My maternal great-grandmother spoke with spirits and it seemed to embarrass my grandmother, but a contemporary view sees that it was one of a few forms of public employment that a woman could offer at that time.
That side of my family are Quakers and it was the most significant religious experience in my upbringing.
One of the aspects of their worship that has influenced me is the idea of being moved by the spirit to speak and, while I haven't been to a Friends' meeting in recent decades, it's something has interested me more and more.
I see a role for reflection and recognising the divine within, but it's something that I mostly nurture in my creative pursuits.
So I had an idea some weeks ago that a Halloween Junto project could be working with the spiritual as well as the physical resonances in a space to investigate whether it's haunted or just musical.
This weekend all my children are at home so I wasn't sure I'd get to record something, but Sunday gave me a couple of opportunities.
The first was an experiment with the FM1 synth that I'd been meaning to use.
I tried a few of the various firmwares, and it really is amazing how this platform has exploded with instruments and interfaces, but the learning curve for some of them led me to pick a simple option.
Purple Monkey is designed for toddlers and doesn't let you play a "wrong" note, so it made it easy to complete something.
It wasn't very satisfying though and I really wanted to use a guitar that I finished building this week.
I have been building lots of guitars and pondering why so many people crave a design that hasn't changed much in decades.
This particular instrument I built with three outputs each going to a different effects chain.
I had been listening to the overhead fan and the ultrasonic cleaner, which seemed to suggest a key.
Then I played around with a riff and improvised a couple of sections based on the glitchy results.