The Ruckus Room

A new (old) VCR that I bought on eBay arrived a few days ago, and I've put it into action along with the one I already had that is still functioning properly. Two others have mostly crapped out. I'm going through VCRs! These old machines seem to have a very limited lifespan when put to work in the sweatshop of the VHS dubbing project here chez Random. Luckily they are (usually) cheap. I got the last one for $25 + $20 shipping. I'm down to the last four boxes of tapes, or less than 100 to go. Yeah, that seems like lot, but it's a mere fraction of what I started with. The late 80's through early 2000s were a very prolific time for me and videotape!

I believe I mentioned that I've been binge-watching the White Centipede Noise podcasts. Well, in order to access more complete content and the WCN Discord server and other goodies, I joined the WCN Patreon, committed for a year. That's over a hundred bucks, so I guess I'm serious! Exposure to so many Noise creators and aficianados is reawakening the multimedia artist in me, it feels like. I want to paint and make collages and zines and videos and CDs and cassettes and get involved with the mail art scene, such as it is in 2026. Sadly, the number of people with CD and cassette players has dwindled to a scant percent of the general population. But on the other hand, people who are really into DIY art and music tend to own them. Noise people actually tend to favor cassettes as their preferred format. There is a strong analog and fierce anti-AI sentiment among the members of that subculture. And I'm mostly down with that. Although, I must admit, I love working with Ableton Live on my MacBook to make music and sound art. But AI can just fuck off in general. I've spent enough time with chatbots to know it's as much a cancer as a boon. It's especially a cancer in the creative realms. Perhaps more of a boon in specific tech areas, but I definitely hate having to deal with AI in business communications. I digress.

The major fruit of the VHS dubbing project is that I'm freeing up lots of room in The Bunker, which is what we call the "bonus room" off the garage. The previous owners of this house used it for storage, and kindly left several metal racks in there. The owner before that, the one who did a major remodel of the entire house, used it for making pottery: there's a 220-volt outlet where she powered her electric kiln. Storage is still a major use for us. We have a couple shelves for pantry items, and there are still lots of shelves occupied by stuff I moved over from the old Chamber of Randomness, that I still need to sort through. But dubbing and tossing the VHS tapes has freed up so much room already! I've got space for a small project table up against one wall, and soon there'll be room for even more space to make art, etc.

Speaking of room names, e.g. The Bunker, I've been calling the large downstairs room the "Family Room"—for no particular reason except that when we watch TV, it's in there. But recently Mrs. Random made known her distaste for that label. Family rooms are for families with kids, I guess, and when I looked up the actual definition, FRs are referred to as central hubs where a family can relax, watch TV, play games, listen to music, where tidiness is not a priority, and where close proximity to the kitchen is key. Our room downstairs is far from the kitchen, and it's not a central hub. It's actually a place where I make a lot of noise on a regular basis. My bands play in there; our records and most of our CDs are there, along with a hi-fi with big speakers. For a party last fall we had dancing there. So I did some research, and I've decided I'm henceforth going to call it the RUCKUS ROOM. Okay? Okay!

A much larger subset

Last night I worked on a new "ambient music" album, a release that will appeal to a much larger subset of the world population than my "noise" releases. Not that I care! Hahaha. But anyway, the tracks in question were the last ones I made at the old house, last July and August, so that gives them a certain aura in my mind. Not exactly sentimental or nostalgic, but the feeling of the end of an era. Also, they were among the last tracks I made in Ableton Live version 11, for what it's worth. The only reason that's significant is that I had to re-save the track projects in the latest version (12.4) before I could do any last-minute edits and touchups. The album should be ready to release sometime this week. Then probably back to noise, no input mixing, and other weirdness.

The VHS dubbing project has stalled a bit. One of the VCRs is crapping out, and I have another one on order. Radio Free Random is still on hiatus. I keep thinking I might revive it as a noise station, but the effort of clearing space and setting up the gear has been too much of a mental and physical hurdle so far. I mean, I have enough stuff going on to keep me busy and entertained without adding more right now. Truthfully, I am governed by whims and obsessions. When/if the RFR bug hits, I'll be driven by forces I won't be able to resist, and it will happen.

