I’m working on a project with New Berlin School vibes + Floydian texture + something else. The “something else” needed to be a distinct element that would bring a different flavor yet mesh well in primarily analog terrain.
Enter the pinnacle of Yamaha synthesis in the 80s: the SY77. Modern synthesizers can be all sweet spot, but who defines the sweetness? This beast is from an era before we rounded all sound’s corners, and can run the gamut from wretched to angelic. Last century’s sound through modern processing like a Zoia Euroburo or Hologram Microcosm still retains its essential sonic essence. Perfect for my purposes.
The floppy drive was long departed and sysex slows me down. I needed a better solve for saving daily sound design: the Gotek II from SamplerZone. Their package includes a 16GB USB thumb and an Eddie Van Loon ribbon cable converter, much cleaner than hacking my own together.
It took a few attempts to get the correct Gotek jumper arrangement and FlashFloppy configuration. After finding a multitude of conflicting info on the web, logic and perseverance led to the below.
Gotek:
J5 open
JA open
JC open
JB open
S0 jumper
S1 open
MO jumper
For library creation, patch/bank identification and conversion duties, I’m using sy.factory to sift through my own sounds and the many sysex files found in the wild.
Next in the SY77 ascension process is experimentation with sector101’s WaveBlade and DataBlade cards, then display swap and perhaps op-amp upgrades.
I’m also curious about Swayed, the coming patch-compatible SY77 emulation from Stryde Audio. I’ve gleaned the WaveBlade and/or sy.factory may allow me to use custom audio ROM images in Swayed.
If you’re an SY77 or Swayed user and would like to trade soundsets - those no longer or never available in the market - please get in touch.
The planet is asleep and it’s the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.
– Sun Ra
I’ve searched for and have yet to find the original source of this quote, but apocryphal attribution doesn’t make it less true. I’ve been thinking about it since I first heard it decades ago. The more I turn it over the more sense I find.
Whichever Sun Ra said this, in whichever timeline, is absolutely correct. When musicians are awake and true to themselves in their creations, their music is a vessel for that truth and carries it to every ear. Awake artists wake up the whole planet.
Sun Ra’s quote continuously drops in to say hello. Some examples:
It ducks and weaves through my notes on music as a distributed, conscious entity. The intentionality and emotional depth of the music would have an impact on the consciousness it could carry.
It soft-shoes a path around my thoughts on what’s missing in purely algorithmic compositions and sound design: the conscious meaning-making is listener-side only.
It underlines songwriting and production similarities/differences across genre and time. All are devised to deliver something living, something in motion, something present for the age in which they are created.
It shines a spotlight on what makes a vocal good: the quality of carrying a feeling directly into the listener’s head and heart. Awareness of and embodiment of the emotion while singing enables it to be transmitted, which then helps the listener become aware of and experience the same feeling.
It peeks out between clouds of pareidolia and why some see more faces in their environment than others. Creativity is not the domain of sleepwalkers - metaphors, analogies, conceptual and pattern-based linkages require viewer awareness before they come to active life.
It howls about divergent neural structures and thought processes and their possible links to creativity. Various forms may enable the hyperawareness of and attention to the depths of feeling art is born from.
It is the voice of instruction in my head every time I relearn this history lesson: when education is removed by the powerful, ignorance fells culture and the human world regresses to a more primitive state. This is why fascists are always anti-culture, because art contains truth and thus cannot be manufactured or strictly controlled. It is made by those who are awake and aware, and those who experience the art may also be awakened and become aware. Chain reactions commence.
The ability to create art; to deeply communicate with more than words; to enter and harness conceptual frameworks in the pursuit of a desired goal; to find the overlap in a Venn of seemingly disparate ideas; to interpret the abstract and make it concrete: all of these require self-awareness and systemic feedback that include one’s self in the equation.
Creation is a conscious act. One must be awake to create.
Afternoon tea with a good book and a friendly murder of crows
Improvement of my language skills
Creative work until the small hours
Jaunts to the lab at Lagrange Point 3
More cats
I did not expect to be reinstantiating this site.
2Second(Fuse) sprang from late 90s currents in the primæval Internet wilderness. Originally meant for another purpose, it instead became a weblog.
Those days had their own pantheon of heroes and villains locked in cultural, environmental and political struggle. Decades on we struggle still, with stakes the 90s and 00s only imagined. Those naïve times appear halcyon next to our Now.
As then, creation in the face of regression is a revolutionary act. Being unapologetically oneself is perpetual disobedience, in advance. Continuing to openly live a life small minds and stunted hearts are afraid of is the best way to say fuck off. Doing it together is unstoppable.
Embodying the ideals of freedom and self-determination centuries of humans have lived and died to advance is what it means to be progressive. Working to expand that possibility to everyone through word, deed and example is what it truly means to be liberal.
However much this dragon tries to be spatial, he remains completely
flat. Two incisions are made in the paper on which he is printed and
then it is folded in such a way as to leave two square openings. But this
dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two dimensions he
persists in assuming that he has three; so he sticks his head through one
of the holes and his tail through the other.
Escher has cleverly hidden the truth in his description. The dragon is proven correct: he can only stick “his head through one of the holes and his tail through the other” if he is, in fact, three-dimensional or has found his capability to become so.
We’re each Escher’s dragon, in all our enormous depth and variety. If we move beyond the default of two-dimensionality then the skies, their multiplicity of views and endless paths of flight open to us. Instead of chasing our tails, let’s break out of time’s ouroboros and eat the bullies.
I’d like to see all people of open mind, free thought and good heart live as irrepressibly themselves as possible, as loudly as possible. Never hide; never stop. Don’t shrink when the 2D bullies come to trap you on their ill-fitting page; rise and revel in your multidimensionality.
As a feral child of the Cold War, I was born adversarial. Even so, I did not expect to feel energized by this fight. It seems dystopia agrees with me.
