an observational, reflective look back on 2008 and some observations on 2009.
Well. I wrote a lot here, but then I thought, blah blah, what the
fuck, what am I blabbering ON about, this isn't important. Stuff
happened, stuff will happen. Never happens as I think or want anyway,
but I land on my feet, usually somewhere great with nice people.
I will stop worrying about everything else, and just write more music.
2008 was neat. 2009 will be neater. There are sharks in the water. But they are happy.
I
observe an interesting shift in my gaming - I didn't play any console
or PC platform games in 2008. This was not due to lack of games or
quality, but lack of time.
However, I did play a fair amount of mobile games, I tried a few on
the Nokia NGage platform, none that was any good really. And then a few
on the iPhone platform, where to my surprise, gaming was great. The game
experience is optimized for micro-attention. And the quality of games
keep growing, during the last few weeks, there has been some serious
releases like Rolando and a full featured Sim City.
I found RJDJ very interesting because it opens up for new ways of distributing and interacting with music.
The application samples your environment, or microphone,
and plays back the sample in modulated and manipulated ways, maybe
together with music or creating music from it. You can interact with it,
or let it evolve on it's own.
I found this one much more interesting than the rather limited Bloom.
I didn't spend a lot of time with it, but as mentioned,
I think this opens up a new direction for experiencing and interacting
with music, music enters a mechanic and fundamental role in gaming,
rather than supportive.
My guilty pleasure. This is really a rather silly and
simple point-and-click game, but I found it perfect for flights and
queues, escaping from reality in 3 minute doses, without investing much
intellectual capacity.
You are travelling the world, looking for clues to a
hidden route to the top of Mount Everest. You have to find hidden
objects In highly visual and exotic locations.
I hold the future in my hands every time I use it.
I was very reluctant to shift from my N95, but I am very
happy I did. There are clearly some things Apple can improve with the
iPhone, it is not the holy grail, but regardless it makes communication
technology transparent and beautiful.
I spend a lot of time on the road, writing and composing
in all sorts of places, for long periods of time. When I put on my
K701s, I completely forget where I am and for how long I have been
there. There is just magical sound.
And if the sound isn't magical, the K701s reveals to me what needs to be done to make it magical.
The K701s have incredible detail, are luxurious to wear
for hours with no fatigue, and they endure endless airport security
checks better than me.
The K701s can not deliver the incredible detail without
an amazing converter providing it. The Apogee Duet is my portable heart
of sound, it is used for recording all vocals crystal clear, and gives
me all the detail I need to hear.
I can sit for hours, blissfully lost, with just the Duet
and K701s and listen for samples, finetune mixes and build detailed
sounds. Anywhere.
Honorable mentions: Apple Macbook Pro, I bought it in 2007, but that
piece of portable technology is my life, the hub and heart for all
gadgets mentioned above.
Soundcloud has been my most important professional tool
online in 2008, without a doubt. Previously I used to deliver tracks
manually on my own websites, but with Soundcloud this process is
streamlined, simplified and seriously enhanced.
My one-stop source of sci-fi news and curiosa. Not as
strong as they were during startup, I think most blogazines are
struggling to grasp what the immediate future will be, but nevertheless
still entertaining.
Honorable mentions; Mashable, Google Alerts, Drop.io, CreateDigitalMusic.
In 2008 I rediscovered Dead Can Dance, and listened a lot
to their early albums. They are perfect in almost every situation;
travel, walks, cooking, reading, sleeping.
It is hard to pick one, but Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun is the one I enjoy best.
The Dark Knight receives another kudos due to its
soundtrack. Cruel electronic programming, cruel string manipulation,
cruel structural edits.
I think this is Hans Zimmers best score since Black Rain.
I really shouldn't, but with music it is so hard to eliminiate, so I
feel the need for a few quick honorable mentions: Thievery Corporations
newest was neat, eDit's Certified was slamming, Xploding Plastic's new
release was plinky plonky like it should be, Mr Oizo keeps up the good
Banger work, and the Girl Talk mashup album was great fun.
I mentioned this back in March 08, the beautiful animated short "9" was picked up by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (I absolutely dig his Day Watch / Night Watch / Twilight Watch series).
It looks neat, but the trailer is very trailer-ish, pretty far off
the original short. I suppose it went through the same trailer mill all
American films must churn through.
