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 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!

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.

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.

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.

No field recordings this week, just a medley of different things. I attempted something vaporwave-y the first half but it just ended up sounding like what I usually put out, and it opens up towards the second half.

My and Brianna kayaked out to hope island, which has a campsite only accessible by boat. We were hoping to get a spot but all the sites were taken, so we sat on the beach and felt bummed out for a while. During which I took a field recording!

WARNING: FIREWORKS SOUNDS USED

For fourth of july my family went out to eat sushi, and my mom ordered the “mexican roll,” which along with the hotdogs I had for lunch seemed just about the most American meal ever. We went to the 3rd of july fireworks show, which you’ll hear right of the beginning of this episode, and I was able to catch 3, maybe 4 languages, which you’ll hear if you listen closely (there’s other stuff going on).

Also in this episode, samples from Lewis Jordan’s “When the Time Comes,” and Joe Mailhot’s live version of a tune he wrote in 2000 which he didn’t name the name of when he played on Free Jazz with Fred this last Monday. If he did say the name I missed it. He was talking about how he had Syd Potter to thank for starting his compositional career. You can hear that live show for about a week longer before the archive expires here: https://www.radiofreeamerica.com/show/free-jazz-with-fred-2-kaos-community-radio, and you can find out more about the Olympia Free Jazz Festival here: https://www.facebook.com/olympiafreejazzfestival/ You can see Lullaby Utopia live and learn how I do my process for the show Sunday July 14th at St. Martins.

This year I went to three whole graduation ceremonies, two that my sister isabelle was in (whose traveloges you can hear in past episodes), and one that I played in. One was for Capitol High here in Oly, one for South Puget Sound Community College here in Oly, and one for the Freedom Education Project of Puget Sound (https://fepps.org/). Of the three, my favorite was the SPSCC one which you can hear here on the show! Don’t worry I cut out all the boring speeches it’s just all the families cheering in all their own unique different ways. My mom says “way to go peanut.”

We also had some thunderstorms out here which is still a little bit unusual for Western Washington I think. It’s only the second field recording I’ve gotten since I’ve been out here, if I was in Wisconsin I’d probably have over a hundred by now.

The computer programming this time was a little more involved than usual, I feel like I keep pushing myself more and more. This is also the first show featuring a foot pedal I was able to hook up to my computer to control events without taking my hands away from the bass. Cool.

If you have any sounds that make you sleepy or happy or both you can send them to lullabyutopia@gmail.com and I’ll play them on the show. See you next week!

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IF YOU HAVE FIELD RECORDINGS TAKEN ON ANY OLD RECORDING DEVICE (including phones) OF A GOOD PLACE, PLEASE SEND THEM TO lullabyutopia@gmail.com

Recordings in this episode are machinery from spring cleaning and a grange party. Yes, there are granges in Lullaby Utopia, it is there where you find the best marshmallow fluff you've had in your life and the wood creaks good too.

At this particular grange, a guy went up to the piano said "y'all want to sing some songs?" and before people could even say "heck yeah brother" he's playing tunes that somehow everybody but me knows the words to. I said "holy moly" and ran out to get my recording equipment, but I had some trouble getting to my car because an Australian (who made it onto one of the recordings in the episode) ran over a tree. By the time I managed to get back I had missed it but witnessing it first hand definitely left an impression on me. I did get a little bit of a guitar player though doing sort of the same thing.

See you next week!

It’s been too long since I last had Christopher William Wolter on the show so I thought I’d ask him to do me a favor. You might have already figured out Lullaby Utopia is a large scale simulation, but down here we also play video games too. Some of the NPCs (non-player characters) have started thinking for themselves! They’re going through a rather angsty phase but the scientists/game designers don’t care what they think as long as they think for themselves. When I asked the head scientist, Maralindorothy Burnosamastein what she thought about it she said “it’s a necessary part of growing up.”

Also the sprinklers are on! We have special night-time ones.

There were two things that happened this last week, my good friends Kylie and Chris got married! To each other! And I stole the sounds from the ceremony! Or rather Brianna did, because I was honored to be able to PLAY FOR THE CEREMONY! What are you kidding me? That’s boss! Thanks for trusting me with potentially ruining everything Kylie and Chris!

The other thing that happened was Brianna’s birthday, so the second half of the show is a super special surprise from me and her families to her. About three hundred of her siblings and parents all called into the radio station at once, and you’ll be able to here them.

I found a field recording that I thought I lost! The landing from Madison in it’s entirety, from before we touch down to when I get out of the airport, and then a long field recording from around where I live where there’s a abandoned railway.

I always fly with this special airline “Sunbeam” out of Seattle where the sides of the plane are all clear glass (probably some sort of plastic but it looks like glass) and they only schedule flights where you’ll see a sunrise or a sunset. I guess they recoup the costs of those things by not serving soda, but you can bring your own which I do. Over the course of the field recording, the sky goes from sunny to dark (I took pictures during which are in the attached image).

And the trail/rails where I was walking you can still find people who catch freight in and out of Olympia and if you stop to talk to them, they’ll cook you a can of beans over their campfire and tell you about jobs they’ve worked in Kansas City, and all the best (FREE!) things to discover across the US. I waved hello to a couple folks here and there, but I didn’t want a whole lot of talking in the recording so I just kept to myself mostly.