no - i don't want to take a side in a religious conflict on the other side of the world.

at all.

even a little bit.

again: i reject ethnic nationalism and would encourage the speedy secularization of the region.

i actually don't have much criticism around the idea of israel taking out senior members of hamas, even if i'll agree that it's likely futile. if the israelis were to change their tactics from indiscriminate saturation bombings to targeted killings of terrorists, i wouldn't have a lot left to say about it.

but, i mean, everybody that is aware of what's happening on the ground knows that what they're doing is a genocide in slow motion, and that that kind of projection is delusional in character.

i'd be happy to see them prove me wrong, though.

yeah, but what if you get rid of the filibuster and the republicans win a 51-seat majority in 2022?

i mean, are you really that short-sighted?

again: i oppose lockdown measures. but, i'm not sure the anti-lockdown groups are really the kind of temporary allies i'm looking for. and, i don't know what the point of protesting in the park is.

it reflects this kind of enslaved attitude, as these people seem to require some kind of validation or something. no, really - that's what it has to be about.

if you don't want to wear a mask, don't wear one. i don't. the rules are far less strict than you think, and they only exist because people are passively allowing for it. if you really want to oppose the mask laws, then just go about your life without one.

likewise, if you want to throw a party, then throw one - although i'd advise taking specific precautions to avoid getting raided.

this isn't a collective issue, where we need to get together to pressure our governments to act, it's a question of individual choice. and, the way to undo the tyranny is not through a protest movement, but by just discarding the authority of the state as overreaching it's constitutional bounds.

so, it brings up questions about what their motives really are, and whether or not what you're seeing is really what are fairly shady groups with pretty bad politics essentially trying to take advantage of the scenario. we're living in a dark point of history, where the left has essentially abandoned science under the force of immense statist brainwashing, so what i would like to see - the left taking advantage of the crisis to build solidarity - has essentially been co-opted by the right, who at least seem to see the potential value of the moment. so, in a sense, i have to applaud the right for actually doing what the left should be doing, and this is just the latest example in a kind of trend of that occurring. but, it doesn't make these groups any more appealing.

i know this is a lonely time, but it's better to stay away from these kinds of groups than think you can co-opt them. they're more likely to get to you than you are to get to them.

so, that's my advice - protesting is the wrong tactic, here, because this isn't about the collective will, it's about personal choice; it's a social issue, it's not a political issue. and, you don't need anybody's approval or validation, in life. just go out and do what you want.

hey, we spent some time a little earlier setting up my maxxed out windows 98 pc, on a psb-f from 1998 that  i got for christmas in 1999. i've had to swap out everything except the board, power supply and case, but it still runs.

i have a 64-bit pc in a box that i haven't built yet and really need to soon....

...but, i fully expect that this 32-bit machine will last another 10 years, at least.

so, i'm pretty sure about the known good gb of ram in the suspected bad slot - that's been stable.

i'm going to try a second gb of suspected good ram in parallel, to close off the first two slots.

this board can take 8 gb of ram, but it's running a 32-bit os (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future), so i put 4x1 gb sticks of gold-plated ocz in there, but i built it in 2007, so it's getting a little bit old.

i've had to rescue it several times, and i've put a bd-r in it and swapped a few things around, but i've only ever had to replace one of the four hard drives in the machine over the last fourteen years. that's it. so, let's hope the ram is fine, after all.

i tend to like the stuff that's less pompous, and more focused on songwriting, in whatever abstraction - or more psychedelic. so, i like genesis, crimson, floyd - although i actually prefer oldfield, or tangerine dream, to the bulk of it.

i tend not to like the geekier or more randian stuff, like rush or elp or zeppelin.

and, when you bring the macho poseurism or show-offism that is more indicative of metal than prog in, i just tune out altogether. so, i just can't get into stuff like dream theatre or slayer for that reason, although the major problem with later dream theatre is less that it's too metal and more that the singer just ruins it. there's a short time window of dream theatre stuff that i've found instrumental japanese imports of, that i can actually get into.

so, i made fun of him for listening to hair metal, too. i didn't just take that shit.

i think i got him a little into tortoise, which is the kind of thing he ought to have liked, although he seemed to prefer mcentire's work with the sea and cake, and i know he enjoyed tool when given the opportunity to, as well.

but, i never saw him play. not even once. rather, it was myself that ended up playing these kits that were always sitting around...

where did i learn about sound recording?

i have taken a handful of courses both in high school and at carleton, but i don't think it helped much, and both were after i'd been recording for years. the actual truth is that my dad was a useful resource, here.

i actually wish he'd have written some kind of biography, so i could order his own life a little better; i wasn't born yet when he was in his early 20s, and he seemed to view that period of his life as something to take a bit of a step away from. but, what i was able to piece together is that he spent some time in the late 70s as a drummer and sound engineer, mostly dealing with local metal bands in and around ottawa.