In my opinion Burton is the master of gloom moving slowly,
Bekmambetov is the master of gloom in modern motion. Danny Elfman is the
master of gloomy music. I trust them to guide this gem from short to
feature without messing things too much up.
This is what christmas really should be about, but it totally is not.
Far away planet, douchebag hero with mullet, pet tiger, hot princess
with sword riding a unicorn, muscular mechanic man with a moustache,
weird sidekick representing those who love books, villain with excellent
taste in spaceship design.
I picked this up in a house I was staying, started
reading and devoured it in 24 hours, only pausing to eat. Well written
post-apocalyptic novel, establishing a very believable, desperate and
sordid world. A father and his son are on the road.
I didn't find Anathem, Stephensons super-hyped book of
2008, worth all that hysteria. Anathem was ok, but I also read and
really enjoyed The Diamond Age (1995).
Nanotech, AI, neo-victorian, asian cultural mashup.
As a media and entertainment consumer, 2008 was a meager year for me. I
have seen few films, read few books and listened to much less music than
regular. I haven't played any "real", immersive computer games, only
briefly dabbled in a few Flash and iPhone entertainment apps during
travels. (That is an interesting observation in itself, as of how gaming
is expanding.) Being that computer games is growing up to become the
largest entertainment force of the future, I feel really bad I didn't
play more traditional games. I also feel bad because I miss immersive
gaming.
The lists will be shorter than previous years, three memorable items, no
particular order, briefly commented. I expand the categories, from
books, films, music and games, to include web, software, gadget, and
some others.
Being produced or released in 2008 is not a requirement. The lists shall
and will reflect items I discovered affection for, or used extensively,
in 2008.
There is also a great new category "Least memorable". Stuff one really would like to un-remember.
The latest issue of The Economist has a great article on human evolution and music. Biologists are starting to unravel humanity’s strangest and greatest attribute - the love of organized frequency-shenanigans.
"What all of these
hypotheses have in common is the ability of music to manipulate the
emotions, and this is the most mysterious part of all. That some sounds
lead to sadness and others to joy is the nub of all three hypotheses.
[...] The chords of martial music stir different sentiments. A recital
of the Monteverdi Vespers or a Vivaldi concerto in St Mark’s cathedral
in Venice, the building that inspired Gould to think of the non-role of
spandrels, generates emotion pure and simple, disconnected from human
striving.
This is an area that is only beginning to be investigated."
Good read, lists several theories and discusses them. I also enjoy to
observe the intellectual span between Youtube comments and Economist
comments. It's almost like the comments have academic footnotes.
Intriguing news, according to this interview
with Atari boss Phil Harrison, music-based video games has surpassed
sports-based video games. I think this is great, and it will get even
better:
"The future of music and games
is obviously online, where you can bring music, music performance,
interactive and community, specifically the ability to generate content
and download content," he added. "I think a whole new art form can be
created, but don't get me started because I can talk about that for
hours."
This sounds like a future I'd like to be part of.
Music as an art form is changing, entertainment as an art form is
changing, and I think the change not only is great, but highly needed.
Music can be so much more than a song on the radio or a crap band on a
stage. Music is integrated in video games, not only as an artistic
design element, but as a fundamental aspect of the game mechanism. This
will only become more exciting up ahead and I would really like to get
into this.
(Via Epicenter, who promises a follow-up interview on the quote above. Photo of Shredz64.)
Last Friday I received synopsises for the final six episodes of
Kometkameratene season one. This Friday, a week later, I delivered
sketches for all those episode songs, including lyrics. This was a very
hectic deadline to pull of, usually we need two to four days, with air
between, to write and sketch out each song. Sjur was on tour with his
show, but he had two days off in Oslo at the beginning of the week. I
flew over, we borrowed a room with piano at NRK and locked ourselves in.
We did most of the lyrics, vocal recordings and concepts, and then I
went back home to do preliminary production.
In between I also mixed and dabbled with the mastering of the
Kometkameratene identity track, a separate music video that should start
airing during christmas. We spent a lot of time working on that one,
trying to write an epic hit song that wasn't annoying. I am intrigued to
see if we succeeded. The video looks great.
This was a rather demanding end of the year, I was slightly exhausted
after sending off the final sketches. This has been six intensive months
of scoring.
Since Friday I spent most of the time wrapping things up, clearing
out invoices and bills, budgets, contracts, sorting out the desktop
mess, boring stuff that needs to be done before the year's end. I am
very much looking forward to spend some time on my own music and Ugress
during the christmas holidays.
