Monthnotes: December 2024
Every month or so, I share a quick digest of what I've been working on and reading. Here's the latest. More in the series here.
On Standby is out! My 10-hour-long experiment with sonification and radio documentary and sound art has been released, and you can listen to it in all kinds of places - on YouTube (with an intro that explains what's going on), on Bandcamp (where we get the most money if you buy it), and on your favourite streaming service (where we juuuust squeaked under the 10-hour limit for digital distribution).
To repeat myself from last month, the whole project is expansive in scope, but the elevator pitch version is that it's a 10h40m piece of music, designed to be slept to, created from data collected by seven volunteers about the overnight energy use of devices in their home, interspersed occasionally with with quiet, calm interviews and poetry. You can get a sense of the vibe by watching this one-minute trailer, and read a longer a description on the Loud Numbers website.
The release itself was a blur. Miriam and I appeared on NGBG Radio's Friday night show here in Malmö, where we talked about how the project worked and did a quiz about sleep and sound. The show normally has a house band, and so I recruited a few of my data-collectors to play some music with me live on the radio. We called ourselves "On Bandby" which confused the presenters greatly. You can watch the whole thing back here.
Then it was a week of disturbed sleep, running On Standby streams in Europe/Africa, American and Asia/Pacific timezones - this meant getting up at crazy hours of the night to start or end broadcasts. Then we had the streaming release the following Monday.
That following week I also had to present the results of the project to the funder, which went well. So well in fact that one of the people in the audience asked me afterwards if I wanted to play a version of the On Standby music during an event she had coming up, where she was filling an ice rink(!) full of inflatables and projections and such.
So I created a live set out of the music using Ableton - having the drone and the sonification parts as background, and dropping in some of the spoken word sections over the top along with a little bit of generative guitaret, and lots of effects, and played it over the course of two hours in an ice rink. It went great. I've never capped off a project with an ice dance spectacular before, but now I've got a taste for it.
Somehow this wasn't the extent of my musical performances in the last 30 days. I also played a 20-minute ambient set at an event focused around the interplay between music and visuals. This was my EMOM set again, slightly extended from the previous version, but this time with beautiful generative visuals from my friend Simon.
The visuals started out textural, with blue and white patches flowing over each other. But as the performance went out, the perspective zooms out and it becomes clear that you're looking at the surface of a planet. As the set reaches its peak, satellites begin to orbit the planet. It was absolutely gorgeous. Simon is a wizard.
To reward myself a little for musical endeavours, I treated myself to a couple of new instruments. A Sandberg Electra TT4 bass guitar, and a Mellotron Micro (both second-hand). Combined with my Guyatone Lapsteel, which has now returned from the restorer that was cleaning it up, I've got a lot of new sound worlds to explore in 2025.
Partly inspired by Simon's beautiful generative Touchdesigner work, I'm continuing to explore my interest in audio-reactive visuals. I took an online course with the School of Machines in Berlin, called "Generative Narratives for Change", which focused on building up typographical systems in Touchdesigner. I've always loved typography, and it's really interesting to think about how it can made to respond to sound.
Unfortunately, while the instructor was a fantastic artist, they were not a great teacher - so I shifted my mindset to treat the course as an opportunity to just play around with text in Touchdesigner. I built a little system that uses an ASCII grid to display different words when it detects different percussive elements in the sound. There's a lot more that I'd like to do here, and you'll no doubt see more of it in 2025.
At Possible, I've been focusing on creating visuals for reports that we've been publishing. Our Hot Wheels work is all about food delivery drivers, and the dangers they're exposed to in terms of air quality and road safety. With almost 20,000 couriers working in London, under precarious work conditions, this is a pressing climate justice issue. More dedicated cycle lanes, better pay, and government support to shift delivery drivers from mopeds to e-bikes would deliver a huge boost to working conditions and the climate, at relatively little cost.
Hannah Bland
I also finally finished reading Robin Sloan's latest novel, Moonbound - the pitch for which goes: "The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon."
As I mentioned last time, it's a fizzy, pacey read - only taking me as long as it did because I've had a lot of other stuff on. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you like weird fantasy and interesting ideas and don't mind missing out on a bit of depth and variety in pace, then you'll have fun with it.
Next up on the reading pile: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works".
Somehow, amidst all this, I also found time to give a Pechakucha presentation to a sold-out crowd at Inkonst, here in Malmö.
It was quite a reflective talk, summing up where my head is at after a year of living in Malmö, leaning heavily on some of the concepts I was thinking about when I moved - particularly Spencer Scott's writing about becoming a "person of place".
Spencer R. Scott
My whole life, "traveller" has been a big part of my identity. But the serious environmental and social consequences of global travel have pushed me to rethink whether that should continue to be the case. So I'm now actively working to replace that bit of me with one that's more rooted in a specific physical place - and that place is Malmö.
This is still something I'm thinking a lot about, and doing the talk was an attempt to do some of that thinking in public. It got a warm reception, so hopefully there'll be opportunities to share some of that thinking more broadly in the future.
Earlier this year, I did some work for my good friend Filip on behalf of the Zoological Society of London. He handed me a database of 400 years of sturgeon (the fish) sightings in the UK, and asked me to root out some interesting stories.
I asked my Loud Numbers collaborator Miriam to help, and we uncovered tonnes of interesting stuff about the populations of these amazing creatures, how they live their lives, and their interactions with humankind over the centuries.
Our work has now been published, so to celebrate, here's a little snippet:
Intriguingly, sturgeon sightings have even been suggested as possible explanations for reports of the Loch Ness Monster. Their enormous size and ancient look make them easy candidates for such legends. People would often attack the fish with pitchforks upon discovering them in rivers, mistaking them for dangerous deepwater monsters that could harm them and/or eat all of the fish in the river. They were also targeted for their prized meat.
Take a look through the whole project over at uksturgeonsightings.org, and don't miss the opportunity to boop the snoot of the sturgeon on the homepage for a little Easter Egg.
I abandoned Spotify earlier this year, and so I haven't had to wade through another of the company's disappointing attempts at data storytelling in the form of Wrapped (I hear there's an AI DJ thing this year? 😬).
Luckily, former Echo Nest founder and Spotify employee Glenn McDonald has written a nice guide to going deeper into your Spotify data, uncovering more interesting things. The best thing? You can do it at any time of the year you like.
But I think there is some value in looking back though, and sharing what was good. So I'll leave you with a short list of some of my best-ofs this year. Please share yours with me in reply!
Best album: Yard Act - Where's My Utopia
Best song: Anna Erhard - Botanical Garden
Best podcast: Empire
Best videogames (joint award): Animal Well & Satisfactory
Best concert: Yard Act @ Loppen, CPH
Best book: Moonbound
Best place: Malmö
Have a lovely holiday season and see you in 2025.
Duncan