DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I figure I’ve baked about 460 loaves of bread in the past three years — three each week, on average. I’ve made white breads, wheat breads, baguettes, focaccia, ciabatta, rye, sourdoughs, pretzels, breadsticks, batards, rolls, Brötchen, pizzas, calzone, and a number of embarrassing messes. I once had to cancel a pizza party, and call the plumber, after flushing an enormous glob of not-quite-pizza-dough down the decades-old plumbing in our apartment building in San Francisco. (This was an unsettling episode all around — I sat at home bored that night, and my downstairs neighbor couldn’t shower for three days.)

I’ve experimented with flours, salts, yeasts, and waters. I own thirteen types of grain and four types of malt. I have a collection of odd-smelling bubbling concoctions in the back of my refrigerator.

I purchase flour in 50-lb bags. Regularly.

Linear Two resulted from a continuation of the experiment I began in Linear One: I created 4 separate 4-beat rhythms for kick and snare and played them under a steady cymbal figure. In this case, the ride pattern is a simple offbeat on the china.

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

This loop was composed in Virtual Drummer. It feels linear to me because every instrument is struck individually, so the time is felt as the sound moves around the kit. Only on one beat are two sound sources struck simultaneously.

I composed this as 4 sets of 4 beats, and my goal was to come up with 4 different combinations of kick/snare rhythms under a slightly off-kilter ride groove (1 + 2 3 + 4). Keeping distinct dynamic levels between the ghosted snare notes and the accented snare notes (represented in V.D. by two different snares altogether, just to make it easier to program) is critically important to the feel.

Played slowly, this groove takes on a hypnotic feel. I would like to kill the guy who made the “ride cymbal 1'' sample for QuickTime, though… ecch.

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

It’s harvest time in northern California. We picked 15 lbs of tomatoes and made about 15 lbs of soup. The entire house smells like tomatoes, onions, garlic… not a bad thing actually, but I had to quickly bake some sourdough before olfactory vertigo sent me reeling.

I saw Nurse Betty today. Renee Zellweger is unreal, or perhaps more accurately, hyper-real. It’s as if she has a knob for sincerity.