads my text and it prompts them to review their content settings and attempt to dial the distractions down, and their own agency up, then I'd be happy, and this post would have all the purpose.

Feeds, the clue is in the name, are there to give us moar content. Taking moar will always be easier than sifting through a bunch of global trend stuff and choosing what you, yourself, actually care about (as opposed to what the algo thinks you're likely to engage with).

We need our agency, stat. Not even long term, but now.

“People who work at labels think bands make loads of money touring, while booking agents think they make loads of money on publishing and so on”

This, from the article, is a great quote. I've written before about my thoughts on not gigging, in response to the idea that playing live is supposedly imperative. However, for years playing live has been a vehicle for selling merchandise (t-shirts etc) and physical copies of music.

But to anyone who has looked to craft their work and perfect their art, more than to simply come up with music they can perform live (provided there's an audience), it's obvious that reaching a level of sophistication above the no-name/no-label/no-following music being churned out on library sites or on Spotify, or more recently by AI, takes disproportionately long time.

That time needs sponsoring, regardless of if, to the artist, it's just a hobby or their line of work. And I don't want more planet-burning plastic (CDs, vinyl, cassettes) on sale.

In the age of scarce attention, corporations trading whole artist catalogues riding on "more of the same of the past" algorithmic recommendations love to deprive us of our agency as audience. What little is left feels like a kind of zero-sum game of who can steal a moment of (y)our time or focus, before it's diverted away again. 99% of that goes to the Swifts and their Eras, with no counterbalance mechanism – unless an artist has made it big, they don't get even a minute share of discovery time. To mix in a metaphor, no tides lifting all boats.

Music continues to be ubiquitous and ever-present. As listeners we treat it as a given. I don't think being a musician has ever meant being financially stable. But over the past few years it has truly morphed into an expensive hobby - simply by way of taking the time to produce new and unique and meaningful art, and, in conditions of being continuously distracted by 24/7 feeds or media, taking risks to release and perform to an audience that may or may not turn up at all.

Unlike the UK, many European countries sponsor the arts. That too feels ancient, in the presence of tech giants endlessly supplying us with endless content. Some of that content swells up enough to monetise in a rush, and leads to more being produced and another cycle of the same. A true industry.

The 20th anniversary remaster (21st actually) of Serial Human is now on Bandcamp.

Here's what a recent review says about it:

"This exists in my musical lexicon as a surprisingly sad album that's trying to be happy. A young man on his own in a new world, wanting to get lost in the wonder of it all but finding it challenging to accept all of the cruft that comes along with it."

Abdicant, who wrote this, is the first to truly tap into the underlying feeling of this album. Other reviews from that time talk in a broader sense – for instance Igloomag describe Serial Human as "dramatic, severe, tense, relentless and hugely compelling". Some, like Sutemos, simply miss the point (and that's OK) – "[it] is a neutral album..." But not this little paragraph above. It goes straight for the feeling of disappointment, the disillusionment I felt with the large city and its people, after having moved from the sunny, quiet, dead-in-winter Burgas, to chaotic, loud, dusty Sofia.

Despite the cover art, Serial Human is less of a hysterical Brave New World take on us becoming programmed, predestined, track&traceable, copies of one another. Instead it ponders how we ourselves accept to grind and monotonously loop, and slowly construct these good-looking-from-afar fronts, until more closely one can see imbalance, hollowness, harm. To every nice thing, a catch. For anything of value, a disproportionate amount of time lost. Underpinning many a warm relationship, a calculation. Dreams interrupted. Injustice. Optics.

And so Serial Human is that – myself at the time dealing with uprooting myself in search of "better", with the dilemma of accepting getting remoulded to standard vs stumbling around mapless, in a squiggly trajectory, among the cruft and the weight and pretentiousness of the city.

And, dear listener, I haven't found any profound answers in the years since. Simply, over time, I have learnt to let it be, and to see it as expression of some collective wisdom if I can. And in works like Chaos Crop, or ||, to let things play out, to try and capture things that emerge, to hold on to what after all these years is really a delicate truce.

Enjoy. ♪♫

So I had to make a hard decision. I gave up on two very nice curated feeds – one for UK politics, one for events in Ukraine – and look at the larger picture of being good to myself mentally.

So I left, and so have others. And then, over the next days since, I saw no reason to go back. The UK politics feed was my own non-public feed, impossible to replicate elsewhere as the sources that make it simply aren't moving away from Twitter. If I had ever done anything close to a functional filter tool in the spirit of "Here comes everybody", that feed was it. But that platform is too harmful to come near anymore.

