The annual Jamuary — that isn’t a spelling error — event is a month-long, communal effort during which people (try to) commit to recording one piece of music a day. I’ve never made it all the way through the month, but that repeat failure hasn’t kept me from trying my hand at it again this year.
The calendar reads January 2 as I type this, with two more days of holiday break left before the start of the work-year, a year that looks to be plenty packed, between proper work and personal/professional creative efforts. We’ll see where 2026 goes. I don’t think I’ll post these Jamuary pieces here individually, more likely in small batches. Here are the first two days:
▰ 01\31 — “Retail Pneumat”: I’ve been experimenting with taking field recordings and reworking the material by repeating and layering small segments, as well as applying light effects, notably pitch-shifting. That’s what this is. I use various tools. In this case, I did it all just in Audacity. The source audio is something I recorded in an office supply store on my phone. (I also used this as my first track of the year in Weekly Beats, which is sort of like Jamuary, except aimed at one track a week for the year, rather than one track a day for a month.)
▰ 02\31 — “Cashier Seq”: Another go at transforming a field recording. This is based on the same source audio as my first Jamuary track of the year. This time around, I pulled out the ping of the cash register, and then created some melodic loops of it in VCV Rack, using pitch-shifting, and then imported those back into Audacity, where I did some subsequent editing.
▰ “Retail Phase”: And for reference, this is the source audio on which the above two are based. Working with field recordings as source material for musical manipulation and creation is a useful engagement for thinking about everyday sound. To listen closely to such audio is to find patterns both in the recordings and in everyday life. Once you start working, hands-on, with that raw material, you start to more readily hear the music inherent in quotidian experiences. The seeming lines between music and sound, between music and noise, and between sound and noise begin to disappear.