catsynth / amanda c

New CatSynth TV! For Halloween, we present the surprising collaboration between Debbie Harry and H.R. Giger on the art and videos for her solo album KooKoo. We also look at Chris Stein's behind-the-scenes book of their collaboration 😻🎹💿💀📺 https://youtu.be/cIVPQmdjCj0

Tuna cleaning himself on a Korg Poly-800 > View this post on Instagram > > A post shared by Anton (@anyrandomhole) Tuna cleans himself while playing a drone on a Korg Poly-800 synthesizer. There is actually a lot of complex variation in here (presumably from the connection to Ableton Live).

CatSynth Video: Tuna cleaning himself on a Korg Poly-800 😹🎹 https://catsynth.com/2025/10/tuna-cleaning-himself-on-a-korg-poly-800/

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

Happy International Cat Day from Sam Sam and Big Merp 😻😻 https://youtube.com/shorts/JHFls-EvGkw?feature=share #CatsOfMastodon

Diagonal fire escapes on the back of an older brick building facing a narrow alley.

An assortment of angles in #Chicago 📷

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

A bit of time this evening to focus on album music 🎶🎹🎛️🎚️

Alt text: "Yo no diría que el país está bien."

Duloingo Spanish lesson. Text reads "Yo no diría que el país está bien.", i.e., "I wouldn't say that the country is doing well."

Well now, this seems like the understatement of the century...

Video is live now! https://youtu.be/yKpmBP5ZKiY?si=wrgv1Xf_jO32gznk

Our interview with JG Thirlwell about his Silver Mantis project is now live! 😻🎹📺 https://youtu.be/yKpmBP5ZKiY?si=btkkPkypOvcdALqU

Black and white cat looking at scattered audio and USB cables on the ground

I wonder what these cables do? 😸 #CatsOfMastodon

Sitting by the window with my coffee and the early morning sunlight starts to climb above the buildings. Making my list for today. It is an ambient list. ☕️📝☀️

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

Portrait of JG Thirlwell with a dark close-up of the inside of a grand piano with preparations (screws, etc) on and between the strings.

I'm excited to present polymath composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus, Manorexia, Xordox, Archer, Venture Brothers) discussing his live multi-channel, multi-media piece Silver Mantis. The video drops tomorrow on CatSynth TV at 9AM US Pacific Time. 😻🎹📺
https://youtube.com/CatSynthTV

Mr. Bean on the piano The handsome Mr. Bean is exploring his household camouflage options and has found the purrfect spot on the black piano. From Laura L on BlueSky, who adds: > He was rescued from a parking lot at 2 weeks old. He is now 2 years [old], and sometimes steps in to help me teach piano students. Rescue stories like this always warm our hearts at CatSynth.

CatSynth Pic: Mr. Bean on the Piano 🐈‍⬛🎹💕 https://catsynth.com/2025/10/mr-bean-on-the-piano/ #CatsOfMastodon

