Looking for people to help me
Plus podcasts and Cornwall and composition and books and all the normal things
Right now I’m in the middle of designing the biggest and I suppose most ambitious thing yet for Music Thing Modular. It won’t be ready to share widely for at least another six months, but I am super excited about it.
This kind of project has so many elements - from finding simple, reliable, easily available components to the three dimensional knitting of PCB design to making a baffling device more readable.
Deadlines are always useful, and the first hard deadline for me is April 13th this year. A dozen or so people will arrive for five days in a big house overlooking the Helford River, just south of Falmouth in Cornwall.
We’re there for “a residential workshop combining graphic and text scores, improvisation, modular synths and other sound-making devices… to collaboratively create an album in just one week.” And, if the Gods of international logistics (currently on holiday and in a snowstorm) smile on me, I’ll be bringing a stack of prototypes for us to use.
The retreat is organised by a new organisation called Dyski (which means teach in Cornish). There are still a few spots available to book ← Book here! .
There are also two grant-funded places - one for a Cornwall resident, one for anyone. Application is simple - just a 300 word note about why you want to attend - please pass this on to anyone who might find it valuable - deadline is 18th February. Email me if you have any questions.
I’m looking for coder-ish people
This project is also more collaborative than anything I’ve done in the past. It’s not just me, it’s a whole gang of brilliant people.
It includes a small computer brain for audio and CV, which can be used in different ways. Imagine lots of small apps, rather than one big lump of firmware.
So if you’ve ever made anything music related on a microcontroller - Arduino, Circuit Python, Teensy, audio or sequencing or whatever - and you’d like to get involved, please send me an email to tell me what you’ve done. At the moment this doesn’t represent any commitment - I’ll probably just say hello and invite you to join a Discord, sharing more once prototypes allow.
Tom ‘n’ Mylar, episode Six
A couple of weeks ago, Alex came to visit me in the shed, and we recorded almost three hours of chitchat, talking about the relative moral worth of charity work vs designing a distortion module, why the 8mu costs so much, the fantastic ridiculousness of Music Easel program cards, printing out .wav files in books and the secret synthfluencer group chat.
Tom ‘n’ Mitch, episode One
A few weeks before that, I went to visit Mitch from Hack Modular in his (frosty but treasure-filled) shed just across London, and we recorded two hours of chitchat, talking about the horror of looking back at old projects, building a punch tape reader for Eurorack, wet consumables and the exploding market for vintage telephone exchange components.
Links and inspiration
You might enjoy…
1000 Matches - feature length match-based stop motion
Rinde is fantastic on tricking your brain to be more creative
I made my Dad a little box that generates poems based on the latest articles in The Guardian
An app can be a home cooked meal - because not everything needs to be a hustle
Max Neuhaus’s Sound Drawings - so chill
The archives of Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly, Tom Waits was a fan
Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise Handbook on how to play graphic scores
Guy Debord & Jorn Asger’s Mémoires the one with the sandpaper cover
Little Languages for Music - way over my head, I’ll ask ChatGPT to explain it