Matthew McVickar @matthewmcvickar@mastodon.social

Great, abstract, occasionally percussive remix of a great, pillowy, collage-y song here by Amy Reid and George Cory Todd, respectively: https://atlanticrhythms.bandcamp.com/album/icon-amy-reid-remix

(The full George Cory Todd album is also terrific.)

(Love that album art too.)

On the advice of a friend I checked out this collection of archival recordings from the 80s and 90s by Bay-area electronic musician David Last, and it’s really great. Particularly love the track ‘Permute (1998/1995).’ https://jacktonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/88-99

(Also, it’s eerie how much the track ‘88 Deep Sampler’ sounds like Odd Nosdam, whom it predates by a decade.)

Emily Reo is playing with Foxes in Fiction and Portland band Ancient Pools at Turn! Turn! Turn! on Tuesday and I think it’s going to be a great show. (Especially if, like me, you have fond memories of Emily Reo and Foxes in Fiction in the mid-aughts chillwave/bedroom-pop era and are really glad they’re still around and moving forward as independent artists that collaborate with and support their communities.) https://www.dbmonkey.com/buytix/197618

The new Emily Reo album is really terrific, bright and shiny many-layered synth-pop anthems about mental health and isolation and relationships and patriarchy and knowing yourself: https://emilyreo.bandcamp.com/album/only-you-can-see-it

Here’s what I was thinking of: https://www.flickr.com/groups/transparentscreens/pool/page10

Remember this mid-00’s trend (on Flickr maybe?) where you’d set your computer background to a photo of what was behind your computer so that it looked like your desktop was translucent? Well I just remembered it and I did it!

I was just checking out the list of provisional emoji and the keywords for potted plant include ‘boring’ and ‘useless.’ 😟

http://unicode.org/emoji/future/emoji-provisional.html#x10131a

And then, once I got it running, I discovered there’s a year-plus-long bug where ParcelJS pretty much doesn’t handle CSS imports at all, and the two suggested workarounds didn‘t work.

So: back to what works instead of grappling with this.

OK, so, after four hours of trying to get ParcelJS to work, I’m back to Gulp.

I’ve learned that ‘zero configuration’ means ‘100% convention.’ If your app/site/whatever lives and runs entirely from one folder and you use the expected filenames and technologies, everything will work. If you’re making a JS app with CSS Modules, you’re fine.

I’m making a WordPress plugin in PHP, using PostCSS, so I ended up having eight .config files specifying the inputs/outputs/settings.

If you’re near SE Portland tonight and enjoy relaxing to calming, fuzzy, bleepy ambient music, there’s a really great show happening at Modular 8. I’ll be there! It’s pay-what-you-want. http://modular8.com/events-2/‬

The new M. Sage album ‘Catch a Blessing’ is absolutely terrific. The nine-minute ‘Window Unit + Three Flat’ is a breathtaking suite of guitar, field recordings, keys, and light electronics. https://geographicnorth.bandcamp.com/track/window-unit-three-flat

I have just found out about https://parceljs.org; turns out being intimidated by and avoiding learning how to use Webpack for the last three years was the right decision. ┐( ˘_˘)┌

I should mention that the last three links I shared were discovered on this list of Bandcamp favorites from Drew Daniel of experimental duo Matmos. https://daily.bandcamp.com/2019/04/02/big-ups-matmos-drew-daniel/

Matmos have been making experimental music for over 20 years, including their new album made entirely of sounds sourced from plastic objects, and their previous album, ‘Ultimate Care II,’ which was made entirely with the sounds of a washing machine and is one of my favorites of theirs. https://matmos.bandcamp.com/album/ultimate-care-ii

See also this collection of extended field recordings by Jeremy Hegge, including a trio of recordings—‘Dawn to Morning in a Dry River Bed,’ ’Deep Night in a Dry River Bed,’ and ‘Evening in a Dry River Bed’—which were “recorded in a dry section of the Limpopo river, located in Mmabolela Reserve, South Africa” during an artist residency and feature lots of great bird calls and plenty of cicadas. https://jeremyh.bandcamp.com/music

Fans of ambient starship noise from TV and movies, look no further than this Bandcamp, which also includes loops of ambient noise from the Starfox video game, a submarine, fans and air conditioners, and ‘Every Super Mario Brothers Sound Effect At Once.’ https://cheesynirvosa.bandcamp.com/

Great discovery today: a totally fantastic 50 minutes of ‘dubs + sketches’ by Manchester producer Anz. Stylistically varied instrumental electronic edits and beats: https://soundcloud.com/yung-anz/anz-springsummer-dubs-2019

And her new EP comes out on Thursday: https://anzdj.bandcamp.com/album/invitation-2-dance

Here is an album by The Boston Typwriter Orchestra which is performed entirely on typewriters. https://bostontypewriterorchestra.bandcamp.com/album/termination-without-prejudice-volume-1

I’ve been staring out the window for two days waiting for a pair of small birds to land at my feeder so I can make a ‘one two / finches feed before you / that’s what I said now’ joke.