Just as the title says, those first 1,000 words of our new manuscript for Unspooled #1 finally came to pass--on Tuesday afternoon, between 11:53 a.m. and 2:48 p.m.--and were e-mailed to my upstate New York aunt after 7:30 that night, well after a text reminder. (Notwithstanding a few copyedits, before and after the submission.) And all it took this time was some doc-page clearance on my new wiki (to save myself a much longer wait)--because progress on my Veritas gift map hadn't been going through for the past several months. (And yes, the spare laptop it's on has all but bricked out storage-wise; that's part of what my new commission line will make up for.)
Those first 1,000 words may constitute the very first scene of that manuscript, but from here on out, we'll do further segments achronologically. (That's a fancy word meaning "out of order timewise".) Initially planned to resume yesterday, but took a break instead. Our helping hands, as with past attempts: The Words of the Day from OED (Oxford English Dictionary), Wordsmith's A.W.A.D., and OneLook. (Not to mention a new one in the mix, Talk to Transformer.) Once we hit 2,500 (by Saturday), time for a long, long-belated New Year's movie marathon--a six-pack all told--almost eleven months late.
As part of the longstanding promise I made to the aunt months ago, the opening extract will only surface online a week after I sent it to her. Which means that you'll get to read it for yourselves at Hive's very own Ink Well (which I found through Hivesearcher yesterday), Publish0x, my Inkbunny account, and the more-or-less active r/furry_wordsmith--starting next Tuesday night. (Forget FurAffinity and DeviantArt.com, whose text-uploading procedures are rather too cumbersome for this contributor's liking.) Said extract will also surface on the Unspooled subportal of my new wiki's Dixwell Dossier after I upgrade to paid hosting with Byet. Upon the final draft, I am furthermore planning to court AO3 (Archive of Our Own) with the complete goods (as an original work); how soon that'll happen is beyond any estimation of mine.
And you know what that means: I'll take what I have over to AbsoluteWrite (AW), NaNoWriMo's forums, and Writer Sanctum in the coming days, starting after Thanksgiving. In the future, I am taking this venture collaborative--just as I always intentioned since 2012. (Once again, I've officially foregone this year's NaNo season.) For now, any fellow authors who are reading this here, wish me luck on the finished product; until then, I leave you with the opening line I've been saving all these months up till now:
"She's turning eleventy."
And if you want to know who, please PM me at reddit.com/u/Routhwick for the answer.
If you thought I'd end this entry right here, you're already mistaken--big time. In other recent project developments and so forth...
Today, my soon-to-be Musescore hub...was ultimately not to be. Their app doesn't let you compose scores, even if you're registered--a big dealbreaker for this Captain, and the reason I'm rescinding my install tomorrow at noon. To make up for it, I decided to try things out at an alternative, Soundslice--but nothing came of that either. (On Android Chrome, at least where I am, you can't select any note or key of your choice, let alone undo. Furthermore, their setup's apparently tailored for standard desktop.) That said, I had no choice but to move back to my old Noteflight account, limited scores or not.
As to why I called today's comeback experiment "Can You Interpolate?" Well...this is gonna take a bit of explaining. Aided by a 32/32 time signature (♩ = 17), I start out with one base note--in this case the personally chosen E major--and let RANDOM.org's Integer Generator do most of the rest of the work. The first bar is just a whole note of E major lasting ~14 seconds; the fun begins on the second, containing two half notes--E major, plus that of another key determined by the integer randomiser. (Correspondence code: 1 = E; 2 = A; 3 = D; 4 = G; 5 = C; 6 = F; 7 = B♭; 8 = E♭; 9 = A♭; 10 = C#; 11 = F#; 12 = B.) Since I'm unable to describe it in words, here's a rundown by beat length and new-note position:Bar 1: 32 (1)
Bar 2: 16 (2)
Bar 3: 8 (2/4)
Bar 4: 4 (2/4/6/8)
Bar 5: 2 (2/4/6/8/10/12/14/16)In short, a mathematically driven approach. I'm a bit proud with what resulted between 12:13 and 1:45 this afternoon, although it could use a little more work. Sue me, but I can finally declare that I can compose when given the time and opportunity. At least that'll save us thousands in licensing fees for our official soundtrack...
