"A very interesting and curious phenomenon happened. I can only regard it as a jest. White coral islands in a dark blue sea. Sand blown by the sirocco. Luminous clouds of hyacinth flakes. Iron and stones that fall from the sky. Vast things…

“These bleats of pedantry should be regarded as respectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless. “Millions ruled by a small band of esoterics. “The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is…

“We have complained a great deal. At least we are not so dull as to have the delusion that we know just exactly what it is that we are complaining about.” – Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919 Live drums, real bass, MIDI key loops…

“White coral islands in a dark blue sea. Luminous clouds of hyacinth flakes. Jet-black snow and hailstones flavored like oranges. Pink snow, flakes the size of saucers. “Vast things poised like crows over the moon. Dark shadows crossing…

“There doesn't seem to be anything to discuss. A needle that no one ever lost, in a haystack that never was. “We've been damned by giants, sound asleep. Things that are leprous to the faithful. Things that deep-sea fishes are bumped by…

“The fittest survive. Not the strongest; not the cleverest -- Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. ‘Fitness,’ then, is only another name for ‘survival.’” – Charles…

“All imaginings that materialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness.” – Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919 Various electrical doodads played…

“A very interesting and curious phenomenon happened. Our greasy, shiny brains may be of some use after all.” – Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919 VCV Rack patch with drums added in Reaper.

VCV Rack patch with LABS instruments.

This December was more somber and complicated than usual, so just I threw some ambiguous chords into an old VCV Rack patch and didn't bother trying to track down or fix the discordant foghorn tone that crops up a couple of times. I wish I could…

It finally dawned on me that I could use the faders and knobs on my MIDI controller to control channel volumes and plugin settings in Reaper while recording live, so I fired up a bunch of instances of Hainbach's excellent Noises plugin, tweaked…

Yet again with the Petrushka chord... Maybe one day I'll learn another one! This time, I threw those notes into some plugins in Reaper.

As has become a habit, I threw together a VCV Rack patch at the last minute based on a couple of YouTube tutorials.

Ran the Petrushka chord through a bunch of modules in VCV Rack.

Messed around with the Petrushka chord in VCV Rack, then added a couple more effects in Reaper. (Thanks to Omri Cohen for creating a neat VCV patch and Ben Levin for his recent video on that chord.)

Plugged my Kaiser Electrical Instruments Drone Stack and Hypno-Drone into my interface, fired up Reaper, and hit Record. Decided to split the 2-minute Drone Stack track in two and pan it hard left and right, just to save the listener some time…

Once again, waited till the very last minute, played around with a couple of new-to-me apps on my iPad, and sent the resulting noises through some plugins in Reaper. Fun stuff!

Played around with a couple of new-to-me plugins on my equally new-to-me tablet, then connected a little USB interface to make sure the guitar signal would come through. Fun little 10-minute diversion that turned into a just-shy-of-2 minute "soundscape…

Built an Omri Cohen patch idea in VCV Rack, recorded a couple of takes, then edited and arranged the results in Reaper.

VCV Rack patch reacting to an audio field recording. Cheers to Omri Cohen for the excellent patch walkthrough!