I was able to go to one day of the Oly Old Time Festival, a yearly event celebrating American folk musics, and take a couple field recordings. There are three recordings of square dances, two of the family dance and one of the night dance. I enjoyed myself immensely, learned new perspectives from the workshops and came away very happy.

I modeled the electronics after a square dance that was taught where there are two lines of dancers with one dancer at the head of both (they used a stuffed animal and I didn’t catch the name of the dance). The head of the line takes a partner and takes them down to the end, and the dancer who didn’t get chosen becomes the new chooser. I haven’t seen this form of shuffling before, so I tried to put into a musical format: each of the seven dancers is a different tone/part of a field recording (one is violins & 275hz, another is shouts & 100hz, another is stomps & 440, etc.). The end of the lines are the softest, and are split into the right and left channels, getting louder as they approach the chooser, while the chooser is in both channels and oscillates in volume a bit. Hardish to hear, but it holds up to analysis, which really is all that matters in music anyway right? Here is an image of the pure data patch. VERY messy, but I didn’t really have a fully realized plan as to what needed to happen, so I had to make up a lot as I went.

Thank you to Emily, Erik, and Ruby.

(View the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzfGNMOt3a0. [It’s way cooler to see the pictures of what is happening in real time.])

Me and Brianna are getting married!

The first eleven minutes of the podcast are the actual surprise proposal itself. If you want to get a feel for the whole date, the rest of the podcast is a time capsule of everything that happened that night. You can check out what she said on the way to meet me in the car, what we talked about before and after dinner, and what we talked about after the proposal happened. Also included is us going out to pick up the ring a couple days later.

I wanted to create a whole new soundscape for the proposal, but I also wanted Bri to recognize and understand what was happening as quickly as possible just with the sound alone, so some of the sounds were taken from the episode I did for her birthday. (https://www.cooperschlegel.com/lullab... )

Thank you to Dale and Sue for not giving up anything!
Thank you to Morgan and Isaac for the beautiful photographs (https://www.mosaaic.com/)!
Thank you to Ryan and Tarissa for bringing bluetooth speakers and for being there!
Thank you to Mom, Dad, and Isabelle for bringing the canopy, setting things up, and relaying my instructions to everyone.

We love you all!

This is the last part of the San Diego series. Two recordings from San Diego Zoo, one from behind the flamingo pen where me and Brianna fed the flamingos dog soaked in water (the watery tchick-tchick-tchick sound is the flamingos feeding). We caught sunset in Owen’s Aviary, which was amazing. The species in the aviary are: Bali Mynah, Black-naped Fruit-dove, Black-naped Oriole, Chinese Hwamei, Collared Finchbill, Collared Imperial Pigeon, Collared Imperial-pigeon, Collared Lory, Cotton Pygmy Goose, Dollarbird, Eclectus Parrot, Edward’s Pheasant, Emerald Dove, Fairy Bluebird, Fawn-breasted Bowerbird, Greater Necklaced Laughingthrush, Iris Lorikeet, Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Malay Great Argus Pheasant, Mariana Fruit-dove, Metallic Pigeon,Metallic Starling, Nicobar Pigeon, Papuan Mountain-pigeon, Red-billed Malkoha, Red-tailed Laughing Thrush, Spotted Laughing Thrush, Sulawesi Green Imperial-pigeon, Victoria Crowned Pigeon, White-bellied Imperial-pigeon, White-breasted Kingfisher, White-breasted Wood Swallow, White-eared Bulbul, White-eared Catbird, White-rumped Shama, and White-throated Ground-dove. Also in this episode is tecolote (owl in Spanish) canyon, which was around where we stayed. My parents and I went for a hike around sunrise, so birds were super active then too.

This is part two of three of our trip to southern California. About halfway in the middle of our trip we drove out to LA to see my aunt Deanna and uncle John. They met us in Griffith Park, and took us to Chinatown for dinner and to see the Thiên Hậu Taoist Temple. You can hear all the fans they had running to circulate air, as well as a huge standing bell that was being struck during our visit.

I went with my family (Mom, Dad, Isabelle, and Brianna) to San Diego for the holidays, and got some good field recordings. I’m going to put them in the shows in the order I recorded them in, which presents some challenges, especially with the overall narrative. The two field recordings in this episode are from silver strand beach and from San Diego bay, where we spent a couple hours out on the water. You’ll hear waves, winches, and the voices of all those present (which makes it a little less sleep inducing this week, sorry, we’ll get back to no voices this week).

