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Rosebud 🥀
Most Monday mornings I swap my digital audio-visual tools for something much more analogue: trowels, loppers, and secateurs. Mondays are when I join a volunteer gardening team at a public garden in Nottingham to keep weeds at bay and roses pruned. It's a welcome break from screens, and our work is rewarded with coffee and cake at the end of the session. 🤗 Sometimes that back-to-nature time loops back into the digital world, though ... What else do you do with a bucket full
halfunusual
Jul 242 min read


Lightbulb Moment
We hardly notice electric light anymore. A flick of a switch, a glowing screen, headlights passing in the rain. Electricity has become so ordinary that it’s almost invisible. Yet every light bulb is a tiny performance – energy flowing, resistance building, a filament vibrating with heat until it glows. This week’s Disquiet Junto challenge began with exactly that: a recording of a light bulb itself. Not a synthesiser imitating electricity, but the microscopic sounds produced a
halfunusual
Jul 231 min read


Creative Fusion
There’s a persistent question surrounding AI-generated imagery: Did the machine really create anything? It’s an interesting question, but I suspect not the most interesting one. For this latest experiment I started with just two images. One is almost absurdly simple: a handful of black blobs on a white background. The other is a dramatic, adjusted photograph of a tree. Those two images become the only visual ingredients fed into the system. Everything else is exploration. By
halfunusual
Jul 222 min read


Art Practice
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI in art of late. I'm not sure the question is whether or not a machine can make pictures. We know it can; we see them everyday. Maybe the more interesting, or perhaps fruitful, question is whether a human can build a creative process that genuinely surprises them. That’s where things become really fascinating. The latest halF unusuaL YouTube short is the result of many hours experimenting, masking, editing, discarding ideas and stitching toget
halfunusual
Jul 211 min read


Supporting Bandcamp
As you're no doubt aware, you have to play a track on endless repeat on Spotify for something silly like 4 years to benefit the artist as much as buying the track from Bandcamp! Just saying 😇 A three-track EP of the little trio we released over the last 3 Fridays, gaps, has just dropped on Bandcamp ... 🙏❤️
halfunusual
Jul 191 min read


gapybara is out now! 🦫✨
Apparently we managed to release it exactly one week after International Capybara Day. We’d love to say that was carefully planned … but discovering we’d missed it by seven days somehow feels entirely appropriate. This is the final release in our little “gap” trilogy. The same lyrics appear once again, but this time they’ve been transformed into something altogether stranger: squeaky chipmunk-style vocals, bouncing pop energy, a chorus of tiny mice and, of course, an unhealth
halfunusual
Jul 171 min read


gapybara! 🐭
Some ideas arrive with great seriousness. But there are others that arrive because someone says ‘gapybara’ out loud. This week’s Friday release is the final piece in our little exploration of the gaps. The same lyrics have now wandered through three completely different musical landscapes, each revealing something slightly different about the spaces between things. This time they arrive wearing oversized front teeth. gapybara is an upbeat, slightly unhinged slice of experimen
halfunusual
Jul 141 min read


| | between the gaps | |
At times the most interesting things aren't the objects themselves but the spaces that allow them to exist. A melody is carried as much by silence as by notes. A conversation lives in the pauses between words. Even a jazz pianist spends as much time deciding not to play as choosing the next note. between the gaps grew from that thought. Musically it's built around a restless piano, steady jazz drums and a beautifully understated vocal. The accompanying video follows the same
halfunusual
Jul 101 min read


The Third Nature and Human Glitch
Between Screen and Stage The upcoming collaboration with Bodies in Flight for their show, Third Nature, has pushed my creative practice into a freshly liminal space. For years, I have been exploring the 'dance' between human intent and machine logic — a process of dependent arising where the most compelling results occur not when we master the technology, but when we allow it to 'glitch' in ways we couldn't predict, or (usually) want. I worked with Bodies in Flight on three
halfunusual
Jul 82 min read


