coral
Video, unsanity and probably too much time
2020 is here. That means I am about to turn 30 years old. The decade has been wild and I just took the time to go through a bunch of old media, remembering parts of the decade. One specific part is a series of nonsensical videos that me and Joakim made back in early 2011-2012, featuring me and Joakim brewing coffee in weird locations for no reason other than appreciating the process of brewing coffee. We called this series “Today’s Brewing”.
Most of these videos are set to the soundtrack of Klaus Wunderlich. Having published over a hundred albums during his lifetime, all covers of famous tracks on his Wersi organ this man was an unstoppable organ force. I’ve been fascinated by this man ever since I discovered his music back in 2005, trying to understand what drives a person to develop a style and committing such a long period of time. If you haven’t heard Klaus Wunderlich, imagine a combination between elevator music, organ, simple drum machines and pop covers. I’m saying it again, this man ONLY made covers, a hundred albums of them.
The last episode I edited (up until today) was shot in 2012 up in Umeå, a small city in northern Sweden around 3 in the morning.
We actually shot 3 more episodes after this one but due to a variety of reasons I never got around to editing them. These videos have been interesting, as I’ve struggled over time with if I want to keep these published or not. On one hand, these serve as a historical document of who I was and what me and Joakim enjoyed doing but at the same time they remind me of all the mistakes I’ve done in my life. It’s similar to looking back at old photos of yourself and only remembering the bad parts of that era. The more time passed, the harder it became to re-engage with the material without experiencing that same feeling of regret over the past.
Today I got over that and got to work on editing the 3 remaining episodes and in a way I can see why it took me so long to get to this point. I just uploaded Episode 10 and although the video is terrible in many ways it’s a reminder to myself that one shouldn’t dwell over mistakes, rather remember the highlights that these videos evoke. This is Today’s Brewing - Episode #10
If you enjoyed these, here are links to all episodes: #12, #11, #10, #9, #8, #7, #6, #5 #4, #3, #2, #1
A good continuous music mix needs highs and lows, intense moments as well as calmer parts, all while creating a coherent feeling throughout. There’s an artform in itself to produce a mix good enough to be enjoyed with headphones that isn’t just mashing together styles. A good mix succeeds in conveying a story through music, using the different parts as thematic elements and tools to push and pull on the listeners’ feelings. Good mixes will recontextualize the source material and sometimes completely change both meaning and feeling by surrounding it with other tracks.
Then there’s brilliant mixes that stands above the good ones I just mentioned. These often use unknown material together with known material to create truly unique experiences while listening to them. The thing that sets these apart from good mixes are when you really can’t tell if the music is all from the same album, as the person mixing is doing such a good job at keeping the storyline crisp and texture smooth. Every once in a while an album comes along that is all that.
A night outside in July with friends had me scrolling through my music collection trying to find a longer mixed album that could run for 2 hours while we enjoyed the night. I’ve had this album in the backburner playlist for a long time and since I was pretty drunk it seemed like the obvious album to put on.
As you might have realized from me writing about this album, this is truly a brilliant mix on so many levels. Essentially it’s James Holden showing off a couple of tunes from his label Border Community together with a few other songs but it ends up being less about the showcase and much more about the flows. It doesn’t hurt that these songs are truly good tech house music but the interweaving of these songs is what creates. I didn’t realize how well this is mixed before hearing it that night, when Holden spins a forgotten track from 1997 called “Lifeformation” which blends in perfectly with “Black Acid Pt 1”.
James Holden mixes this seamlessly but the selection is what makes this one stand out. Looking at the tracklist, one might wonder why Holden would play 2 songs from the same single, only different mixes back to back on the first disc. Once they hit it turns out that this is just a better mix of the actual track that should have been the single, rather than the two individual ones. My only criticism about this mix is the terrible cover image which screams 2005 aesthetic, the sole part of this record that feels dated in 2020.
I’ll end this by quoting my RYM review
Late at night.
With four friends in the deep forest of Sweden.
We’ve just spent a week building the fundamentals for a larger party.
The day before people show up.
Something in my body that’s clouding my mind.
