#Music

Jamuary is a project started in 2016 by True Cuckoo, a musician known for his positively quirky synthesizer music. The challenge is to record and share a jam every day of the month of January. In 2023 I managed to complete it, with 31 jams up on my YouTube channel. Here’s an overly detailed blog post summing up the experience!

The subject of this 1989 album got raised the other day amongst the Disquiet Junto members. As Destroyer’s latest album got released, its opener reminded me of Lost Wishes era The Cure. During the conversation some big fans of the band admitted they can’t even listen to Disintegration all the way through. That album resonates very deeply with me so it’s hard for me to imagine not being able to listen to it in its entirety. I ended up writing a lot there about how I see the album, so here it is for posterity.

It’s kind of sacrilegious to doubt one of the top ten best-selling jazz albums of all time. Here’s the thing, though: I’m not entirely feeling it. What follows is an unfiltered analysis, which I need for my own exploratory purposes. It is entirely subjective. Every statement below should be read as starting with an implicit “I feel like…”, or “In my opinion…”, or “It seems to me…”, etc.

I like my Intel MacBook Pro and will probably hold onto it for a while. But for music production it’s been more than a little annoying with its tendency to blast fans at full speed. I’m happy to say I solved that problem!

I’m very excited this is out: I added digital FM synthesis to a popular hardware synthesizer, Polyend Medusa, used by some personal heroes of mine like Richard Barbieri or Eraldo Bernocchi.

Simply an amazing song. Three simple monophonic synthesizers panned in stereo, some delicated padding here and there, and Thom’s voice telling a complex story. Here’s what I think about it.

This is one of my favorite songs of all time. It beautifully covers love in a long-term relationship, which is much more complex than the initial infatuation. It also uses some famous 1980s timbres and techniques for a really timeless feel. I prefer the album version over the later autotune-heavy renditions from concerts. What follows is my interpretation of the lyrics.