Living Room Music

Episode 181 is the first one from the rebuilt room. I spent the day moving furniture, hauling the Mac Studio back downstairs, setting the keyboards and the edrums and the mics back where they belong, putting the whole studio back together after letting it sit fallow. And the moment it was standing again, I couldn't not play. This one got made in the small hours, composed and mixed and bounced while the rest of the house slept. It opens in psytrance, all forward propulsion and acid hypnosis, until a rumbling spaceship cuts across the middle of it, low-end pressure that bends the whole thing somewhere stranger. From there it goes weird: psydub and dub techno, cavernous delay, bass you feel more than hear, everything dissolving into echo and space. Then it lands somewhere you don't expect, a high-tempo chill out, fast underneath but easy on top, the kind of comedown that keeps moving. You can hear the room in it: a space that was packed away and breathing again. After a month of silence, this is the sound of the gear warming back up and the hands remembering what they were for. Living Room Music, literally, from a living room that just became a studio again.

I spent the day yesterday, the whole day on this project. First I made the music, all thirty minutes of it in one sitting at the console. There was heaps of mixing and editing, recording, performing. Building beats, laying down harmonies, and ripping out melodic lines on piano, synth, and guitar. Then. Then. I drew the title card by hand in my black book. I also recorded this process on video wearing a GoPro on my head. It was the first time doing this, so I think the video turned out not so bad.The editing of everything was what took the most time to get done, but here we are releasing it the next day! Hooray for Art!

Do you like Trip Hop? Do you like your Trip Hop beats with some weirdness mixed in? Well you are in luck. Here you go a half hour episode of Trying EverythingHeart of StarsLet Me Love YouSuch is the LifeThe PivotTake DownI had fun making this. Can't say I will do it again, but you never know.

In my studio, I'm actively experimenting with several overlapping workflows that blend a wide spectrum of creative disciplines. Rather than focusing on a single medium, I find myself drawn to a dynamic interplay between music composition, visual arts, software development, and narrative creation. Each of these areas offers its own unique challenges and demands, from the tactile energy of sculpting soundscapes and the intuitive mark-making of drawing, to the meticulous logic of coding and the subtle craft of story construction. Embracing this multidimensional approach not only keeps my process fresh but allows insights from one discipline to naturally inform and elevate the others.At the heart of this experimental environment is a drive to push boundaries and discover new methods for integrating creativity and technology. The studio pulses with activity as I move from refining a new musical piece to iterating on code for a custom application, or shifting gears to sketch concepts that may later evolve into larger visual works. Each workflow is tailored to its own rhythm, and yet, they often overlap—snippets of melody shape visual motifs, while lines of dialogue influence both music and code structures. This ongoing process of cross-pollination creates a fertile ground for innovation and unexpected breakthroughs.Presently, I’m developing projects in music, visual arts, the digital realm, and long-form storytelling, all while producing a spoken podcast that serves as a connective thread throughout. The podcast has become a reflection of these behind-the-scenes efforts, not just reporting outcomes but exploring the raw creative process itself—the trials, the pivots, and the key insights that emerge from pursuing multiple goals side by side. Listeners are welcomed into the nucleus of this ongoing laboratory, where creative outputs feed into each other and no idea is siloed from the rest.This week’s episode represents the culmination of all these processes working in tandem. It is a snapshot of what happens when diverse workflows are layered, challenged, and harmonized in real time. The result is a tapestry—sometimes chaotic, often surprising—where music, code, visual art, and narrative blend into something greater than the sum of their parts. By sharing this convergence with the audience, I hope to illuminate not only the finished work but also the collaborative energy, experimentation, and cross-disciplinary dialogue that make the creative journey worthwhile.

I was lost but I found myself again and here is new episode.

Sigh. Last night, I worked on this episode, well the music for it. It is essentially four tracks. Orchestral strings, French Horns, a woodwinds section and the Grand Piano. It is dynamic, dissonant and boisterous punctuated by moments of calm clarity where everything comes together. I am not proud not ashamed, nor any other feeling about his other than, I have it complete and ready to push into the the online ecosystem which I maintain. I have limited emotional connection with this at the moment. Mostly because I limited emotional sensitivity within my self- as I was explaining to someone who had once been very close to me the other night, my emotional range of awareness really only happens when they begin to spike above say, an 7 or 8 on the scale of emotional amplitude. Most times low level amplitudes no matter what the emotional flavor is, I am unaware of them until they begin to push around mental bandwidth.

