Kara Brightwell

  • how IN PROGRESS was made

    album cover of IN PROGRESS by ASYMPTOTES, showing those words very large blended into a dark photo of a stream in a forest

    IN PROGRESS is the new album by ASYMPTOTES (me), out now on 972276 Records DK. here’s how each track just barely came together.

    BLOOD BLISTERS

    this track actually started out around 2014 with a cracked copy of Ableton Live 9 and even less idea of what i was doing. it was called Red Kite and it was basically a Four Tet knockoff using the jangly bits and whurmp bass you hear in the final track. i would play it in a loop in Session view and sit there going “okay now what” until i quit Ableton disheartened.

    when i started working on this album in late 2021/early 2022 i came across the session file again, played it, realised i liked the sounds, deleted all the midi and reused the instruments in a different track that needed something extra (working title i am not ludwig goransson since it was uh heavily inspired by the Tenet soundtrack).

    OLD SELVES

    in 2017 i got my 49-key midi keyboard out from under the bed, plugged it in, loaded the cracked Live 9, created a track with a grand piano instrument on it, and recorded five minutes of absolutely terrible piano improv midi. just awful, zero artist merit.

    in march i found the session file, played it, cringed, bounced it to audio and sliced to midi by transients, put a bunch of audio effects on it i ended up saving as an effect rack called Deconstruct Smear and using a lot on the album (it’s a Beat Repeat into a Reverb with some fake tape saturation and wobble which turns random slices of the dry sound into a big lush wash of noise), and played a the slices with chee’s Ableton Push. then as became common for this album i went “what this really needs is… some house drums”.

    THREAT ACTORS

    the last song finished if you don’t count /// (FALSE STARTS). written entirely in a single day, at work, the friday before the album released on wednesday june 1st. lol.

    i wanted to somehow make a circa-2010-65daysofstatic song. it started with putting some synthesised clean guitar arpeggios through a bunch of pedal-like audio effects and somehow programming a legit 7/4 math rock drum pattern with some session kit samples, then throughout the song going like “a real drummer would put a half bar fill here, some snare rolls here, switch to the ride cymbal here”.

    BONE IDOLS

    not intentionally done (at first), but this is also very heavily inspired by 65dos (which is why i wanted to do that intentionally for THREAT ACTORS; if i could make something that sounded vaguely like them by accident, what could i do on purpose). the detuned sine chords came first, then the very reverby plucks, then the glitchy drums were a natural choice.

    before i wrote THREAT ACTORS, this was the only song on the album not in 4/4. it was i think the only song i’d written since of substance not in 4/4. that was a deliberate choice; i wanted to try to make “more conventional” music to bring out more of the subconsciously weird choices i make that are often hidden by deliberately weird choices.

    then i wrote this in 5/4 and i remembered why i like weird time signatures. this is also the only song i’ve ever written with a time signature change, and every time i listen back to it i get to that section and think “oh! dope”.

    /// (FALSE STARTS)

    i was trying to finalise the track ordering and realised i needed an interlude. i haven’t deliberately made any ambient since un ep in 2019 (rise / hold / fall from of substance was never meant to be a finished piece). like un ep the philosophy was “take an interesting sound, tear it up, have the pieces become something more dangerous”.

    this was recorded on the evening of the friday before the wednesday. it’s all from Eurorack; my original 38hp case in a gutted DAB radio is now a portable ambient-focused system. the patch went something like: midi from Ableton → 2HP2CV → Pico Voice → Monsoon → Monotropa → Freez (in the Monotropa feedback loop).

    Pico Voice is providing the karplus-strong plucks, Monsoon is glitching and reverbing them, Monotropa is doing the feedback distortion, and Freez is just there for sample rate reduction for extra gnarl on the feedback.

    SUBTLE BODY

    working title: rhodes arps and stabs (i am not modeselektor). it didn’t end up sounding much like Modeselektor but the bloop loop did on its own.

    this is probably the best song i’ve ever written, and will write for a while. i mean listen to that drop. damn girl.

    the chopped vocals are from I disappear in your arms by Christine and the Queens. i took the chorus vocals, sliced by transients, listened to every single slice and wrote down what kind of syllable it was, sorted them, put them across all 64 pads of the Push, and played them like drums over the section that wanted them.

    FALL DAMAGE

    another one that came together mostly in a single day. i had the basic loop of the samba drums and the two fighting arps down before, but no structure and no donk bass that forms the driving core of the song. i started arranging things, had a good build up going, got stuck, went for a walk, wrote in my notes “fm bass calls ‘donk donk’, kick responds, drop”, then it was all over. i think maybe there’s a music name for the thing i do where the “donk donk” comes back. but i don’t know music theory.

    the title is a pun. the song is about seasonal depression. if you’re not paying attention to how the song actually feels, you might say it sounds summery. but it’s very much full of sadness and pain.

