Heya! We had our prescribed 2 weeks of Spring here in Minnesota and now it's just warm out. Hope things are nicer where you are at!
Had an immensely busy month. My wife had her 3 day art show and then we went on a mini vacation to try to unwind and rest. With that and the allergies kicking in with the warm weather everything was kind of a blur.
Commissions
That being said, it was a productive blur. I finished up the two commissioned projects in the Albums folder:
2025.5 Pocker Playground OST - Two new songs were added to this album
2026.1 Chain of Command OST - A fully new album for a game coming to Steam NextFest on the 15th of this month.
Music
With the chaos of this month, I've fallen behind on my weekly Troubadeck. I do plan on catching up once everything settles down a bit.
Week 18 Distant Skyline - This is a funky song I had a ton of fun putting together.
Week 19 Dark Portents - I had less inspiration on this one so I just went where the chords took me. It definitely has a certain vibe to it.
Hyperfocus!
A lot of my free time has been spent building out a simple homelab. The short version is that it's a small "cloud" server, but it's hosted and maintained in your house. With it, I can stream music that I bought on Bandcamp from the server to my phone, so I can disconnect from Spotify and other streaming services.
It also hosts proper backups of all my files. I realized that the last 30 years of me making things is all scattered on hard drives. Consolidating that down and automating backups has been a very satisfying process.
It's been a project of mine for the past few months, but this month I really dug into a few of the details and trying to sort out. Still a bit to go, but it's been a lot of fun to learn and stake a claim on my own data.
Artifacts
While we had our small vacation a few weeks ago, I dusted off all my recording equipment. It was a lot of fun running around capturing sounds and pictures again. My goal is to write a small 4 or 5 track EP featuring sounds and vibes inspired from the trip we took.
This album art is still a work in progress, but I definitely want to use a picture of this overgrown boot I found in the woods.
Onward!
Things continue to move. Feels like things are going slow, but looking back on the month, a lot happened. Hope you have a good one! Off to donate for the kitties :)
-ben