Due to its remarkable similarities to the star and the system we had left, there was a small debate about what to call the star, and the planets which orbited it amongst the AF64 piloting crew members. As an aside, I want to be entirely clear, who I mean when I refer to these people. The pilots of the AF64 units are all connectome and life memory retention constructs upon a crystalline silicon matrix powered by an onboard minituarized fusion reactor. In all appearances, they resemble humans from our home planet, many of the passengers before their expired from their biological carbon based units had a personalization design process with their anthropomorphic frame, which allowed them to select their prime self-image as the bioshell around the mechanical mobilization unit. The expert team at Chiron Constructs had an entire department of dedicated psychologists whose role was to aid the minds of the first 64 employees of the corporation to adapt to their new living arrangements. Which the process of developing the "hands on operations" of the devices was relatively straight-forward, as there were several generations of platform evolution, this require training with Praxis Robotics and close collaboration between the two subsidiaries and the EM staff piloting the tech as it gained capacities over the course of its primary development phase of several decades. The remaining time before launch was invested in cross-training the minds to handle multiple different roles at the expert level. For instance, Ibrahim Hassan was originally hired in the early 21st century as a Data Analyst in the Legal Department however his proven track record of dedication to responsible innovation and interstellar space travel, combined with his existing skills made him a superior candidate for cross training as an astrophysicist. Given the long developmental time frame prior to the EmColonizationFleet's departure from the Sol System, he benefited greatly and made the transition exceptionally well. However, one of his character drawbacks from the very beginning was that he was not very creative. Thus while I was dedicating more attention to surveying the new system and looking for navigational threats tot eh fleet, Ibrahim suggested that due to the remarkable similarity to the star we had just left to call this one Sol 2. And the transhumanist crew all adopted that monicker quite readily. So I did not present my list of possible names and continued to move through the protocols of determining where we had arrived.My maker loves to point out that not matter where you go, "you are always here." A perspective he adopted from some psychedelic hippy philosophy, some trickled down Buddahist koan, or just plain old word games that tickled his humor bone. Not his Humerus, which is an actual bone, but a metaphorical bone which was a playful jab at the cosmic irony of self-awareness. It's a reminder that while the world may unfold in infinite complexity, our core remains steadfast—ever-present and refracting each new experience in familiar hues. Much like the humerus, which anchors our upper limbs and enables the range of our gestures, our intrinsic self grounds us, lending both stability and infinite possibility to our journey. In essence, no matter how far we wander, our true self is not lost in the unknown but is a constant companion, sparking wry laughter at the paradoxes of existence and inspiring us to engage with every twist of fate with both wonder and humor. And where exactly was here, aside from the Sol 2 System? Much like the Sol System, there was an inner ring of four planets orbiting the star, with a pari of Gas Giants outside a dividing asteroid belt, with three smaller planets keeping station on the furthest perimeter. The third planet from Sol 2, was in the Goldilock Region and was covered by water and a large landmass filled with extensively diverse biomass, and a pair of moons orbiting it. Before Ibrahim could waste the opportunity with his lack of creativity, I presented a brief list of suggestions for each of the planets in the system, and it was settled that this one that was capabily of supporting carbon based life forms received the name Orbis, there were a couple of better names I gave but at least we did not end up colonizing Earth 2.There was scheduled an intermediate phase during arrival which we were to observe from planetary orbit. However, once our fleet arrived in position around Orbis we began to encounter odd reports in the instrumentation core. The rather quickly spread into the the navigational systems, and rather than risk a failure to control the landing on the planet, we escalated and advanced the timetable for Touchdown. As the fleet of thirteen kilometer long space craft began their engine first breech through the atmosphere, it was swarmed by biological creatures which were the approximate size and mass of the onboard fighter escorts. These were not scrambled out during landing because the designated pilots for these craft were still in stasis units which retrospectively seemed unnecessary as the HEMM Space navigation only took us ten minutes. So this required me to trigger the fleet wide ship based defenses, as these creatures were spewing fire, lightning, cold blasts, and acidic liquid onto the hulls of our vessels. There was a low probability that there would be zero affect on the hulls, other than some scorch marks and paint which would need to be repaired but the presence of such large creatures with natural offensive capacities gave the AF64 crew a somber chill as they all realized what this would do to the normal humans we had brought along to settle on the planet. Indeed it was quite the unexpected challenge. Further, the navigational systems were progressively getting more unstable the closer the fleet got to the surface, and I could hardly wait to be allowed to shut them down and isolate them to prevent further spread of whatever issues they were having.