Turning to the commission stuff: So far, I've posted my pitch to r/furry (as planned), r/furry_catwalk (with thanks to u/Kobold240), r/artcommissions, and r/commissions, and left a link (plus the reason for my recent dA inactivity) at DeviantArt.com's ArtCommissionArtists group. And so far, no takers for whatever reason--to the point where I've had to reach out to three Inkbunners ("PreciousRat", "ordosan", and "UrbanSaint") and one FurAffinity member I found late this afternoon through Google and IB ("LucaShoal"). That said, about high time too I updated my profiles on both sites with the pitch details in case anyone passes by them sometime. (Swapping the old STM references with Hive ones; you know what happened over there earlier this year.)
Whatever I churn out just for the sake of paying ByetHost will appear on my Inkbunny/Patreon pages in the near future; I meant to reopen the latter once the Veritas rework got off the ground, but now there's another purpose in lieu. This Captain still can't catch a break.As for the Dixwells and company, the account that follows below effectively doubles as a preview of my new creative-venture wiki. Contents taken verbatim, with a few edits, from "Portal:Adanson Jukebox/A Musical Legacy". (Again, PM me for the link till I upgrade.)
"We never strive for less than anything decent."
So goes the motto of Autrison Records, a music label hailing from Giraudel, Dominica and now incorporated as a brand-name management firm in Panama City, Florida. Founded in 2013, Autrison is a spiritual revival of what was once West Indies Records Limited (WIRL). WIRL's regional discography is covered by OtherSounds, a music interview site whose name's French translation "autres sons" gave the company its name. Until 2020, Autrison was a force to be reckoned with in the vinyl revival, priding itself as the Lesser Antilles' only outlet not to venture beyond vinyl singles.
Originally, Autrison used the "A####" catalogue code for their releases; between February and May 2020, they started over with "AN####", or the Autrison New Series. As the COVID-19 pandemic upended their field, they joined forces with their biggest clients--the Adanson Trust--along with their new sales partner Kino Lorber and other firms. This ad hoc joint venture, Kino Lorber Panama City LLC (KLPC), specialises in the production, development, music clearance, and animation of multi-hour visual albums. Each tune in those albums falls under the "AVA####" scheme, while the albums themselves bear the label/production codes of "AVA-4J" and "AVA-RF##".
Most in Autrison's team reunited with their former Adanson clients in late January 2020, just in time for their comeback re.BUILD concert at Panama City's M.B. Miller County Pier. They also allied during a New Year's feast during February and early March, plus edition #9 of their one-night Music Time revues on March 10--both at the Celebration Hall in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. As COVID-19's first wave was approaching, the team planned holding the next three editions of Music Time, their next Easter Ball, and a Record Store Day Panhandle finale by April, en route to the Bahamian leg of re.BUILD--all using buffered seating. Nothing came of those the moment Dr. Anthony Fauci and his maximum mandate of 50 in a crowd made headlines--the likes of which ran contrary to their live-performance commitments. Since April 2020, Adanson has become the Core of the team responsible for Kino Lorber's visual albums, Revolution and Reflections.The Jukebox takes its name from the Adanson premises, a Manse-cum-event facility and nature reserve located uphill in Marigot, Dominica. Adanson in turn is named in honour of the Adansonia grandidieri baobab of Madagascar, a 150-year-old specimen of which towers next to the Manse and is the basis for its official logo. (The two 19th-century botanists immortalised in its species name are Michel Adanson and Alfred Grandidier.)
The Manse is a 95% brick-by-brick replica of The Vault, a bank-turned-reception facility in downtown Tampa, Florida. The Marigot architects responsible for its design saw the building on a drive through the city in the late 1950s, and negotiated with the original bank's proprietors to construct the replica on their home turf. (Elements of Malagasy architecture found their way into the design.) Opening in 1958, it initially served as a wedding hall for its first eight years, before doubling as a community hall in 1966 and transitioning into a discotheque during 1976-1979 and 1982-1983. (The gap in operation resulted from Hurricane David.)
After a visitor suggested Michael Jackson's Thriller to them, Adanson's tenants flipped to top hits whose LPs were donated by locals and guests alike. Times changed along with the hottest genres of the moment: Zouk and Caribbean music hit the team's playlists by the dawn of the 1990s; adult contemporary favourites (from Céline Dion, Michael Bolton, Annie Lennox, and Enya among others) in 1995; bouyon in 1997; country classics in 1999; New Wave picks in 2006; and a handful of Jpop, soukous, and Afrobeat selections in 2010. These genres formed the basis of what Adanson branded as "world contemporary", a format slightly more advanced than what Dominica's national stations (DBS, Kairi FM, and the later Q95) were dishing out.
