H. Montgomery @h@boisterous.community

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

Le Guin, _The Dispossessed_

But what's great is that it, like so many other audio-forward languages, is so designed around giving you the tools to just plug functions into each other that play is really easy. When finally the headphones pop into life and you've got signal...serious fun.

Attempting to learn a little Faust again (https://faust.grame.fr/). I've done this several times and always given up, but now I'm just letting myself play around and it feels good; the web IDE is really astonishing once you get a sense of what it's doing. I do wish I had more general mathematics knowledge --- trying to figure out how to properly use a FFT without a real solid sense of the vocabulary is basically like chewing on sand for me.

Got to see “Water Damage” last night at the Parlor in Austin. Three percussionists, two basses, one synth, one ambiguous chordophone, one song. Really vigorous performance style, the beat just pounded away for 30 minutes with bass rhythms fermenting underneath and washes of feedback swirling over top.

The new record’s on bandcamp: https://waterdamage12xu.bandcamp.com/album/repeater

There’s this tree in a park near me in south Austin that perfectly frames a few skyscrapers. Something about the perspective makes it impossible to capture with a phone camera, but it’s a magical place to visit. It’s fascinating to me how much of this experience is flattened in the photo, how banal it seems. I guess part of the magic is that it’s an ordinary experience (a tree, a cityscape) that’s folded in just such a way as to seem completely extraordinary, at least to me.

This might be a silly question to those in the know, but is it possible to spin up one of the Linux audio systems (e.g. pipewire) from just the tty? I just got an old box running with Alpine and, while I have sway (and xfce), I kind of like the austerity of no gui…but it’d be nice to have audio.