I hereby introduce a new internet acronym: CWT. Crying While Typing. It hurts my heart so much to limit this list of albums I experienced in 2006. There were a lot to pick from, so I ended up selecting albums that met two criteria: I really liked them AND I really listened a lot to them. There were many albums I liked but didn"t end up listening to. I also must point out that some of these releases are late 2005 and didn"t reach my lab until 2006, because the caravans doesn"t go during the winter.

This year"s list sees some old timers making a comeback, some shocking alternatives and some new kids on the block. Where possible, I link to Bleep.com for instant mp3 preview/purchase.

2006 is approaching its termination pretty fast, and if I am to fulfill my own ambition of presenting narcissistic lists of the best within major medias, I must accelerate and stop blabbering so much around each. Here goes, the best 5 films i experienced this year.

Links to IMDB page for the films.

I finally got myself an American iTunes account, and got me some TV show goodies, amongst others I picked up old Lost In Space episodes. And then I found the best TV series I have seen in ages, probably since Twin Peaks. It"s better than Carnivale. Heroes.

Wether you are red, blue, green, believe in something or not, reading this or not. Pulp holiday wishes.

Sorry for the bad sound quality. Everything is gonna be better in Web 3.0.

Muhahaha. If there is one thing Michael Bay is good at, it"s making destruction cinematically beautiful.

This could be sweet.

I am currently swamped in work, and xmas is looming like a dark cloud before the storm, but I"m having a late night break and a beer and here goes the list of the 5 most awesomest games I played this year. Again, as always, many of the games were not released in 2006, some are as old as 2004, but I finally found time to play them this year. And that is what matters.

Games link to their page on Gamespot.

If there is a buzzword that captures the zeitgeist of music right now, it must be "Music 2.0". I think it"s a bit daft, the whole Web 2.0 thing is a bit too buzzwordish, but it also summarizes the concept really well. And the "2.0" term is slowly growing into a meaningful meme more than a marketing buzz.

I think music right now is on the verge of a paradigm shift. Perhaps not even on the verge, we could be right in the middle of it. There is so much going on, so much potential, it is really hard to tell where we are heading. But one thing is for sure: Everyone involved; fans, artists, clubs, labels, record shops and agents will see changes to their world, both good and bad.

Jason Herskowitz has created the Music 2.0 wiki. It was just born, and doesn"t contain much yet. But it will be interesting to watch it evolve, and the sum of everything within, could give a glimpse into the future of music. Now please excuse me, I have to go create the music of that future.

If you are one of those heathens that celebrate the capitalist-religious mashup festivity called christmas, this could make a fantastic gift. A pulp book cover for your iPod! Complete with library card.

If you also give an iPod inside, preferably filled with excellent pulp christmas music, I am sure the receiver will announce you the best giver ever. I know I would.

For the robots and their revolution, this technological breakthru is definitely a step (or four) in the right direction towards total world domination and human race wipeout.

But what is most scary in this clip, is the music that will accompany the apocalypse. The horror!

Update Dec 16th: Finished the post, moved to top.

First out in the "Most Memorable 2006" lists is my most dearest. The books. They are often monochrome, with hardcoded resolution and font, no cut copy paste or search, and when traveling in groups they are heavy. But even thou the technology is at least more than 100 years old, fictional literature has been my best friend since before I could read. I loved books before I knew there were worlds within.

I won"t http you to Wikipedia for the books, since they have full synopsis and give it all away. In full consumer-capitalist-christmas-compliance I will link them to Amazon for your instant purchase bling-bling relief. And since I have no sense of time just sense of quality, the list is not of books released in 2006, but books *I* read in 2006. Which is what matters.

Here are the 5 most memorable books for 2006.

• Like any good madman, nerd, and slightly dissocial figure I love lists.
  • And even more I love organized lists.
• I have lists for everything, sortable in every conceivable manner.
• In fact, if trackers hadn"t been a running lists of notes, I might not have been so intrigued by music, but rather ended up as a trainspotter.

• And now it"s that time of the year.
• No, not xmas, god forbid.
• Xmas is the runner up on my worst-holiday-list.

• It is the end of the year and high time for annual lists.
• Time to organize the most memorable and honorable of 2006.
• The intertubes is flooded with these now.
• A great and clever disguise of narcissism by nerdery.
• So without any further ado, let us list.

dsphotography.com has a noob photoshop tutorial on how to remove tourists from pictures. That"s fine, but:

The question springs to mind; does anyone know of a technology to re-apply the shopped picture back into reality? I detest tourism.

