knocks & floats (a bit techy)

so the music therapy lot turned me down - knocked me a bit it did - a few weeks back now...

& one of my classes that i teach in homerton has been low on numbers for awhile and yesterday they told me they're taking that class away from me...

so i'm losing hours...

it hurts... it will hurt financially and it hurts emotionally... but life goes on - more work will have to be found...

i've got a few things keeping me emotionally afloat at the moment... one of which is my synth world which is slightly larger than it was & more interconnected now...

i've been messing around with a modular synth called jasuto - on my phone - i have the somewhat undernourished android version... it turns out there's more money writing for apple so the android version is the poorer relation in the family but even with seemingly no attention from it's creator for a few years it's still a fine beast...

over the weekend i made a sound on it which i called "peeved child"... my ladyfriend (i forget what her nomdeplume is...?) within days of meeting the peeved child expressed a wish not to hear the peeved child again...

i love it still...

yesterday - day of receiving bad news - i found myself on the overground from canonbury to new cross gate - nipping home after work before going out again to a spanner rehearsal...

i saw, behind my bicycles rear wheel, a mains plug... which i've been meaning to check out for a while now - a sign by the plug said not for public use...

so i got my Dsi Tetra out of my bag and plugged it in - all the lights came on - i found my headphones and set about converting the peeved child into a "confused hippy"...

most of the bits that make up peeved child in jasuto on my phone are similar to bits that exist in my Tetra - 4 LFO's, a low pass filter,

the sound generation in jasuto is a sampler that i drew the waveform into & that's beyond my Tetra, but Tetra's saw/triangle wave works pretty well instead... by the time i had arrived @ new cross gate i'd completed confused hippy which i later unveiled in the spanner rehearsal and it's earned itself a place in the spanner set on saturday night...

really nice that the phone synth is influencing the gigging synth... long may it continue...

the spanners are @ the round midnight in angel on saturday night if you're a londoner & you want a fine night of free music - confused hippy included x

train journeys

i took my last journey on the gospel oak to barking route this morning, last of this week's journey anyway, i'll probably be darkening those train doors again someday...

and i have 2 things to say...

firstly there are some nice things to look at from that train, i was filming videos through the windows this morning, much to my fellow commuters bewilderment...

around blackhorse road station the train goes across the lea valley, the river lea, the reservoirs... lots of nice water in amongst the industrial & residential landscape...

also there is a strange site underneath the north circular, just before the train reaches barking station... as i was looking at cycle maps before i started this week, considering the mad cycle journey i was curious about the north circular, as it seems there are not nearly enough points to cross it on a bicycle...

and then from the train i spied these strange looking tents that you can just see in this satellite image... a little scifi looking, or radioactive or... you know how you're brain makes things up on little sleep..?

ok so the 2nd thing... advice to people avoiding conductors on that train line...

the conductor starts at different ends of the train on different days and doesn't seem to make it all the way through the train, even though it's only two carriages... so the days when i had my bike with me i picked an end, hoping to pick correctly and both times i picked wrong, and couldn't move to the other carriage because of the bike... but the two days without the bike i was able to slip through to the other carriage when i spied the conductor - i still picked the wrong carriage but it didn't matter...

it's a train line without proper stations so you can't buy a ticket until you're on the train anyway so you don't get stung for a £20 fine if you don't have a ticket, but it is pricey if you meet the conductor, £4.20 for a single (9 stops)...

and i never saw a conductor on the return journey @ rush hour...

if i was doing this work for more than a week and i was still without money i would do a proper study of the ends of the train that the conductor starts at... because you never know, they might have a pattern...

oh the way that my mind works in these non-financial summer periods...

x

report from out there

right now i'd like to be working on the film... so this is a kind of pointless post, just expressing that, i'm @ work in dagenham on my lunch break...

i've been inducted into the langdon corrupted ladies crew... even though i'm not a lady and i don't go to langdon school... but longcat is in amongst the tags on the board as part of that crew... only they don't spell either corrupted or ladies like that...

the different names they go under... teenagers... one of the levels of names my students go under is: cabbage, pants - the same 2 are also called younga kiddi & tubbzy... the 2nd of which is a name balthazara gets called when people think she's over weight...

i got so excited last night when i made the piano float in over the thames path images and then recede like a ghost... i so want to be making that film... although between here and the finished thing there is a lot of menial work..

also the text needs to be written... i bring my notebook into work these days but yesterday on the way in my head was full of the approaching day/week and on the way home i was really tired, sort of fell asleep on the train a couple of times...

this morning i was trying to dodge the train ticket collector amongst other things... strange to be doing these things when you're 33 but needs must...

anyway... rabbiting on as i do... i hope you're all well...

bless the ceasefire in lebanon & long may it last x