Oh my … oh my … oh my …

It’s been over 9 months now, since my last creation and commit onto these pages. It is traditionally enough time for a gestation in the human realm, isn’t it? However, rather than someone was born, I have had to face a fairly painful disappearance, the passing of my dad Georges in November 2022. May he rest in peace, God might bless his cotton socks!

So you can call it a period of grief, and mourning, as it goes. Time is required for the mind, the heart and the soul to process such life events, and try to make any sense of them. It has been a very busy time as well, at work and at home, establishing new flows and balances to keep things steady, moving towns, renovating a flat, reconnecting with healthier life habits. No lies, depression has been looming, and it has taken all the love of my dearest human beings to keep it together. I am still in the process I believe, work in progress somehow. The doors of some dark, dusty closets are ajar … archive boxes are untapped and cut open … piles of junk are sorted out … and I just pulled a string !

It was holding together a stack of old letters, conveyors of ancient memories and deep echoes from the past. Just a string pulled … and like an insect inadvertently hitting a complex spider web, it sets in motion all my bodily garment, sending tremors wide and deep across my entire being. Is it an Ariadne thread I must follow? Or I am at risk to unknit myself row by row? One thing is sure, I am reconnecting: I have just hit a live wire which reminds me that I am alive, and invites me to remember who I really am.

Emotions and ideas are in urgent need to flow out again, on the creative channel. I have been thinking of writing, and of producing some music, but intuition is a tyrant, and it tells me to go visual again for a while, at least to prime again the creative pump somehow. So I do …

Some time ago, I played with Chaotica to kill time and distract myself, and I spawned this abstract visual of a dense network of looping curves, another evocation of the intimate fabric of the cosmos, according to the string theory. Today, I ponder, what would happen if someone just pulled one of these strings? Could that trigger an avalanche of effects, just like the butterfly effect concept tells us in the theory of chaos? Could an innocent pull of a string spontaneously create and broadcast a meaningful flow of information?

Processing helps me generate a radial kaleidoscopic animation of Platonic symbols sent out in a centrifugal manner from the epicentre of a sudden shockwave.

Techniques: Chaotica, Processing, Magic Performer, Pixelmator

Now, as I said, I am treating that as a creative prompt to also “go audio”. This animation obviously needs some sort of soundtrack, of the trance or deep house flavour. I decide to give a shot at playing with royalty free loops in my new-found Ampify Studio, I really love what these guys are doing for Mac and for iPad hobbyists like me.

I pick the Analogue Deep House 2 pack, and start sampling and looping. I mix up a couple of percs and vocals coming from other packs in the same vein. Et voilà!

To assist with the looping, I am using this great nifty Launchpad Mini from Novation, pure bliss.