So I usually chronicle my musical adventures on this blog, but between the three-month-long heatwave and the adventures themselves, it just dawned on me that I had totally neglected to keep up. So I’ll hopefully be catching up over the next few days, starting with this post. #NHAMFest26 took place on August 27, with an animated and retrostrange pre-fest evening on the 26th, CELEBRATING CREATIVE HUMANS AND FRIENDLY HANGOUTS as the (n)hamster who made it all happen described the event, which saw a non-stop series of artists perform from 5am to 1am the next morning (UTC time).

I’m not supposed to play favorites, but I’m only human and I have to say that Sound Of The Void (@Firesledge@piaille.fr), Johann Bourquenez (@johann@masto.bike), control.org (@controlfreak@social.control.org) and (big surprise) @bgm@musicians.today and his son George were particular highlights for me (no offense to the others whom I also greatly enjoyed).

I participated too, by helping with organization and backstage logistics, and by playing my own set, because it generally takes about a year for me to forget how stressful it was the last time. And as usual, I was paralyzed with stage fright from start to finish because I think playing live is totally incompatible with my brand of offbeatness. Mentally, I was relatively serene, even though I hadn’t been able to learn my songs properly due to the uninterrupted crushing heat, but my body begged to differ and tried to sabotage the whole thing. Nevertheless, I muddled through acoustic versions of the songs from my latest album, offbeat, and even brought out the ukulele to play my smash hit, Ukulele Bonk to close out the set, and the kind audience was very supportive.

The whole event, despite tricky logistics, went off with nary a hitch, I managed to catch all but 2 or 3 acts (out of 20 or so), a lot of people showed up, and the vibe in the interactive chat was fantastic all the way through.

Until the next time I forget how traumatic it is.

Thank you to those who attended and/or watched the replay of my set and sent kind and supportive words my way. I really appreciate it! Several more recordings are available on the NHAM Live Performances page.

And a huge thank you to the (n)hamster for the huge amount of work he put in to make this happen!

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Since I’m often asked this question, I’m going to be lazy and publish answers I posted on the bonkwave forum a while back:

1

In clumps:

The Beatles, Harry Nilsson

Prokofiev, Schubert, Erik Satie

Emerson, Lake and Palmer (I was young, but it did open my ears to some stuff)

Weird Belgian bands I used to be friends with (Aksak Maboul, COS...)

Tuxedomoon, The Residents, Snakefinger, Renaldo and the Loaf...

Kurt Weill (my all-time musical songwriting hero), Carla Bley, Nino Rota

Bernard Herrmann, John Barry

Robert Wyatt, early Gong, Magma

Talking Heads, B 52s, XTC, and other post-punk bands (Siouxie, Ian Dury, Madness, others...)

Kraftwerk, Gary Numan

Philip Glass, John Adams, Laurie Anderson

All of Zappa up to the mid to late 70s, Albert Marcœur

French singer-songwriters (Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Nino Ferrer, Georges Brassens, Richard Gotainer, a few more...)

Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds

Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli

That's it for the early years 😅

2

I came to jazz much later (via fusion bands at first, and probably thanks to Zappa also). My dad listened to a lot of scratchy old blues records, which I should have included in my list, because one thing that puts me off a lot of mainstream music, is the total absence of blue notes (or even slightly weird non-diatonic or extended chords) 😅

3

I mentioned Prokofiev in my list because my earliest musical memory is hearing the famous dance of the knights from Romeo and Juliet on the radio and my brain exploding. Just thinking about that piece gives me goosebumps. And looking at my list again, every artist I mentioned has tracks that give me goosebumps just by thinking of them! 🪿

Also in elementary school (in France), I had a music teacher who taught us a series of original songs, each one about an animal. And once we all knew our songs really well, he had us sing them at the same time, and they all fit together forming counterpoints and harmonies and canons, and my head exploded again, and I think that this influenced me more than anything else. In fact, I still remember the melody and lyrics of my song (the hippopotamus 😄) 50 years later! 🦛

These are my main influences. I obviously listened to a lot more stuff over the years. People often ask me if I was influenced by The Divine Comedy for instance, which is very flattering, but no, because I discovered them rather late in life. Similarly, I would bring the entire Cardiacs discography to my desert island, but I only discovered them a few short years ago (not that my music bears any resemblance to them, unfortunately).