I just spent a whole day, that means 16 working hours uploading tracks, fumbling with CSS, battling that disaster-area and hellhole of design, usability and superficiality called MySpace. And it still looks like crap. The most horrible element is that Windows 3.11 media player. AFAIK it"s un-CSSable.

I"m not actively pursuing a MySpace career, I don"t think MySpace is gonna be around forever. So I think I"m better off pouring most of my http-energy into my own websites, like here. I remember mp3.com, just like MySpace, it was a good thing at the time, but eventually the world moved on. We are now, gentlemen, at the so-called "web 2.0" and I think MySpace was one of the earliest 2.0 phenomena. Time has not fared well with it, especially graphically. And it"s owned by a dubious character.

But that doesn"t mean I"m totally ignoring it either. Ach nein! What is bad is also good. The community is vast, there is a lot of potential biz for artists, labels, clubs and agents. It is, by any definition, the worlds largest social network.

So you can rest assure I"m working day and night to sculpt and finetune an overpimped slowloading blinking drop-shadowed rainbow-gradient background youtubical slideshow infected collage-feist of friends, flyer-comments, and favorite pet animal sodapop commercials. All the lemmings are going to love me and I don"t have to do anything MySpace will make me rich and famous and cool and Tom will beg me to be his friend for REAL this time.

Late as usual, since even your granduncle blogged about this earlier this week. But this one is too good to pass up, even if it"s been slouching in the inbox for a few days. I have no idea what the commercial is about, or even if it is a commercial. But everything in it is AWE-ZOME, from the matrixesque koto players, to the cinematography, via the synced breaking slash ballet choreography, via the beatboxing via the classical musical references. It"s mashup essence goodness.

Oh, I just thought of something! An x-mas wish! That youTube goes HD and surround sound. Please please please.

Diidn"t take long before enterprising nerds with hearts of gold started turning the Nintendo Wii controller into a musiical gesture iinstrument. Turns out the bluetooth chip inside is generic, so blue-benders, start your engines.

Create Diigital Music is keeping an eye on the progress.

Even the braiins over at Max/MSP forums are working on it. I am sure we will reach criitical mass and the Wiimote will be making sweet MIIDI data lovebursts wiithin short time!

Remember that post three, four posts ago? The one about christmas decorations killing Wifi? Well a lot of people think I hate christmas. They are bloody right.

But I"m not überevil, no no no. And I certainly respect that other people make benefit christmas like I benefit MIDI. If you want the both of best worlds; you want your Wifi screaming and your X-mas dreaming, I hereby in true christmas spirit provide you the solution:

The Charlie Brown Pathetic Tree. The tree is made of metal (it probably strengthens your wifi!) and the ornaments are kept to a minimum. And it certainly expresses my feelings for this jolly holiday.

It"s a sad sad day for us mad scientists. One of our highest regarded fruitcakes and most benefit crazybrained Dr James "Mad Nully" Anderson, appears to be teaching his theories in regular school! WTF? What happened to his lab? The castle? His secret funding? Where is his adorable mutant assistant?

I tell you, folks, it"s hard being a mad scientist these days. Most of us have fallen back on day jobs, but it hurts my heart to see James sink so low as public school. And it breaks my brain to see his over-the-top crazy excellent theory of "nullity" being taught to stupid maggot schoolchildren. What happened to world domination plans, Dr Anderson?

Ha! An excellent reason to skip that pesky christmas this year. A study from Airmagnet concludes that WiFi signal drops with 25* strength when christmas decorations are present. Even that wunderbaum of a tree is a horrible http-over-the-air blocker!

More information and background info on the company at Engadet.

Talking about that horrible holiday. Check out these excellent and heartwarming Scared Of Santa pictures.

<Flashback> Earlier this year I released the Nanokaravan album with one of my projects, Shadow Of The Beat. The cover shows a jolly bunch of dust mites shoveling their loot up a hill. I was very satisfied with the cover it took me ages to photoshop. </Flashback>

The last couple of weeks I"ve been really out of the loop, itchy eyes, running nose, the lots. And the usual allergy medicin just make drowsy. So I went to the local communal witchdoctor center, and they probed my veins with a huge metal spine-tentacle machine for many hours, at least. The results are just in, and whaddayaknow. I"m highly allergic to house dust - which, by large, is produced by and contains those devils the dust mites.

