Monthnotes September 2025
Every ten days 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.
Last month, I forgot to mention something - I released a record! "June 2025" is a recording of the Tom Runs Alone live set that I was working on alongside my friends Konstantine and Simon in the Spring.
Bandcamp New & Notable May 1, 2023
Tom Runs Alone is a band I formed earlier this year. I'm doing the bits that are musical notes, Konstantine is doing the bits that are percussion and beats, and Simon is doing visuals (he also played the basslines in this recording). We're calling the genre "maximal ambient".
I'm pretty happy with how it sounds - not just compositionally, but in terms of production too. I've been building up my music production skills (mixing and mastering) in the last few months, and this was the first time I could really put them to use on my own project. Hopefully we'll do more in time.
Also, I'm really quite proud of the fact that we were able to register the domain https://tomrunsa.loan/.
Tom Runs Alone also played a live show at NGBG festival - the annual street festival in the middle of Malmö's "culture & noise zone". Unfortunately, it didn't go super-smoothly - we had great weather, and we were playing on a stage facing directly into the sun. This meant that Konstantine and I couldn't see any of the screens on our synths, or LEDs on our Eurorack. So we were playing blind. But we were in a better situation than poor Simon - he had lugged a screen half-way across town to display visuals and no-one could see anything on it.
Lesson learnt: playing outdoors is hard.
I'm also slowly spinning up a new project, called s01system. It's a sort of creative technology lab - a collaboration between me and my friend Kotte, and a rotating lineup of collaborators. We're trying to figure out how music-making with technology can be less about consumption and resource-use and gear and scale, and more about community and sustainability and having fun. Our inspirations include 100rabbits, Lodis, monome, Feral, and Low-Tech Magazine.
So far, we've played a few solar-powered ambient shows - including a two-hour performance (outside!) at Malmö's old ferry terminal (which Feral are slowly turning into an urban design lab). We're also going to be playing at EMOM Skåne on Wednesday (tomorrow) - and there'll be a YouTube live stream you can tune into. We'll be playing at about 1930 Swedish time. If you're reading this after Wednesday, then it should also function as a link you can use to watch back.
I was writing something about geodes the other day (as you do) and through the course of my research, I unearthed the Wikipedia page for the Coso artifact - a 1920s-era spark plug encased in what was claimed to be a 500,000-year-old geode. In reality, it's actually encased in a concretion - a geological process that takes place over years/decades, rather than millennia. Boo.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
BUT! That page links to a page about the London Hammer - a hammer found in 1936 in London, Texas, which was also encased in a concretion. This artifact was bought by a creationist, who claimed that it was a 'pre-Flood' discovery, and put it in his museum where it remains today.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
AND! The London Hammer page links to the Wikipedia page for "Out of place artifacts", and this is where I lost a good couple of hours of my life. Everything you might imagine is in there, and plenty that you couldn’t - from the Antikythera mechanism and the Maine penny to the Quimbaya airplanes, the Bosnian pyramid complex and the Face on Mars. I'll let you explore for yourself.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
For the last couple of months I've been slowly making my way through Lazarus, the latest series from Cowboy Bebop's Shinichirō Watanabe. The setup is interesting, the characters are great, the soundtrack (Floating Points! Bonobo! Kamasi Washington! Boo Radleys‽) is wonderful, and the animation - particularly the attention-to-detail - is solid. But the scripting never felt like it went beyond cliche, and the ending was a real damp squib. So I kinda hesitate to recommend it. But if you prize vibes over story then you'll find a lot to enjoy.
Can better words lead to better climate action? That's a question I've spent most of my career trying to answer, so it's nice to see Becca Warner explore it for Atmos:
When it comes to talking about climate change, familiarity is important: Research shows that people’s strongest reactions are to phrases they know best. But as the world changes, we inevitably reach for new ways to express what we’re living through. And if metaphors shape our reality, it has become clear just how urgently we might need new ones—big enough, strange enough, urgent enough—to meet this moment.
Read more here.
Atmos
A couple of weeks back I went to a really good seminar called "Rethinking Social Media Platforms", which was basically about getting off of Big Tech, and it has spurred me to make a few changes.
Regular readers will know that I got off Gmail back in July, switching to Proton (though I'm still using Google for calendar and docs, for now). I also used to be a big Firefox user but I switched to Arc when it was launched out of curiosity. So I've now taken the jump back to Firefox.
I'm trying to migrate chats slowly from Messenger and Whatsapp and Telegram to Signal. If we're chatting somewhere that isn't Signal, then feel free to message me on Signal instead.
Finally, I want to try to start exploring Pixelfed as an Instagram alternative, but I don't have so many people to follow there yet. If you're registered on Pixelfed, add me at https://gram.social/duncan_geere.
Project "make a small physical device that plays ambient sonifications of local API data. Weather data, air quality, ISS position, earthquakes, etc" is approaching a conclusion. We have a small physical device, it plays ambient sonifications. Job done? Almost. I have a little more work to do in sound design, and probably switching out the earthquakes API for something else (not enough activity in the timescales I want), but as a first prototype it's 95% there - and it'll be exhibited in a couple of weeks at Malmö Gallery Weekend. Swing by STPLN if you're in town and want to see it - I'll also try to get some documentation online, and share it in next month's newsletter.
Were you thinking "Hey Duncan! you don't seem to have enough projects on this month"? No? Me either. But in mid-October I'm going to be making a little orchestra of eight synthesizers that'll play A Symphony of Bureaucracy - a Loud Numbers piece published a few years back.
Right now I'm trying to get local people to donate tiny Eurorack systems to the cause, and hunting down nice looking table lamps in second-hand stores, while also trying to finish off the sonification machine project above. But I'm gonna have to shift gears to this in the coming weeks if it's going to happen successfully.
More on this next time, no doubt. But if you want to come by in mid-October and check it out, here's the event page.
Speaking of next time, that's all I've got today. See you in October!
Duncan