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 #writing 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