It's gotta be me

I'm sitting on the living room couch between the Tinycats, Griffin and Fleur, here the early morning. It's quiet. The night of deep booms and sharp cracks is over, though I'm sure we'll hear random artillery here and there throughout the next few days. We enjoyed a low-key outdoor dinner party at a neighbor-friend's place last night. Kept kitties in overnight. Betty wanted out but it comforted us to know that she was sheltered from the explosive sounds; yeah it was probably more about us than her. She's a tough former street kitty, savvy and cautious but unafraid.

Mr. Random's noise factory AKA Rogue Deployment has been busy making more recorded racket. Check the Fame Fighter label Bandcamp page for the latest albums: mrrandom.bandcamp.com. My recent experimental forays have involved "no input" mixing, where I connect outputs to inputs on a mixing board, fiddle with the faders and knobs, and record the often highly interesting audio feedback output in real time. My latest album Aching Glass started life as a long no-input recording, which I subjected to various processing and effects and layered a couple field recordings of a fallen tree next door being sawed up last week. It was tons of fun to make.

Yesterday I printed out the NaNoWriMo writing that I did last November: 30 days of "quality nonsense." I used 8.5x14" legal sheets, and it came to 82 pages. Very nice to have it all printed out in physical form. The vast quantity of text surprised me. I had little feeling for how big it was while it was still only in digital form. Now I'm slowly going through with a pencil and lightly editing. Things I am looking for are the same word repeated too soon after its initial use, and unintentionally misspelled words. I intentionally misspelled and even made up many words as I wrote the drafts, so it's not like anybody else could do this editing. It's gotta be me.

A few weeks ago I transcribed a bunch of pages of typewritten nonsense pages that I wrote in 2019—using one of my AlphaSmart Neo devices—so that stuff is in digital form now and ready to print out and subject to the same editing treatment as my NaNoWriMo material. My current idea is to combine all this nonsense text into a book at some point. But what actual form that will take is still TBD. I might want to add images and even more text. I might want to give it some kind of interesting visual form, something creative and provocative. Who knows? It's like how I make sound art, in the moment.

My new harsh noise album on Fame Fighter Records

This is the second release under my new noise project name Rogue Deployment. It's noise. It's harsh. It's loud. Hey, it got an upvote on the jaded r/noisemusic subreddit last night!

Two more inputs

We've had some very spring-like weather the past few days, contrasting with the warm summery weather of the previous couple weeks. I've been loving the rain!

I spent part of yesterday evening setting up my gear for today's Teasel Swarm. Not sure if I've mentioned it, but for my birthday gadget last month I got a Zoom Livetrack L12next multitrack recorder. It has supplanted my old Zoom R16 for band recording, and it gives us two more inputs, one for lēlūlāserlight and one for me. I think we're still experimenting with our new added capability; at least I am. I thought I'd try adding a mic but it turns out I really don't want to do vocals. Today I'm using my new input for my old Yamaha keyboard, which has been out of action since the end of LaunchPad in 2019. I've missed playing it, so I'm excited to have it out again!

Slow-binge-watching

Rain! It was raining when I went to bed at midnight, and it is raining now as I go for my first sip of coffee. I love it. It looks like we've got a cool and somewhat rainy weekend to look forward to before the temps head back up.

I've been slow-binge-watching Noise-related podcasts on the White Centipede Noise youtube channel. Oskar Brummel in Potsdam, Germany, has interviewed many significant Noise artists, as well as running a record label and distro and physical store. The 1.5 to 2-hour interviews are fascinating and super informative. Brummel is really doing a great service to the genre getting all these artists in front of camera and microphone, talking about their own backgrounds, their artistic careers, and their perspectives on other artists and the Noise world in general. I've learned many things much more quickly than if I'd had to rely on other available sources out there.

Well, that's my blog for today. Bye for now.

Right meaning visceral

Ahhh, pizza for breakfast. I did nuke it for 30 seconds, so it's not the classic cold pizza for breakfast I used to prefer. I've gotten a bit more civilized in my sixties. We got Track Town delivered last night—our standard large, half Florentine, half Triple Jump. Yum.

I'm still on the Noise kick, of course. I made another track yesterday. Noise is the Abstract Expressionism of sound art (or "music" if you will), I guess I could say. No need for particular rules, structures, or forms: just go for what feels and sounds right. Right meaning visceral. And a natural affinity for randomess doesn't hurt!

