Creative Deep Freeze
A Blizzard of Activity
Here in the Des Moines (Iowa, USA) metro area, we just went through a blizzard and are now dealing with a deep freeze. I think they said we had 22 inches of snow in a week, about 10 inches on Thursday through Friday, followed by 30 to 40 mph winds, and we woke up on Sunday morning to -18F (-28C) air temps, never mind the wind chill.
I’m not going anywhere. Travel is not advised. We did get the 40” snow drift in front of the garage plowed out last night. Because of drifting, large sections of grass are exposed, but then you have scenes like the above picture with neighbors with 6 to 7 feet of snow on their decks.
It’ll all be a memory in about 8 days, when temps climb back above freezing for the time being, although we’re not usually out of the winter woods until late February.
With help from Sweetwater, I recently bought a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB audio interface for my laptop so I could attempt “live-streaming” ambient music from my studio. It worked - I painted on video, silently, while the music was going. Although the recording I heard from YouTube didn’t sound as rich as what was going through my headphones, likely due to live-streaming compression. I’ll keep playing around with it.
What I want to be able to do is have a weekly or bi-weekly or occasional show of me creating music “live” while recording it in my studio. It’s broadcast live (either “live” or “pre-recorded live”) and without edits. People do this on YouTube and Facebook and Twitch all the time, but mainly with “low-fi beats” and mixes. Later, I’ll take the recordings, edit them, and have them distributed with titles.
I made a track for this week’s Disquiet Junto assignment: Rode Here on the Bus. It’ll get released to the streamers eventually, but you can hear it on Soundcloud.
The 628th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Alchemical Brothers — The Assignment: Explore an aspect of the ancient occult science using music — at: disquiet.com/0628/
Due to winter weather in my area, I've been taking the bus. I have a 5 minute drive to the mall where I park and then hop on an express bus for the 12 mile ride to work in downtown Des Moines. Leaving the car behind and taking the bus is a transformative process for me because I haven't taken public transportation and been at the mercy of schedules in a long time, so it's a change. I do appreciate the time on the bus, and I always open my iPad to sketch out some music projects, listening in earbuds.
And that's how this piece started - on the bus. I have to compose with all the noise and heated air rushing around me. After I get home, I run it through my boxes, and turn it into something else. In that way, it's a kind of alchemy.
The title, "Rode Here on the Bus" is a direct lift of the beginning lyric of "Dreams Tonite" by Alvvays. "Now you're one of us, it was magic hour." Yep, transformative - and alchemy is a kind of magic.
Last night, I scheduled a new Aleodeology album, A Matter of Time Before It All Goes Away, for release on March 1st. It’s seven tracks varying between 91 seconds and over 13 minutes. Aleodeology music is ambient music that doesn’t have much variation throughout the course of the recording.
There’s a lot more to get scheduled in 2024. More ambient, minimal beats, drones, processed lap steel and kalimba, and mashups.
While I made a bunch of playlists this week, I only posted one to my Playlisting Substack: Fine Tuning the Groove - steady beats for the gym or repetition for walking.
That’s it for now.