Glacial Communications

I think I may have found the appropriate bag for transporting my desert performance rig (and charging my spare batteries in the process).

I got a Korg AG-10, but it’s not powering up (which disturbs me a little, but it only cost me a little). I’m attempting to troubleshoot for now, but I think I’m back to looking for a cheap QY-10 (it’s familiar to me- I used to have one until I rather stupidly decided to sell it) or QY8.

I’m also busy working on our MIDI-controlled RGBLED light organ. It’s moving along, but the trip to DEMF kind of slowed things down. Things will pick up again either tomorrow or Saturday (likely saturday, since I gotta make a small parts run…)

Since we just got back from the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, we decided to do a show about the history of modern electronic dance music (mostly Detroit Electro/Techno, but some touching on Acid House and various intersections between the two). I was rocking the tables (poorly) with a selection of classic cuts, while Widget was handling the sampleage.

A salute to the lovely and talented hetmana on her birthday.

We played her album “cat dreams”, as well as some of the other material available on her web site. We also did some live overdubbing(with some CS1X, AN200, and various softsynth/effect combinations).

Heck, for a little while there was both acid house and acidHouse going at the same time

Now We Are Ten. – EXTRA SPECIAL GUEST Everyman (from Colorforms, and you know, started Press The Button with me those ten long years ago).

Thematically, it’s a mash of lots of 9/11 and Iraq War material with a very mashed middle eastern music background.

My role was DJ’ing some of the music bed (using djay, my favorite app for that kind of thing). I also got a chance to try out a new version of the Shortwave Emulator (it’ll be available soon) as an effect in djay. Most of my source material came from this online tribute to Muslimgauze.

I’ve revamped the look here from Ice to Nikz Black (and then made some changes over that) – it’s a much cleaner look. Ice was a bit too busy sometimes.

And now, to unveil my new creation – NEOelectro – a community website for the electronic musicians of Northeast Ohio. Right now, it’s what I would consider an “alpha” state, but I would encourage people to check it out and add content!

Playlist

Some of Ike Yard’s A Fact a Second
Some noodling in GarageBand (the start of a new track?)

Some audio files laying around on my hard drive:
PentaTrip
YAD (from the same site as the file above)
Pedalphile (AKA Ryan from Thursday Club) – “I don’t worship Satan but my keyboard does”

Some playing with red curtain Lite (using it as an Acid/Live wannabe?) until it crashed (boo! But that said, I do like it, and will write up a full review soon).

more random stuff (much from 365 days part 2 @ WFMU)

some more GarageBand futzing.

A bit of the new Animals Within Animals album.

More 365 days stuff.

Oh yeah, and I had my scanner running in the background the entire time.

Expect something very special next week.

For whatever reason, I decided that more stuff needs to sound like it’s being played on a shortwave radio. So I whipped up a little AudioUnit (in SonicBirth. It’s pretty simple right now, it offers such great features as band-limiting, static, and carrier noise from someone tuning up on top of your frequency!

Have fun and download it from the Software page.

I decided to whip up a special chiptune today. It’s short and sweet. It’s also my first attempt at making an instrument that uses the pulsetable. The pulse sequence is quite the hit these days. It should go well with the drum loop syntax came up with.

The files:
MP3 format
SID format
GoatTracker .SNG format
GoatTracker .INS format

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The first 90 minutes or so were a recording of the jam session that occurred at Notacon 4. It was very odd, especially since some instruments were not present in the recording (a guitar and bass that had their own amps).

I followed this with a couple of solo tracks I’ve been working on, including my submission to Notacon’s (at least this year) associated demoparty, Blockparty, a track called echoHC.

This was followed by nullsleep’s Depeche Mode Gameboy Megamix.

The last minute or two were an experiment with live performance of chiptune-style music using GoatTracker (my latest musical obsession). Hope it didn’t suck too much.

I promise I’ll catch up the April show descriptions soon. It was a rather busy month (especially leading up to Notacon) and I’ve barely had time to do much else.