And today, through my involvement with NHAM and The Indie Beat Television, I mostly listen to artists from the fediverse!

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I don’t remember where I read, ages ago, about how when faced with a choice, if you make a carefully thought out and well-reasoned rational decision, then logically, any other rational person confronted with the same choice will follow the same logic and come to the same decision.

Which in a weird way creates a moral, societal obligation to follow the logic and make the rational choice.

The problem of course, is that most people aren’t rational. Or to be more precise, reason isn’t the only or even the main driver when making choices (or forging an opinion, etc.). To oversimplify things, this is how I think of the way things actually work:

I imagine a spectrum where at one end, you have the ultimate fashion-victims, people who just go with the flow, follow the crowd (often their particular crowd), no matter what, regardless of what’s right or wrong, ethical or not, and right off a cliff if necessary.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the people who tend to think things through for themselves, and follow the logic and their personal morals or ethics, no matter what, regardless of how unfashionable they might be, and the social cost to themselves.

And of course, most people fall somewhere in between. No-one is totally and entirely unable to think for themselves (if they have to, in a pinch), and no-one is totally and entirely immune to any kind of social pressure.

Incidentally, that’s how I picture neurotypical vs neurodivergent (ASD) people. Whether it’s because ND people are unable to think with other people’s brains or because they have been excluded from NT society, they are condemned to figure things out for themselves, whereas NT people are much more susceptible to peer pressure, because it doesn’t require any effort to go with the majority flow.

Where am I going with this?

Well, when I talk about making rational ethical choices with lefty people who feel a lot of social pressure, they’ll usually answer that they agree with me, but that sadly, people™ just don’t care and just follow the crowd (I tend to picture a school of fish or a murmuration of swallows), and therefore that doing the right thing ends up being a totally pointless endeavor, so why even try, especially when it happens to be a bit inconvenient?

I would wear a mask, but... I would leave Meta/Google/Spotify, but... I would stop eating meat, but... I would boycott Amazon, but... Yes, I know LLMs are evil, but... Yes, our current way of living has led to global warming, biodiversity collapse, the rise of fascism, but...

But that just begs the question. Why don’t these people who claim to agree with me, who say they want a better world, and who are somewhere in the middle on the above spectrum believe they can’t influence their neck of the school or murmuration by altering their own trajectory when they have the ability and the means to do so? Even for small things and narrow gains (and even if it means being slightly unpopular for a while?) And how many of these semi-autonomous fish or swallows would it take to meaningfully alter the trajectory of the school or murmuration towards survival instead of instant social gratification ? (Studies seem to indicate that it takes a fairly small percentage).

Meaningfully altering the trajectory wouldn’t even require those poor, poor clueless people™ to summon or rely on any particular kind of rationality!

So it seems to me onus is on you, dear caring and smart social butterflies, to lead the way towards a better world! And I’m sure you could rely on the social outcasts for help too, just as long as you don’t force them to answer the phone.

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the bonk way is my collaborative contribution to The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 3 Sample Challenge

I didn’t know what to do with this edition’s sample pack. I lack the required chops (I am sample-challenged), and I said as much on Mastodon... That’s when C.Circo (@CCirco@ravenation.club) came to the rescue by suggesting we collaborate on a track, and this is the result. The lyrics are an ode to the ethos of #bonkwave, and an expression of my gratitude towards C.Circo, who embodies that ethos.

It was mastered by Ordos Mk.0 (@ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club)

You can hear it alongside a ton of other great #bonkwave sample-challenge tracks on The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 3

You can also find it on my Faircamp site, which has an exhaustive collection of bonkwave-related materiel.

Finally, the bonk way is available on my shiny new hand-crafted music site.

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I was interviewed by Sam (@ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social) about my new album offbeat over on #NHAM.

Read the interview →

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As I wrote on Mastodon in what turned out to be an interminable chronicle of the making of offbeat :

I’ve never released an album. I write and publish individual songs that progressively outline and become part of albums, sometimes jumping around from one album to the next.

But collaborating on projects on the fedi has taught me something I usually lack : patience. Weeks or months often go by between the moment I finish a song and its release.

Which has probably put me in the necessary headspace to think of a whole album before I’ve actually finished any of the songs.