    CHEAP SHIT

    the closest i’ve gotten to like, actual house? this grew up around the mallety plinks, the bloops, and the sort of breakbeat with the finger snaps. the FM bass is an Ableton preset (99% of my sound design at least starts with presets. about 80% is just straight up the unmodified presets, which, who cares) and it’s definitely the dankest bass sound i’ve used.

    there’s a very chopped up sample of SHAME by Young Fathers in there which really just comes out as breathy mouth noises. this and the Christine and the Queens sample came from me listening to 6music and being like “that’s a nice sound. i’ll have that”.

    this is the track i’m probably least satisfied with tbh. it could have done with another pass of cleaning up and adding some flourish. so could everything, but then i would never release any of it. so it goes.

    RARE JPEGS

    i’m so so sorry Lady Sovereign. you have a great voice and it sounds so good all chopped up and scrambled. i just needed something vocal and rhythmic and almost but not quite familiar. i hope you’re doing okay. i would love to see you making music again.

    i literally googled “techno drums tutorial” for this, then watched five videos and ignored them all. i think i’m recreating the progression of electronic music in my own way, because i wanna try making some DnB or garage next. i have another Eurorack system that’s meant for live techno but i haven’t played with it much yet.

    mixing and mastering

    it turns out these are both really hard, and i’ve avoided putting any effort into either for past releases and they’ve somehow turned out alright? but having spent at least a day mixing and mastering IN PROGRESS has made it sound a whole lot better than anything i’ve made before. even the single releases of SUBTLE BODY and RARE JPEGS just sound like complete shit next to the album versions.

    because i’m a goblin who knows nothing about music production all my tracks originally just had a limiter on the master channel and everything turned up to 0dB. okay look it works fine and produces a sort of okay mix level for listening back to but with wildly inconsistent levels between tracks (governed by how much sound there was being mixed down before the limiter).

    i went through every track, removing the limiter and turning all the levels down, then listening through with an LUFS meter on master to get the final levels more or less the same on each track (aiming for -16dB LUFS integrated i think?). they were exported to flac and put in a single master session.

    the mastering chain was just: Gullfoss, EQ with a 30Hz cut, Limiter. that’s it. Gullfoss is pretty interesting, it’s an EQ that something something 300 times per second something perceptual audio something something clarity. i sort of regret using it. overall it had basically no effect, maybe giving things a bit more space? but it also reduced a bunch of impact from the drops, and in a couple of places it did some completely fucked up things that sound awful but also like deliberate stylistic choices, like making the skittery glitch thing in THREAT ACTORS extremely uncomfortable to listen to when it plays on its own on that one bit.

    i should definitely have listened through to the entire master while tweaking the settings on Gullfoss, but by that point it was like 11pm on the sunday and i needed to get the album submitted to Distrokid that day to have a chance of meeting my fake made up release deadline of wednesday 1st june. there might be a lesson to learn here but i’m just not seeing it.

  • weeknotes #11: leman locke

    i guess i write weeknotes on wednesdays now

    we’re on holiday this week

    we stayed two nights in this frickin, hotel:

    a studio apartment with a millennial-pink sofa overlooking the city of london

    for millennial hipsters (hi). we did hipster tourist things like Brick Lane and the Thames Path. i went to a gin pub with Rowan and Charlotte and drank a chilli negroni and played Subjective Guess Who and i went to a spa and i wore a bikini in front of real people and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

    tonight i made roast beef short rib and if you ever want to make Pub Roast Beef, buy some short rib from a supermarket and just like cook it any way you know because oh my god

    top rope climbing

    so those queer climbers have a weekly meet up at a different climbing wall in London. last week was The Castle: it’s this ridiculous victorian water pumping station that’s, well, it’s a castle, and in the nineties some people built a climbing wall in it.

    top rope climbing is a different beast to bouldering. you need a partner to belay you (hold your rope and catch you if you fall). so it was pretty much “hi! i’m Kara” “i’m Lisa” “i trust you with my life now” “same”

    i used to be good at climbing but that’s okay, i will be again

  • weeknotes #10: milton keynes

    i have nothing of substance to say about the war in Ukraine

    other than “fuck Putin”.

    chee puts it best:

    btw on world war 4, if you have the wikipedia page for ukraine open in another tab rn i do not need to hear from you