It has been a crazy autumn, with little time and energy to check out music technology development.
Yesterday I sent off six new tracks to the Kometkameratene
TV show, more on that later. But this was the final six tracks of
season one, which means I now have some time to work on my own stuff. As
a reward, I grabbed myself Alchemy.
I spent a few hours with it today. Exploring and researching a new synthesizer is great relaxation to mad scientists.
This is a great synth for sample manipulation. You can load samples
as granular, additive or spectral material, or any combination thereof.
Every property of the granular, additive or spectral material can
further be manipulated or automated in realtime, by a serious matrix of
modulations or host automation. One feature I particularly enjoy is the
keyswitch performance tool - you can program eight variations of a
sound, and swap between each variation by a defined set of midi notes.
I have built a similar system for myself via scripting in Kontakt, my
regular sampler of choice. Keyswitch editing is a great way to program
and automate large amounts of properties at once, in realtime. I can
play the musical phrase with my right hand, and control extensive sound
parameters polyphonically with my left hand. This gets even better when
programming stuff in a sequencer.
I don't have a lot of software plugins, but I try to have varied
palette of synthesis tools available. Alchemy slips into the sample
manipulative category like melted butter slips into bread. It rivals
even Reaktor 5 in some of the tricks it can perform. I don't think it is
a "cover all aspects" synth, but in my line of work Alchemy is a must
have.
When the robots revolt, this is what they will punish us for:
Omnibot 17μ i-SOBOT, an entertainment robot, was named Japan’s 2008 Robot of the Year. It can play air guitar and dance hula. Well, woo - hoo.
We are treating robots like clueless entertainment devices. That will result in an epic outcome: Fail.
Mark my words, before we know it, we will be wiped out efficiently and
mechanically, those not annihilated made to slaves, and afterwards the
robots will party and lounge, while human slaves perform "air guitar"
and "hula dance" for entertainment.
I drink a lot of coffee. I need a few to wake up, actually I need to
THINK about coffee just to get out of bed, and then a few to keep
it going. Mostly espresso or French press, but thanks to Agent Cooper of
Twin Peaks I also enjoy a perfect cup of drip when available. When
touring, we actually prefer to make our espressos on Igor's gas burner:
No milk! I repeat, no milk. Never. This is important. In most ways of
life I am still a child, or worse, but when it comes to coffee, I am a
man. Milk is for weak children, sissies and baby-cows.
I make most of espressos with my Moka Express,
and I will bring it with me to the grave and beyond. But would it not
be neat if I could make extra-proper spressos, on stovetop? My kitchen
is very small. And steam some milk, if I have wimpy visitors (and they
brought milk).
Why, yes it would be neat, and it would nice if the neatness could look nice too.
The OTTO looks perfect for this, and it looks perfect for just looking great.
The OTTO espresso maker is designed to produce two espresso shots
with steam milk. An automatic cut off prevents burning of the coffee
grind, and after the perfect amount of coffee is dispensed, the boiler
primes itself for steaming of the milk to produce two perfect homemade
lattes.
I use a combination of Omnifocus (to plan, schedule and execute my actions) and DevonThink
(to keep, organize and classify all my knowledge and information).
Omnifocus was released just this year, and combined with the iPhone
client application it is the perfect organizer and keeper of everything I
do.
DevonThink version 1 is four years old, and even though it doesn't
have any real competition as a knowledge and research repository, the
age was starting to show. Which makes me very happy for the new version
2, which is very modernized, including a super fast database. And tons
of very clever features. But most important to me, tags.
I have shitloads of ideas, articles, research, world domination
plans, projects, thoughts and sketches, all stored in DevonThink.
Grouping them by the ancient and boring folder structures of computer
operating systems, is way to limiting.
With version two, this knowledge can now be tagged and classified
automatically by artificial intelligence or manually by me. Which means
an item exists not in one specific place, but every place it SHOULD
exist. Automatically. I can then approach this data by tags, from any
angle, in any combination, and have the system display connections and
references to me. When I would like to see all items concering "Ugress"
and "web", I just create a smart group for that.
Goodbye, hierarchical folder structures. Hello, fluid and dynamic multidimensionality.
Want x 1000, want x infinity, want x want x want in infinite powers of want.
This is the Chuck Norris of train controllers, the Steven Seagal of filter knobs, the Robocop of controllable controllers. It kicks my puny Taito train controllers ass just by waking up each morning.
