12:59

Yet another new thing hit the software page a week or two back.

Twelve, seen here hosted in Logic Pro, is only a pre-release and still needs some tweaking and polishing, but it should run okay. Mac only for now. The iOS version exists and may find its way to the App Store eventually, but I’m finding it hard to force myself to go through that palaver lately, and this isn’t quite at that stage yet.

Eagle-eyed viewers — were such creatures to exist, which I’m confident they don’t — might spot that Auxotroph also has not yet made it to the store, despite being ready ages ago, and the App Store version of Osculatrix is lagging behind the Mac one posted here. In theory I want to get all these apps up there. In practice the prospect of boarding the App Review treadmill again makes me want to crawl under a table and hide. It’s not even that painful, it just seems so pointless and exhausting.

Or maybe it’s old age. The timer flipped over again last week. I was mostly too busy marking exam scripts to enjoy it, though the day itself was pleasant enough.

Big one next year. Not really looking forward to that.

For the record: heatwave; aircon; rescaling; cheese and wine; antipodean voices but hapless failure to facetime back. Fleeting landmarks that future me probably won’t remember how to decrypt. But maybe they’ll spark something, I don’t know.

Arrival

There’s another new toy over on the software page.

Screenshot showing Auxotroph playing through Osculatrix in AUM on iPad.

Auxotroph is another AUv3 plugin, but this time a generator rather than an effect. That means it makes sounds all by itself — via FM synthesis in this case. It’s a simple pattern sequencer based on regular divisions of the bar, with motion and stochasticity to spice things up. Unlike the effect apps, it can run standalone, though (like nearly everything) it sounds better with some effects.

Mac version available for download now, iOS will be on the App Store once it’s been through the review dance.

Temporal Engineering

Frankly still reeling from Meryl Tankard’s genius Pina Bausch restaging, Kontakthof – Echoes of ’78. Like a blow to the head, but in a good way.

The gimmick of surviving dancers performing alongside archive footage of themselves — and their non-surviving colleagues — from nearly 50 years ago sounds simplistic, perhaps even trite. Hackneyed. Yawn. Seen it all before, right?

Wrong.

Bloody hell. It is so good. Great source material projected across time to become something even better, breathtaking and heartbreaking and ephemeral and astonishing.

Maybe I’ll be more measured when the concussion wears off, but don’t count on it.

Novelty

While we’re at it:

Screenshot of new audio effect app Osculatrix running inside AUM on iPhone.

WT had a “coming soon” page for Osculatrix from probably 2016 until last week. That app was going to be a synth module. There was a mostly working version, but I just didn’t like the sounds it made, so it never seemed worth finishing.

This isn’t that, though it reuses the assets — that knob was undoubtedly the best thing about the original. It’s another perverse AUv3 effect, basically a multiband tremolo with some other stuff layered in. I do like the sounds this makes, at least some of them. Mac version available right now at the software page. iOS links to come when the bureaucracy allows.