My VHS dubbing project is going quite well, and the actual finish line is in sight. I've dubbed close to 200 tapes to digital files, and I've got maybe three or four dozen to go, give or take. After that, I want to dub my 8mm camcorder tapes, and THEN there are the many spindles of CDRs and DVDRs to deal with. But I can already see significant space liberation has happened in the Bunker. It's great to experience big progress on a massive decluttering project.

This morning we're getting our roof leaf-blown and our house and driveway power-washed. Before they get here, we need to move stuff away from the house, so that's the next order of business. Type at ya later.

A New Entropy

The family room is a mess of cables and tables and music gear. tHE bOY came over on Monday and we revived our old band FRANTIC! but decided to drag it beyond, evolve it past, our traditional bass vs. bass format. He brought two synths, a couple mixers, several effects pedals, and a sequencer, and I quickly set up my own synth and effects; plus we also had our basses. Equipment malfunctions and mystery silences and sounds plagued/blessed us throughout the session, and I ended up getting barely more than 15 minutes of useable material recorded onto my new multitracker (a "damaged mix" of which might soon be released as an EP). I chalked it up to the universe reacting to a challenge to the status quo. We bring a new entropy here in 2026, and the old sonic physics structures are groaning in protest. I'm sure the proper realignments will have taken place by the time we reconvene to make more noiz.

Meanwhile since Monday, I've taken advantage of having gear sprawled out, and added my drum machine and more effects to the mess. Yesterday I made a couple of really noisy pieces for my new project Rogue Deployment. In my recent reading and watching, I've noticed that it's common in the Noise community for artists to use Noise to process personal trauma as well as anger and angst towards society and politics. Me, I'm just reveling in the sonic mayhem. It feels good.

NOISE

Happy Solstice, blog readers. My last entry was two months ago. In the meantime, what has happened, transpired, come to pass? Radio Free Random is on hiatus, still. I've gone somewhat whole or at least 75% hog into making "noise music" and learning about the history of the Noise scenes around the world, going back to the early 1980's. I mean, I've been a noisician for decades, to be honest. FRANTIC! is a "noiz-improv" band, and we started in 1998. I even bought a Merzbow CD around the turn of the century (Venereology, 1994). But I never really had dived into the culture of Noise and makers of Noise. A couple of books and lots of Youtube videos and Bandcamp pages and the r/noisemusic subreddit have brought me up to speed on the general outlines of Noise-making over the years and have given me a feeling for how pervasive and complex this underground/DIY phenomenon is—very similar to punk rock in its early days, with hyperlocal focus, international reach, and self-produced recordings and art. Color me fascinated and maybe even hooked.

So, during the last month I've made four noise albums for my Bandcamp page. Two are of the Harsh Noise Wall variety. HNW is basically what it sounds like: an relatively unvarying wall of noise lasting an hour or more, typically. The other two consist of shorter more varied tracks. I had a blast making these albums, and I've got ideas for more.

"Why would you want to listen to and make noise music, and can you really call it music??" You might ask. If you're really curious, the internet has lots of prose for you to peruse. Suffice it to say, many people love Noise. I couldn't really add much to what's already been said. There are lots of "extreme" music genres, and they wouldn't exist if there weren't people passionate about them. Nobody else needs to understand, frankly.

I have thought about bringing Radio Free Random back as a much more experimental and "noisy" station. I do realize that many of my regular listeners, some of whom are friends, would not really like such a direction-shift. But RFR is something I do for me, to be honest. It's like, you're welcome to come along but I want to do stuff I'm personally passionate about. Pleasing listeners is secondary. I'd rather attract listeners who enjoy what I'm going, not adjust what I'm doing to attract listeners. Know what I'm saying?

I sold my Freewrite Smart Typewriter, so I'm down to this Traveler I'm typing on now, and the Alpha. The Typewriter is definitely a very cool machine, but I found it to be overkill for me. And the friend I sold it to was very happy to get it.

If you want to check out my new albums, go to https://mrrandom.bandcamp.com. Cheers!

