Lab

Field Four: why I made a digital four-track tape recorder

Field Four is a four track tape recorder for Windows. This is the story of why I made it – from the TASCAM Porta 07 that I used to record songs in the late nineties, through my dislike for digital DAWs, and finally to my reasons for making the thing I always wanted: an analogue-style digital 4-track tape recorder. I also explain some of the choices I made in creating Field Four, and discuss what it means to be afflicted by the filmic gaze.

A casuarina tree grows on the shore of a Cambodian beach.

Reading Alex Garland’s The Beach on the Gulf of Thailand

Alex Garland’s The Beach is a novel about the backpacker’s desire to be authentic, to be something different from the average tourist.

The tragedy of Oh Mi-Oh and Ju Ri-Hyeon.

My adventures in attempting to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet with Korean middle school kids at my university’s Winter English Camp.

A hand-drawn apple with handwritten notes

Apple, or, Slight rebellion off 근거리

A long story about an extended attempt to avoid desk-warming, an apple, and a beautiful Korean art-student.

Working in a call centre.

In 2009 I made a resolution to change my life. A few months later, this resolution would take me to Korea. In the meantime, it led me to getting a job in a call centre, something I was terribly unsuited for. It was a brief if memorable experience that gave me a friend who I still communicate with twenty years later, and a good essay.

The Third Person.

At around two in the afternoon, on Christmas Eve, it began to rain, and he decided the Christmas rush had ended. He didn’t so much close the store as abandon it – half the lighbulbs blown, boxes of empty and half-empty books everywhere, a back room full of boxes of catalogued books that he had […]