View of the sunset over Alicante from Santa Barbara Castle.

Experimenting with the Phrygian mode (just happened to end up there). It's supposed to be the mode of tension, foreboding, and... doom.

A winter sunset.

If you need to top up the winter stash, there's a good place to get some extra food right here.

A collaboration between Neema Mjengwa and Husby Konst och Hantverksförening.

It's winter. For sure.

The previous evening was cold, and the night colder. Winter is here!

In the preceding two reviews I mention that Hack Music Theory Book 1. Hack Music Theory Songwriting and Producing, and the Hack Music Theory YouTube channel taught me enough to create my very first tune and thus completing my New Year's resolution to learn to compose music.

Once you have read and understood Hack Music Theory Part 1, you should get this PDF. If the aforementioned book is the best ten dollars a beginning musician can spend, this PDF is easily the next best ten dollars. It basically answered exactly the questions I had about how to compose music.

There are an infinite number of musical compositions, and that's a problem for anyone trying to write one. Specifically, most of them sound really bad. The infinity of choices doesn't just make it hard to evaluate the best path from concept to finished result, it also makes it hard to refine the initial concept into a solid starting position. As Ansel Adams said, there is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

When I started my attempts at making music around new year's I had a question on my mind: what makes certain music sound like that kind of music? Or, to be more specific, what makes Middle-eastern music sound Middle-eastern? Is it the instruments? Is it something else?

I googled, and googled, and found that there was something called a maqam. It's an Arabic extension to the older Persian dastgah system, which, in turn, is best described as a set of musical scales and connections between them. (Similar to the Indian ragas.) Could I make music sound Arabic or Persian by restricting the melody to these scales? I tried a little, but then got sidetracked into making a little application where I could explore these scales.

I made a a sliding drawer for my keyboard, and while at first I thought that I would not further derail myself from actually practicing, you know, making music, a brief experience with LMMS sent me right away doing things other than actually doing music. See, the keyboard is not just a bit in front of my "typing" keyboard and my mouse - it's also offset a bit to the left. This makes it quite a reach to get at the mouse when I needed to do something in LMMS, and of course that's a job for the hobby engineer to solve.

In the service of peace.

A subterranean tomb of the ancient Thracian king Seuthes III.

Two of the graves at St Clara Church have received flowers and candles.

Having grown up with V and Independence Day, The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party, or Buzludzha Monument as it is commonly known, looks like the ruins of a concrete spaceship. Due to the bad shape the building is in, it's not permitted to go inside. But it is imposing enough from the outside.