Hiatuses

Trilliums at Wild Iris Ridge park last week

I think I was emotionally ready to abandon this blog. But of course that's not gonna happen. Long hiatus. And perhaps this is a lone entry between two hiatuses. I just looked up hiati and the internet told me that was incorrect. Semi-related: it's trilliums, not trillia.

The thing is: I don't really have anything I want to write about. I'll have to sneak my way in. Tomorrow will be eight months since we started living in our new house. It's gradually feeling more normal! It's our first spring here. Mrs. Random has been documenting the flowers and plants that are springing into action around the house. That's definitely her department. I admire but she seeks knowledge.

I just peeked at my last blog entry, which was in early February—Groundhog Day actually. I stopped keeping track of books I've been reading, but I don't think I've read very many. Just finished what I believe is the third reading of Simon Reynolds' book about post-punk music (1978-85), Rip It Up and Start Again. Obviously it's a favorite. I'm in season 4 of my fifth binge-through of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., probably my favorite TV series, although Max Headroom and Star Trek: Voyager are up there, too. Psych as well. I've been spending time on Kanopy watching documentaries. There's some pretty interesting stuff there. If I'd known I'd be getting back to blogging, I'd have kept track, logged what I've been watching (and reading). I wish Kanopy had a watch history feature.

I started a big project a few weeks ago: dubbing my massive pile of VHS tapes to digital. I bought a second VCR and two little video recorders that save MP4 files to MicroSD cards. It's going to be a long and somewhat tedious process, but I want to save a lot of the programming that I recorded in the late 80s and 90s. With two VCRs and accompanying digital dubbers, I can get through 2-4 tapes per day. I archive the files to three hard drives and then toss out the tapes. Ultimately I'll be liberating a substantial bit of volume in the Bunker, making room for more desk space, more area to do art and music.

I was all excited about my Freewrites last year (Alpha, Traveler, Smart Typewriter), but as it often happens, the new gadgets lost their luster and started sitting for longer and longer unused. One reason I'm blogging today is to put some words onto one of those gadgets. I'm writing this on the Alpha. And I started a journal entry on the Smarty. That's good.

Can recommend

Howdy gentle readers. And speaking of reading, here's what I've finished since the previous blog post:

The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker (2024)
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich (1986)
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (2024)
Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading by Brooke Allen (2025)
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (1994)

I can recommend all of the above. The first two are histories chock full of details. The Osman is a fun mystery written by an Englishman, first in a planned series. Good Bones is a collection of essays on mostly forgotten but significant-in-their-time writers. The Lethem novel is his debut, hard-boiled and humorous dystopian noir science fiction.

Also since last blogging, I've started taking three different drugs: for diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. I'm also supposed to be getting a topical ointment (cream?) for a toenail fungal infection, but there's currently a tussle over whether my insurance will pay for it. Colonoscopy, check! They found and completely removed three polyps, none of which had abnormalities. Re-do in five years. Later this week I'll get my first eye exam since 2022, and quite possibly new prescriptions for eyeglasses and contacts.

The blood pressure medicine works eerily fast. I took the first pill in the evening, and by noon the next day, my systolic number was down 20 points.

Our gas fireplace inserts got ordered two weeks ago, and now we're just waiting. We're hoping installation will happen within a month. Our kitties can't wait!

We've had a couple movie nights over the last two weekends, and we watched all-time faves Desperately Seeking Susan and Napoleon Dynamite.

Maybe that's enough for now. Thank you for reading.

Still feels wild

When will Mr. Random the Daily Blogger return? Unknown. But here's his occasional version, today.

Five months ago we were in the middle of moving stuff to the new house. Today might even be five months to the day that I woke up from a nap in the old bedroom and noticed in horror the nasty decades-in-the-making discoloration on the wall at the head of our bed. "We need a headboard," I exclaimed to Mrs. Random. Of course, she was way ahead of me, just waiting for the nudge or realization on my part. We hopped in the car and headed downtown to visit a couple furniture stores, found a satisfactory bed-frame-headboard-mattress set, and ordered it. Then we drove north to "California", which is what we call north Eugene on Coburg Rd., and shopped for a spinny chair for our new living room. We didn't find exactly what we wanted in stock, but we got enough information to place an order a couple weeks later.

