Aural, optical, lexical
Transmissions
What went out: records, films, apps and writing. The collaborations that made them are Conspiracies, and where they were played is Sightings.
Aural
Records and songs.
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Singles
2020 to 2025. Eleven singles as Sarth on Noise | Groove, from “Squishy | Bass” to “Softly Questioning (Reprise),” and one as Catfish Calhoun and Friends.
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Beautiful Tornado
2020 to 2021. The podcast with Dom Bouffard: six conversations with musicians and artists.
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I Just Believe in Christmas
2015. A Christmas song sung by Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith, words finished with Jesse Schoen, Virginia Piazza and Doron Lev.
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Reflections, Vol. 1
2015. My first release of improvised duets, subtitled A Noise Akin to a Flight of Deranged Swallows in Combat.
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Transmissions from the Book of Sarth
2013. Four pieces from the music of The Book of Sarth, released as an EP a year after the app.
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Solsbury Hill
2013. Lou Reed’s recording of the Peter Gabriel song for And I’ll Scratch Yours. I produced it and played electronics.
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Awakening (To Blacklist)
2012. A track from The Book of Sarth. Its melody is made out of a recording of 60 cycle hum.
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Lulu
2011. The Lou Reed and Metallica album, grown out of the score Lou Reed and I wrote for Robert Wilson’s Berliner Ensemble production.
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Junior Dad
2011. The closing track of Lulu, nineteen and a half minutes. It began at Lou Reed’s apartment with Rob Wasserman’s bowed electric upright running through Kyma.
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Peggy Sue
2011. Lou Reed’s recording of the Buddy Holly song for Rave On Buddy Holly. I played bass on it, a Moog Little Phatty.
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Power and Serenity
2010. Six pieces of tai chi meditation music composed and performed with Lou Reed for Master Ren Guangyi’s DVD, and only there: no CD was ever released. The first thing we worked on together.
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The Creation of the Universe
2009. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio, live. The two REDCAT nights nearly whole.
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The Family Album
2008. Lucibel Crater, the trio of Leah Coloff, Paul Chuffo and me.
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Miracles
2007. Lucibel Crater’s EP, the year before The Family Album.
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Suspension
2001. Number19, the band I formed in 1999 with Tony Diodore, Leah Coloff and Mark Righter.
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I Before E
2001. Track six of Suspension, with the note I wrote about it in May 2022.
Optical
Films, apps and video.
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The 2026 animated shorts
Seven films made at Third Wall Studio with Doron Lev, Jacob McCoy, Savas and Jonathan Arons, built in Burlap.
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Through the Brambles
2026. A 360° VR film from Third Wall Studio, directed by Jacob McCoy, built inside Burlap from prompted 360° imagery.
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Burlap
A native macOS infinite canvas for visual reference prompting.
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Introspections
2015. Improvised drone pieces on Continuum and Kyma: “For Lovers” with Jacob McCoy, “Sunset Meditation,” a Warper Party clip.
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The Book of Sarth
2012. A graphic novel and concept album built as one iPad app. My first full-length solo release.
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Lou Reed Live at Lollapalooza 2009
2011. An official DVD of the festival set. The credits read
Sarth Calhoun – electronics & continuum.
Lexical
Essays and writing.
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DuckDB, where have you been all my life
Sep 22, 2026. Asking Claude how much an artist spent on a project in Burlap, answered straight from JSON files with DuckDB. Plus the whole append-only pipeline pattern, on a laptop.
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External Tables, Partitions, CTEs, Window Functions, and Partitions
Tutorial series, five parts. Building an append-only data pipeline on external tables, with window functions for the current truth and runtime type checking at the boundary.
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Window functions, the mental model
SQL. Compare them to aggregates, PARTITION BY vs GROUP BY, ROW_NUMBER vs RANK, and why the window grows.
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SQL as the data language
SQL. Views, CTEs, joins, and why everything is a table (which is also not true).
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You might not need Pandas
Essay. Most day to day Pandas work is better done in SQL, with a side by side example, and where Pandas still earns its place.
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Why Python is the default for data work
Essay. It is what people know, plus an ecosystem written in C, C++ and CUDA. What that does and does not tell you about building pipelines.
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Modern Postgres is shockingly capable
Essay. JSONB, horizontal scaling, and the rise and fall of MongoDB.
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Node vs Rails: agnostic vs batteries included
Essay. The case that an agnostic server beats batteries included, and why I am not sure I believe it.
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Visual Reference Prompting
Jul 31, 2026. How original images can hold a subject together, bend a style, and open up stranger places to go next.
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About Awakening (To Blacklist)
Nov 21, 2020. How the track’s melody came out of a recording of 60 cycle hum: a frequency shifter on the Spacebirds preset, wet/dry automation, and a happy accident with two frozen drum tracks. With the audio examples.