You'll find me on Bluesky.

♪♫

The State of Culture, 2024 is a devastating article that you should go and read now, to understand where all the quality art has disappeared (with the exception of outliers able to break out of the whole construct). There isn't much more to say. Just read it.

Back in 2017 I made a list of things that disturb me - from small to big. It had Brexit, Bitcoin, Trump, Putin, as well as "not enough time", "growing older", "corporate speak", "post-truth", "privilege", not to mention "global (weather) weirding". Sadly, six seven years later, these are at play as much as they were back then.

Talking to friends, when looking back, it feels like much of our lives are somewhat on hold. Personally, change has come at me at irregular pace – sometimes things not moving at all, sometimes one big chunk at a time. I keep telling myself to just keep going till the really good times show up. Mostly did music in 23 as a form of meditation. Released very little.

Obviously 2024 starts with three simultaneous big waves.

One is AI and the phenomenal push to devalue art, and to just settle for all sorts of derivative bullshit, and forever rob once creative people of their chance to earn a living doing what they do best – create. We have the algorithms to stream freshly hallucinated words, music, video, etc, which doesn't even need storing on a drive, or recording in the first place. My music jam instagram is an endless scroll of ambient noodling and not much else. The long tail is gone. We have Swift and the millions of buried artist names no one else cares about.

Two is corporate greed. Tell me where to look to not see it. In the cities, it has huge sway over our lives, and even more so on the internet. But going to live somewhere away from corporations seems self-defeating and vastly expensive.

Three is war. Having the shittiest politicians here in the UK, I've had it up to here with hearing war is the reason for everything else that's bad - from water pollution to house prices. I like to think of war as a symptom – that something else has gone totally out of balance – and war is just a reflection of that, masking the truth, instead of letting us closer – doubling down instead of fixing things.

I'm sure none of the above reads as "Hello 2024 Good Vibes!!!1". Which, dear reader, is why I mostly keep to myself. Plus, in a terribly fragmented online space, it's harder to have a conversation of the kind that my early internet generation loves. Twitter/X is a dump. Bluesky is nerdy and stalling. Mastodon is disinterested in being anything more than an idiosyncratic mess. Threads is .. kinda special, as in terrible. Instagram is for reheated second-hand memes. Twitch is for hot tubs. Discord is too private. Facebook is for old (or dead) people. And all seem to be optimised for shit-posting.

And here is for cobwebs at this time. 🕸️

So I upgraded, somehow accepting the costs of losing a bunch of software plugins. Unfortunately they were very cool plugins:

Native Instruments Kore Player

I had some cool libraries for this somewhat strange player, most notably Acoustic Refractions, which was very sound-design-y and never failed to provide inspiration when I hit the wall against a fast approaching deadline. Sadly, NI seem to have ditched it altogether and didn't bother exporting the library to separate instruments Link

Native Instruments Super 8

A cool retro-sounding synth which bizarrely lost its host plugin. At least it's still available as a Reaktor ensemble. Dumb move on part of NI not to support it.

FXPansion Tremor

This is by far my favourite drum machine. Powerful, flexible, inspiring, with a great sequencer, and infinite sound options. Discontinued. Unavailable. Link

Air Music Technology Loom

Loom is a phenomenal synth just for sound design alone. Sadly, it and Loom II are both unavailable for Apple Silicon at this time. Loom Classic is simply no go on macOS 13. And try as I might, I couldn't make Loom II pass AU Validation either. Knowing all this, I still bought v2 on sale. I emailed AIR about it. They replied in 100% InMusic style, basically an AI-like "sorry not sorry" reply that was exactly 0% helpful. Link. Basically do not buy this. Edit: Loom II was released for Apple Silicon, its UI and idiosyncrasies remain the same.

Spectrasonics Omnisphere

It took me years before finally deciding to buy Omnisphere 1, mostly because of the price tag. Having only explored about 10% of it, I was in no rush to upgrade to Omnisphere 2. Somewhat expectedly, v1.5 does not run on a modern Mac, and v2 costs moar money. I also lost scores/ratings I had assigned to a rather large number of library instruments (same with Logic Alchemy actually), not to mention saved patches. If you do a bunch of things just right, Omnisphere opens in Logic. On the next reboot it's gone again. On the plus side, Omnisphere 2 installs with the same ID as v1, and seems to have picked up my ratings and favourites from v1. On the minus side, as v1 was disabled in Logic, v2 was disabled too, until I looked. Link

The Mangle

This little plugin is a pure inspiration machine. Sadly, it is now lost to the sands of time. The copies I still have would open but become unresponsive almost straight away. Link