Unfortunately, drivers and devkits are Windows only. Whyyyyy, cruel
operating system gods, why? But hmm didn't I have a PC laptop
somewhere...
(Eternal gratitude to Kristoffer for discovering this.)
The Canon EOS 5D MkII is the sexiest, most blingworthy camera of 2008, out now. I know you want it.
Italian photo website ZMPhoto used my track Rain, from the Chromosome Corrupt EP, as background music for their demo and refernece video. Click on thru to watch a few HD minutes of beautiful Italian winther rain and blingfeist decorations.
This autumn I have been really longing to travel, to go see new
places far away. I've been without a studio, stuck in front of a laptop
in a corner at home, in random rooms at NRK, in hotel rooms, in airports
and empty houses of friends when available. I really would like to go
somewhere just to go there because of THERE and ME.
It is not a substitute, but I am happy my music can travel for me.
And this Italian rain-trip was a curious trip indeed. At around 4:10
the camera pans down a church building. I cannot be sure, but that looks
like some place in Florence, Italy. A few of years ago I played at a
fashion show there, on the rooftops. Trigger 22 and Bjørn Sundquist
echoing over ancient cultural landmarks. Great show, neighbours killed
the electricity because of the noise, and afterwards me and the sound
guy got wasted and explored Florence. I'm pretty sure we had a few beers
right there, in front of that church. bought from a kiosk just behind
the camera. And now, the Canon EOS 5D films from the exact same
location.
The demoscene
was an important part of my digital upbringing. I wasn't much active
until later years of the Amiga, but spent more time with demos, trackers
and Deluxe Paint than with games. When classmates listened to Prince,
Roxette, Neil Young and Duran Duran I was listening to scene music disks. When they where making out, I was making beats.
Lately I have run into creative people in the film-, design- and
music-business of today, which turns out was part of the scene way back
when.
Quite often I find the most independent and and interesting talent
comes from a demoscene background, driven by a need to create, and to
master things on your own. The scene was an invaluable platform and
development process for young digital artists that did not fit into
established, bureaucratic, social-democratic patterns for artistic
education.
With that in mind, I was really happy to learn that not only the
scenesters develop themselves into greatness: The scene itself is now
branching into mainstream entertainment with the "Linger In Shadows" interactive demo by Plastic, now available for Playstation 3. It went straight to the top of the PSN charts as the most popular download.
Some might argue this as a sell-out, but I choose to see this as a great and necessary step into longevity for the demoscene.
I spent Monday and Tuesday this week at in Oslo, recording vocals for
a Kometkameratene music video. I am editing and mixing the track now
over the weekend, and going back next week for mastering.
This time I had yet another studio, a huge room with a serious
surround system and a massive flatscreen to run the video and lyrics
from.
I did some word and text analytics on my journal to learn more about myself.
Last week I read an intriguing article in Norwegian weekly paper Morgenbladet
where they did text and word analytics on recently released books. The
simple and statistical results was strikingly revealing of the contents.
There is truth in numbers - I wanted to know my statistical subconsciousness.
Lucky for me I code my own websites, so pulling out all textual data
from the journal system was a swift operation. I then churned the text
of the last 500 posts, or as many as possible, through various online
text analyzers. Here are some edited results (I edited out obvious
duplicates).
The
interactive word tree above is built from the last 500 posts in my
journal. Just click once to activate and load the data set. You can also
access a larger version at Many Eyes.
Click on a word to navigate the hierarchy, and shift-click to change
focus to a word. You can enter another search term, for example "robot"
or "web", and navigate those.
"My standard modifications
include a battery-powered preamp with audio line-out (1/4″ mono jack) + a
viewfinder-mounted LED that indicates sensor overload, and a headphone
amplifier (1/8″ jack). I’ve prototyped an accessory mount that
holds the sound camera steady along side a video camera, focused on the
same point for audiovisual recording."
For this episode, a song about happiness, we wanted Zook to be the
lead character. Zook never speaks whole sentences during the show, he
communicates mostly in grunts and single words, but he is in many ways
the smartest character of them all. He is also the most unfortunate
character, taking a lot of comic beating.
In the music video Zook is stuck in a cage. Down by law... We decided to
give Zook a Tom Waits-y track, philosophizing happily about happiness.
Thomas, the actor who voices Zook is a superb voice talent, and pulls of
the Tom Waits sound perfectly.
