5cense 558> Herding th unheard silence ahead of The Raft's wake: logarithmic confessions of a 4-track mind


17 Nov 2017 | DC> Aint been on hear 4 almost a fortnight, dear Inurnet. No apollogees. Did do sum compulsive journeling the utter day, bud in a (paper) notebook, (gasp) by hand, wich is sorta liberating, u shd try hit... sayin' what u wanta say knowing fool well no 1 will ever read hit. Sorta like wut we do hear on 5cense but dares all weighs the chants (slight as hit may bee) sum randumb surfer mite stumble cross this, so inevitably we succumb to self-editing. Brain processes come diffrent writing pryvet, by hand, as well as typing on a remington... aint no gong back 2 edit wut u rote unlest u scribe in pencil or use whiteout. Moreso writing by hand u can seamlissly morph charactors to lend certin hand-waving ambigooeyties, even diegresse to imedge or nonlinear doodling, left-handed or rite ± both @ the same tempo. Word-choice changes deepending on wich mano u use, jus like hit changes writing by hand vs. on a mashine. Aye 2 sides to hit tho, dares the outputting end + then on the input end u cant make no assumptions bout kids these dayz... most folks now halve been weened on swiping + texting + got no payshints for reading hand-writing.

[was gunna post a scan'd pg or 2 from this pryvet hand-writ journel we speak of

then figgered dat wd d-feet the purpiss, no?]

Wreckon u cd say we's guest-blogging now as «unknown artist»... another face(t) of anon I'm us, or knot. As unnkown artist weave been into heavy sound-editing mode this past week or 2, not txt or imedge editing like we normuley inklined todo. Serendipitous dat last we posted hear we took in 3 strait nites of concerts in Greenpoint, 2 of witch pushed the decibel limits of Warsaw's fine sound system... Swans as Q-tips to recalibrate our audible threshold. @ JFK we partid wayz w/ our bedder-½ who headed tward the Ivory Coast wile we flew back hear to DC + set out to putt together a cassette, a 1st for Calamari, yo. In archiving the '80s in resent months, weve bin posting sum of our home-recordings from way back when... dat + also receiving a book/tape from Dan Mahoney got us to thinking hey, woodnt it be fun to make a cassette? the absurdity of hits on par w/ making book objets. + the fact dat no 1 gots walkmen no mo makes hit even more cumpelling... funny how cassettes halve made a comeback in resent yrs, a medium we was weened on, mor then any udder we identified w/ tapes for varyus reasons, in part this idea of impermanence, how u was free to record ova hit if u wantid just by pluggin' spitballs into them holes. Inny 1 cd make a tape! Toto like dat now, inny 1 can start a blog, inny 1 can publish a book, inny 1 can post an album up on bandcamp, etc. But when the first 4-tracks came out this blew things wide open.... hard to imagine for inny 1 now w/ axess to GarageBand, etc. Weed playd in varyus bands + sure, dare's a certin beauty to dat, collaborating + improvising live, bud the idea of recording, of laying tracks on tape, really struck a chord w/ us, as the sayin' gose. Hit became an obsession, an x-cape (from + @ the xpense of our studies, in math + sighents)... away of chronicling, jus like what we do now w/ writing + in regards to publishing u cd say we cut our teeth on cassettes... no, we dint use tape as dental floss fool, bud the whole DiY sensibilly-t of hit influenzed our approach to book-publishing—designing the covers, getting tapes duped + networking w/ like-minded folk to swap tapes. This sorta grass-roots thing dont ∃xist no mo... sure kids now mite beg to differ, hollerin' dat kickstarter or indiegogo or whatever crowd-sourced ap means «grass roots» but hit aint the same buey, hit werent sumping u cd just click a button + voila. A lot gits thrown out the window w/ such convenience.

Anyhow @ sum pt last munth we sent out on a few tapes to get them properly digitized (the MP3s we posted b4 were hastily cunverted on our last dying tapedeck we had in the '90s so were of shitty quality). Being dat the tapes had been sitting around for almost 3 decades we wasnt sure wad to xpect... but for the moss part they was well-preserved (inny 1 lookin' for a good place to do such xfers weed recommend Midwest Productions). Unfortunately we dint keep nun of our 4-track tapes as we cd of had them transferred w/ ea of the 4 tracks isolated + been able to remix them, remove vocals, etc. but the only versions we kept were 2-channel (R+L) masters. B-sides the 3 tapes (The Ethereal Aether, Whorl + Starfisheye) we had digitized professionally, we also had a dozen or more demos + 1-offs of varyus stuff we did before this, tapes we wasn't sure the contents of it had bin so long... so we got 1 of them cheap USB tapedecks (surprising u can still get such things, let alone for $20) to xfer these other misc tapes, sum of which we hadn't herd since the '80s or '90s.