Naturally my off-balanced paranoia combined with mad genius skillz for detecting possible pattern everywhere makes a horrible conclusion. Does this mean I"m allergic to anything I put on my covers? What about the tiger on the PixxelTyger cover? Am I allergic to tigers?

I didn"t like Mary Poppins as a kid. I didn"t know why then, but now that the subliminal curtain has been lifted off my mind, the reason is obvious.

This is old news in the blogosphere, but it"s mentionable anyway. Edgar Bronfman is the CEO of Warner Music Group, and Reuters asked him if his kids stole music of the net. It appears they did. But not any longer. His reply:

"I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that."

I read the Second Life interview transcript, and he seems like an educated and well informed man. He"s probably not evil, for what I know. But it doesn"t matter, I will gladly take this totally out of context and say: Sue the fcuk out if him and his kids. Let the big guys taste their own medicine and put their money were their mouth is. He can just talk to them about morality, and then it"s OK? And then RIAA can run all their lawsuits against normal people? In particularly this case where the big smart record companies suce a soccer mom because her kids stole music. It doesn"t add up nicely, Edgar. Doesn"t add up.

I think most people would be moral, if given a proper choice, and not threatened to it via lawsuits. The world doesn"t work like that, EDGAR. Stop suing people. I wrote about this before.


(Via Wired / Listening Post.)

H.P. Lovecraft? Check. Film noir? Check. Stop-motion? Check. Burtonesque visuals? Check. Creepy contemporary piano music? Check. Free download? Check.




Visit TrickFilmNoir, and download Die Musik Des Erich Zann, a haunting stop-motion short made by Anna Gawrilow. I really like her philosophy and experiment on integrating contemporary and "difficult" music with animation. A piece of contemporary music gets several new meanings when used in this short. It benefits the animation very well. The music in the short is made by Olav Lervik.

"The Music Of Erich Zann" is one of H.P. Lovecraft"s best works. I am very fond of his spaced-out horror tales, but this one is rather subtle (for Lovecraft, that is). No tentacles or abysses. You can read the complete original story at Classic Reader.

Now that we have documented how easy it is to make a pop star, it doesn"t take more than two posts before I gladly forget that and cover the release of the pop-star-creators favorite tool: Celemony finally releases their Melodyne software as plugin.

Melodyne is the best realtime software for pitch, formant and rhythm manipulation. Up until now, if you wanted to run this in sync with your host, you had two choices, either via Rewire or via a cumbersome bridge plugin solution. Now, you can have the whole application as a single plugin, as many times you want in your host. Best part; if you already own Melodyne Studio, it"s free. That"s pretty nice of them.

Here is a clip from the documentary "Before The Music Dies", a documentary about the current homogenization of popular music. I saw the film earlier this year during BIFF (Bergen International Film Festival). I think it is a very important film, and it"s very well put together.

At times, IMO, it becomes a bit biased and prejudiced, like the filmmakers decided their view before starting the film, and they only talk to people that will support that view. But that is quickly forgiven, mostly because the problems and issues they investigate are really important to be aware of. And the filmmakers fundamental love for music really shines thru.


The clip above is a short segment that demonstrates how easy it is to create a potential pop star. I guess most people already know how easy this is, and that there several other aspects in creating and launching a successful "music product". So it"s not exactly breaking news, but the clip nevertheless illustrates the concept very well.

If you are remotely interested in the future of music, I"m sure you have picked up that RIAA, the "saviour of music" and high defender of DRM and everything else fucked-up, is suing your mom and your 1 year old sister and everyone else. Right now they are after an elderly survivor of hurricane Katrina, and they are calling some guy"s boss just to, you know, spread the word he"s a criminal.

Its pretty clear to me that they"re not really after the poor victims in these cases. And to me it"s not really important if any of those people are innocent or guilty of downloading illegal music. I covered a sensible approach to that in a post about the germans.

More photos from the shooting of the Kosmonaut video. Yesterday was the last day of bluescreen shooting, I popped in to take a look and make a cameo appearance. I got to see some footage of the breakers, captured on highspeed HD cam, this one guy doing a headspin, it was amazing and literally dizzying.