When I was taking the field recording on silver strand, the sun was setting, we got there just in time to see it approach and go under the horizon line, which meant a whole lot of deep oranges and blacks and maybe some grey-green around the edges, and as the sky got darker the street lights came on and the stars started poking through. We saw Venus!

I found my halloween recordings! My recording device attaches a date to each recording, which is always in the year of 2007. It’s almost like digital preemptive time travel. I was searching for files to delete to free up space on my computer and found my old recordings! Hurrah!

There are two big field recordings in this episode, one was my initial walk from around the capitol blvd bridge over I-5 through south olympia, down past the fountain by the capitol, and into a restaurant on 4th ave. The second doesn’t really follow a route, but stays in south olympia the whole time.

Listening back, there weren’t many “trick or treat”s but that’s what I remembered. There were a lot of “thank you”s though, and a hearty rendition of jingle bells, as well as a “stop being so rude.”

I started playing in Hospice this last week and have my second attempt tomorrow. Wish me luck!

I went through some old home videos (the source of the fuzz you’ll here in this) and picked out 54 different soundclips, which I plugged into my computer so it could choose between them at random. As always when I give my computer the ability to make all the choices it surprises me with what it gets attracted to. About half (~25) of the soundclips made it into this episode I think, and I’m only basing that on things I didn’t hear. There were a number of clips that only played once and a number that were played very many times despite all being equally likely to appear. I also played electric bass for this episode exclusively!

Although this is for my Dad’s birthday, I’d also like to dedicate this episode to my sister and mother as well.

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Unfortunately all of my halloween field recordings were lost in the sands of time, so I had to take more field recordings this week. I decided to go the mall for some field recordings in the food court and outside the movie theater. I also took a walk on Kenyon st. going away from the mall and onto Harrison, you can hear someone ordering fast food in the episode.

Malls are strange places; the mall here in Olympia is hardly any different than the malls I've been to in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, and New York. Much like airports, they all have sounds in common. They exist on the same plane of reality and then you walk outside and it's something completely different, only unlike an airport you don't emerge into a different place, it's just your local neighborhood again. Wild!

In honor of the KAOS fall pledge drive (our goal of 10k was met!!) I added more voices to the pledge drive randomizer and reworked the whole think a little bit. KAOS is made up of amazing community members who don’t get anything for djing, not even: 1. money, 2. internet points, 3. exposure-bucks, 4. status, etc. Just people who want to bring good music and content to their local community. Do people listen to the radio less than 10 years ago? I have no idea, but we all still get calls when we have a good show which I think is DA BOMB. I put into my computer 30 different clips of people pitching on air, and let the computer pick which ones to play.

I was out recording halloween sounds of trick or treating and leaves and stuff, but I need to edit them before they get on the show just in case they’re super wake-up inducing, but I still wanted to do something for halloween. So I made a wind patch in pure data out of some hipass/lopass filters, oscillators and noise generators to make it sound october-y, and brought in a bag of leaves to rustle on the mic. During the show I’d record about 5 minutes, slow it down 33.333% (which brings the pitch down a fourth), record over it again, and then slow it down again, etc etc and the results turned out kindof spooky, but not in a wake me up inside way.

Short show this week, also NEXT LIVE SHOW NEXT TUESDAY @ SPITE HOUSE IN SEATTLE: https://www.facebook.com/events/911842465875980/

I took some rain sounds before the radio broadcast of some October rain. When I got inside to edit them, I loaded them up and thought "wow the sound of the small droplets onto the surface of the large puddles sounds really cool! I should go out and get more of that sound!" but by the time I figured that out, it had stopped raining.

Anyway, if you're in the area come and say hi, the house is a hop skip and jump away from the west side koibito.

I went to Oktoberfest with my parents for the first time in a number of years this last weekend and had a lot of fun. Good food, and if you sign up to be a designated driver you get free soda and coffee. This episode was a little departure from the norm.

Live show coming up next week @ the hobbit hole: LINK

Me and my mom helped my sister move into where she'll be staying for college, and I had a great time! My sister was a little stressed, as was my mom, but not me, because I brought my equipment to take field recordings. In this episode you'll hear us sitting at a restaurant, lugging stuff into the building, me drumming on her furniture, and me saying my not-so-final goodbye. In fact, I'm hoping I'll be able to see some more music shows up in Seattle. We got to see Flying Lotus (with a surprise special guest Thundercat appearance [!!!]) a little while back and that was a rootin-tootin good time. I got a gong the same day as the move-in so you get to hear some of that in this episode.

