Ronin

After the best part of a year doing a fekkin' office job (though one which was financially rewarding and allowed me to spunk money on various bits of kit like I've got huge dosh-spurting gonads) I felt like I had to prove there was life in the old nag still (that'd be me).

So, I bought a van and with the help of people less clumsy and ignorant than me kitted it out for travelling. Hayley (she's a Daily) took me to Teknivals in Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria plus a mini festie in CZ Republic. I managed to play at least once at each party, though being without any large larging-it Anglo-entourage meant having to stoop so low that I was on the blag for sets, like a fucking commoner.

It has to be said that all the teknivals were a bit limp. Even when there was a few bods in front of a rig they were all dandying around like they were waiting for some actually interesting music to come on that wasn't the usual Mono-Tek. I had to grab a piccie of the only time I saw a rockin dancefloor, in Bulgaria, despite the fact it was only rocking to impress the pissed-off police standing nearby, and because they were playing 80s pop-disco classics!:

FreezeFest in Czech:

When I remembered to splatter me stickers around:

Well, there's nearly two of us:

Aw, fuck me... I had to stop pissing myself, though if I hadn't pulled over I would surely have crashed:

I fucking love my Lemur (not so much that I wish they fit 'an extra port' or anything) coz it's just what I needed to be able to take my new live setup to Japan. I was dreading trying to keep within my poxy 20kg limit on the baggage with a laptop, 3 midi controllers and possibly other gizmos too.

Enter my new best friend. It's a multi-touch controller which you design your own control layouts which then send MIDI or OSC to the program of your choice via an ethernet cable. People literally drool over it whenever I've used it so far though it's about 5 years old - I just didn't ever have the money to get one. Nice what selling your soul in a 9to5 can get for you in exchange!

This clip doesn't really do justice to either the setups I've built or just how intense it can get playing with one... mainly coz it was shot on a stills camera by a rather drunk friend during a particularly dull first minute of a set with zero monitors to listen to what I was doing:

I was initially trying to keep my cool when I bought it in January as if it wasn't working for me I was gonna sell it and cut my losses. Like I said, it works wonders for me though it's bad points are a lack of tactile sumink to grab whilst doing the rave-face and the fact you have to be constantly accurate where you put your fingers. This also means that if you lie it flat on a table you stare down at it the whole time, and it's potentially even more boring for the audience than if I was just staring at me laptop!

I've still got to get round to whittling my Japan pix and edit the rest of the audio recordings. I mostly blame coming back and then going straight to Bloc for a weekend of getting thoroughly trash-ed. There was some good music to be had at Bloc: I finally got round to seeing Tim Exile's new setup... I was in full geek-mode for his set as his technical merit was for superior than the latest style of tunes he's pushing. Beardyman's set was along similar lines to Exile's - lots of improvisation and looping spits into a mic, building layers and then dubbing and twisting it up. Both are technically wicked and put on a real show.

A lot of people had big expectations from Aphex Twin and Hecker but all we got was egos trooping the colour. Mr Twin not only insisted they setup 6 speaker stacks in the main arena, he then forbade the sound engineers from using the panning device used to control the 6 stacks until he had finished his set, two-thirds into the weekender event. Then the music - I gave it about 10 minutes of being in a part of the room which meant just getting bursts of glitchy repeats from the speakers nearest me whilst not being able to hear the rather duff electronica which made up the actual music. I felt like grabbing Selected Ambient Works II and giving it a quick listen to avoid completely writing the man off.

Thankfully there was one excellent bit of lineup programming - sticking the hard-as-nails Dylan and Robyn Chaos on as the last set of the weekend. Meant I got to have a good boogie before I stumbled off to bed.

Well, so far it's been quite interesting, and I've got another 2 weeks to get through before I head back to blighty.
They, quite literally, are bonkers mate. All the various stereotypes and obsessions you might have heard about are very very real. Not that eccentricities and obsessions are a bad thing... though when they involve paying to sleep in a coffin, being frosty to visitors, working far too much, techno-toilets, 24hour porn vending machine shops and consumerism on an absurd level... you could say that they have room for improvement.

The country is beautiful, or at least what I've seen from the few days good weather we've had, and they definitely are efficient in what they do (me-like-efficient) and the range of food available is dazzling. This is some muvvafuffing gourmet shit I'm talking about here. Though it comes with a hefty price tag, so I have tended towards the cheap and nasty option.

On the plus side, there always seems to be an open wi-fi connection to nick, so hence why I am even bothering to post this blither in the first place!

Mata mata!

As a comment to an article on the excellent Create Digital Music (also check out sister site for visualists Create Digital Motion) I thought I'd video a few minutes of my new livesetup in action:

Not only do I dibble-dabble with creative audio and visual output but I'm also a loudmouthed gobshite who has spent years waffling on to all and sundry about the state of music production, live performance, the party/DIY scene, art, politics and possibly some kung-fu films. This has either been to some poor sod over a beer and a loud sound system or via the pages of the Rupture zine which I created back in the year 2000.

I'm never been keen on the idea of blogging, though i do read a few and get something out of them, so I guess I see the point. Whether I keep up the word count on this blog remains to be seen, though I am expecting to do a fair bit of travelling this year which could give me something to report back on.