The video now goes into the magic post-production period, the mysterious area of film production where computers buzz and hum and make pixels of everything and beep very fast and replace the blue with the sweet goodness of CGI. I wish I could replace all the blue in my life with CGI.

At last something sensible. The german government has put a limit of 50 Euro on fines for downloading illegal music. This means huge music companies and their ice cold lawyers cannot sue a soccer mom for thousands of Euro if her kids download music of the net.

I do not like illegal sharing of music. I (try to) make a living off my music. But I think the problem of filesharing and illegal downloads exists and persists mostly because the music biz was waaay too late in embracing and utilizing digital distribution. I mean, on one hand you can get free music that works everywhere, with no problems, free of the net. And on the other hand, pay for something full of DRMs and rootkits and problems and EULAs and limits and no"s and don"ts and expiry dates. What do you think a person would do, when given a choice between those two? I mean, IFPI and RIAA, listen to me, you fucking numbskulls. What do you THINK?

You were too late. You came too late to the party. And then you started yelling and making trouble and blaiming everyone else at the party, because there were no food left. No wonder you"re not popular. What you should have done, you should"ve apologized, somehow made up for your lateness, and made sure everyone at the party had fun. Maybe even ordered a pizza for sharing. People skillz, ever heard of it?

Whoa, we had a little steam-off situation there. But I really dislike the senseless way record companies and IFPI/RIAA have attacked the problem. I think they are hurting the music biz more than they are helping. On a general level, I get provoked by stupidity and whenever I hear something from their direction, it reeks of stupidity and cluelessness. I haven"t experienced anything from them that ultimately benefits music. It only benefits the pockets of a few and themselves. Its good to see a sensible and real-life approach to the problem from the germans. It"s a beginning. Sehr gut.

This thing pictured above is interesting, but not immediately because of what it does. It is a USB widget called InstantVideo To-Go that speeds up compression of various video formats, for example compressing a DVD into iPod formatted .H264 video in around 20 minutes. Meaning, there is specific hardware magic in that stick that is much better then your all-purpose CPU at doing what it does.

If you do a lot of video codec translating it's a must-have. But for me, the concept is much greater than the widget itself: Dedicated processing power for specific tasks, hot-pluggable via USB. Imagine the possibilities! For example for my life as a computer based musician/producer, someone can make a realtime FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) processing device, or a VA (Virtual Analog) DSP, or whatever it is that usually eats up your CPU juice. And you can expand your audio system after your needs. I tell you, the future, the future. Don't miss it.

Ugress video news: I'm just back from a visit at the shoot for the Kosmonaut music video, and here's some pullitzer-winning spy shots from my cell camera. The above photo is the beginning of a huge piece that is (besides pants-wettingly nice) a central background element for the video - as far as I know. It's done by Jørgen and Anders.



The video is directed by Svein Sund and produced by Yesbox. They are currently shooting backdrops and greenscreens and bluescreens and windscreens and I don't know what but it looks sweet. They are even using overhead projector. I'm happy just staring at that backdrop. The story behind the video is food for another post another time. It started out as a video for Binary Code... I will post updates on the video as it progresses.

According to Norwegian law, today you can screw the internet and its OK. The first http page ever (scroll down to 1990 for info) dates from Nov 13th, 1990, meaning WWW is 16 today.

I must say she has grown to be quite a suave young woman full of knowledge.

If these guys come visit me this christmas, maybe I finally will enjoy this traumatic overhyped holiday.

Japan: A 73-year-old bar manager who illegally performed copyrighted tunes by the Beatles and other artists on the harmonica was arrested Thursday on suspicion of violating the Copyright Law, police said. (Via Joi Ito .)

I am speechless. Luckily, not typeless, so i managed to type this.

Here's a mind boggling recipe for future awesometotalness.

1. Check out this upcoming Photosynth software from Microsoft. It takes a bunch of photos from and around a location, analyzes them, and creates a 3D world of the place for you to navigate around.

2. Now, digital cameras are starting to include a GPS chip that stores the exact location of the picture when it's taken.

3. Consider Google Earth. A total interactive zoomable navigationable map of the planet. Also including more and more building structures.

