Creating a garden

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Over the past two decades, I have maintained a personal website. Looking back, ten-year-old me would have found that an incredibly long time, and honestly, I still somewhat agree. For most of its existence, it has been a basic landing page with a single paragraph introducing myself and my work. This straightforward format served me well, providing a destination for visitors and a hub for essential contact information. It also allowed me to experiment with personal branding.

However, since transitioning to full-time freelancing in February and driven by a desire to create my own "digital garden," I feel it's time to expand this site into something more. As a stereotypical Capricorn who prefers observation to participation, I often find myself misunderstood. My hope is that by showcasing my work and interests here, I can open doors to opportunities that are currently hidden from view.

Expect a mess

Don’t expect this site to be highly currated with lots of polish—I don’t like that shit. I want to ditch the clean, picture-perfect Instagram world and get real. I want to share works-in-progress, those unfinished ideas that might not make sense right away. Life isn't always neat and tidy, so why should our online presence be?

In fact, I think Lu Wilson (aka TodePond) said it best…

<figcaption>A <a href="https://mas.to/@TodePond/112614106022692413" target="_blank">Mastodon post</a> by <a href="https://www.todepond.com/" target="_blank">TodePond</a></figcaption> </figure>

Forget about the traditional idea of life being a straight line with a set end goal. Growth and change happen when things come together in the right way—that's awesome. Why not share our present moments as they come with people who want to see them? Some of the coolest stuff I've seen online started as someone's random thought or project. Let's embrace being real and honest. By showing our unpolished, imperfect selves, we can connect on a deeper level and celebrate how diverse human experiences are. Let's make our online culture more inclusive and vibrant by embracing the messy, imperfect reality of life!

A journey into loop composition

Sat, 24 May 2025 09:28:00 GMT

Some of the sound that bounces around the inner chambers of your ear holes that resembles patterns we can recognize coupled with frequency syncopation that you've heard up until the dawn of techno is music that is—or was—performed in real-time by a human. Since then, we have been encroaching on a new paradigm in which systems of language conspire to produce a simulation of the same thing. So far, we have chosen to entertain this notion of soulless expression without a call to arms to suppress it.

“Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.” — Terence McKenna

Could it be possible to construct an instrument performed by a human that would allow free-flow of human expression but use the soulless product of these systemic language models as a sound source? What if we played the thing that was playing the simulation of something being played?

Now, I'm not a scientist. I don't claim to do things systematically or follow some rigid practice in order to gain answers to questions. I like to think that there is room in this world for the miraculous; confusion is just as exciting as an answer, and in our short experience of time within this plane of existence what difference does it really make? Therefore, to start this journey I purpose we limit to what can be possible within standard MIDI 1.0 messages.

In the summer of 2024 I started to long for loose time keeping in music composition and had the thought that creating my own command-line interface (CLI) for doing such a thing could be a ‘fun’ experience. I had started a weekly ritual of performing live coded composition using Orca under the name Shadowtackle and kept finding myself in situations where I needed an indefinitely held note or a phrase performed on a MIDI controller to loop over and over instead of being programmed on the spot. Keeping my head within the feeling of the music was an important aspect to me. I could use a loop pedal, but the messages coming from MIDI to perform the loop was one step closer to the system in which the phrase existed at all in the first place. The end result of my time experimenting landed in early August of that same year.

Krait, a MIDI looper that takes record of MIDI messages over the course of time determined by the performer was born. A couple weeks later my second born child would also emerge into this world, and for the months that followed I would be preoccupied with this new life unfolding in front of my eyes.

Levi Beach

Creating a garden

Expect a mess

A journey into loop composition