New years are increasingly starting to feel like new smartphones – marginally different but mostly disappointing in a way you can’t put a finger on. I started this year off hoping to do a lot of writing, but didn’t anticipate a majority of them to be papers, proposals, and applications.
I had several blog posts in mind, but the nature of 2024 meant that I was frequently caught up in things and couldn't get around to sitting down and writing them. While I feel the need to purge my head of the “task” of writing these essays, I’m ambivalent on whether I can do justice to each idea as a full blog post. Not writing them out immediately has brought about some staleness. I’ve hence decided to declare amnesty and write a single post with everything I need to get out, thus emptying my cup for the new year.
I might return to covering these ideas in more detail someday, or move on to new things entirely. I also suspect that some of these will call back to each other, forming associations and leading to some sort of gestalt quality that can only be achieved by smashing all these little ideas together. Or perhaps not. It’s hard to pre-meditate things like this.
I finished reading Busy Doing Nothing in July, months after starting it in late March. I have a newfound fascination for what Devine and Rekka (Hundred Rabbits) are doing with their lives, and how they practice their own values. I have previously played around with Orca and generally followed their exploration of Permacomputing as a concept, but this was the first time I got a closer look at what they are up to.
My reading of the book overlapped with my trip through Asia this year, which, as cliche as it would seem, gave me a taste of what people mean by "life is a journey". It makes some sense to plan for life the way you would for a trip. At several points during my read, I caught myself wishing for a similarly rich and creative life to lead with a partner. That said, it takes two to be a "power couple" (if I may use that phrase) and I don't know if I am as smart, kind or brave enough to pull that off.
Towards the end of the book Rekka talks about how they would smirk as they walked in public, holding their little secret about circumnavigating the pacific ocean. I think it is a beautiful feeling – to hold the knowledge that you have accomplished something that no one you know has. Where ideas around leading a radical life have turned out to be vacuous and misleading for the most part, this book really does offer a fascinating account of what such a life can look like.
I also see the appeal of doing fewer things, and more of each thing to the point of mastery. I am in a stage of life where I feel agonizingly stagnated and yet pulled apart in a million different directions. It could serve me well to reduce the number of things to focus on, and lean into some of them harder and deeper.
I also liked the various accounts of cooking in the book. Simply reading the book was often enough to snap me out of my takeout-habit and get me cooking. The book comes with an appendix of recipes, which is in addition to their Grim Grains recipe and kitchen tooling website.
Over the last year or so, I’ve realized that I might be falling out of love with live coding in general. At the very least, I imagine that live coding will eventually stop being a focus and get relegated to being another tool that I can reach for, depending on what I’m trying to achieve musically. This slow drift of interest has in large part been influenced by the New York live code scene and its metamorphosis in the last few years.
I’m grateful for the existence of this community and its influence in my growth as an artist in recent years. I have also made great friends and met my girlfriend through this scene, so I do have a soft spot for it as a group of people with shared sensibilities. I’ve already written a more objective report on how the community operates within the city, so I will allow myself to be opinionated and critical here.
LivecodeNYC and the surrounding scene has been in sort of an evolutionary stalemate in the aftermath of the pandemic period. While the community has a strong reputation for being intriguing, artful and welcoming to outsiders, it has little to offer as a roadmap for anyone that might want to pursue this more seriously. Several ambitious projects under this umbrella have somewhat floundered soon after they began, in part either due to creative differences, interpersonal issues or a general lack of consensus on what an appropriate collective identity for this scene is.
The community is stubbornly anarchist in its organization. While this is a breath of fresh air in many ways and has helped keep the scene from being swallowed whole by the tech or non-profit industries, it does its part hampering in a couple of ways. The first is the more obvious “Tyranny of Structurelessness” flavor of problems wherein cliques and closed-groups are quick to form, and invariably create a power structure that everyone is unhappy with but can’t directly gesture at. The second is the growing inability to interface with the real (i.e., capitalist and explicitly hierarchical) world, which is often necessary to address resource constraints of various kinds - real estate, funding, backline etc. This inadvertent detachment also hurts members of the scene that hope to formalize their art practices via record deals, tours, residencies, grants and such. There is a slow movement towards finding a slightly modified org structure that solves some of these problems, but none of that feels imminent just yet.
Finally, I’ve never really been a part of rave scenes, or even encountered them outside the “Algorave” context. The energetic dance party with the music-as-upholstery approach, along with its tenuous relationship with drugs and alcohol doesn’t really mean much to me from an emotional or cultural standpoint. So the subtle but sustained enmeshment of live coding with rave cultures, combined with the convergent evolution of live code scenes into dance music scenes feels weirdly contrived for a medium and ecosystem that could be so much more. To be fair, there is a fair amount of overlap between experimental art-tech communities (NYMS, CCNYC, Creative Code Art, NYC Resistor, etc) and LivecodeNYC, which is a good thing. That said, it is odd to me that live coders have struggled to interface with the active indie, jazz, hip hop, and experimental film scenes in the city.
I've hosted 10 events (loosely defined) since having moved to my current apartment 4 years ago. In the process I’ve understood a good deal about the shape of my apartment and how it influences the dynamics of people in it. Learning to host parties and other events at my place was somewhat of a steep hill for me to climb. I have nothing compelling to say about this yet, except to reflect on my experience and learnings.