And I paired it with some slow moving google maps. Hopefully if I leave the watermark in there I won't get in trouble.

(see summary for part one)

I have two episodes in one here: One is all bass and one is all field recordings. It’s like choose your own adventure.

I needed to meditate on some stuff last week, and so I chose to do the show unaccompanied (for the most part, I did cheat a little bit halfway through with the help of my sister Isabelle). I haven’t done this in quite a while! I used to do this much more when I first started out doing the show. Contained within are some coded messages, and like I said before the live broadcast, it’s devoted to my sister and mom. (Last week I helped my sister move into college! Yikes!)

I felt that it was nice to put some large constraints on the show, so this week I did only field recordings. I’ve been sitting on a surplus of field recordings for a little bit, so this was a good way to use a good amount. Featured in the first half are recordings for Brianna’s first big horse show out here in Washington, as well as Brianna’s grandpa’s 90th birthday picnic and Brianna’s grandpa mowing the lawn to celebrate the end of summer. The second half of the show is ~2 minutes worth of sound randomly taken from the back catalog of field recordings I’ve taken (>24 hours) by my computer and looped on top of itself in a teleidoscopic fashion. What is a teleidoscope? It is a kaleidoscope which uses a big lens instead of beads and bits and glass for the source material for the mirror-mandala. This way it uses the outside world for the image. Did you know there is a kaleidoscope underworld that all meets at the Brewster Society Kaleidoscope Convention every June? (Named after Sir David Brewster who is the inventor of the kaleidoscope). They’ve figured out how to use mirrors in such a way that the seen image is a three-dimensional orb or polyhedron instead of a flat bicycle wheel sort of thing. Their website specifically talks about ergonomics of the kaleidoscope which enable extended viewing time.

I've been thinking about getting a stethoscope to try and capture body sounds, but pressing my ear up against someone works well. I just have to edit out the gurgly noises, and I'm left with some breaths and clicks and faint thumps. Maybe a stethoscope would get heartbeats better. Also in this episode was the current night sounds from that previous Wednesday, still some crickets around.

I was walking past the local skatepark downtown and was drawn in by the sounds. I asked the kids there if they were ok with me recording them and they all got up and started skating to make more sound! Dope! Thank you James, JJ, Jo Jo, Jacob, Dalton, and Greg for skating. And then just down the street as me and Brianna were recording the fountain at Heritage Park, Chris came over and asked what we were up to, and after we told him we were recording for Lullaby Utopia, he asked “so it’s like human interest mixed with music?” and I was like “well yeah actually it is I guess.” Later he was like “once I started listening it sounded like a drum circle” but I didn’t get that on the recording unfortunately.

I told Jake to send me some drums, and he did, but I completely messed up the mix and so I had to cut out ~20 minutes worth, but he’s still on a lot of the show thankfully. You can here the unedited show on the 89.3 KAOS website (https://www.radiofreeamerica.com/show/lullaby-utopia-kaos-community-radio).

I played a company picnic for my Dad’s workplace with my good friend/mentor Steve Luceno and my sister got some recordings of it which you can hear in the third third of the show. I programmed all the recordings she took and was hoping it would select the piñata getting beat but it never got around to it (she ended up with 2+ hrs of recording and there was room for maybe 40 minutes worth when it was layered on itself). Maybe it’ll make it onto the show some other time. I also programmed three chords for it to switch between in the second half, but it only ever got around to 2 of them in the entire hour that the program was running. Yet another statistical anomaly on this show I suppose.

Another Isabelle travelogue episode, she is with my mom in Chicago and you can hear the annual cicadas in the recordings she sent back. (They are not the every 17 year cicadas, but a different species [every continental state has 4 or more species of cicada]). I’m really happy that they’re out there and that they are sending love from all of us back here in Olympia.

Field recordings in this episode include but are not limited to: Cicadas, thunder, birthday parties, dogs, kids walking backwards, pool, and crazy 8s.

Since there were no field recordings last week, there’s a wealth of them this week. There was an owl hanging around our place whose hoots I stole. Judging from online video comparison I think it’s a great horned owl, but if you think otherwise please let me know at lullabyutopia@gmail.com. Did you know that owls have some of the most proportionally large ears in the animal kingdom? I was thinking of including a picture of their ears, but that might be something to find on your own. They also have one ear higher than the other so they can be more precise when gauging where it is vertically, as well as face feathers in a dish shape that channel sound towards their ears. They can control the depth of that dish in order to change at what distance their hearing is focused on.

Crickets are also starting to be noisier this time of year, and we had a magnificent thunderstorm last week.