Month: December 2016

Cat Links disquiet junto / sounds / tracks

[track] sterling fades [disquiet0260-tonefade]

PROCESS
Thank you so much, Marc (@disquiet) for thinking of Sterling in this project. As I told Marc in an email exchange where he told me of the dedication in this week’s prompt, my thinking about how the sound waves we produce may somehow go on forever began with the Junto’s week dedicated to the death of Jefferey Melton (@Nofi). This week brings much of that exploration full circle.

Nick Drake’s ‘Northern Sky’ open tuning resolves to a Dsus4 chord (with the suspended G as the center note and F# up high)
D-A-D-G-D-F#

I was gifted knowledge of Drake while working at Rolling Stone as an intern in 1992, and ever since, ‘Northern Sky’ is the song I turn to when skies darken. Felt right to invoke it here by striking its open chord for a few minutes. (Note: Soundcloud’s auto-compression revealed my perceived silences to be not so silent. Hi ho.)

Sterling passed in our home at the hand of kind veterinarians, on a soft rug, with easy, knowing caresses on 22 December 2016 ~6:20 EST. I trust he’s suspended somewhere now between space & time in painless parallel peace. Fwiw, we had David Bowie on random shuffle and ‘Absolute Beginners’ came on as the process began. Perfect is a strange word in this context, but life works in curious ways sometimes to deliver solace.

All the love.

:^D

RELEVANT EXTERNAL LINKS:
My reflections on Sterling:
https://medium.com/westyreflector/sterling-at-the-gates-dcff944b76df

Alan Watts on how the universe is made of vibrations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhHfKqLR6NI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmkwqn0mSQs

My prior piece “Riding Waves” to honor the passing of Nofi:
https://soundcloud.com/thereflectors/riding-waves

RIG
Guitar:
Jolie (2000 Gibson ES-335 DOT reissue, modded 100% with custom http://peekamoose.com electronics)

Pedal Board:
EQ Devices The Warden optical compressor -Lotus Pedals SnowJob Underdrive -tc electronic Flashback delay -Diamond Tremolo -EQ Devices Grand Orbiter -EQ Devices Afterneath -Strymon blueSky Reverb

Recording:
Line6 POD-XT (Blackface Lux emulator) -MOTU 828mk2 firewire interface -AcidPro 7.0 -Harrison Consoles Mixbus (Mastering)

META
More on this 260th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Tone Fade: An exercise in when a sound ends

(This project is for Sterling.)…

continued...

Posted-onBy lineBylinewesty
Cat Links real life / sterling / words

[real life] Sterling At The Gates

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medium.com mirror

A dog’s will to live is its raison d’être. Dogs do not suffer Albert Camus’s “one truly serious philosophical problem” of suicidal ideation. The canine affirmation is automatic and compulsory — a dog will never choose to end his or her life. It simply can’t. Dogs live, and only live.

A dog, by extension, affirms all lives it touches. Life’s entirety, of course, comprises a spectrum of emotions and ricocheting perspectives on reality — from nihilism to optimism, frustration to contentment, abandonment to love. A dog brought home becomes a nexus and repository for all that home’s experiences, memories and outlook.

Projecting a dog’s POV through ours, there’s beauty in their affirming life while (perhaps) never knowing that life is an opt in/out choice. The phrase “dogged determination” is doggone true. We don’t know what a dog knows, but we sense — and communicate through — some kind of mutual sentience. The true paradox of our cross-species communication surfaces as our dogs act with intention: we know they think — but only because we can’t tell what they’re thinking. 

(The know-can’t-tell paradox will also be true in determining whether an artificial intelligence achieves true sentience, but this story here’s about organic lifeforms. Ignore the robots around us, for now.)

Posted-onBy lineBylinewesty
Cat Links real life / words

[real life] real fake truth

“fake” is the opposite of “real,” not of “truth”

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We don’t live different lives in one reality. We all live the same life, but in different, discrete realities.

“Conspiracy theories” are battles among competing realities, not between truth and lies. Truth also requires conspiracy to be accepted en masse.

Gravity is a conspiracy theory.

No perception is fake. There’s only what’s “not real to me.” All realities are true.

What’s true, however, is separate from the truth.

“The sky is blue” is true.

“The sky is blue” is not the truth.

Blue is how our eyes perceive a scattered refraction of light passing through particles.

Therefore, belief in blue skies (and their corollary “clear skies”) is a conspiracy theory.

Every blue sky is “fake news.”

Posted-onBy lineBylinewesty