The "shape" of the parties are strongly affected by the shape of my apartment – the arrangement of furniture, the size of rooms and how the different spaces are defined. Decisions like lighting adds another layer of influence. I’ve also come around to understanding my apartment much better through these events. The dinners have led me to really understand the strengths and weaknesses of my kitchen, and get a better sense for how to project-manage the cooking of an elaborate meal given the resource constraints of stove burners, counter space, standing room, and pots and pans.
The context of parties requires me to think differently about what music fits well with the collective atmosphere in the room without sacrificing my own sensibilities or settling for something overly generic and accessible. I’ve recently begun inviting the guests to pick music from my record collection, usually resulting in something I wouldn’t expect. For the Winter Solstice this year, I invited friends to bring instruments and jam in my living room, which instantly added to the atmosphere of festive coziness in the apartment.
My introversion itself is a hard constraint that I’ve learned to recognize and make peace with through these parties. Outside of logistics, it means that I need to set aside adequate time for emotional preparation before, and for processing and recovery after an event.
I enjoy the fact that inviting people into my apartment on specific occasions gives me the opportunity to “charge” the space with their spirit.
One thing that really stuck with me from reading Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt a few years ago was this idea of a sacred vs. profane axis of perception, and how the dynamic range along that axis tends to vary wildly between cultures. Growing up religious meant that everything was excruciatingly meaningful and sacred. Later, I flipped into the “nothing is sacred” phase. It compatible with the generally flattened sacredness axis in the liberal west, creating an air of liberation and connectedness as my sense of the world expanded in my twenties. But that felt equally unsatisfactory, and I still occasionally run into value discrepancies that I can't ignore.
Last year I stumbled upon Julia Hendrickson and the "Art as Theology" movement. I didn't really care much for its focus on Christian theology, but it did set me off about how I consider my own art practice in the same ways as someone would approach faith. I strongly associate religion and theology with rituals and a sense of domestic seriousness that doesn't involve community at large. I’ve written about how this affects my social life.
My parents have a part of their home turned into a shrine with pictures of gods, accompanied by oil lamps and other accessories for a quick prayer ritual. The recurring activity there is enough to slowly accumulate meaning in that corner. Similarly, I have a corner of my apartment dedicated to making music and art. There is a ritual aspect to tuning my guitar, connecting synths, and setting the amp, pedals or microphones up. There’s also a more abstracted version of this in the starting and finishing of notebooks, mixing of music, building of oeuvres and such. Making art is a cherished social activity for me — I frequently get together with friends to jam or paint.
Funnily enough, as I write about this, I suspect that it partly explains my musings about the local live code scene, where I feel a palpable mismatch between where I place music on the sacredness axis in comparison to the rest of that community.
Currently, I’m working to achieve the balance between treating art with the seriousness that comes with holding something as sacred while avoiding the trappings of solemnity. I enjoy the meditative and relaxing quality of making art, but am also wary of letting that result in tedious and overwrought pieces that are lacking in emotional resonance.
Transit and music seem to connect with each other in many interesting ways, making it compelling enough for me to write about. I’ve seen this idea jump out to me in three different ways.
The first is the applied musicality in transit infrastructure – this is probably the area I’ve studied the most among the three. I’m referring to the musical motifs in the form of jingles, announcement sounds and other little musical fragments that make up the general soundscape of a transit system, often cementing its identity. My earliest encounter with this was of course when I composed a track about the NYC train door chimes, but I’ve performed pieces built using other examples of the same phenomenon. There is a more subtle but exciting example i.e., the interval of tones caused by an accelerating motor in the R143 and R160 rolling stock. Montreal has something similar. I am similarly fascinated by the musical multi-tone horns in Indian trucks, NYC bikers playing music on bluetooth speakers to signal their presence on the road, and the “bark” sounds from an Airbus hydraulic system post landing.
The second idea is somewhat related but distinct enough – the rhythms and mechanical noises from transport systems. There is historic precedent for the sounds arising asymmetric wheel placement in trains influencing musical swing. I remember spending a lot of my childhood attempting to recreate the atonal pitch variations of motor hums in a manual transmission vehicle. I think there is an inherent musicality to how machines operate, and this stream of thought could easily be its own rabbit hole. I’m also reminded of an old algorhythmics paper, and a more recent attention to that field in the context of cybersecurity.
The third, one which I’m starting to become more and more excited about, is the direct association of certain music with travel. Road trip CDs and playlists have always been a thing, and easily translatable to the context of long-distance train and airplane rides. I’m however interested in the collective association of certain music with transportation systems. Brian Eno’s “Music For Airports” is a more refined and high-brow interpretation of this idea, but so is the whole genre of Townbus songs, which consists of hours-long playlists containing obscure melancholic tamil heartbreak songs harkening back to government buses rides in rural South India. This is something I’d love to study more deeply and document as a substantial music culture that seems to hit upon a unique combination of location, medium, context and listener agency.
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Alright, that’s it. These were the ideas bouncing in my head that had also snowballed just enough to form the basis of blog posts while sitting behind a barrier of effort. In retrospect, I see that the posts distill some of my own experiences from this year, which in a way makes this a 2024 reflection post.
I have a few other ideas that didn’t fit this trenchcoat post, and would be better off existing as standalone articles since they exist in a different frame. I hope to get around to writing them in the New Year.
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