Hi, visitors from The Old New Thing! Nice to meet you! Welcome to rage-driven acoustic elfmetal.

I know you’re here for the triple-rainbow pictures and the aftereffects of the Rainmaker 68000, but if you get a chance to listen to our music or watch any of Dara’s solo-performance video, that’d be awesome too.

We’re currently in studio working on our new album (Din of Thieves), a second project involving a book soundtrack for a fantasy novel series, and a couple of side-projects with other bands. Lots of planning, lots of plotting, lots of mayhem, hopefully lots of sales! Ah, a supervillain musician can dream, can’t she?

Anyway, no rest for the wicked and all that. We’ve moved a bunch of wires around so more of you should be seeing this. Thanks for coming by, and thanks to Raymond for the link. ^_^

Looks like the Rainmaker 68000 has some unexpected side effects.

I can deal with that. 😀

GO HOME RAINBOW YOU ARE HIGH

I HAVE PROOF

Welcome, visitors from The Old New Thing, and welcome, visitors from gawker.com’s comments sections! There certainly are a lot of you!

I’m Dara, I’m an ex-software-geek turned musician (hence the links from Raymond and Gawker) and this is my band website. In addition to the albums, we have a bunch of full-fidelity free downloads over here, so download away! You don’t even have to hand over your email address. Enjoy!

It may surprise you to know that Thanksgiving (both First and Second) are big holidays here at the lair. That’s because food is yummy. No, wait. That’s because supervillainy is awesome. And because food is yummy. You didn’t know there was a connection? What, don’t you remember Cooking with Shego and Baking with GlaDOS?

No? Well, here, I’ll scan a couple of old programme guide listings. That’ll jog your memory, I bet.

Ah, nostalgia

Nothing? Really? No CBC12 or CBC 8 for you, then. That does suck. Ah, well.

Anyway, no update on the missing instruments and electronics; we’re kind of presuming them gone at this point. No time like Black Friday to terrorise some malls and steal some merch, tho’! At least there’ll be some fun out of it.

Happy Second Thanksgiving, and, as always, try not to die!

Going to get the stupid car today. The shop in Kelso can’t find the problem – or even recreate the problem so far – so we’ll be driving north in a tiny convoy, and I’ll have AAA on speed dial.

So here, have a Friday amusement. Seattle’s big passenger rail depot, King Street Station, is being restored. It’s been a huge undertaking and I’m really excited about it as someone who rides Cascadia Rail a lot.

Where it’s built faces two substantially different street levels; King Street is low, and Jackson Street is rather higher. So there’s an upper plaza while the rails, ticketing, and waiting rooms are down on the lower level. Originally, the Grand Stairwell connected the two, and you had entrances on both levels; the stairwell has been closed for decades, but they’re restoring it.

I just found out today that the Grand Stairwell was originally narrowed – but not yet closed – in 1949, to add escalators. I’d never even known those were there, as they’ve also been closed for decades. And following some threads on the construction update I was reading, I found this:

[sadly-deleted picture of a large art deco neon sign reading ELECTRIC STAIR]

I WANT THAT SIGN FOR THE LAIR. NOW.

I’d steal it but according to SDOT in this thread, it was gone by the time they took over the station. So sad.

The station took the most damage in the 1960s (…of course…) as it was “modernised” with drop ceilings and and and. Thankfully, in the main waiting area, they did not rip out all the ornate plaster and marble work, but instead hid much of it, semi-intact, behind new material. More of it had to be removed – temporarily this time – for the seismic retrofit, but it’ll be coming back, along with repairs and replacements for the 1960s damage.

There are about eight zillion photographs here, and notes here.

Find some of the pre-restoration photos of the station if you can. That was just sad.

This weekend for me, assuming we make it back in one piece: more recording with Leannan Sidhe, then prep for Second Thanksgiving at the Lair. What’ve you got?

Busy making learning tracks today; these are where you take other peoples’ recordings of Irish tunes and chain them together in appropriate ways, mixing and modifying them as needed, to make new set performances of what you’re trying to do.

They’re Irish tunes in this case, for the book soundtrack album, and, yes, falls under fair use for educational purposes. Maybe I can post a couple of 30-second excerpts of transitions? I don’t know!

Anyway, have some link fun:

• Winter Illuminations, Nagashima, Japan. I so wish I could visit this.
• Smooth Life, which is the old Life game/demonstration, only in floating point math. Hypnotic and cool.
• Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn: Cthulhu as bubbles of spacetime curvature in the South Pacific

I’m thinking of a recommendations/reviews post next Friday. You supply recommendations, I repost them the following week. Worth a go? Speak up, but don’t post them yet! Wait ’till I’m sure I’m going to do it. ^_^

Have a good weekend, everybody; see you Monday!