The Adanson troupe, a revolving door of performers from the village and beyond, only performed during Easter break, summer vacation, and Christmas time. Admissions to the nature reserve helped pay for the upkeep of the facility when school was in session. (Three in five of the troupe's performers were children and teenagers.)
From the very beginning, Adanson operated a backup system comprising twelve gramophone turntables whose playback would compensate for any gaffes or difficulties during sessions. This lasted all the way into the 2010s, even as new and more efficient formats--8-track and cassette, the compact disc, and MP3s--displaced vinyl in the public conscious. As such, Adanson became one of the vinyl revival's first beneficiaries without once knowing it.
Into the early 2010s, Adanson only kept a fraction of their donated records permanently; most of the material on their racks was leased for 1-2 years before their withdrawal, sale, or return to the original donors. All of what they played till then were official, label-sanctioned cuts. This practice wound down soon after they announced a partnership as the first-ever clients of a new Giraudel record outlet, Autrison Records.Autrison's founder, brown-furred rabbit lady Tabitha St. Germain of Giraudel, was previously friends with several former employees of WIRL's Barbados division. WIRL had already gradually disappeared by the turn of the millennium, while the original Jamaican outlet (established by future Jamaican politician Edward Seaga) became Dynamic Sounds in 1969 under new management. Research, recollections, and interviews with the old WIRL team from 2007-2012 led St. Germain to secure a loan for a new label that would effectively fill in the gap WIRL left--complete with legal personnel, a couple of curators, and the Nature Island's first vinyl-pressing plant. The latter dominated the local fanfare, press coverage, and marketing of its May 2013 launch.
To industry observers, Autrison was the Caribbean's answer to Time-Life Music, their catalogue encompassing highlights from hundreds of artists across dozens of genres; replacements being offered after they managed to locate cleaner masters; and having a dedicated legal team at hand. Autrison stood out by issuing and manufacturing nothing but 7"/12" vinyl singles for sale all across the Lesser Antilles--all under official license from the original labels and artists. Autrison was merely a licensee and distributor (sometimes for hire à la film's Freestyle Releasing), and eschewed signing up bands and offering contracts. DJs were their main clients and biggest source of revenue, but several releases went on sale to the general public as well. Suggestions for their catalogue came from many sources: customers, citizens in Roseau and vicinity, local radio, TV commercials, movies on cable, Saturday-morning memories, Inside Edition, Billboard's Hot 100, the UK Singles Chart, the SNEP France archives, even "recently played/searched for" feeds from a couple of discreet sites.
At the end of August 2014, Adanson from the northeast struck a supply deal with Autrison on the west coast, the Marigot elite seeing value in the exclusives they offered--and the rest was history.Reginald Routhwick's Last.fm feed began keeping track of Adanson's exploits on July 11, 2015--back when the Marigot troupe's collection was relatively smaller than it is today. The early logs show a work in progress, the differences between which era and now will be be explored in future. At the end of August, Tropical Storm Erika prematurely put an end to Adanson's summer season; one more get-together was scheduled before then. (The Manse itself did not escape from the damage, but the vinyl collection fared better inside a nearby warehouse used for evacuation.) In response to Erika and several later tragedies worldwide, Adanson initiated a global charity-concert series called re.BUILD. (Their trademark received this styling at the behest of another such institution, Rebuild Dominica.) The bulk of those concerts were held from December 2015 till February 2016, with future legs occurring sporadically until January 2020.
In 2016 and 2017, Adanson held the first two editions of the Easter Ball at their old facility while on break from re.BUILD. Edition #3 has since been called off indefinitely due to the Nicaragua crisis (2018),⊙ the passage of Article 13 in Europe (2019), and COVID-19 (2020-present).
Adanson returned to Dominica in October 2018, just in time for the last days of local Independence season. Starting the following month, four test parties ensued before most of the team left again in March 2019 for Hurricane Michael cleanup duties in the Florida Panhandle. In response to the Article 13 debacle not long after, their affiliates at Autrison vowed to look towards open-source music to complement years of fully copyrighted offerings. Starting on June 28, new management in Marigot treated the villagers to the first such offerings from the catalogue during a grand reopening, with selections from TRG Banks, Lamprey, RXNS, Wordsmith, Kevin MacLeod, Jahzzar, and more.
Summer outing #1 -- and a Fourth of July Gala catering to the islands' U.S.-based diaspora--were both plagued by communication errors and were remounted in August; a second outing occurred days afterward. Meanwhile, Autrison's Giraudel offices had been swamped with hundreds of licensed acetates from all corners of the world since February--to the point where they started holding lotteries in an effort to clear the backlog that had accumulated. This has put pressure on their open-source campaign since then.