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

The splendid drowsiness that accompanies a rainy afternoon 🌧️

Sunday Newsletter: Halloween III In the spirit of the season, we have been re-watching the original _Halloween_ series of movies. And in some ways, the most intriguing one is _Halloween III_. It’s an odd one as it has nothing to do with the first two, or the Michael Meyers saga at all. It’s a standalone story that follows the uncovering of a rather ominous plot by a successful Halloween mask company. In some ways, the movie is a bit of mess, particularly when it comes to characters and storyline. But putting aside those, it is full of some interesting sound an imagery. This is no more so than in the opening credits. Rather than the iconic 5/4 theme from the first two movies, we open with some low analog-synth tones, and simple pixelated computer graphics that is gradually revealed to be a Jack-o-Lantern. I was curious how these were done. The synthesizer sounded like a Prophet; the graphics were a mystery. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to find out that John Carpenter indeed used a Prophet 10 as the main synth, along with a Prophet 5, a LinnDrum, and an ARP analog sequencer. I don’t have a Prophet 10 handy. Very few people do. It was a massive synth that was essentially two Prophet 5 engines in a large package with two keyboard manuals and a wooden finish. I did have the opportunity to play one once at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum. At CatSynth HQ, I have Cherry Audio’s P-10, a great re-creation of the original. We did a review for CatSynth TV back when it came out. It came with two “Carpenter” presets. One was a beautiful, undulating drone with noise and filter details. The other combined a bass synth with a minor arpeggios. Of course, these referenced not only the Halloween series but Carpenter’s other films of the era, like _The Thing_. I had quite a bit of fun improvising with these after watching the film. I recorded a bit of what I did, which you can see and hear in this short. Finding out about the computer graphics required a bit more digging. I did find this interview on the website The Art of the Title with designer John Walsh. “The _Halloween III_ animation was fairly simple. I enlarged the logo that production used for their TV spots and had it printed out on a grid. That made it simple to manually generate X and Y data for the logo. The program that animated the reveal of the scan lines was written in Fortran. I could control the speed of the lines as they animated onto the screen, and did several detail animations of different parts of the logo, as well as the entire pumpkin.” The program was run on Cromemco Z-2D computer, an early microcomputer that used a Zilog Z80 processor and S100 bus, and ran the CP/M operating system. In many ways, it was similar to the Zenith Z89 that I used as a kid in the early 80s, but Walsh’s Z-2D apparently supported color graphics. I thought it was interesting that he used Fortran rather than BASIC, but either was a perfectly good option for CP/M systems of the time. It would be interesting to recreate this on an emulator, though to get the true effect, one would need to run it with a big old CRT monitor and film it. In addition to the opening credits, there was the sinister company town of Santa Mira, a strong visual element, and a character in its own right. Although the town is fictional it was sound in the very real tiny town Loleta, California, just south of Eureka. [_NoeHill, CC BY-SA 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons_] I will have to stop there next time I head up to Eureka and the north coast.

New Sunday Newsletter: (Visuals of) Halloween III 🎃 https://catsynth.com/2025/10/sunday-newsletter-halloween-iii/

New Short! "Carpenter Soundscapes" improv for Cherry Audio P-10 😻🎹🎃📺

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

JG Thirlwell performing on a Moog Theremini in front of a projected abstract video.

Amazing performance by JG Thirlwell tonight at the Center for New Music of his immersive electro-acoustic composition Silver Mantis. He played Moog Theremini (pictured here), prepared piano, and sundry electronics.

New #Caturday short with Sam Sam purring, and a teeny bit of music 😻📺 https://youtube.com/shorts/zx6MbXrltdQ?feature=share

I did the best I could today. I will do the best I can again tomorrow.

If I could design a capital city, it would probably look a lot like Brasilia 😺

@acb yeah, Stalinist is pretty bad, too. But Yugoslava had a unique modernist/brutalist style, and East Germany had interesting places like Alexanderplatz.

Why do authoritarians, and right-wing authoritarians in particular, love neo-classical architecture so much? It quickly gets tacky and boring.

New Daily Disc! Music from Mission Impossible (Original Series), by Lalo Schifrin 😻💿📺 https://youtube.com/shorts/wFdmaeC6KjI?feature=share

Ringo and Roland Juno D Ringo poses amidst the creative chaos. We see a Roland Juno-D synthesizer, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm Pedal, a Zoom B3 bass effects pedal, pains, a bowl of painted eggs (or are they painted egg-shaped rocks?). From our good friend Damien Olsen in New York. You can see Ringo’s previous appearances via his tag.

CatSynth Pic: Ringo and Roland Juno- D, Hologram Electronics, Zoom, and more 😻🎹 https://catsynth.com/2025/10/ringo-and-roland-juno-d/ #CatsOfMastodon

Hoy hice lo mejor que pude. Mañana haré lo mejor que pueda otra vez.