The idea for the album came from the song I wrote for the Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves album back in October 2025. I usually write silly songs, or topical songs about ideas or issues, political or otherwise, and have released rather few personal, inward-looking songs in all my decades of making music. But Downfall was my first, serious, earnest #bonkwave track, which is what got the ball rolling, and so after some hesitation and prodding from early listeners, I included (a remastered version of) Downfall on offbeat.

I’m definitely stepping out of my comfort zone with this album, as all the songs are about me, or say a lot about me in a less roundabout way than usual, and not always in a very flattering light. But hopefully, they will still appeal and speak to people who don’t have my particular brand of oddballness (I just realized I could have called the album oddball instead of offbeat, but I’ll stick to the more musical option...).

And hopefully, it will be an interesting ride for regular folks too.

Musically, the album is quite varied (no two songs are in the same key, and meters vary from three to four to five to six or maybe even 12), even though the songs always somehow end up sounding like my slightly oddball, offbeat pop songs. Probably because I never worry about making them sound like proper pop songs that follow proper pop song conventions. I let the words dictate the melodies, which dictate the harmonic and song structures, and the arrangements are then dictated by a mixture of personal taste, available tools and instruments, degree of (im)patience, number of spoons, musical chops and lack thereof and of course, serendipity. The result is what it is, for better or for worse, although hopefully the former.

In other words, I hope you enjoy the album, which you can listen to and/or download in the usual places:

• My shiny new hand-crafted music site.
• My Faircamp site
• Mirlo
• Bandwagon.fm
• Oh, and as an experiment, I also created a dedicated javascript-free page for the album.

I would like to thank Emma and Sam (@ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social) and a lot of lovely people on the fediverse for their encouragement and support.

Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Ordos Mk.0 (@ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club) for expertly and enthusiastically mastering the album.

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Downfall was written back in October for the Four Seasons of Bonk Wave fall album, which was appropriately released in spring (if you’re in the northern hemisphere like me :)

Downfall also sparked and opens my upcoming album, offbeat. For now, you can hear it alongside a ton of other great #bonkwave tracks on The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 2 (Autumn Waves is actually a triple album!)

You can also find it on my Faircamp site, which has an exhaustive collection of bonkwave-related materiel.

Finally, Downfall is available on my shiny new hand-crafted music site.

And thank you to @ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club for mastering the track!

If you’ll pardon a little music geekery, all these months after having written and recorded the song, I’m still kind of amazed by how moving from D minor to D minor 7 (pretending is phony...) changes the feel of the song. And it’s not just the arrangement or the harmonies. I get the same effect when I’m just strumming an acoustic guitar.

Also, don’t ask me why, but I remember that when I sat down to write the music, my initial idea was to make a song with a lot of silence in it. I mostly failed, but still.

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In the first post in this series, I explained why I used PHP to generate the playlist of my new hand-crafted music site from a large-ish XML file, instead of doing it locally like I used to (damn you Chrome and Firefox for dropping XSLT support!)

Thing is, depending on the speed of your device and your internet connection, it takes a few short seconds for PHP to do it’s thing on the server, before sending the result in one go to your browser.

And this slight delay has been nagging at me since day one. So I’ve been thinking of ways to load the very lightweight page skeleton, and then retrieve the rendered playlist from the server.

And I finally took the time to figure out how to do it, using the javascript Fetch API to fetch the PHP code in a separate file once the skeleton loads. Which meant rethinking a bit of code for everything to keep working like before (basically making sure the data is loaded before calling anything critical).

After ironing out the kinks, I’m pretty sure I have a version that works!

The question now is, do I actually like it better? It does have the following advantages:

• The site loads instantly, even on a slow device.
• There’s a fun little loading animation. I went with an austere design after years of visual excess, so the animation reintroduces a touch of whimsy.
• When you click on a link to an album or a song from somewhere else like here (or your Mastodon feed), you get a bit of visual context before the page scrolls down to the target album or song.

I did a quick poll on Mastodon, which came out in favor of NOT going this route. Still, if you’re reading this, it probably means I decided to roll it out anyway.

It’ll be easy enough to roll back if I change my mind or if it proves to be troublesome or unpopular.

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So, thanks to @limebar@mastodon.social and @scy@chaos.social who implemented this feature for TIBR and TIBtv, I discovered how to send metadata to the system media player when you play my music on my site (using the Media Session API).

What this means is that you can now see the title, artist and artwork in your system player when you play a song on sknob.fr/music.

