August 14, 2017

There is a shadow side to great strength (Personal notes, St Beuno’s, October 18, 2013).

8.10 am: A communion:

Over the weekend, I cleaned the study and batched and filed personal correspondence that had slept too long in my too many in-trays. While dispatching redundant paperwork from my filing cabinet to the paper bin, I alighted upon reflective notes that I’d made over a decade ago; they represent an early draft towards a ‘manifesto for becoming’ that has been on-going ever since. It’s relatively straightforward to discern the roots of our dissatisfaction, to define the person we’d rather be, and to envision better circumstances. Far harder to undo the consequences of a lifetime littered with poor decisions, unheeded advice, missed opportunities, lacks and losses, wasted time, talents, and resources, regrets and hurts, unresolvable relationships, and calamities of our own making:

9.30 am: Back to the conference call for papers. The hardest part behind me, now was the time for some spit and polish and ‘furniture’ moving. The ideas found their groupings more readily on a second draft. Things began to settle down. The overview needs to be completed by the end of this week, at the latest.

1.40 pm: In the studio, I redrew the schematic for the sound system. Gradually, in both small and large ways, it has changed substantially since last week. The schematic is as much a guide to dismantling and reconstructing the gear as it is account of the connections for their own sake. When I visualise a network, like this, I grasp its totality:


Schematic for ‘Double Blind’ (second amendment)

It remained for me to rationalise the mains input to, and distribution boards under, the primary table. Wherever possible and, certainly, whenever necessary, the boards are rigged with RF insulation and power conditioning.

Since Saturday, I’ve been developing an occasional series of works entitled Surface Noise, based upon enlargements of small areas of digital photographs, each 20 × 15 cm, that have been rendered as GIF files. Presently, they represent the exterior planes of anything from sound equipment and file boxes to walls. The intent is to generate a set of sound ‘drawings’, based upon these samples, using the photographs that have been processed through a data-bending technique, in order to evoke, analogously, the quality of visual source. The exercise is driven by curiosity alone. I’ve no plans to exploit the portfolio that may ensue:

7.30 pm: Further tests on the stereo imaging of the system. There was a puzzling monaural output from the TC Electronic array of effectors, but a stereo output elsewhere in the system. I retraced the the signal paths to and from the turntable mixer and via the two Boomerang III sampler/loopers. Everything was intact and divided, left and right, as it should be. Unanticipated. And, not immediately resolvable.

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