Jamune Celebration 🎉
With all the excitement of recent and upcoming releases, complete with some pretty unusuaL visuals, it would be easy to miss today’s quiet landing of a video celebrating Jamune … even though Jamune itself finished only just over a week ago! The upbeat grewve provides the soundtrack to an audio-reactive skip through the visuals of the full 31-day compilation. The visual mash-up is created in TouchDesigner, a constantly morphing multi-box thing I’ve been working on recently - a
halfunusual
Jul 82 min read


between the gaps
Last week’s release was the line. This Friday, the same words return — but they inhabit a very different place. between the gaps takes the lyric somewhere altogether different: piano, jazz, space, and a singer that seems to drift between presence and absence. That idea found its way into the video too. Sometimes the singer is there. Sometimes only the outline where she should be. Sometimes the two almost meet. I’m becoming fascinated by what happens when the words stay the sa
halfunusual
Jul 71 min read


silver line-ing 🩶
the line is (finally) out! 🎉 sometimes you follow a line. sometimes a line follows you. what started as a mark, a boundary, a distinction … can become a path. or a signal, a noise. or a question. the line has been unfolding for a while now — across sketches, sounds, symbols, and strange recognitions ... halF of an idea ... now it’s finally out in the world. if you’re curious, take a look. listen closely. there may be more in it than first appears. i’d love to know what lands
halfunusual
Jul 41 min read


Wow! That Was Quick! 😮
It's amazing that Jamune is over already! It's been intense, but much fun ... 🎡 For anyone new to halF unusuaL, Jamune has been a month-long, YouTube post-every-day challenge ... following on from the month-long, post-every-day challenge of A-S-May-R, which was over on the Paintbrush ASMR YouTube channel. Every day of ASMayR was taken up, day-by-day, and developed into something more 'musical' (or, at least, sonic beyond more straightforward ASMR) in Jamune - which actually
halfunusual
Jul 22 min read


Whose Line Is It Anyway?
There’s a point where an idea stops being something you are making and starts becoming something you are listening to. the line began in a simple place — a visual motif from a new logo. An eyes/ears figure. Something halF-symbol, halF-presence … err, halF unusuaL. At first it was just an image: a way of suggesting perception, attention, awareness. They’re also my eye and ears - in all the wrong places - that puts me more personally on the line … But it didn’t stay still as an
halfunusual
Jul 12 min read


AI Should Never Be Allowed to Read Poetry
That was the joke. After No Man Is An AI-land — an experiment feeding John Donne’s words into an AI voice, AI-generated imagery, and AI-generated music — a friend offered the perfect response: “Great graphics, but AI should never be allowed to read poetry.” Which, naturally, felt less like criticism and more like an instruction. So I fed that back in. This time the poem itself was written by AI: AI Should Never Be Allowed to Read Poetry And then the same process repeated. The
halfunusual
Jun 292 min read


You’ve seen the fragments. Here’s the whole thing.
Grewve is out now. The track, the video, the finished loop. If you’ve followed the build-up this week, this is where it all lands. Or doesn’t. Listen / watch.
halfunusual
Jun 261 min read


The Fount of All Glitchness! ⛲️⚡️
Patreon file drop notice! Free downloads … Help yourself! 🤗 What happens if you take the sound of a gushing fountain … and then slice and filter that sound in a virtual modular synth ... then use THAT sound to create a twitching video of the original fountain? This little experiment connects two playful workflows: ⛲️ Part 1: Generative cutting and filtering in VCV Rack ⛲️ Part 2: An audio-reactive animated fountain in TouchDesigner If you watch the YT video: You can see the
halfunusual
Jun 251 min read


Stepping in the Same Loop Twice?
There’s something really deceptive about loops. They promise repetition. Return. The same thing, over and over. Guaranteed. But of course, the loop just doesn’t deliver. The trouble is, nothing repeats. Not exactly, anyway. Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. Which is awkward news for anyone making loop-based music. There’s a Jamune experience, released today; hyper-minimal, a clear demonstration of what I’m talking about … All it is is an increasingly l
halfunusual
Jun 242 min read


new grewve
new unusuaL streaming release: grewve drops this Friday, 26 June 2026 pre-save now on your favourite service ... #newrelease #grewve #halFunusuaL #unusualaural
halfunusual
Jun 231 min read


The Lakeside Barber
It started, as these things do, with … a capybara. It actually wasn’t the animal at first, although maybe that’s unavoidable now. It was more the word itself. Capybara. What a strange sound. Heavy, rounded, slightly lumpy. The sort of word that feels like it belongs to something larger than itself. I’ve been orbiting it for a while without really noticing. I first met the word a while back. Capybara was also the name of an extraordinary digital audio system in the nineties —
halfunusual
Jun 223 min read
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