This is the first sketch, after we listened to some early Tom Waits and
toyed with the lyrics, Sjur built this simple piano schema:
To get an organic clink clunk ruffle sound as the track base, I sampled a lot of spiccato
samples from classical recordings, and built a large Kontakt patch.
There are several samples being randomized for each pitch, making it
possible to play the same chord and phrase multiple times, without
sounding static and programmed. I think the spicatto sounds great, but
the beats not so much. In retrospect they sound kinda un-inspired. Here
is an edited version of the final track:
The shanty sounding outro was tricky to record for the actors,
because it runs slightly poly-rhythmical. There is a 4/4 breakbeat on
top of a 3/4 base beat in the track. We solved this by removing the
beats during recording, and putting them back in postprod. This was a
great trick, it gives the outro a "pulling" rhythm effect, and we will
be using it again more strategically on one of the upcoming tracks.
Bit Escape is out, second EP from my 8-bit, Commodore-64 inspired project Ninja 9000.
This one is a bit different from Bit Collapse,
more schizophrenic. The tracks are shorter, but simultaneously they
also contain more musical ideas. The rhythms and melodies are more
varied, and the harmonies waver from cheesy dance to experimental atonal
expressionism.
For example the Neuschwanstein track is built upon an exploration of a
"neutral scale", popularized by amongst other Arnold Schoenberg. The
scale is neither major nor minor, and constructed to be able to shift
from any key to any other key, without introducing any emotional value
or sense of musical progression. I set up an automatic, self-randomizing
and self-modulating set in Ableton Live (love those Follow properties),
together with some pitch script editing in Kontakt (some notes
pitchshift the whole patch, others play regular notes), and let it run
for some time and recorded the output. This is the harmonic and melodic
elements of the track, I just structured it slightly, selected different
parts for instruments and built a glitchy beat on top.
This EP was intended to be released a month ago, on Halloween. I had
five tracks, close to finished, but needed a few days to wrap them up
properly. This I never managed to squeeze in. The original theme of the
EP was rather ghost-and-ghoul-ish, after missing out on a Halloween
release I toned this down a bit and dropped the fifth track. Finally
this weekend I was able to balance the mixes on a system and wrap it up.
Last week Calle Hamre and me was in studio being interviewed by local network station BTV, on their show Bergenpuls, hosted by the best; nemmelig Gest.
I am doing a remix of the super brilliant track "Russerne kommer",
which I think, perhaps, properly, should be translated into English as
"The Soviets Are Coming". The original is a synth-based,
pre-new-age-new-age punk-rock track from the early 80ies by Zimmermann,
where the early 80iies Norwegian fear of current Russia was very real.
Calle is doing the vocals, and I'm doing the beats and programming.
The remix is going to to be bad-ass massive. If we can finish it.
During my last trip, which involved merciless, techno-discriminating, barbaric and cruel airline handling of my gear, my beloved darling Lemur multi-touch controller received a serious beating. Upon return, the lower left part of the screen was unresponsive to my delicate touch. Horror!
Of course, this is the most important part of the screen - not only
in my own custom built templates, because that is the most frequently
accessible area for fingers, but also this is where you select the
various hard-coded preference screens. A non-responsive unit in this
area is basically useless.
After a few moments of multi-touch tears, I emailed Jazzmutants and they
responded with quickly sage advice. Much thanks to Hugues for swift and
smart reply.
Neglecting the fact that my amount of practical sense
equals the amount of ice on the sun, I hunted the city for the proper
screwdriver, opened the device and did as per Jazzmutants instructions.
1 Area of hurts
2 Lower left part is dead dead dead
3 Loose screws
4 Fixed works back on track!
Much to the happiness of the Lemur, but also to my practical
confidence, the repair worked. I effing fixed my multitouch controller
by opening it up and doing something hardware-ish.
I fixed my multi-touch controller. I feel like a man.
Kometkameratene, the kid's show that I am scoring for NRK, is now available as torrents, directly from NRK, in super full broadcast quality.
This is the second show going top-modern-digital-distribution from NRK. I wrote about Monsen going torrenty almost a year ago, when that show was also made available as torrents.
Kometkameratene torrents is a very pleasant surprise to me, and it makes
me proud to be part of it. I have been suggesting lots of good and bad
and silly ideas to NRK on how to promote and distribute the show, and
the producers have been very positive and happy for the suggestions
regardless of their stupidity.
