Wow, it has already been a week. That's kind of nuts. Don't know how I feel about that. Time keeps on slipping.
For context, I am currently in the small borough of Patton, Pennsylvania. I came here to attend the Art14 Residency. My goal over these three weeks is to create an album of music and to make some progress on locative.garden, my long unfinished collection of fiction. I am here from 2026-04-11 to 2026-05-02.
I am also trying to recover a bit from some general work burnout. I am able to do this residency because Laurel historically has had a one month sabbatical once you reach five years of employment. Sadly after this year it's going away, so I'm taking advantage of it while I can.
This week I did a bunch of stuff. One thing I'm fighting against is when I get stuck with writing or playing, I dive back into general code stuff. I do like this from a pure dopamine hit, but often it also makes me frustrated. My point of this time off is to focus on skills that I am not great at, or regularly don't focus on because of time. So going to things that I do during my normal day to day feels good because I am good at them, but most times it's happened I regret it.
In the category of random coding stuff:
- Put a landing page at subalpinedrift.com.
- Made some improvements to robot.villas.
- Cleaned up my github, archived 240 old repos.
- Made some pull requests to wayback to fix a GitHub Action I have on this blog.
- Fixed some GitHub Actions for the norns-community repo.
In music making, I made music every day! A lot of it was general experimentation and teaching myself more. One area I am particularly learning a lot about is MIDI, something I historically have avoided... why I have no idea. Other things I have done:
- Published my Modstock 2025 performance on Bandcamp.
- Made and published a Norns script for generating MIDI: grurder.
- Published the first track of my weekly sound experiment, Drifts. This is something I've wanted to do since the new year, but this focus time got me off my ass.
- Finished first track of my album.
I didn't do too much writing. I journaled every single day, a habit I used to have that I want to get back. I also wrote 320 words in locative.garden... and deleted 664... Next week more writing!
I have also been doing a lot of active listening, trying to learn and analyze artists that I like a lot. From major artists, things I listened to included:
- Women of Ambient Spotify Playlist
- Sexistential by Robyn
- Fred again..: Tiny Desk Concert
- clipping.: Tiny Desk Concert
- Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter (USB002, Alexandra Palace, London 27 February 2026)
- Ogazón @TheLotRadio 03-16-2026
And in more independent artists, I have been listening to lots of good Bandcamp stuff:
- Somewhat the Same by Jameson Nathan Jones
- thoughts persist by fields we found
- hypervisibility by tehn
- pola meets lyrica by pola
- Monocoastal (10th Anniversary Edition) by Marcus Fischer
- Perpetual by Ryuichi Sakamoto / Illuha / Taylor Deupree
- Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer by Ezekiel Honig
I also have been listening to The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I've been listening to this for the last few months, and I regularly restart chapters or sections. It often takes me a little bit to get into, as Rubin's spirituality has always felt performative to me. He's been buddhist since he was 14 though so who am I to judge? Anyways, the book is great. Has inspired me a bunch in how I think about creating, and I really connect his point that everyone is creative and can be an artist.
Finally some photos of my time this week:
Sending love from the Allegheny Mountains,
/Nat