Got some guitar to record today – not me, I don’t play that, unless you count bass, which you shouldn’t – so have some fun things.

If you haven’t seen it yet, watch this Air New Zealand air safety video. YES, REALLY. I know. Trust me here.

I posted a video a little while ago about studio treatment, getting the room all nice and under control for recording. It was a DIY thing. I also made this 360° view of my home studio, but didn’t embed it. That’s from room centre. As you can see, it’s a small space! But it works.

STERN MICROPHONE IS VERY STERN. Also very Russian:

Во славу Родины, броситься под немецкие танки!

Finally, since we’re recording guitar today, here’s a 3D printed guitar. Change that to an Irish Bouzouki, take it on the road, you pretty much have everything I ever post about here. XD

Soundtrack album work all weekend for me – I’m going to be editing together some learning tracks for our musicians. What’ve you got?

You have, of course, heard of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, yes? If not, you’ve heard their work, assuming you’ve watched much television from the BBC, pioneers of electronic music, of noisemusic, of textured sound, of sequencing – absolutely amazing work. They’re probably best known for the Doctor Who theme, in North America, but that’s only one small part of their legacy.

There’s a lovely documentary called The Alchemists of Sound, about the Workshop. (Thanks to Paul Johnson for referring it and providing the YouTube link.) It’s totally worth your time if you’re interested at all in these early electronic and noisemusic sounds and how they were made.

(Parts two and three.)

In Part II, there’s a demonstration of looping – using, you know, actual loops of magnetic audio tape – and live-synching of components across four tape machines. Delia Derbyshire, one of the pioneers of the shop, takes you through it. Hard. Core.

There’s been a bit of a revival in oldschool sounds like these, too. Really, it’s a direct parallel to chiptunes. BoingBoing has an article you may enjoy up on hauntology, the art of retrofuturist music, as specifically applied to pre-8-bit electronica revival.

Enjoy!

On Twitter, around midnight, I saw:

James Urbaniak ‏@JamesUrbaniak Rosemary’s Tumblr #boringhorrormovies
Danny Zuker ‏@DannyZuker Paralegal activity. #BoringHorrorMovies

Aaaaand we’re off:

Solarbird Bakula. #BoringHorrorMovies (Scott)
Solarbird The Mommy #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird Interview with the Umpire #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird Invasion of the Bawdy Catchers #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Slide: One All-Star’s Search for Recovery #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird The Fandom of the Opera. #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird The House of 1000 Bourses #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird The Abominable Jackson Fives #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird The Common Centipede #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird ‏Children of the Koi #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird Prints of Darkness: Photographic Processing in Film Noir #BoringHorrorMovies
Solarbird Stephen King’s TWIT. #boringhorrormovies

I’m pretty pleased with The Abominable Jackson Fives, I have to say.

Colin Birge (@WoS) and S. T. Rev (@St_Rev) were also playing, along with a lot of Twitter.

Your turn!

Having just watched the space jump – the skydive from near-orbit, the edge of space – I have to say one thing on an old topic.

People talk a lot about things from science fiction coming true, most particularly Star Trek. Star Trek kind of holds the record on that, arguably, and you can quibble about whether that’s prediction or cause (since it inspired so many scientists and engineers) but no matter how you count it, all that’s fair and good.

But this? This space jump from near orbit?

This one isn’t for Star Trek. It’s for that show’s predecessor, Lost in Space.

Nobody remembers this, but for one year – the black-and-white year, which generally isn’t in reruns – Lost in Space was hard SF. Not always very successfully – arguably, not often very successfully – but very much intentionally. They were trying.

And in the very first story arc, in Lost in Space, protagonist Dr. John Robinson made this jump.

Wherever you might be, Irwin Allen: at long last, that’s one for you.

Since the optical theremin I was attempting to build blew up, I thought I’d first link to the base circuit from which I had expanded:

Build a Photo Theremin from 7 Parts

And introduce you to:

Useless Machines have a Debate:

And Useless Machine II: Useless Machine ANGRY! (Wait for it, it’s worth it)

(h/t Paul Johnson for the first.)

In other news, the rains have returned to Cascadia; it’s time to go buy cake vodka! Are these related? CLEARLY. Because I said so. Yay! Cake vodka!

And now since Useless Safari already decided to force-refresh every browser window on my once while writing this tiny post, I’m going to go ahead and post it before it’s et again.