Music

Experiments With Loops
December 18th, 2018

I made this album several years ago when I was still in high school. I am working on new music, but it is slow going. As much as I don't think this album sounds very good (though there are still small moments I think are interesting!), it represents a period in my life when I had very little self-doubt towards my own music. Despite the fact that this lack of self-doubt was matched only by my lack of skill, I still look back fondly on the music I made at this point in my life as it represents a period when I felt I could make freely. I'm trying to get back to that point and hopefully make music that retains that beginner's mind while also being better!

The album was made almost entirely in Garageband with the Arturia SEM and CMI plugins, along with some random GB stock synths. The impetus for the entire album was my discovery of an interesting feature in one of the GB delay effects: while the delay parameters let you set the time of the delay—from up to around a minute to less than a second—the effect is actually constantly recording the maximum delay time's worth of audio into some larger buffer. By combining this with a very high feedback setting, which in effect makes the delay act as a looper, one can achieve some interesting results. For example: say you have the delay time set to one minute and you record audio for the full minute, meaning you now have a snippet of audio that loops ever minute. If you then set the delay time very short—say to one second—you would get whatever second of the original audio was playing when you changed the parameter looping over and over. But the effect is actually always recording the longer, one-minute loop, so if after thirty seconds you set the delay time back to one minute you would have your original audio with a thirty second interlude of one-second repeats. I do not know enough about delays to know if this is a common way for them to work, but it was the first time I had encountered such behavior.^[1]

At this point, the aspects of this album that I am happiest with are all the visuals, which I worked on in the summer of 2024.

Each visual is made up of at least one—and sometimes several—random videos from my harddrive, which I chroma keyed in OBS to create recursive loops. Making these visuals was a lot of fun, and it's a style I'd like to work with more in the future. If anyone can identify the source videos I used (they are all on Youtube!) I will give them some sort of prize.

I've uploaded three examples of the visuals I made without music, which you can see here, here, and here.

Zanné made the logo used in the album art. I don't know where they are, but I hope they are doing well!

Writing

Le sentiment d'un début
Written for Stephanie Harzewski's 2024 Fall short story seminar

Download Here or Read Here

In his novel The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes makes numerous references to poets, writers, and philosophers, yet nearly all of these references go unsourced. In fact, the narrator Tony often directly comments on the fact that he is referencing these texts without naming the authors due to his declining memory; this is yet another way Barnes plays with the ideas of time and memory in the novel.

There is one name, however, which is explicitly mentioned: Patrick LaGrange, a French historian whose epigrammatic quip about the nature of history is used by the character Adrian to impress his peers and their history teacher. The only problem is that Patrick LaGrange does not exist. Barnes has made him up, along with his quote. This aspect of the novel—the many real yet unnamed allusions or quotations juxtaposed with the one fake yet directly cited quotation—fascinated me, so I decided to write a piece exploring the role allusion plays in the formation of a text.^[2]

Besides this central theme of allusion and/or illusion, my piece shares several basic elements with Barnes’: a two-part biographical structure in which the middle part of the main character’s life is skipped; a suicide which forces the reinterpretation of a character’s motives; and the grappling with the loss of a metanarrative in postmodern thought with which we can frame our relation to history and our pasts. While I did not try to imitate Barnes’ prose in my writing, I did try to imitate the overwrought, ponderous writing found in many academic texts.