now, he was a prog guy - his drum heroes were like terry bozio, bill bruford, phil collins, neil peart, that kind of thing. he was a big mike portnoy fan later in life. and, he had this kind of zappaesque disdain for punk rock as overly simplistic, although i think i was able to help him understand a little later on that the point of punk was political rather than musical. it was actually on his suggestion that i check out the dead kennedys, after i brought home a new offspring record, at the age of 13 - although he then made fun of me for listening to it.

i think this fundamentally warped his concept of punk rock for life:

...and he would constantly reference it in making fun of me for recording by myself, something that shows up here and there, tongue-in-cheek, if you look for it.

but, he wasn't exactly an expert or a working musician, either - he often insisted on owning a drum kit, but i never saw him actually play it, so i can't offer any kind of informed opinion about what he could actually do on it. i saw him noodle around on a bass a few times, and it was clear to me (as a seasoned guitarist, even at age 15) that he had no idea what he was doing. but, he fancied himself a drummer in his mind, anyways - and those were the musicians he followed, drummers in prog bands. 

but, it was enough to get me started, and that's really the most important thing, right? my concepts about microphones, about room acoustics, about equalization, about recording gear and even about guitar effects are rooted primarily in questions i asked in my mid to early teens, and while i know today that he was actually even flat out wrong about a number of things, that starting point was really invaluable.

......but, only up to a point.

i'm not a digital native, but i'm the very last gen xer and i had a computer with (dial-up) internet access in my bedroom before i turned 17. so, i'm not a digital native, i had a learning curve, but i'm just about at the end of the cusp of it - there are no doubt even people my age that would consider themselves digital natives. so, i was able to take these basic things i learned from my dad, and this glossary of language i understood, and just yahoo search it. this was before google, actually.

i toyed with going to school to be a sound engineer, and in hindsight i sort of wish i did, but my dad's apprehension about that period in his own life meant he wasn't going to pay for it, and the student loan system in ontario wouldn't cover it. these were expensive programs, too - $10,000/yr on base tuition, compared to around $1,500/yr at the local university (this was still the late 90s). so, i ended up stumbling through a math degree, instead, just due to the realities around me...

i don't think i'd have ended up working in a studio, though. i fundamentally can't deal with other people, and it sort of doesn't matter what my education is or might have been - i would have run up against this same brick wall of social awkwardness, regardless. it took me a long time to kind of figure that out. i would have enjoyed it a lot more, though, and i would have no doubt walked down a very different path and had a very different journey, even if i ended up in the same place, in the end. and, we're all dead, in the long run.

but, as a path, that's not something that was available to me, due to finances and the sort of societal perspective that it's not a vocation of much actual value. i was born poor and raised poor and found myself middle class due to marriages in my middle to late teens; regardless of where i started, the government will send poor kids to school to be doctors or lawyers or professors, but they won't send them to school to be sound engineers. you need substantive capital to invest up front if you really want to do that, and it just wasn't available to me.

so, i often sound like i have a fancy sound design degree, but i actually don't - what i actually have is a math degree, although i studied physics for a while, i took a handful of sound design courses and i went deep into the computer science and law programs, too. it's more that i grew up around gear, and learned about it by actually using it, and by asking functional questions, as a child does, to my dad, who owned the bulk of it.

alright, so we've got up until the end of july done, now. i need to eat.

this is intended to be a dirty run through, remember.

inri051 starts yet another new project, the political noise project fuel true anarchy in the americas (stylized as the ftaa). this is just a minor tease of a few short experiments i was toying with over the fall of 2001, as reaction to the event that occurred at the time. while the concept only develops about 70% of the way, a record is constructed in 2004 out of odds and ends pulled from other projects. a second record is constructed in 2017 called spoke that finishes the thought properly.

===

i don't have an exact date for these files, so i'm picking november 11th. as others were, i was concerned about the president abolishing the magna carta after 9/11 and congress doing little more than helping him do it. however, this was meant to be a more encompassing project that combined harsh noise with political sampling that was pushing an anarchist agenda. the name of the project (ftaa) was chosen as a pun - it could either be the free trade agreement of the americas or about fueling true anarchy in the americas. i ended up dropping the sampling aspect and just focusing on the noise for the project's completion (inri079 ), so i'm going to upload these two pilot tracks (with the sampling in tact) as an introductory single and place them in this more topical chronological space. 

in hindsight, i think there's something profound about juxtaposing the fair trade movement with the 9/11 attacks as, looking back, it really sucked the life out of the movement. 

created in the fall of 2001. sequenced and released on sept 7, 2014. disc finalized on oct 22, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

these tracks appear without samples on my seventh record, ftaa (inri079): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ftaa 

they also now appear, with samples, on the spoke compilation (inri067): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/spoke 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2001, 2014, 2017). 

released november 11, 2001 

j - noise generators, cool edit, sequencers, guitars (electric, nylon, acoustic), mandolin, effects & processing, digital wave editing, sampling, production