The time between getting the keys (Aug. 7) and actually starting to live here (Aug. 21) was a total whirlwind of activity, which I believe I documented fairly well here in this blog as it heppened. It still feels wild to be on this end of things, all moved in and living our lives in this completely different location and environment. Last year ranks as one of the most change-oriented time periods in our lives together.

We do have one more significant change, or two, depending on how you count it/them. Today we're getting a visit from a Midgley's Stove & Fireplace Center technician to check out our house layout and make a plan for installing two gas fireplace inserts (upstairs and down) that we ordered last week. So, within a month to six weeks, we'll have brand new glowing warm units that make us and the cats even happier here. Exciting!

Yesterday I had my first medical appointment in nearly five years. My old doc retired in '21 and then the medical group he was part of went downhill, having been purchased the year before by an evil corporation. Many staff quit or were laid off, and thousands of local people lost their primary care providers. It's been a shit show at Oregon Medical Group (Optum) ever since, basically. There's a newish group in town called Praxis, and they were accepting new patients when I called a couple weeks ago. My new PCP is an FNP (Family Nurse Practitioner) and I immediately liked her. It was a "getting to know you" visit, as they called it, with me basically answering a bunch of questions, them taking my vitals, and me giving blood and urine samples. Also, I got referrals for a colonoscopy that I'm due for, and a podiatrist for a toe issue. Anyway, I'm feeling a bit more like a responsible adult now that I'm not playing the avoidance game with my health anymore. Next: eye doc and possibly new glasses and updated contact lens prescription.

I've been doing a fair bit of live broadcasting on my fake pirate radio station, and having a fair bit of fun with that. In addition to my usual morning DJing, I've started playing old KWVA shows in the evenings. Why not? I've got hundreds of hours stored on hard drives, of my shows and former fellow DJs' shows. It's a plethora of time-capsuled material, late-90s through 2007.

Reading.... Two weeks in, I'm still abiding by my New Year's decision to stop multi-tasking i.e. reading multiple books simultaneously—i.e. focus on reading one book at a time. In January I've finished: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Adam Bede by George Eliot. And, after switching from a hundred-and-eleven-year-old translation of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky to a modern one, I've gone from slogging to sailing through that book, now at 61% and counting.

I found the film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) free on Kanopy and watched it. Star-studded cast, and a valiant effort, mostly successful, to translate a 500-page novel into a 2-hour film. I also watched Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, a 1985 modern retelling or recasting or something of the story of Mary, Joseph & Jesus. Very weird but very beautiful and evocative, i.e. standard-issue Godard (in my experience).

Okay, that's it for today. RIP Bob Weir.

I hope to reduce my in-progress list

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but this year I have some things I want to do and some things I want not to do. The last vow I made was to make no more vows. So these are "decisions" or "goals" I suppose. I'm not going to list them here. But one of them follows on my last blog entry. I have decided to finish a book before starting or switching to another book. That way I hope to reduce my in-progress list down to a very small number from the ridiculous size it is right now.

Last night I finished Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It was much longer than I thought it would be. Reading on an e-reader obscures a book's true length, which can be both good and bad. Some books' massiveness can be daunting, so it's psychologically easier to read the e-version, and it's also physically easier: a 1000-page tome is big and bulky! Catch-22 isn't that big, but it's substantial at around 500 pages. And it's a doozy of an absurdist early postmodern character-driven crazy-quilt masterpiece, perhaps the first novel to capture the ridiculous double-binds and arbitrary tragi-comedies of life during wartime (WW2 in this case) for American soldiers. I'm glad I read it and I'm chagrined it took me this long to do it.

Now I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a Solstice e-gift from a friend, and I am thoroughly enjoying the author's gift for creating lifelike characters and entertaining situations, as well as his witty and poetic way with words. I'm so happy to encounter Lethem, who's been publishing novels since the mid 90's—way off my radar until I read his 2017 collection of essays, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers.

I'm continuing to enjoy my Freewrite devices—writing this on the Smart Typewriter. Job descriptions, or division of labor, if you will: Alpha for daily journal writing, often several times a day; Traveler for quiet writing (I envision it for coffee house writing); Smart Typewriter for working on my nonsense novel or when I want a premium clicky typing experience with a front-lit e-ink screen. They are all getting used.