Sunset: 5:14pm. The blurry days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve stand outside of time. These long nights are tailor-made for dusting off childhood memories and tending to personal passions. Perhaps this is why I’m dredging up my old delay pedals, tape decks, and loop machines. I’d like to start making tracks again, and I don’t want to do this anywhere near a screen. In an age of mind-numbing options and endless virtual palettes, parameters are critical.
Today I spent the afternoon rooting through a storage unit for my copy of Snowcrash and some audio cables, and my brains hummed with digital chatter and trash. Celebrities are shaving their heads, there’s a glass bottle shortage, and China is building a hotter version of the sun. I want to improve my ability to sit still and simply be a person, so I stopped by the local zen center.
I meditated in the recreation hall of a Unitarian church with two elderly men who were live-streaming the situation to the internet. No matter where I go these days, there’s a fucking screen. I closed my eyes and tried not to fidget or look at the clock while I listened to the two men breathe. Heavy rain fell on the rooftop that sounded like static, and I spent the time thinking about how to set up my soundsystem, debating whether my beautiful new reverb pedal should come before or after the cassette deck.
Atlas Minor – Texas Radio Drift
American Decay | 2015 | Bandcamp
An old reverberated and looped bit of radio that I caught down in Texas ten years ago. I collected this with some other tracks for an extended-player in 2015, and I’m looking forward to making a new batch.