Audio Damage Quanta

This granular audio processor has a very nice interface. Sadly, it fails to install its own factory content library. (Of course,) Quanta 2 is available for $$. Link

Audiorealism Bassline ABL

I think I've now bought ABL1, ABL2.. and ABL3 over the years. It's frustrating not to be able to find my own old ABL2 license code, which is somewhere on my old machine, but nowhere in my searchable emails (looking at you, Yahoo). Plus ABL2 (or ABL2x) simply fails to turn up anywhere in the system - Rosetta or not - I've not been able to instantiate it at all. Confusingly, I was also able to find at least three versions of ABL2 on my system - one fat binary with three architectures, one with just i386, one for x86_64. Alas no arm64

Plugin Alliance Unfiltered Audio SpecOps

This plugin can't authorise itself even though it created the folder where the license file should go. I was able to trick it by downloading a license and placing it in the folder. This is stupid. Audiounit detection and validation (and caching) is bad enough on macOS 13, and asking to hack around in cryptic ~/Library paths makes things worse.

Others

There's a bunch of other plugins I'm yet to check - C700, Digits, Synth 1. Not sure what to expect but these days it takes me absolutely no time to feel tired and wishing not to bother.

It's not all bad news - GRM Tools, Absynth, Synplant, Aalto, Kaivo, Granite, Nuance, Michael Norris's plugins, Soundhack Spectral Shapers, are all available, and most cost nothing to update to arm64. It's nice to see plugins with heritage continue getting support. Like the above, those aren't easy to replace.

All in all, I'm in two minds about reinstalling a large number of plugins I used to have, since i simply don't need them, or I don't trust that I could commit to using them going further (Cumulus, Quanta, Curve, RayBlaster). Those in the list above, however, are proper sound design tools, making for interesting sounds, and interesting sounds inspire the sort of music I later like releasing.

It does feel unfair that there's more than just a hidden cost to upgrading. I literally won't be able to run these plugins again, unless some lucky day, via some bridge, I'm currently unaware of. I wouldn't want to rely on them for new projects anyway.

Shrug 🤷

In the UK, the BBC – a much loved and respected broadcaster, where I used to work – appears to be in something of a meltdown, so it feels good to have left it some time ago.

The backdrop of a poor country economy, no love for the creative industries, fragile food supplies, very high energy costs, and a generally low morale, all presided over by a divisive government (this needs no expanding on), just makes any attempts to save face after Brexit, as a nation, all the more surreal. Much of my time since last summer went into finding work (in the tech sector) before a wave of layoffs hit, and then into securing that before some other significant thing had potentially happened.

The air feels like people retreating into their comfort zones. Not great timing as, on the back of a pandemic, I've been trying to get out of mine and have a more socially connected day-to-day. Plus I had to dial back Twitter before I was ready, for two reasons: 1] it has become too political, too toxic, too mainstream, and 2] my twitter client of choice no longer works (because of You-know-who being at the helm).

Technically I remain on Twitter, but the music artist in me is now on Mastodon at @eesn@mas.to. On it I stick to music or art in general, which means sporadic posts (shrug). More broadly I'm trying to transmit less, receive more.

With your help, I finally bought what feels like a grown-up instrument (not counting modular for many reasons) – the Novation Peak. I realised I'd held off for too long, mostly due to cost, but your support on Bandcamp made it much easier. A truly inspiring instrument. Novation sounds do feature in my music, especially Scateren-era, so this is, in a way, reconnecting today's Esem with earlier Esem.

Speaking of which, I'll be adding Serial Human to my Bandcamp discography soon. There are many reasons why it has been missing, but it feels like the right time to amend that. Meanwhile I have decided to delay adding my other releases to Spotify indefinitely.

Lastly, as once a tracker musician (= always a tracker musician), I've been bringing my Enveloped-era samples over to Dirtywave M8, which is ridiculously powerful for its portable size. Although I have modern replacements for many of those sounds, my journey to figure out why they resonate with me, and inspire me so much, continues.

That is all. You're up to date.

♪♫

First off, a link to a playlist of obscure music that seems to be variations of the same composition but separate recordings are published on Spotify, each under a different artist name. Individual artists have hundreds to thousands of monthly listeners, and (somewhat predictably) zero followers each. Every track also leads to a separate playlist of more such music.

And then a mind-blowing discussion, describing various kinds of fraud, intended to direct subscription money towards specific playlists / tracks / projects. Described within: bot plays to specific artists; fictitious artists; nameless musicians (real people) powering popular playlists; and, of course, full-on AI theory of generative music (which is entirely plausible, following on from AI-powered visuals).

