Latest Dante Update.

I've been having problems posting to one of my other blogs all day so let's see if Google lets me post here.

What began as an outing to collect things from storage at my mom's place turned into quarentine as she got stomach flue and then today had me feeling really queasy myself. I did find my copy of Inferno and a couple of other things I've been missing. I'm still grappling with just exactly how to convert Dante's Comedy into music without either geting in trouble with the publishers of the translations I own or being really wankery about it. I'm convinced that the music is in the Cantos themselves and I'd like to use the arguments now as a guide to how each Canto should sound if that makes any sense to the handful of people who I suspect may read this from time to time.

Boy oh Boy. I think I'll have to write to Sandow again this week and tell him what I'm thinking about because if I use the text of his translation then I could ernd up paying out my ass to his publishers and sending him royalties and while that's not so bad it would be very potentially complicated. Perhaps I should just use a Gutenberg project translation of the text and deal with the arcane language... ugh. I really would rather use Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders translation because the language id accessible and I have a sentimental attachment to them. I think that if it's easier to understand the language it would come out less pretentious to listeners and ultimatly more enjoyable for me as well.

I'm still trying to reach a Dante Scholar who was reccomended by a friend I'm hoping that he'll have valuable insight into how I can best do the poet's work justice in the medium I want to work with.

Speaking of the medium I'm really enjoying working with my Evolver as a compositional aid. I've made a couple of really great guitar effects and clearing out the garbage patches I made when I was first learning it. I didn't approach it with any sort of method so there's gems scattered amidst the crap and presets I kind of trashed a bunch of presets and there are so many memory locations (4 banks of 128 each) that it's a bit of a chore trying to clean out the deadwood and then trying to keep track of it all.

That said I've really got to hand it to Dave Smith he's made a solid instrument, after my modular rig I think it's my favourite synth and it's about tied with my guitar as favourite instrument, really the deapth of possibillity just in the effects it can give external audio make it almost an extension to the guitar there's barely any need to buy another guitar pedal with the variety of sounds I can carve from it.

I'd get a second one for sure if I could justify it and recomend it to anyone who wants to get into analog synths. It's a bit headdy to learn straight off and it's not an easy teaching synth but I love it, shit I took it on my honeymoon.

Anyway that's the news. I'm hoping that tomorrow both my mom and I will be feeling better I've gone through most of the boxes here and found a bunch of things though not everything I was hoping for. I'm still missing two important power supplies and all the boxes with electronics have become boxes of horror after three years in a garage: imagine spiders, dead woodbugs, dust and gordion tangles of cable in everyu box. In one of them I found greasy skateboard parts and a bike handle resting ontop of the exposed circuit board of an old nintendo.

I'm really displeased.