Ambient Breakbeats (Probably AI)
It’s Sunday evening, and this month has been fraught with preparation. There’s an upcoming safety inspection, one of the few times management requires access to my home, and I half-needed, half-wanted to finish the clearing of the excess left over from the life I led with my late wife. It’s been three years and a lot of internal growth, and I was close enough that it made sense to spend the time to focus and push through. A crew came a couple of days ago to take the last of the stuff. The inspection is on Wednesday. I’m done.
Emotionally I’m exhausted, but it was worth it.
I’m supposed to be doing a class on developing my intuition - or rather - I am doing a class on developing my intuition, it’s just that… the timing isn’t great. Or maybe it’s supposed to be this way, but every waking minute that isn’t work has been slammed into the clear-out push. The classes are at an awkward time that I have to stay up late for, and so I’m tired through the whole thing. I’m not complaining, I feel privileged that I get to do this thing at all, I just… I guess I always want things to be perfect and they never are.
I found an old photo of my wife in a gorgeous red dress, god she looks amazing.
I spent some time in silence today. Well, silence is relative here. The building is (fortunately) old enough and big enough to be concrete and steel, so sound doesn’t really travel like a modern wood-frame building, but it does travel. I’d prefer to live in a little house with a garden, but around here, something that would be $80,000 - $120,000 in most other places in the country is $2.5mil here. I was lucky to get into the unit I have now over a decade ago with a barely affordable mortgage. It’s not my choice but I’m grateful every day, as the alternative would be living 2-3 hours further away from work.
Today, silence meant this odd, distant high-pitched whine that ran rhythmically, pausing with a mechanical closing of the sound. It reminded me of the back and forth of an old ink jet printer, making me wonder if someone in the building has a 3D maker. It’d have to be immediately above or below me, as I know the people on my floor, and they don’t seem like the type to own such a thing.
My own thoughts found me in the silence, too. Everything I don’t want the coming week to be, lost friendships, the relief at getting all this stuff done. Wondering if I can finally relax, or at least, do fun things now. The realization that it’s easier to feel accomplished about doing necessary things than it is to feel accomplishment over doing fun things. It’s been an odd weekend.
I’m listening to some ambient breakbeats from some random YouTube channel. They’re probably AI generated. There’s a particular drum skip pattern that’s making me want to listen to The Prodigy again. Maybe it’s just when and where I grew up, but even as someone whose musical center is rock and metal, I have to say that The Fat of the Land and Music for the Jilted Generation are two amazing albums. If anything, they sound more relevant and contemporary today than they did in the 90s, which is maybe an interesting commentary on where the world has gone.
“Breathe the pressure. Come on play my game I’ll test ya.”
The video for this 45 minutes of probably-AI generated generic waveform has some stylized kanji and and some monospaced hybrid of C and T-SQL script, each line of code containing a bunch of syntactically valid statements that would never go together for any functional reason, like an Edward Lear poem for computers.
There’s something hypnotic about it, like Neo hunched over his computer in 1999’s The Matrix. It’s as if the presumed AI is searching for meaning through the music it probably created.
We’re all out here searching for meaning. Even the AI.