Nathan Palimpsest by Empathic Window

"Nathan Palimpsest" is a pun on my full government name and
also the fact that palimpsest is a word describing a writing
object, like a slate, that has been written over. The source
material for this 31 and a half minute improvisation session
was an album I put out in 2014 called Reprieve, recorded
under my first musical alias, The Downgrade Complex. The
sound source has been and fed into a resampler, resonator,
wavetable synth and vocoder; parameters for all of these
different processors controlled by a DualShock controller for
the PlayStation 4. The different effect chains are dubbed in
and out with a MIDI mixer.
Just as a slate or tablet is worn down with use and age, so
have I. The past 10 years have not exactly been kind to me,
and can in a lot of ways be summed up with the single word,
"failure". Failure to "stay in school", like I should have done,
after a serious nervous breakdown that better people have
bounced back from; I still haven't after almost a decade. Failure
to be a REAL MAN, and likewise, failure to transition as a
woman after it turns out that looking really gay with long hair
and nail polish turns the world into a PvP server, and my gamer
score is pathetic. Failure to make friends. Failure to keep
friends. Plenty of professional failures. Making above $20,000
from my job was depressingly, a huge milestone for me I only
passed two years ago. Thank you, IRS, for reminding me
recently of this. Finally, definitely failure in making a lasting
impact in my creative endeavours, or at least that's how it feels
sometimes. I'm 28, soon to be 29 in a few months, so at least I
didn't 27 Club myself. Perhaps I was never invited to the club!
Good! It means I can keep making things.
Despite all my whining, I'm pretty good at hanging in there.
Overall, I'm happy to be here. Just as palimpsest implies rubbed
away, it can imply fresh starts from a square one, a tabula rasa,
all that jazz. Hope you like noise. :>

Empathic Window, March 2024

Personal archive & curation entity of Empathic Window (formerly of Downgrade Complex and Training Montage)

Previously Omchaki Recs.

Submissions welcome at valueexchangerecs@gmail.com