I was playing around with various alarm clock programs for Mac. After going through some which bewildered the heck out of me, I came across Alarm Clock 2, which is prolly a sequel better than the original, and which I've found to be simple, straightforward, and elegant to use. It easily goes on my list of recommended software, and I just wish there was something like it for PCs.
Too many alarm clocks in the world are loud and annoying and I don't like that. Same goes for telephones. I don't like those ugly, sudden rings, when there's so many opportunities to inform in distinctive, healthier ways. My own alarm song right now is "Days Go By" by The Contrast (how inspirational is that??), 'cuz Alarm Clock 2 integrates nicely with iTunes. It even does a gradual fade-in, so the track doesn't start at full volume.
Have I said what a YUGE fan I am of crossfades yet? When I actively composed music, I loved doing fades, all sorts of different curves, across intervals of bars—I might have one set of hi-hats exponentially rising over the course of 8 bars while an arpeggiated drone faded out over 4 bars, leaving an extra-ample space at the tail. The audio equivalent of gradient painting, really. I do miss it.
I just got off the phone with my lil' bro, who I've been bugging to blog. Not because I need it, but because he does: he has loads of self-expression the world never gets to see, and apart from his old website and a blog he setup—and abandoned—what seems like eons ago, he hasn't been too interactive on the web.
Perhaps too much focus is spent on the word "blog", but at the same time, to identify something you need an easy name. Tongue-in-cheek and on a retro tip, I've called my website "Torley's home page" with good reason. Remember, a lot of my life is spent colliding chronologisms and mashing up memories: I wonder what a friend I met 10 years ago (and have since lost contact with) would think of a friend I met last week, who reminds me of them. Or what playing Spectre VR would be like in Second Life (I've seen some tank-based games, but it's all about the polygons!)
Had a wild idea once, sort of a riff off Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder: my idea had to do with a party of electronic musicians (inself a nod to Dancers & Drugees) traveling through the spacetime continuum, restoring timelines by listening to the groove in each era, and figuring out where a given pathway had deviated from the next. For example, say a popstar named James Fletcher (he's English) had one of his vocalizations—Aeooooooo!—sampled across many subsequent generations. (Think James Brown here.) And in one of these timelines, he died prematurely, and never ended up making the record in 1972 that got sampled. That would have some sort of massive quantum shift on future happenings lacking that piece of music, or to a broader extent, his influence might be diminished and/or augmented (think of many rock heroes who've died prematurely). Or, what if: the maker of the TL-030 Accordion Emulator got killed in a traffic accident, robbing future generations of the style of Base Mansion (an awkward parallel to Acid House). Other comparisons I'll toss out: Highlander with synthesizers, James Bond played by Juan Atkins, a New York Times edited by Simon Reynolds.
If that sounds crazy, think of every single piece of music that's ever used the Amen Break, think of it not existing, and come back here. Great documentary by Nate Harrison on why it's so important—or if not that, at least quasi-ubiquitous…