We dont got much experience working w/ digital audio software, so had to figger dat shit out... used Audacity @ 1st (came w/ the $20 usb walkman) but why use clunky software like Audacity (the audacity!) when our Adobe CC subscription comes w/ Audition? Way more firepower then we need, but amazing what 1 can do these days... kind of scary actually, how easy hit is 2 manipulate stuff + off corse we was temptid aint gunna lie, i mean w/ the click of a button u kin git yo voice in tune or get rid of tape hiss, etc. + we edmit we startid to mess around sum w/ such enhancements before realizing we just wanted to keep everything as is. A few long songs we clipped tho, or mixed diffrent clips to gether. Freaky how ez hit is to splice digitally... w/ tape u got to git the scissors + scotch tape out + cue things up just rite + then once u made dat snip dare was no gong back... kind of like what we was sane in the beginning of this post in regards to writing on paper by hand vs. typing on a computer. We's not necessarily sane we want to go ∀ll anti-technology, but hits shocking moreso what these modern conveniences do to yo brain, such accessibility, the instant gratification, this idea of an "undo" button, stuff that kids now take for granted + become hardwired w/ no clue udderwise.

Innyways, we sounding like sum grumpy old man lamenting the good ol days. Spose dat's what we is. From these tapes we digitized we cumpiled a cullection of songs... made sense to arrange the tracks chronological, in the order they was made... so noisier more expiremental stuff on side A + by side B hit mellows out... u cd even call sum «pop» songs, tho they was by no means ever popular. As we wint thru this cathartic process we wonderd what to call hit (in lite of the new Calamari paradime we off corse dint want to use our ℝeel nombre (tho hit aint hard to figger out if u follow the above links + look @ the labels)... when we went to play the trax in iTunes they came up as "untitled artist" haha so dat settled hit for us, the name stuck. The name of the tape we was gonna call them «Santa Cruz Sessions» or «Camper Lot Tapes» or sumping mo mysterious like «The Lost Logarithm Tapes» but in the end the opening line on the 1st song gave us the name («I heard the unheard silence...»). Sew w/o farther ado, here tis, The Unheard Tapes:

We sent the tapes out to get duped yesterday, shd git them back in January (again, inny 1 itching to try this @ home weed recommend duplication.ca... natl audio seems good too + perhaps cheaper, but more of a process we dint halve payshints 4). For the cover we opted for the simple logarithmic rectangles (cassettes another objet dat just happen to be in «golden» proportion). Weed worked on another fancier cover dat we endid up using inside + as the bandcamp artist image:

So dat's what weave bean up to this past fortnite... b-sides continuing to put The Gotham Grammarian online (just posted unit 4 of 7, Countererrorist Measures), whose sheer size is taxing the limits of our computer's capabilities, not to menshun our own hack HTML chops. Again, makes u long for the good ol dayz when u just put pen to paper or pressd a key on a typewriter + dat was dat... hits overwhelming to think of ∀ll the crap gong on b-hind the scenes of Inurnet, how hack sites like ours dat cant conform to latest technologees git banished to uknown dark reaches. In the end tho, dats where we feel most @ home, our mind freed up to think a bout utter things rather than fortune + fame + # of hits... free to speak our mined, unaffected by xpectations + no reputation to keep, chemosabe?

In utter news, Chimps can tailor their language to what their audience knows, sumping we aint even capable of! We got the slightest clue where our audience is coming from. Yesterday we was hiking the Billy Goat trail along the Potoemick + saw a snake + spose we paused in our tracks just like the chimp in the video + grunted back to P who was a few steps behind us... perhap we even said «hoo», hoo nose, u'd half 2 aks P. When we wint to snap a photo of the snake hit slithered + startled us + this is how the picture came out:

Snake along the Potomac

Sure, we click'd off other more legible photos to proob we was dare, but we need to brake this habit of compulsively documenting toto we do + see, turn ova a new leaf, move onto a new chapter, a new book. And we need to brake this ear habit of speakin' like Rem+Rom, but hits hard cuz they awkcupied us for 2+ yrs + on + off b4 dat, cant even recall how we used to speak pre-Raft. Part of what we do hear on 5cense is exorcise such demons, git residual toxins out of our system, but we still feel the presents of Rem+Rom neath our skin, possessing us. Sum of dare charactoristics might rub off on us + dat's ok, we xcept dat as collateral damedge. Bud dudes, move on. Meanwhile, as Cal A. Mari, weave bin niglecting A Raft Manifest cuz hits still so close to home we cant bear nun to think about hit objectively, weather hits shit or not. We initially sent out a few ARCs, but then plum forgot + suspect sum review copys never made it to dar dustynation cuz of dat dumb USPS rule how u aint sposed to drop nada in them blue-boxes over 13 oz. (we know of @ least 2 peephole dat dint get a copy we sent) + strangely the onely person whoos menshunned The Raft on Inurnet is Dennis Cooper + we never even sent him a copy. Innyways, if u want a copy letus know, happy to oblige. Same goes for the tape, when it comes out.

So yah, we'stuck in dis transitional limbo now, b-tween books. Making this unheard tape helped to ease the metamorphosis, clear our palate. Dare's utter big changes in the works bud we aint @ liberty to speak of dis cuz day aint bean finalized yet... may-b by next dispatch more will be reveiled...

 557 <( )> 559 > Buckskin Cocaine + Sisyphus Stones: begins again the renunciation against colonization @ the base of George Washington Bridge

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