    💙💛

    come to the milton keynes snozone last saturday if you want an asskicking

    a selfie of a pale slim ghost riding a button lift up an indoor snow slope

    i hadn’t been snowboarding in two years. i had been going once a year, with university friends, to the French Alps. i miss it so much! our last trip was in February 2020, and i’m pretty sure all we thought about you know was feeling a bit weird playing the board game Pandemic.

    sometimes i remember “oh i’m an adult with money. i can just frickin, go to milton keynes and snowboard if i want”, so i did! i had one first slow, steady, careful run down the slope, letting my legs remind me how every turn, every carve, every stop works, and from then on nyoooom. it takes about four minutes to get to the top of the slope and twenty seconds to get back down.

    milton keynes is a fucking weird place. it’s like they decided to build the business park on the edge of a town but forgot to build the town.

    pizza time

    i have a list of the top ten pizzas i’ve ever eaten. number one is John’s, of Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, New York, New York. i was there (New York) for a conference in 2017 and ate at John’s, this massive anchovy pizza that i also ate cold in the hotel room for breakfast.

    third on the list is my own pizza i make at home.

    i mean it’s literally just the recipe from The Pizza Book but i’ve gotten pretty fuckin good at it.

    the recipe canonically ferments the dough in the fridge for three days. except, i’ve worked out you can just not do that, you can add too much yeast and use yoghurt instead of olive oil and let it overproof a bit and it tastes just as great and is actually slightly easier to throw, even.

    this means instead of having to plan pizza three days in advance, i can have it on a ninety-minute whim.

    i have eaten pizza for lunch five times in the last two weeks.

    spicy pork bun

    on Thursday, Alice and Rowan were in the office. we went for lunch at this little Korean place around the corner; i had spicy pork bun. we ate them around a big table in a breakout area at work and chatted about tech strategy and team gossip. felt like i was at the big kids' table. love you folks.

    i suppose, in terms of technical leadership at work, i am one of the big kids now. people keep looking around the room at meetings for a grown up to make a decision, and often that’s me, and i have to stop also looking around the room for a grown up and be the grown up. which is a great feeling, and also has caused at least two panic attacks.

    WFS(tudio)

    i (finally!) finished and programmed the keyboard i had built for my studio (the H keyswitch was just straight up not soldered in), and this monday i actually did my day job from there. i had such a lovely day, the weather on monday was lovely, i went for a walk at lunchtime along the Thames Path at Greenwich Reach and the world felt open and fresh again.

    i did an experiment and tried to get some packages delivered to the studio. the Amazon package arrived no problem and somebody received it and put it by my studio door. the Pimoroni package did not. i asked around, looked everywhere (including the large pile of flytipped rubbish on the street outside) but no. eventually i realised that the Iceland downstairs actually has the same address, so i went down there and asked (feeling a bit weird about it) and the manager went into the back and came out with a small cardboard box with my name on it.

    in the box is a raspberry pi based automatic watering system for my peace lily.

    new laptop who dis

    work finally came through and gave me this. it’s a thirteen inch pro with an M1. it’s,,, good? the fan is running never, instead of always, and the keyboard doesnnn’t ddo thiis

    i should wake up; grab a brush and put a little makeup (you want to)

  • weeknotes #9: fucken wimdy

    it fucken WIMDY

    Storm Eunice hit two days ago and it was actually kind of scary to be told by the Meteorological Office “hazard to life from flying debris”. we shut the cat in, charged our battery packs, made sure we had enough candles and butane and didn’t go outside.

    around the corner a row of houses' garden walls fell down and are blocking the pavement. the vent on the boiler flue is still going ham rattling as i type.

    Storm Franklin is on the way, i hear.

    queer climbing

    i went climbing, again, this afternoon. i tried less hard, and things still hurt. climbing is pretty social: i actually talk to strangers when i climb? i got chatting to some people about this one route we were taking turns on, that i apparently made look easy (sorry! i climb only for me), and it took them about two minutes before inviting me to their queer climbers' Discord server.

    we spent the next hour and a half following each other around and chatting and taking turns on bouldering routes, and if you’re reading this Emma and Beth and Amika(? sorry i didn’t quite catch your name, it was loud and i’m awkward) you are all cute and lovely and i can’t wait to see you again

    laptopn’t

    work said i could have a new laptop. i said “i’ll be at the office on tuesday”. work said “”. i went to the office and they were like “you never booked a slot with us”. i said “whatever, book me a slot please”. they said “we don’t have any 32GB ram laptops”. i said “whatever, 16GB is fine”. they said “would you like this 16” pro"; i was like “oh dope, i didn’t know you had those, sweet. is it an M1” and they said “oh, no, lol, it’s a 2019 16"”. i said “please just give me whatever new macbook you have, i literally don’t care” and they said “cool can you be in the office on tuesday”.