The album comes on,
the crisp start, difference it makes has these lush pads that sets the stage.
Mixing Antrieb? Meta.83. The original is 110 BPM and Holden is pitching this one to 128 and it sounds amazing.
A rush of feelings.
Mixed in key, beautiful transitions.
Outhouse, the double, combination, perfection
Hour passes by
Looking at the sky
Hayling, thinking about Need for Speed Underground from 2003
FC Kahuna, what ever happened to them?
The world is pulsating
Lifeformation
People on RYM say that CD2 is the lesser of them two, they have no idea.
Takes you back up
Euphoria
The confusion, standing up? Sitting down? Freezing? Sweating?
Night is pushing on
Fog when i breathe
End Titles rolls on
The album rolls off
I am forever ensnared
Mr Holden, you really did it
This is the essence of mixing
It’s a journey, story, feeling.
Not individual tracks.
I forever wish I could experience this night again
This is probably my most weird blog post yet. I wrote earlier about the rack bar, something I briefly touched upon was the two 56k modems in the rack. To understand why we mounted two US Robotics 3453 about 2 meters from each other at a 90 degree angle in a 42U rack laying down on it’s side we have to jump back to October 2018.
Wberg and Summalajnen visited me in San Francisco and we spent 2 weeks talking about what we wanted to build for next year’s iteration of ANDERSTORPFESTIVALEN. Part of our brainstorming session ended up talking about how ridiculous it was browsing the web using a dialup connection. The slow speed, combined with the sparse amount of information presented using barebones UI, all of this in order to access the exciting world of the early internet. Fighting for your slot on the phone line with family, having the dialup modem hang up due to someone lifting the phone. All of these are problems of the past that we luckily don’t have to experience anymore using the modern Internet. What if we could recreate this experience? Not simulate, recreate. Simulation would be building a “dialup environment” but knowing it wasn’t real would make it a simple gimmick, to get the actual feeling we would have to actually make it “like it used to be.
Could we connect two modems together and build something using these? Bar dashboard? A bar menu? The exact shape was still unknown but we knew that we needed modems in order to see if this idea would even be feasible. We ordered two US Robotics 3453 modems, two relics of the past that can be found on Ebay for about $10 dollars today. The modems are built like tanks (except for the RJ11 port) so you can expect these to work as well today as they did back then. Once the delivery was in, I had a chance to meet up with wberg during an event, where we spent one night connecting these old modems together, hoping they would just call each other out of the box.
Sadly, this was not the case. Digging deeper and using the AT commands for these modems, we issued commands to have these dial up but the modems only complained about no dial tone. Could this check be disabled? The modem surely must have an on-board configuration that allows us to set the parameters of operation? Digging deeper into the S-Registers of the modem (the custom settings for this particular modem) we found some hints that the modems could do this, but nothing was documented to the point where we could understand it out of context.
If you’ve ever tried to search the internet for information about this it’s clear that most of these endeavours stopped being interesting to people once broadband became inexpensive enough to run long distances along with cheap ethernet for home connections. The majority of sites that present information are either forums linking to dead sites or ASCII graphs trying to convey information around this subject. It’s highly frustrating to see how fast information disappears from the internet, almost like tribal knowledge falling out of view. The “hard links” that people used as references are long gone and we are left deciphering clues from russian forum posts. After a while it turns out that the definite source on DIY phone circuits available today is ePanorama.net’s index of “Telephone line audio interface circuits”. I’ve taken the liberty to archive this site locally, if this site ever goes offline I pledge to host this once again in order to help people avoid the same situation that we had to endure to find information.
Back to the modems, it turns out that these modems needs a line current in order to open relays on the modem. Without the modem detecting current, the software just refuses to open the line regardless of what S-Registers we tried. This took us a long time to figure out and after hearing the internal speaker open it’s line for the 200th time without any result we almost gave up. Foxbat helped solder a small circuit to emulate line voltage and to our surprise both modems for the first time started dialing numbers! Sadly, they did not connect to each other. Getting the modems to dial was only a small part of the larger challenge, the actual problem was configuring these modems to talk to each other. Having changed every single parameter in the S-Register didn’t help either as it became very hard to know what settings were set on each modem. To remedy this, we went over every single bitmask in the S-Registers and reconfigured these to be the same at which point the modems finally opened up a connection between each other.
