RAVE RAVE, TECHNO TECHNO!

Wow, am I ever a slacker! Time flies when you're busy, I guess.

Updates since last posting: the rackmount machine is up and running and being used for shows now. I had to abandon the idea of solid-state drives for the time being, as no matter what I tried, I simply could not get the CF cards to boot. I used Linux tools to copy the partitions over block-for-block, including the boot sectors, I tried using both Grub and LILO to bootstrap... nothing. I suspect it's the card itself; the machine counts its RAM, then goes to a black screen with a flashing cursor, waiting for a bootstrap, and just never goes any further. Oh well, a space 17G hard drive fits in the case nicely - longer term I'm thinking of replacing it with a pair of SATA laptop hard drives in a RAID1.

I've played a few shows since the last posting - the most notable of which were probably the Robot Invasion Skytrain party, the Victoria 'Jungle Room' show, and the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival... here's some details.

The Skytrain party was insane, the idea was basically that since the Skytrain doesn't have a driver, perhaps it'd be nice to throw a party and invite a bunch of robots - there's a review and some great photos here: http://www.goldengod.net/gallery/robots/

The Pickled Beats crew in Victoria invited me over to play a show in the Jungle Room, which was a lot of fun - thanks to Jamie and Lehna for the booking, Walter for the beers and hospitality, and especially thanks again to Lehna, Cim and Sarah for the wicked crepe breakfast in the killer snowstorm! Erin's pics are here:

The BEAF Boogie, thrown by Boogie Universal as a part of the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival, was super-cool as well - I played a set of techno just before KJ Sawka got up and blew me away with his wicked live-drumming drum&bass. The show was held in a radio and electricity museum, tonnes of hands-on stuff, and the space was amazing - not to mention the wicked three screens of visuals from VJ Culture, with full Edirol sponsorship... man, what a rig that guy has! Erin's pics are here: http://www.reelgeek.com/images/photos/2006_12_02_mux_beaf/

Anyway - another big show coming up this weekend, this time in Seattle. Should be a blast, I'm headlining a classic rave for the Inertia Labs crew, who've been throwing wicked events for eight years running. I'll post a review when I'm back. :)

I'm listening to Solvent's disc "Apples and Synthesizers", having seen him play a live-pa at Lotus on Monday night... excellent stuff, fantastic live vocoder work. The name of the album reminds me of a story from the Costa Rica days...

A friend of ours was dating a Tica (Tico/Tica is what CR folks call themselves, kind of like Canadians and 'Canucks'), and was at her house for the first time, meeting the parents and having dinner with them. Something came up in conversation, a comparison of two dissimilar things which I no longer remember, and his opinion was asked; he replied

"Oh, es como... manzana y naranja..." ("Oh, that's like.. apples and oranges")

The family looked a little confused, but then agreed, smiled and moved on. It wasn't until later, when the younger sister asked what he'd meant, that he realized that instead of "naranja", he'd said "merengue", a

style of music and dance popular in South America. Still, the family had processed his message, decided that apples and dancing *are* pretty different things, and understood.

Heh. When I started typing that anecdote, I figured I could bring it 'round to being something deep and meaningful about the techno, but I think it's a little too out there. I'm not going to bother deleting it tho. :)

So the set in Calgary went terribly - three major technical problems; the mix sounded awful on the big system even after trying to tune the rig for a good hour (I *really* need to spend more time tweaking the new rig on a big system). The microphone failed utterly for both songs, and then at the end of the set, halfway through the "big ender" track, the power went out on stage. Just to add insult to injury, the laptop stayed completely stable and all the rest of the gear rebooted! People told me they liked the show, but it really wasn't the show I wanted to put on. I was very disappointed.

Since then I've played another show, booked by the Kcuf Uoy guys for a Lotus Long Weekend show. That went a lot better, a lot of the bigger kinks were hammered out of the rig - it still has a ways to go before I consider it "perfect", but I doubt it'll ever actually get there. :)

Now, I'm back in the studio - well, sort of, I've been going out to a lot of shows and stuff lately, checking out what everyone else is up to, shopping demo CDs and such around trying to drum up some gigs. Last year at this time I had *five* upcoming gigs; this year I have zero. :/

Ok, it's seeming like it'd be a good idea to put up a blog, if just to keep track of post-show thoughts and tech details. I'll allow posting, too. :)

The Lotus Long Weekend show went pretty well, all told, with the usual slough of last-minute mishaps. I played last, with my timeslot being 2:00am-3:00am... but at 1:45, the bartenders told us that we'd have to shut the music down sometime between 2:00am and 2:30am, because they wanted to clear our room out before the other two rooms shut down, to help with the cleanup process. We complained loudly, and they agreed to let us go until 2:30am. Ricardo's set (awesome house) was cut a little short, to give him a 45 min set and I would cut my set down to 30 mins... felt kinda bad for Ricardo, as he didn't hear about it until 10 mins before he'd have to stop, which always sucks. About halfway through my set, I got a note saying the staff really liked the tunes and were willing to go until 2:45am, then someone else told me to go until they shut down the system. ;)

Fuck, I FORGOT TO PLUG IN MY VOCODER.

AGAIN.

Jesus.

I've since wrapped up four 1/4" patch cables together, so that when I go to plug in the red and blue 1/4" cable for the Nord Micro Modular outputs, there's already two cables there for the inputs. This should make it so I don't forget ever again. LAME, LAME, LAME.

Thanks to everyone who came out!