    it’ll still be fucked up with jamf and sophos anyway. i don’t know why i bother

    things change

    a bunch of people i love are leaving my employer and istg i’m gonna be still working there as a sixty year old lady that nobody can get rid of because she knows how all the Spicy Code works

  • weeknotes #8: real things

    i went bouldering

    first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.

    everything hurts.

    that was sunday.

    i uh. i did a v4 grade? which was surprising. there’s a large hole in one of my climbing shoes and i bought some replacements, except there are two types of climbing shoes:

    • cute ones
    • ones that fit

    and, fuck everything

    i made a synthesiser, for my dad

    well okay so i made one in december for him for christmas. it was built on stripboard in an altoids tin, and looked like this:

    a prototype synth in an altoids tin

    it’s somewhere in a Hermes depot, or a ditch.

    so i started again (this is your strength)

    i designed a circuit board for the thing:

    three-dee render of a pale slim ghost synthesisers parakeets

    and got it printed by a company in Shenzhen. because it turns out you can just, do that. and it’s just a bit of soldering, and troubleshooting, and working out the headphone amp you added never would have worked because of something something capacitance something phase inversion. and now it looks like this, which is a real thing, that i made, i can design and make real things:

    a real thing

    designed and hand built in Nunhead and Greenwich™

  • weeknotes #7: surprise presentations

    new case who dis

    (sorry, this bit’s pretty nerdy, skip on if you don’t care)

    hand built 4u eurorack case full of modules

    i built a new eurorack case. this one’s designed to be a portable live techno set in a box. it’s massively inspired by the mylarmelodies Suggested System video with the same premise, except:

    • rhythms and modulation are handled by Pamela’s New Workout and the 6eqencer. no external clocks here
    • mylarmelodies uses Percall for a bunch of mixing, muting and drum envelope duties. i’ve got a Pico Drums and my own Mallards for that
    • the main voice is a Knit (a 6hp Plaits clone) which has a built in decay envelope so no envelope/VCA needed
    • i managed to get a μBurst in there. i love Clouds derivatives

    the box is actually just straight from Amazon. i happened to find one with internal dimensions that are exactly 58hp × 4u. it’s pretty cramped inside; the deepest modules are but millimetres shallower than the case itself, so i had to get creative to make the power bus and all the cables fit.

    just need to learn how to play it now.

    i gave two surprise presentations on thursday

    by “surprise” i mean “i forgot they were happening until five minutes before”. still a disaster ✌️

    1. i talked to the Engineering Enablement group about Tool Kit. EE is the part of FT Technology that makes stuff for other parts of FT Technology. my team is the bit of Customer Products that makes stuff for other bits of CP. we’ve been working on completely rethinking our shitty ageing unreliable developer tooling, and EE was like “owo what’s this”. it went pretty well!

    2. our Tech Director, Anna, has been meeting with all the tech leads in the group to relearn how all our tech works after being on leave for a while. my team owns most of the weird old stuff in the group, so we had a fun hour chatting about what we could do about that and what the future might look like.

    speaking of old weird tech

    my team did another mobbing week. this time we were learning how the FT.com Fastly configuration worked. we started the week not knowing anything really about how VCL worked, and by wednesday were asking each other questions like “if this request is always doing PASS and then restart how would we ever cache that response”. i love my team.

    we also spent an afternoon drawing architecture diagrams. in person, on a whiteboard. god i miss whiteboards.

    photo of a whiteboard with a diagram of the containers in the FT.com CDN & routing stack

    it’s feeling kind of like spring

    okay it fuckin WIMDY out there as i write this but yesterday my brain presented me with a strange new emotion that i eventually realised was “lack of seasonal depression”. we’re almost there, lxds.

  • weeknotes #6: peace lily

    a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that

    i have a studio space

    on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there’s an iceland. above the iceland is this 70’s pebbledash concrete box. i don’t know what it used to be, it’s a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.

    i’ve put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it’s really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.

    it’s a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.

    some of the things i’m making there

    i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they’ll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it’s so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.

    photograph of five unpopulated circuit board with quirky designs and tantalising prospects, created by yours truly

    from left to right, top to bottom that’s:

    • Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
    • Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you’re either going “why is that useful”, to which i’ll say if you’re live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you’re going “holy shit i want one” in which case hmu
    • Ants: (probably) the world’s smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it’s tiny, it’s like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
    • a bootleg black panel for Pamela’s New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. “rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face” also describes a PCB
    • a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them

    this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay

    i have a new line manager

    and it’s Alice! hello Alice. you’re fantastic already

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