iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

thank you Éliane Radigue. a towering inspiration in learning how to listen & lifetime creative practice.

b&w photo of Éliane Radigue at the NY Cultural Center in 1971 ( or ‘72? ), installing for the premiere of “Chry-ptus”, standing alone in rows of empty auditorium seating

quote from Éliane Radigue:

“It's the quality of the listening one brings to sound that makes it perceptible; it's the listening that makes it our own, according to the quality of our attention. If you open your body and your mind to listening with an active attitude, you will draw out very specific things. The condition for listening is obviously different according to the point in time, according to one's state of mind.
That's the mirror effect, it's a reflection of one's state of mind in that moment. There exists a means of listening to any sound and making music of it.“

Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

absolutely *essential* book for anyone interested in music and recording. even if you have zero interest in the artists he worked with! i reread it once a year and it never fails to inspire.

a shelf of books in our studio: “The Legendary Joe Meek” by John Repsch, “Just Kids” by Patti Smith, “INTIMATIONS I” by George Middlebrooks, “Are We Still Rolling?” by Phill Brown, “HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH” by Dave Tompkins, and “Analog Days” by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

qotd: what car do you want most, but know would be an absolutely miserable experience to own?

an EMS Synthi 100, a very large and very rare modular synthesizer

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

"you're mixing a song for a band. there is a stick click inside the last drum fill. nobody mentioned it. do you remove the click, or do you leave the performance as it is?"

scene from "Blade Runner" involving the Voight-Kampf test, which is used to detect androids. Harrison Ford in front of a weird camera thing with an eyeball on a monitor behind him.

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

love that one. this one gets dangerously prog as well ( also a favorite )

the cover of JOHN ABERCROMBIE’s ECM album “TIMELESS” with JAN HAMMER and
JACK DE JOHNETTE. cover is a landscape represented through bars of horizontal blue for sky and water with small islands rising above the horizon.

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

also it’s the same size as a reel of 2” in the box, so if you have a bunch of those around it fits in nicely :

the “Recording the Beatles” book on a shelf next to several reels of tape for size reference

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

if you make audio plugins & you add a 'noise' option to make it more 'authentic / analog' & the default setting for this noise option is ANYTHING but 0% / 'off' i will find you and do the Star Trek II ear bugs thing to you

Ceti eel larva crawling across Chekov's face; screenshot from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

"the larvae enters a host's ear and wraps around the cerebral cortex, causing severe pain and making the host highly susceptible to external control"

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

i appreciate the warning, but there's no way I don't want to know EVERYTHING there is to know about the making of this song. no detail is too intricate. I AM THAT AUDIENCE

the "Development" portion of the same wikipedia page, with a warning:

"This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may only interest a particular audience. Please help by spinning off or relocating any relevant information, and removing excessive detail that may be against Wikipedia's inclusion policy."

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

alright, time to brush up on this truly excellent song that i love

screenshot of the wikipedia heading for the Yes song "Owner of a Lonely Heart"

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

completely enthralled by Theodore Gordon’s book “The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America” -especially in resonant in our current man-machine era.

the cover of Theodore Gordon’s book “The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America” ( which depicts an early Buchla modular synthesizer) on a bunch of synthesizer garbage

screenshot from an excerpt from the chapter on Sun Ra:

In this sense, Ra's prototype Minimoog was, like Buchla's Box, Oliveros's patchwork system, and Lucier's experimental instrumental systems, a musical black box. Ra's relationship to this black box was, however, fundamentally different from the relationships between musicians and black boxes discussed in the other four chapters of this book. In those cases, musical black boxes were imagined in some way or another as liberating inner human subjectivity by allowing it to be more immediately expressed, pros-theticizing and enhancing the modalities of musical expression available to the human subject, or otherwise freeing the subject from the confines of inherited models of musicality. Subotnick, Buchla, Oliveros, and Lucier expressed varying degrees of optimism about their black boxes, which they imagined could help them better understand, and potentially change, the fundamental structure of the self. For Ra, however, the opacity of the Mini-moog seemed to help him articulate a radically different proposition about the self as unknowable, immeasurable, and potentially more-than-human or other-than-human. Instead of exploring the black box in order to understand its internal workings and develop plans to change it- turning it into what cybernetician Norbert Wiener called a "white box"— Ra embraced his black box's blackness, with no plans to turn it white.

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

guys literally only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting

the glorious Tex-Mex meal depicted on the inner sleeve of the greatest record of all
time ( ZZ Top’s “Tres Hombres” )

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

"I'm still working off of an old Sony digital 48-track, reel-to-reel"

Lindsay Buckingham in his home studio in front of a Neotek console

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

( trigger warning: ( American ) football )

Bruce Levenstein’s post @brucelevenstein“we are in big trouble.”

with the ironic juxtaposition of a random “What's Hot Classic” post from Seth Walder “WE ARE SO BACK” below it, presumably about an ( American ) football game.

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Using one pic already on your phone, what is the announcement at 2:00 p.m.?

screen shot of reddit post from r/SteelyDan:

r/SteelyDan
u/Medicbagnow

“Royal Scam Remaster is uncomfortable”

I physically cannot listen to The Royal Scam through Apple Music anymore. Everything sounds so weird and I just can't understand why Steely Dan remasters always have their BPM bumped up. This really is criminal

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

sounds like Gemini just got the fourth round of mix revisions

screenshot from an article about how Gemini AI is terrible garbage and hates itself:

"I am a disgrace to my profession," Gemini continued. "I am a disgrace to my family. I am a disgrace to my species. I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes. I am a disgrace to all possible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe."

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Adam Curtis please pivot to music documentaries

picture of Trevor Horn in a car with the caption "TREVOR HORN WAS A MUSIC PRODUCER WHO HAD BOUGHT ONE OF THE FIRST DIGITAL SAMPLERS"

second shot of Trevor Horn in a car with the caption: "IT WAS CALLED A FAIRLIGHT IT COULD SAMPLE AND TRANSFORM ANY NOISE INTO ANYTHING YOU WANTED IT TO BE"

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

finally got around to this one. a very inspiring #CDFriday //

the cd box set of Costin Mirreanu’s “Poly-Art” recordings, blue box on a windowsill

Rear of disc sleeve, bright magenta with green monochromatic photographic sliced diagonally

Rear of box set booklet, some kind of digitally manipulated black and white photograph

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Beau Sorenson @beaunoise.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Erik Satie’s death, “Satieworks” - my EP of synthesizer arrangements of Satie pieces - is now available on streaming websites.* Free / PWYW on BC, of course: beaunoise.bandcamp.com/album/satiew...