4. Consider flickr, and numerous other public photo sharing services.

5. Mix, shake, compile and execute the mix in your soon-to-come Web 3.0 intertubes browser.

How incredibly sweet is it going to be when you zoom into a location on Google Earth, and when you get down to building level, the surroundings are highly maneuverable and photo-realistic recognizable based on a photosynthesized 3D rendering based on GPS located photos from EVERYBODY'S uploads . Ka-zza-wazzingh! That was the sound of your brain rebooting.

Update Feb 15th, 2007: Comments now implemented.

The truest reason is because I quite simply haven't got the time for maintaining it, both content-wise by following up comments, and moderate-wise, by fighting spam and irrelevant posts. As of right now I try to fit in time to write on average one entry a day, and more than that I really don't have time for. And goodness gracious me, that is too bad, because usually there is so much to write about I have to prioritize. I'm running a secret laboratory here, there's no time for http chats! If you need to get in touch my email is on the left.

Perhaps when the next Ugress album is out, if there will be a lot of touring I could open up a comments system, because then I would have a lot of dead time / travel time / waiting time to fill up.

Technically I also would have to build it. I see there are some web 2.0 / ajax tools for implementing a comments system via third party scripting, but I prefer having the comments in my own database, and building my own system. So I would also need the time for building it, and I have some bigger "community" plans for ugress.com version 4, and I would prefer to build it all into a complete planned package instead of randomly tacking on stuff here and there.

And of course - this journal is, like everything else, in public beta.

As of today, the third Ugress album has been in the making for exactly 365 days. There are mindless statistics available. Except from a months time in April and May, when I released the Shadow Of The Beat album, I've been working constantly on it, on average 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are over 100 songs so far. And its still far off. Why isn't it finished?

I can make up a billion excuses!

By adding a Sampler to their newest version, Ableton Live 6 (out now) suddenly became very interesting... Previously I've only used Live for its literary meaning - on stage, where it really shines. Many of the new features in 6 will make live use even sweeter. However, I've been betatesting it for a few weeks now as a production tool, and I think it's starting to come together as a total package for music performance and creation. There are some things that really annoys me, coming from Logic, but also many things that impress me, and for the first time in Live's history, this balance between annoyances and xxx flats out.

I put some of the Ugress videos up on youtube , as well as a 4 minute clip with video excerpts from live shows. If I could figure out how to inject the youtube html code into this blog editor i'd put a video into this post, but seems like i have to get my hands dirty and do it manually. And i'm too lazy.

A Coca Cola commercial in GTA style! I wish my life was this exiting every time i go to get a refreshment from the sugarwaterdispenser in the studio. Here is a better fidelity version (and some more information) than the current youtube craze.

I just programmed a script for my favourite sampler Kontakt 2 so i could make host tempo (the tempo of a song) a modulation source for whatever i fancied. The idea was to change the character of beats dependent of the songs tempo, so when going around in a lazy 90 bpm, the beats are soft and slow, but when adjusting the tempo towards 150 bpm the beats should gradually change character from soft and slow to hard and punchy.

Of course it sounds like shit. But the concept is executed, mission accomplished, the script works, and hopefully I'll put it to good use some day, and probably in a way i never thought of.

Here is a list of music software one quite clearly should not live without, or at least if one wants a happy digital life. At the moment, in some kind of order, but i can't explain it.

Apple Logic Pro, for sequencing, synthesizer programming, mixing and composing.

Native Instruments Kontakt, for extensive sampling and samplebending

Native Instruments Reaktor , for experimentation, soundbending and alternative programming

Max/MSP , for even more alternative programming and human interface interaction customization

Audiofile Engineering Wave Editor , every sound surgeons precious supersharp knife

Iced Audio Audiofinder , if you have more than 5 samples on your HD, consider this

Ableton Live , for stage use, looking forward to the video stuff in version 6

Celemony Melodyne , for bending samples into something and someone else

Renoise , tracker escapism, great for composing in cramped places (tour bus/airplanes)

U-He Zebra, synth extravaganza

reFX QuadraSid, Commodore 64 takeaway

Native Instruments Absynth, lazy filmcomposer takeaway

Ohmforce QuadFrohmage, dirty filters and also the Ohmboyz delay

A bunch of other plugins I can't remember so i guess i dont use them that much and I'm sick of finding URLs for all of this.

I am SO interesting. Interesting interesting interesting. I am so sure everybody on this planet is just DYING to read about me, what I do, and what I care about. Let's procrastinate together!