You can't go home again (everybody knows that by now).

My parents sold our house. This means that in a couple months, the official place I could always count on returning to will be intruded by some other family. I feel ok with this right now although it will be different when I actually go home and experience the disturbing reality of not being able to seek refuge in my normal places: the basement or the tree where my child treehouse used to reside. When I moved to Nashville, I felt the slow loss of Rochester as "my home" and knew that my parents would move eventually. We lived in this same house my entire life so I am not familiar with the feeling of a family move. Im sure it will be disorienting but I think I can handle it.

I am nearing the end of my training at the Recording Workshop. It has been amazing and I can't wait to put my knowledge to work upon my return to Nashville. Part of me doesn't want to leave though. This is kind of like a refuge for audio nerds from all over America. Conversations revolve around audio and music exclusively. There are house partys like any college would have but the drunken arguments revolve around Pro Tools vs. Cubase, Analog vs. digital, stereo micing techniques etc. Pretty bizarre at times.





Ryan Booth was kind enough to take some pictures during the Allie Peden project. Here are some of my favs.

On Sonic Intolerance by Larry Thrasher

"This is not a perfect world.

Since the onslaught of affordable Digital audio I have noticed a certain breed expounding new convictions on sonic acceptibility. Intolerant to any audio experience which does not conform to the new standards they negate 5000 years of human experience in exchange for an extra 20 dB of signal to noise ratio. This is not consumer fetishism, this is consumer fascism.

Digital-Aryans begin the new inquisition.

A new crusade promises to save the world frin its past sins of tape hiss, wow and flutter, and record surface noise. Scratchy old records must be "cleansed" and re"mastered" (or simply discarded). Field recordings are considered 'unusable.' Masses flock with great alarm to expect new standards of audio conformity. Preprogrammed factory presets seduce users into convenience oriented approaches. Sounds become controlled by marketing committees and are spoon-fed to eager audio sheep. Under the aegis of multi-national electronic corporations, music produced is little more thand brand endorsements which have nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with disassociation. Human experience (and expression) is entirely ignored. The frenze of indigenous chants echo no more. Studios become an Auschwitz for sounds. A cold sterile laboratory where nothing lives. Souls are reduced to binary data. The heart is discarded, its wonderfully irregular beat simply doesn't live up to click tracks.

Digital audio is a crock of shit...

...At this very moment scores of living, breathing human beings plot the revolution. An underground subculture of non-believers quetly stock-pile noisy vacuum tubes, oversized reel-to-reels, spring reverbs, and tape delays. They use razor blades to edit with. They smile when the meter goes into the red. They not only tolerate human error, they leave it in the mix. They strive for a value system which places the mundane material world in a healthy context...

-Larry Thrasher