Thoughts and Things

September 3, 2021.

It's 3:30am. I find myself standing in a field just 20 minutes north of Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm staring at the stars. The batteries in my camera have all but depleted, but I'm still shooting long exposures of the high energy protons forcing their way through the magnetosphere above and all around me.

I don't care about the cold anymore.

I've been thinking about coming out here for decades, and I finally made it. Flew into Anchorage. Picked up the car. Drove six hours through every bit of glorious wilderness to get here, and now I'm here. And dammit if I didn't almost miss it.

With every terrible thing that happens everyday, everywhere on this planet, to be standing here in this field away from all of that - to experience what bit of magic exists at the almost-edge-of-the-world - is all that I could have ever asked for and more.

I'll never forget it.

Music is my own:

"Seeds" - Reliqs ('18)

The visuals for this track are generated on the fly and rendered real-time based on bounced tracks input I produced in 2017-2018 and updated for 2021. The evolution of this variant you see is a result of the growth over time of the length of the snippet from this song (NGC_Ael-172), and each captured high frequency drum strike triggers several variables at random to introduce a new growth pattern - it continues to spread until the track finishes and restarts.

As I'm sitting here waiting for one of my various projects to render in the background - on another screen - I found this video of Bjork talking about her experiences with screens when she was younger.

There is profundity in her words. Perhaps a bit of poetry.

An old house is a picture
Between two pages of history.

Its lines are etched by the slanting
Long fingers of rain and sun.

Its walls are stained and yellow
As the margin of an old book.

Down to the windows dark branches
Droop with the heaviness of leaves.

the wind among them is like
The turning of many pages.

Florida Watts Smyth

RELIQS - LKNE 3908C [FULL] from Reese on Vimeo.

New music from me, Reliqs, for 2021.

Headphones may be necessary for maximum enjoyment.