Saturday, July 9, 2016

am i finally awake? i'm a little groggy, but i think it's the air. overall, i think i'm feeling refreshed.

it's taken me some careful listening to decide how i want to organize the confused ep. i almost immediately removed the duplicate from 1998, as it was immediately clear that this was pointless. i've noticed repeatedly, now, that the archived 112 kbps mp3 sounds better than the cd-r - probably because it was converted to mp3 one less time. i keep blaming everything on the fact that i'm 17. but i really am 17. in fact, i just turned 17. you can't expect kids to get through life without making mistakes. further, i know that the music is very intricate at points, but this whole technology thing was still a different world. it's not just that i'm 17. it's that i'm 17 in 1998. back then, using a computer was still something that got you taunted for being a nerd. this was before the concept of hipster geekdom - nerds were really just flat out fucking nerds. so, digital media still had this taint to it, by way of being associated with a circuit board. in 1998, i'm still the elite nerd kid that even knew what an mp3 even was in the first place. and, fuck napster, by the way - you get the good stuff through private ftp servers.

the point is just that i didn't really know how badly an mp3 breaks the audio quality. in fact, i thought that the result actually sounded better over mp3. i had seriously convinced myself that an mp3 compression was a crude mastering process. psycho-acoustics, indeed. this excuse will go away soon, but right now it's still very real.

what's left can be partitioned into three sections.

1) the first five tracks, which were all remastered and finished in 2015/2016.
2.1) original mixes from 1997/1998 (this track was written in '97 and recreated with the machine in '98).
2.2) remasters of those mixes from 2013, including the inricycled cut.

the question is whether i want to cut the disc off at section 1, leaving all of section 2 for bonus material, or whether i want to cut section two in half. i've opted for the latter - keeping 2.2 on the disc, and 2.1 off of it.

on the one hand, it may be easy to argue that i don't need any of the vocal parts because i remastered the vocal version for this track. but, it's also true that the 1998 vocal mix is very different than any of the first five tracks, and the 1997 mix is practically a different song. i did not find that also holding on to the original mixes was worthwhile, but i do think that they should be accounted for.

i want to separate them out a little bit, though. just a gap in the audio, making the last two tracks seem like they're hidden in plain sight. so, what i'm going to do is drop the inricycled mix in to track 6, and then leave an audio gap in between. the original versions will then be bonus mixes, in addition to that.

i am pretty much certain on that track listing, but i will need to listen to the material before i finalize it.

08-07-2016: burning out repeatedly at the end of the head clear (some inri007 listening)

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/confused-2
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

well, i'm awake for now...

i'm going back to a concept of time that is more familiar to me, which is to order time around the completion of a task. the last year or so has just been so chaotic....i reject the concept of scheduling with the strongest amount of disdain possible, but a more flexible concept of organizing time and prioritizing outcomes is really essential. of course, i haven't exactly lacked this over the last year - i was consistently meandering in one direction or another, half-blind and often inebriated. what i lacked was the order that comes from organizing yourself around small victories. before i shifted to reconstructing the aleph-disc, and closing all of the discs one-by-one, the last new project that i started was really back in january. life over the last few months of 2015 was likewise related to ending a project i had started in june of that year - and was bogged down by what was eventually isolated as interference from an environmental magnetic field.

i should also point out that i went through a stressful process of disability renewal over 2015. in august, i was finally given five years. that was after almost two years of medical review. i found myself living as though i had nothing to lose, due to the increasing certainty that i was going to run out of time. getting the extension was a complicated thing, emotionally, and i think the results demonstrate that. i lost a source of stress, which is good, but i also lost the sense of urgency attached to it. that in itself was a kind of trauma. quitting smoking was both a function of that and a factor in how things developed. however you want to analyze the situation, it appears that i'm in the process of reasserting a more ordered existence for myself.

as mentioned, my concept of order is probably still insane for most. i do not want a daily schedule. i do not want a weekly schedule, either. but, a more familiar way for me to live is to segment time in such a way that isolates ideas and events within it.

i think you get a little bit of a taste of this in the way i've broken the vlogs into episodes. as of right now, these are imprecise. but, normally, my life would actually decompose pretty efficiently into sets defined by different purposes.

my immediate task is to get my energy back up, and while i may have short days for the weekend i think i'm actually most of the way there. while i am catching on sleep, i will be completing up until the end of my first record. right now, that is up until inri013. i cannot commit to numbers.

when that is done, i will need to stop and clean. this will include a compost run and full run through the living space. this is also when i will start the vlog catch-up.

i will then need to begin on the next project, which is completing the string of singles for the second record (currently thought to be inri018) and the resequencing the second record, itself.

so, that's three upcoming segments of time. it's unclear where they begin or end. they don't have lunch hours or smoke breaks. they may be measured in days or weeks, but hopefully not months. yet, as loose as they are, they are an ordering of time - and that is required, in some abstraction, or no work will ever get done.

i don't know what i'll want to do directly after i finish the second record (and offshoots of it). i suppose that the next chunk of time will be about finishing period 1.3. and then period 2. but, real life things will no doubt assert themselves in between. what i do know is that it is likely that this stronger ordering of time will reassert itself, until some further crisis (temporarily) collapses the concept of order back into irrelevance.

inri007-inri014 are actually basically done. i'm sober this weekend. so, this will be comparably fast. i'll be republishing mar-july, 1998 tonight and then working to make sense of it over the next week or so.