It could have ended there, but that’s when things got out of hand... In the following image, you’ll notice you can’t skip to the previous or next track.

But it turns out you can handle these actions with the mediaSession API, provided you have your own functions to do the actual work.

This revealed a different paradigm between what I had implemented on the site, and how a system media player works.

• On my site, you could keep skipping tracks, including the last track of an album.
• Whereas the mediaSession API sensibly assumes you have “go to the previous/next track” buttons, and if you are on the first or the last track of a playlist, well you can’t go back or forward, respectively.

Which means that in the end, I had to:

• Rethink my “skip” function as a “next track” function
• Write a “previous track” function
• Add a “previous track” button to my weird UI (and to my keyboard shortcuts (available in “about”)
• Grey out and deactivate the previous and next buttons in my weird UI when there is no previous or next track (which is what took me the longest to figure out; funny how it’s often the simple things that trip you up)
• Add the appropriate calls in the mediaSession function to go to the previous/next track, including code to grey out the previous/next buttons in the system player when there is no previous or next track
• This all seemed to work everywhere it was supposed to, until I noticed that the play/pause button was disabled in the media player on my old iPhone 7! So I had to add the appropriate calls in the mediaSession function to call my play/pause function.

Phew... I told you things got out of hand! All this probably deserves more than a 0.0.1 version bump...

Hopefully, it’s all sorted out now. But before you complain, according to the spec, this is supported pretty much everywhere except in the Android WebView!

Media player on the Mac:

Greyed-out buttons in my UI and in the iPhone 7 media player:

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Hot on the heels of my smash hit Ukulele Bonk video (and my sleeper hit Bercée d’illusions video), I am pleased and proud to present a new, hand-animated video for my 2024 track Driven By Desire about making art in the age of slop machines.

If you’re curious (and since some people asked), here’s how it was made. CW: probably TMI!

Animation

Since the launch of The Indie Beat Television, I thought it would be fun and appropriate to make a crude, hand-animated video for this track about the slopapocalypse. Then version 2.0 of Procreate Dreams, an animation program for iPad based on the acclaimed Procreate drawing app, came out, and I figured I would try that.

I started creating short animations in Procreate Dreams on my iPad mini, usually while sipping coffee in bed in the mornings. As the days rolled by, I settled more or less consciously on a few arbitrary rules for the video:

• I selected a single, silly photo of myself and decided I wouldn’t use any others
• All the drawing animations would be done by hand, one image at a time, the old-fashioned way
• I would only draw using thick, rough, dirty brushes
• Keyframe animations would only be used to animate the photo and the backgrounds (and to cycle through colors)

The cool thing about Procreate Dreams, is that you can layer and group and mix flipbook animations and keyframe animations. And each flipbook animation can have multiple tracks, plus use drawing layers. I only scratched the surface of what this program can do!

It also has a lot of export options, so that simplified things a lot.

Once I had a fairly decent bunch of snippets, I started thinking about how to assemble them.

Final Assembly

Then, as luck would have it, a new version of Final Cut Pro was released, which added beat detection to audio files (in order to be able to snap video clips to the beat), a huge potential time server! But I first had to upgrade my macOS to install the new version, and it turned out the beat detection feature has a nasty crash bug which I had to figure out how to circumvent.

• importing audio snippets back into some Procreate Dreams animations, and adjusting the animations to match the tempo as best as I could
• having to tediously stretch or shorten certain clips a little in FCP to snap them more or less to the bars and beats

I tried to use FCP as little as possible to animate things, even though it has a keyframing system. I ended up doing cut animations when I zoom in or out of a clip, and animating the 2 small flying heads that float up behind the big flying head. I also used a couple of FCP plugins to shake certain clips (the second part of the Love me 2 clip for example).

One thing I did use though, was green-screen keying. I modified certain animations in Procreate Dreams to add a green screen background so I could composite them into the video (the bouncing sound wave in part 2 for example).

Finally, to answer another question I got in the chat when the video premiered on The Indie Beat Television, the assembly phase in FCP (and going back and forth into Procreate Dreams to tweak things) took a couple of days.

I ended up making more animations than I actually used (see the one below), and had to make a few hard choices, but it is precisely the accumulation of countless choices, big and small, conscious and unconscious, logical or arbitrary and driven by desire that is missing in slop, which is one of the many reasons it is so utterly soulless.

Thank…

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