Occasionally this stuff is caught in, and thus revealed by, the algorithms. More often than not we just don't see it. According to the comments, and I'm inclined to believe, Spotify are well aware of this.

Unlike spam, most of which is caught in various systems, this is content, of the kind that siphons what is left of the subscription money pot after Spotify takes their cut. In effect subscribers sponsor a win/win for the platform and for the people using the platform in an "innovative" way.

From this, we could go full circle to asking what it means to release music and to listen to music: 1/ if the listener isn't engaged, 2/ if the artist isn't engaged, 3/ if both aren't engaged, 4/ what if we strived for the opposite?

Here is the crux of the issue: If Sydney Sweeney cannot afford to take six months off, it is a safe assumption to make that no one in Hollywood without family money can. That means that even one of the most famous and in-demand actresses working right now is less secure than every nepotism baby who sauntered into an audition because their dad had been the legal counsel for Warner Bros. or whatever.

I've been raised on the idea of meritocracy as much as the next ordinary person, and have been asking myself questions about the sustainability of long-term skills training or of pursuing high quality output (in other words: how does one afford to train as an artist for N years in order to create unique and exceptional work). As a reasonably skilled person I've also been asking myself why is it so hard to do "basics" like more predictable work streams, having a life outside work/job, having a strong social circle, secure time off, and other stuff made of Unobtanium such as owning a home, or comfortably bringing new life into this world. I haven't found satisfactory answers. Only more questions.

Like the article says, there's much anxiety and resentment at play, and if talking to my peers signals anything, it is that I'm not alone. It's all a little hard to navigate.

Amazing that as a society we don't talk more about this. Yes, there's much talk of inequality, cost of living, etc. Not much of that looks at the arts (and us people doing art), maybe out of fear that in an industry fixated on success, it makes anyone asking the question look like a loser.

While there's practically no barrier to becoming an artist, there is a very high bar to achieving recognition, much higher than just two-three decades ago. In a dysfunctional long-tail environment such as music, keeping at the craft over the required period of time has become a question of being able to fund it from elsewhere and to still have the time/energy/space to pursue high skill and quality of creative output.

• the space and time to perfect your craft
• the vision to see yourself as an artist
• the connections to become a paid professional

found in a wonderful little passage about Jit and how the Jitterbugs came to be. But thinking more broadly, this is the stuff that, together, takes you from hobbyist to a full-time artist.

Of the first two – space and time – time is the more expensive one, since it's almost irrecoverable. Also it's so easy to lose or waste (mainly by not showing up, not practicing, or getting sidetracked). However, space is more rigid and is harder to organise. It's harder still to make and guard mental space (loss of which nets you lost time).

The vision is largely left to your imagination, though it helps to have a few early voices who believe in what you do and try to mix encouragement and critique in healthy proportion. Cross your fingers and show your work.

The connections are premium stuff. A big differentiator in terms of privilege. But it takes space, time, vision, and a substantial amount of practice, to exercise connections. But connections also have an efficiency multiplier effect to space, time, and vision.

It's all interconnected, and in these days extremely hard to come by, as a package.

I grew up with Depeche Mode's music. It wasn't just part of my teenage years, I don't see it as anything remotely nostalgic. It is deeply embedded in my own art. The first time I was asked about my influences, top of the list was Martin Gore. Him and Dave Gahan are the two people I'm thinking about at the moment – the DM triad now unclosed and unstable.

For all the intense personalities of the two, for all of Alan Wilder's talent, the glue between the egos, the one who got on with the boring stuff so that Depeche Mode could be everything but, and who was there at the start, and who never left, was Andy Fletcher.

🖤

I was introduced to Vangelis's music twice. Once through Bulgarian state TV who would use it in all sorts of video clips and programme signals. And a second time through a friend of mine, who had his albums on cassettes. I'd borrow my friend's copies of The City, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, Chariots of Fire, and be immersed in a grand, exquisite, sonic world. That was more than twenty five years ago - long before I would discover for myself Oceanic, Soil Festivities, and Blade Runner.

Re-listening to this material, it is so striking that every music technique I've discovered for myself over the years, through countless hours of experimentation and play, was already in Vangelis's music before I ever touched an instrument. He was well ahead on things I happen to like: sound design, ornamentation, syncopated timings, space, free exploration, even traditional music influences, everything is readily present in his music. I realise that those early experiences listening to his art, must have influenced me profoundly, and his sonic aesthetic and approach are, without doubt, embedded deep into my own music.

What a loss 🌊