Once the actual modem link finally was alive, some configuration had to be done in order to make sure that the modems communicated back and forth, then figuring out how to actually pipe data over these beasts. For someone that’s born with REST and JSON, it’s almost unthinkable that you can pipe whatever data you want to a serial port without having to think about what the modems do underneath but this really is the case with modems. It’s amazing how simple this actual step was and I could see why people believed newer solutions to be complex. Once we got the hang of the underlying transfer representation, I wrote a quick mockup of how a “menu” reading our Firestore database would look using NodeJS and blessed (yes, I’m linking to neo-blessed because the original project was abandoned).
With this actually working, the question was “What do we do with this shit?”. Since the “terminal bar menu” had been an idea we’ve thrown around for Anderstorpsfestivalen quite a bit over the years it was obvious that we had to do this, but was this the only thing? The experience we tried to replicate was the modems actually being interrupted, so what if we added an actual phone you could lift to break the modems? What if this phone also had someone actually screaming at you through the receiver? All these ideas got thrown around now that we knew that the actual idea was possible.
Rendering the bar menu / dashboard itself without even using X really stroke a chord for us. By making it so simple that it can be streamed like a BBS it can convey a certain visual experience that modern rendering stacks will have a hard time to approximate. Browsers do a tremendous job at rendering fonts and graphics so stepping away from this stack gets us closer to the past. On top of this, combining old rendering technologies with modern realtime backends seemed like an extremely stupid idea which meant it had to be done.
In order to build a bar menu out of this I started to sketch out a simpler “framework” around blessed. Blessed itself has a pretty normal rendering loop but since we wanted to develop isolated “modules” that would fit on a grid, simplifying the developer experience would help iterating on the different parts. Since wberg hadn’t worked with NodeJS at all before, it would also help him if the modules had clear entry and exit points instead of being one large file. I began iterating on this framework in December 2018, rewrote the entire thing in February 2019 once I knew what the pain points were and started onboarding wberg on to writing modules for this. The structure of the framework essentially looked like this:
The framework handled all the backend services (DarkSky, Google Calendar, Firestore, Postgres and SNMP) and exposed these through nice interfaces to every single module. Since Firestore has realtime updates, the framework could help to redraw these modules on updates from Firestore to create a realtime update experience. Each module would make up one distinct “square” of a larger grid. Since there would have to be multiple pages, the system would handle the display loops for each of these modules and placing them on the correct place. The framework then multiplexed the output of these modules onto different targets, such as a telnet server and an SSH server, allowing us to stream the actual data over the modems easily. It also hosted a local rendering pipeline for developing parts. The different exposed hooks for the part is:
Load: This function is run once when the modules is first loaded which allows the module to bind data notifications, hook into firestore notifications and do the first pass of data fetching. The data services is exposed here from the framework which allows the part to store a reference to this object for future invocation.
Hook: This function should replace a “blessed-grid” object class which i implemented that has all the information the system needs to display the part, this includes borders, labels and padding for the part.
Display: Runs every time the module is displayed from being hidden, this is where the module would render the data and modify the render state that the framework holds for the part.
Update: For animations, this function is run every frame as long as the part is displayed and allows the part to modify the render buffer to create simple animations.
After a couple hours spent iterating on these parts with wberg we ended up with these pages:
Common to every “data” page was that the menu to the left always persisted with the other data changing. On this page we had a schedule that read data from Google Calendar, a weather widget I implemented that used the DarkSky API to fetch data and an image to ASCII art renderer which i beat into submission in order to scale images and render them to the different parts.
The second page holds detailed sales statistics from PSQL, showing remaining stock, how many of the different items that had been sold at any given point, top 5 sold items and some beautiful (absolutely terrible) ASCII bars that would render the top sold beers & drinks.