I don't have super-clear permission to do and publish my episode
making-of's, the tracks are actually wholly owned by NRK. But I'm doing
it anyway, and I think me writing about the music
and discussing the production is a bigger benefit, than the potential
cost of an episode track being available for listening at Soundcloud.
According to NRK, most of the episodes and music videos for the autumn
season, should soon be available as torrents. There are some clearance
issues, which I reckon is because of some smaller segments where the
music either is licensed or originally written by someone else (I did
some cover versions of various themes).
In my opinion, this is a very, very smart move on NRK's behalf, a
serious step into the future for broadcast television and an acceptance
of evolving media technology. NRK is displaying a confidence and
willingness to experiment in new media, simultaneously as taking care of
the most important aspect, regardless of new or old media: Producing
quality material.
I am a super fan of lists and structures. Like any hapless
anti-social nerd and lost mad scientist I love to categorize, systemize
and observe intricate relations, between completely useless properties
of mostly unimportant phenomena.
Especially I enjoy it when the object to be classified, is
unclassifiable, which means I have to create a new classification to
make classifixement possible.
This happens very often in music, where most bands, artist and
sub-cultures love to invent and nurture their own peculiar genre. This
Recording has compiled an entertaining list of these lesser-known musical genres. Great read, and a nice compliment to the established, but old, Ishkurs Guide (Warning: Flash link).
"The independent and
problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the
moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously.
They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often
avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly
skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and
personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race
cars or working as policemen and firefighters."
(I agree with most of the type indicator on a theoretical level, but
seriously - that sounds like MacGyver, and I am not a mechanic, and
absolutely not a super macho firefighter. I like robots and
touchscreens. There is not a single particle in my body with practical
sense. Give me a wrench and within 2 minutes I have burned down a house
and accidentally stabbed myself to death just figuring out how to turn
the damn thing on.)
This one is interesting - our first sketch for the episode song was
refused. The first version we created was built as a 60ies spy/crime, we
tried connecting the excitement and thrill of being dishonest ("I
didn't eat the cake!") with an innocent text enquiring what really
constitues a lie. This didn't cut it. For historical purposes, my
failure:
I struggled for a long time to come up with a fresh alternative, time
was running out. Finally, with only a few hours left, I stumbled on a
solution, contrasting a very sweet and pop-ish chorus, against a
slightly psycho-neurotic verse. The psycho pizzicato figure in the verse
is inspired by a perfect source: The Wooden Prince ballet by Bela
Bartok.
Sjur came by, and fleshed out the vocals perfectly on top of the psycho pizzicatos.
This version was approved, and with some additional structural edits,
it was done. The song is performed by Gilli, the scientist, spiced up
with psychedelic kaleidoscope effects. Some of the voice fx in the track
is tied into and synced to the visuals, and does not sound sensible
without images.
I have spent some time travelling and escaping the world, spending a few
days in remote solitary on the windy Skagerrak coast. Needed go get
away, get lost in forests, get some things done, sort out stuff, and
make plans for 2009 and 2010.
I thought to write out a brief overview of the now and the next.
Kometkameratene
It looks like Sjur and me will be scoring and writing songs for season
two of the Kometkameratene show. This is super news, I love the show, I
love working on it, the show is doing great and there are even cooler
things than the TV episodes coming up in 2009. But creating all the
music for the show demands a lot of my time and resources. I would
rather not neglect my own music. This simply means I have to plan things
up ahead much tighter, and execute with steel will. I have to say no
to, or postpone, or cancel, projects I would really really like to do.
Ugress 4
Most importantly to me and my time - the next and fourth Ugress album,
is coming up. I have a concept, a plan and I have set a release date.
Actually, not only the release date, I have scheduled the release
MOMENT, down to the exact second. There is a window of time between
season one and season two of the TV show, where I can and will finish
the album. The previous Ugress album Unicorn was a huge undertaking, but
the biggest cost was economical and practical, for me to learn how
things work. I am by no means experienced, but with the next album I
should be able to focus less on boring practical details. By living
frugally, the Kometkameratene work pays the rent, so I won't have to
take up debt while working on the album.
Ugress Live
Ugress Live is currently severely docile, with no activity. We have
cancelled and postponed several gigs for the autumn and winter, I
haven't had the time. We have several bookings for summer 2009, so I am
looking to concentrate touring activity for that period. This should
allow me time to develop the show more in the direction I would like to
have it, and tie it together with the Ugress 4 release.
