Graham Dunning

Over the last couple of years I’ve made various attempts at reducing my tendency towards doomscrolling. I left both facebook and twitter in part due to the negative impact it had on my wellbeing, and the inability to mitigate the constant feed of frustrating and upsetting political articles. At one point I switched to reading actual news sites instead, without feeling any better. 

Looking for something less miserable to read in moments of downtime I initially tried the reddit app and a joined a few subreddits related to my interests – starting quite broadly with music, climbing, specific TV  programmes and computer games, and fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. I quickly tired of the (often quite depressing) chat on the techno and electronic music production boards. Outside of my old twitter echochamber – musicians and producers I liked and mostly knew, quite a diverse bunch and generally pretty right on – the wider electronic music community on reddit was blokey, entitled and often argumentative. Bouldering subreddits were usually too technical and dry. There are only so many Half-Life memes I want to read on a daily basis. So I eventually gravitated towards the D&D boards, finally narrowing down to one of the DM forums. A good balance of in-depth answers to obscure questions about lore; agony aunt style threads on problem players and how to deal with out-of-game social interactions; and useful tips for running a game. As with many things on the internet nowadays, and this may be a topic I return to, enshittificaion reared its ugly head. Changes to the back end of reddit meant moderators’ jobs would become exponentially more time consuming, and various boards were set to private, essentially going  on strike to protest the profit-driven changes negatively affecting the communities.

I spent some time working though daily crosswords, and had a bit of a self improvement drive on duolingo, before deciding to try an older approach to sourcing bite-sized reading material, the RSS feed. I use an Android app called Feeder which is simple and handy, allowing copy-pasting of a URL to look up a feed to add. It took me a while to find blogs I wanted to follow – and I had lots of help from folks on Mastodon with some great recommendations. I’m finally at the stage I have an app I can open to read stuff I’m interested in, that’s not trying to sell me anything or start an argument. Reading blogs about people’s niche interests is incredibly satisfying. This morning in the dentist’s waiting room I learned all about the workings of a mechanical aircraft computer. The blogosphere feels like a wholesome space to visit in periods of downtime, to me. I find people’s enthusiastic posts encouraging. I like having a feed of bits of info about new weird music releases or new synth modules and software. 

I’m currently in a position where I’m doing a lot more writing than I’ve probably ever done. I’m in the second year of a PhD, which is a practice-research project looking at the affordances of my extended turntable system. There’s lots of practical work, spending time building new interfaces and soundsources, making and recording music, collaborating with other artists, and performing live. But there’s a lot of writing too. I’m keeping notes relating to most of my activities in regular reflective journals. Writing notes and ideas as they occur to me. Paraphrasing other writers’ concepts to help me make sense of them. Plus the various administrative documents, literature reviews and reports that the study requires. So far in 2024 I feel as though I’ve spent most of my time writing, having finished co-writing an article for a journal, completed a paper for a conference and written another abstract. The process is new to me, and I’ve found it quite difficult – in part due to feeling quite unconfident, due to my inexperience.

So here we are, at my decision to begin blogging. I’m posting for these reasons: to contribute something back to the community that is the blogosphere, and to give myself more practice writing and putting it out there. I’ve been inspired by recent posts on blissblog and disquiet and it feels like now is as good a time as any.

Previously I used the feed on my website for news updates, posting for every single gig, release, radio broadcast and mor. There were nearly 500 posts on here, mostly of a couple of lines of info and a link. I stopped doing that during the Covid pandemic, and in setting up this blog I’ve got rid of those articles. The past posts I have kept are ones where I’ve written a bit more, both selections of music for quest mixes: a podcast about turntablism and a radio show about mechanical music. Going forward I’m aiming to post a couple of times a week with thoughts related to sound and music, things I’m working on in the studio, recommendations for books, podcasts and music and whatever else might be seem relevant. It’s likely this blog will take a while to settle into its groove, but I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.