At page 3 we started running out of ideas so we implemented some more data queries from PSQL together with actual network data pulled over SNMP from our network layer, this allowed the people visiting to see the statistics of the festival WIFI in realtime on this dashboard. How did we envision this to look at the actual bar? Since I rendered the bar earlier to visualize the idea it was easy to throw in a screenshot into the rendering to find out.
So the last remaining issue to solve was how to build our circuit in order to get the phone to break the modems and the attached Raspberry Pi to play back a sound into the actual phone. Since the phone we had functioned like a proper telephone and allowed power to flow through the upper conductors on the phone jack (3&4) when the hook was on, using that to detect if the phone was on the hook or not became easy. The last part was figuring out how to interface audio onto an old phone, luckily the page I mentioned earlier had a pretty sketch that made this seem trivial.
Wberg drew a world class professional blueprint of how the electronics was connected when we added in the GPIO detector for the phone.
With all of the outstanding problems solved and with the help of Love Olsson (thanks again for everything Love, without your help this wouldn’t have worked out) there was just a matter of keeping polishing all the rough edges, solve bugs in the dashboard, make the modem software better for the hangup functionality and implement the Python wrapper that controls the sound playback until mid-July 2019.
Time really flies and I was suddenly in Anderstorp. It feels like I skipped almost a year but that’s the amazing part about working on longer projects like these. Since they technically never get finished, the showcase at the festival becomes the actual goalpost. It’s hard to describe the relief I felt once we setup the modems back to back and tested the dashboard onsite, seeing it work over the modems for the first time.
One problem had started to manifest itself that turned out to be harder to deal with onsite, this being the aged RJ11 connectors on the modems that had deteriorated over time. Since our current location here was in the middle of the forest in Sweden, finding new connectors to solder on wasn’t an option. After watching wberg trying to adjust the pins for an hour, decided to just hard solder a 5 meter cable between the modems which in theory would eliminate all these issues (also make the modems permanently connected).
Thankfully this solution worked. Sometimes bruteforce really is the best solution to a problem. Gujjdo worked on mounting these modems to the switches within the racks, as the alignment had to be perfect for the symmetry between both sides of the rack to work.
With all this mounted, we started up the modems and the dashboard and waited for the night to set in order to see it in action.
What about the stupid phone? Not forgotten! In fact we mounted a real telephone jack on the side of the bar for the phone to be plugged into and waited until the second day of the festival at which point we brought this phone up. One last minute addition that we built on-site was that since we already had the audio circuit built, what if we allowed the microphone from the phone to actually be piped out through the large loudspeakers? Like a really bad announcement microphone that you hear at trains, cruise boats or shopping malls where the PSTN system is also an announcement system. Soldering on some connectors to jack this into the mixer was a breeze and the phone got a fair amount of usage as an announcement microphone.
Fozzie captured an audio clip of how bad this actually sounded using a handheld dictaphone. You can really hear the profile of the electret condenser microphone just screaming cruise boat.
In general, I was really happy about how all this eventually came together. It was a long multi month team effort where everyone helped to build the complete idea. It also sort of proved my point that technology put in the right context can be art, allowing people to experience specifically crafted moments through using and observing these contraptions. Being there really conveys outdated 90s technology that had gotten a second life and many people remarked on the memories and feelings that this brought back to them. That in itself was very fulfilling, setting out to communicate a specific feeling and succeeding in using the tools to do just that.
Modems for sure are part of a lost era, representing the heydays of the Internet. Edward Snowden wrote about these days in his book “Permanent Record”.
“Before you recoil, knowing well the toxic madness that infests that hive in our time, understand that for me, when I came to know it, the Internet was a very different thing. It was a friend, and a parent. It was a community without border or limit, one voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and customs. Everyone wore masks, and yet this culture of anonymity-through-polyonymy produced more truth than falsehood, because it was creative and cooperative rather than commercial and competitive. Certainly, there was conflict, but it was outweighed by goodwill and good feelings—the true pioneering spirit.” 1
It’s fair to say that we didn’t completely catch the full representation of what Snowden mentions, although we provided a small glimmer of it. Hopefully our future plans for this will realize the vision further, the true pioneering spirit.
Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record (p. 4). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.↩︎