Outing #3 was called off due to concerns over potential tropical activity heading Dominica's way. When Adanson returned in September, it was with Music Time, a one-night version of their summer weekend feasts. Eight editions took place until October 8, by which time Independence and election frenzy began to set in. After a November of wedding banquets, election protests in Marigot that December forced Adanson to close for Christmas.
During New Year's 2020, the remainder of Adanson's old guard and most of Autrison's Giraudel staff reunited with their former Marigot friends in time for their comeback re.BUILD performance at M.B. Miller. February and early March brought a New Year's feast and edition #9 of Music Time at Celebration Hall. Once Fauci's crowd limits became headlines, the Nature Islanders were forced to cancel all future engagements of theirs. A list of Upcomers for MT #10 was already in the can, and negotiations with iHeartMedia (the former Clear Channel) to send that next setlist to radio syndication were in the wings.On March 25, talks with iHeart ultimately disintegrated, and the Dominicans--now facing the start of a pandemic--stayed put for a miracle. The following day, that miracle came--in the form of a set of secondhand servers and SSD drives from an anonymous Ohio donor who was apparently a big fan of theirs. Raccoon cousins Sam and Alfred Dixwell--themselves already artistically talented--already saw the potential in these systems. A hand-drawn animated rendition of the setlist was practically their only way out going forward. Production began during April 1-11 with a 15-minute proof of concept made entirely in-house at their Briarwood Apartments Phase II facility. The 92 personnel based therein--78 from Adanson, the rest from Autrison--each worked on 36 or more frames a day. The Nature Island critters shopped it around to several potential suitors before Kino Lorber, a firm better known for DVD reissues and silent-film offerings than music programming, caught wind of it. Seeing promise in the concept--a sort of modern-day Fantasia for the Autrison brand--they immediately struck a distribution deal with the Dominicans on the 15th and greenlit the first four volumes. Kino Lorber effectively took over from Italy's pandemic-stricken Mediaset as their new sales partner. By the time the governments of Dominica and Bay County in Florida provided co-production financing, and animation society ASIFA provided technical and union assistance, a new joint venture--Kino Lorber Panama City LLC (KLPC)--was launched.
In the early stages, KLPC planned to call the series Quarantunes following the lead of several LFM users, but soon found it too contrived and questionable for marketing purposes. Fortunately, someone in the team already brought up "Reflection", the theme from Disney's Mulan. The choice made a lot of sense, given various factors that led to the branding of KLPC's endeavours as Reflections.
Pretty soon, the MT #10 list once reserved for Reflections' début was abandoned in favour of a fresh now pool consisting of more than 200 tunes. At that point, the Briarwood campus knew they couldn't do it by themselves--an 18-hour volume would take them almost a year and a half to complete--and so they enlisted the help of a few dozen overseas outlets for outsourcing. Among the most prominent of these were Production I.G., Sunrise, OLM, and Toei in Japan; Flying Bark (formerly Yoram Gross' studio) in Australia; Les Armateurs in France; and Nelvana and WildBrain Vancouver in Canada. Within the U.S., Baer Animation and William Joyce's Moonbot Studios helped out as well. To save money and time, and to meet a Memorial Day deadline, most of the footage in Volume 1 was entirely rotoscoped on digital equipment; this strategy would be employed for the next three volumes and beyond. (On Wacom tablets, animators traced over live-action scenes frame-by-frame à la Max Fleischer, Ralph Bakshi, or Richard Linklater.)
But a while after that very Memorial Day deadline, protests over the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police began to take root worldwide, putting pressure on the Panhandle team to deliver Volumes 1 and 2 by a new late June date set by Kino Lorber. Things only got more complicated on June 18, once someone in the team reminded them the Fourth of July was only a fortnight away. With that, Briarwood went into break-pace mode for the rest of 2020's first half, and put the main projects on the shelf for the time being. This was also where they called on the help of "homesteaders"--stay-at-home artists and animators receiving their big break in the spotlight--for the first time. Since they were now making an ode to America, their appeal was limited to personnel in all 50 states and D.C.
Kino Lorber eyed a July 4 premiere, but a series of delays stemming from various factors--chief among them Hamilton on Disney+--pushed it to August 8. This allowed the crew to check for animation errors, smoothen out the keyframes, and shell out extra for the six licensed Upcomers in this year's go-round.
