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2026-06-30T12:00:00+01:00

// Audio Test

Testing how Claude Cowork can help me create a music player element in Hugo, so I can share my music experiments on this blog.

I’ve made electronic music for a long time but thats a story for another post because this post is a test to see if Claude Cowork can help me with a Hugo Template that allows me to easily embed audio files.

Hugo is the system I use to manage this website. It’s really great. You should have a look.

Here’s some music.

It’s a little sketch, a jam or an F-Loop as I call them. Functional Loops. I make them to test out new ideas or to experiment with techniques I’m figuring out. It’s a bit like prototyping in design. Thinking by making.

Here’s another one.

It’s not a whole track, but an example of what I call “fuck around and find out” in my creative practice. I do it a lot. It’s all about little probes and experiments to learn and understand process and techniques. It’s not about completing anything. It’s curious play. The playfulness and curiosity is the entire point and often it’s the mistakes that end up becoming the most interesting stuff you come back to. The mistakes are where you find your creative voice.

The photo is from Watching Trees, a festival run by Optimo and The Ransom Note. It’s where I remembered how architectural electronic dance music can be, that the music is the space we dance inside - and what the experience of communal listening is like at scale.

More on that later too.

For now, this is just a work in progress post. It might evolve as the audio player does.

I’ve also been building an EQ visualiser shortcode. Here’s an example curve — a fairly typical mix bus EQ: a touch of low-end weight, a small dip in the low-mids to clean up mud, a gentle high-mid presence lift, and a high-shelf air boost.

Felt curious, might delete.

Here’s a different shape. Dialling in a kick drum for thump. A high-pass to clear out rumble below the fundamental, a big low shelf lift around 70Hz for weight, and a scoop around 300Hz to keep it out of the mud.

One more. A snare that hits hard. High-pass to lose the rumble, a small lift around 200Hz for body, a cut around 500Hz to kill the cardboard box sound, then a big push around 3kHz for the crack. A touch of air on top to finish it off.

And a compressor to go with it. Same snare, squashed hard. Low threshold, a steep ratio, fast attack to let the initial crack through before it clamps down, fast release so it pumps back up and breathes between hits.

And here’s a DAHDSR envelope — a slow attack with a hold at peak, a medium decay to a sustained level, then a long release.

The DX7 doesn’t do DAHDSR at all. Each operator gets four rate/level pairs instead, and rate is a slope, not a fixed duration. The same rate takes longer to get somewhere if the jump in level is bigger, which is why DX7 envelopes never quite look like anything else. Here’s an approximation of that shape, not a cycle-accurate one.

Here’s the same loops in a release player.

I'd love to tell you more.

2026-06-30T09:24:58+01:00

// Proof of Life

It’s been a while. Here’s where I’m at.

A long overdue check-in covering sobriety, why I’ve mostly fallen out of love with social media, and why I think the friction we’ve been so busy optimising away is often the best part.

Also: post-optimal objects, constraints, eating frogs, and a clock that tells the time in poetry.