What ultimately became Revolution: An Animated Fourth of July premiered on Vimeo Livestream and as a brokered special on select U.S. and Canadian broadcast stations (on August 8). The following morning, its companion soundtrack went on sale at Bandcamp, and an official Internet Archive upload surfaced.
Exactly a week after Revolution, Kino Lorber launched Volume 1 of Reflections--in six parts--across Livestream, IA, Pluto TV, CBS All Access, and various national broadcasters in over 120 countries. Volume 2 premiered in late August; Volume 3 on September 11; and Volume 4 at the start of October. Production imagery is placed in the public domain under CC0 and Kopimi, while the individual segments inherit the license of their original tracks, and the entire volumes are officially copyrighted to Autrison Records, Adanson Trust, and Kino International."We'll Meet Again,
Don't know when,
Don't know where...
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day"
--Vera LynnAs we wind down, our last two in monochrome from the August request line: An uber-realistic Samson Dixwell (by r/Zyrilll)...
...and a cartoonish take on the merchandising mascot by r/candiicom, a.k.a. "AruLove" on DeviantArt.com. (Wish a third one came our way, but nothing's come of that.)
An architectural lament from back in May constitutes our Nature Island Minute this week: Vena's Guest House, once the home of literary legend Jean Rhys and her family followed by a succession of various owners up till the early 1980s, was torn down to make way for a four-storey office complex. Vena's, which stood at the corner of Independence and Cork Streets in Roseau, suffered from damage caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017. (Details in this Repeating Islands story [via Dominica News Online; via Google's image results for Fond Colé, the setting for our aforementioned opening extract].)
And speaking of Nicaragua, it and other Central American countries bore the brunt of back-to-back hurricanes this past week--Eta and Iota--but Adanson's re.BUILD donation line has practically remained open for the broader task at hand. In the Dixwell universe, the double hurricanes disrupted the local production workflow of Reflections' next four volumes, with talks of relocating the payrolled staff to Baja California by December (cf. the Louisiana crew's move to Panama City in October). Nicaragua was where Adanson themselves once planned to hold a re.BUILD edition; details in this entry's footnote.
- Not to mention the Philippines, where re.BUILD once visited in 2015, had their own share of typhoons again recently--among them Vamco/Ulysses.
Last but not least, giving out greetings to @slobberchops and @wannderingsoul (from the recent Trending queue)--and we're not leaving out @bleuxwolf, @ChrisInPhuket, or @marcocasario for all of this either.
And so ends an entry that's just as ambitious as what we put out three months ago--amid my most demanding week yet. In our next entry, favourite gems from the Briarwood Apartments team; next week, porting over what I call the "Lost Five" from Steemit to Hive; and of course, be on the lookout for those first 1,000+ in public (plus any commissions I manage to do). Until then, please take care, stay connected, wipe everything down...and God bless.
All of us, and Mr. Floyd's family.
From the #MarigotNotebook on
⊙ In May 2017, Adanson scheduled a re.BUILD event in Nicaragua and travelled there from their last venue (Minneapolis-St. Paul) shortly after an Ariana Grande concert was bombed in Manchester, England. Worries over security integrity put the event on hold for months, but after fallout from the Nicaragua crisis, Adanson's backers cancelled the performance in September 2018 and instead opted for Panama City in Central America. An impromptu encore at Barbados' Kensington Oval (already visited in December 2015) followed shortly after.
(3067/MN #411)
WOOHOO... what a lot of information you put into this post I like to check on. And d*mn, you are so active all around the internet. Where do you find the time? Must be 24x7 creating content for and managing all these communities. Chapeau!
For some time I'm thinking, I like to try to create some music. But I dont dare, I have to many professional music creators and producers in my circle of friends. That said, your attempt and writing about it, gives me another trigger to really step into this world and try something. Planning some off-work time anyway soon, while miss Covid doesnt let me travel the world, giving me lots of time to dive into this abyss :)
You should've joined me on Google+ back when that was active. (And yes, before you ask, its public closure forced me to continue over at STM in February 2019, then successor Hive a year after.)
Trust me, I've been around in some capacity since joining Wikipedia in early 2005. Discovered it while researching the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami as a college student--never looked back.
Reminds me: I feel like renewing my calling-card links in the next month or two. (I'll try reminding you, too.)
Owww from Google+ to STM...That must have been a interesting jump. Before I started with STM back in 2017, I never was really active on anything around, though having accounts at many social media. HIVE is interesting to me, better content at least :)
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