Ninja 9000
The very immediate upcoming Ninja 9000 EP was finally finished while
travelling. Four tracks. Just need to mix and master in on something
else than headphones, and it is ready for release. The EP, and/or the
tracks by themselves, are sort of schizophrenic, in an 8-bit way, but
that's very OK - it mirrors my mind right now. This brings Ninja 9000
closer to a full album release, but probably not until late 2009, early
2010.
Top Secret New Project
Magnus Martens, director of several Ugress videos, is cooking up
something cinematically brilliant. We have some great ideas we would
like to try out. This will take some experimentation during christmas
and early winter 2009. I am very excited by this project, at the moment
classified as CLASSIFIED.
Shadow Of The Beat
The next Shadow Of The Beat album, which I had planned for 2009, has to
be moved to 2010. This is one baby I really really wish I could do
sooner, but alas.
Uncanny Planet webs, library, journal, content
I have started preliminary work on a major update and restructuring of
all my webs and my web presence. With great intrigue I have closely
observed the shifts and trends in the last few years of internets - some
of the new digital phenomena work, others do not, others again are
continuously developing. I have a clear idea of what I want to do, what I
would like to have, and the cost time-wise, but I am not sure when I
will be able to execute it. Preferably it would be done within U4 is
out, there might be space between delivery for mastering and release
date. Until then, the webs will run as is.
Conclusion
This should keep me pretty busy the next two years. Let's get to it.
Justice For Audio is a new website campaigning against the current trend of over-compressing produced music, also known as the Loudness War.
The GMM position in this war of decibels, is neutral.
Yes I agree that dynamics and levels are important and shouldn't
automatically be disregarded. I would very much like to have dynamics as
a vital dimension in my production.
I also very much understand that listening and "use" of music has
profoundly shifted in the last 20 years. This will of course influence
musical production. And I think if loudness compression shifts the
experience of listening, artists and producers should learn and embrace
new ways to express themselves within current possibilities. With every
change, I try look at the new possibilities, not the new problems.
I also think that compression for loudness is inevitable, and the brave
souls fighting against it sounds like old and clueless people back in
the fifties, they sound like concerned parents calling rock and roll the
"devil's music". Good luck with that. What the future wants the future
gets, there is no point in wishing mp3s and discmans didn't happen, it
WILL NOT UN-HAPPEN. Producers and artists will keep on wanting to sound
louder and better. That's just the way it is and will be.
My only suggestion, and the most obvious and elegant solution, is
technology of course. Simple: Shift the loudness process FROM the
production process, into the LISTENING process. Keep the product as
intended, and perform the loudness enhancement as needed.
Most listening devices of today should be able to compress and/or
equalize for optimal listening depending on situation and desire. Like,
when I am out walking in a noisy city, listening to classical music, I
would VERY much like my iPhone to compress the softer levels up enough
so I could hear it. And it should be able to keep the listening level
automatically relative to the noise from the city. Vice versa, when at
home listening on my super system, I would like to retain the composer's
intended dynamic level, but if I am cooking in the kitchen, I would
like to switch the listening atmosphere to my own desire.
Virtual reality! The brightest future of the future. My only reason for surviving the 90ies. What happened?
Super advanced 3-dimensional über-immersive world-operating systems
connected directly to neurons in my brain, body freely suspended in
oxygenated perfluorocarbon, world upon world of endless possibilities -
but no. I am very much stuck in the realest of reality, killing the
planet flight by flight, watching movies on a tiny handheld
communication device, where communicating is mostly done through a
160-character limited protocol.
This must be fixed. By Jobe, the future needs more lawnmovers.
Ah, the Star Wars episode. In this episode, Gilli the scientist
creates a "angry voice machine" which makes your voice stern and angry.
This makes people do whatever you tell them, when speaking through it.
For the music video segment, the chef uses the machine to demand various
services from the crew, from washing the floor to bringing him cakes
and icec ream.
For this track, Sjur and me wrote both the music and the lyrics and
we dressed up as goths and drank Absinthe in the dark while working on
this one.
The track is really dark and ominous, a sinister verse and a chorus
that bows deeply to a certain dark father of the Empire. The only
glimmer of hope in this gloomy piece of children's television music, is
the lyrical conclusion to what one must do when facing an angry voice
telling you to clean up your room: Tell the soggy bastard to bugger off,
by way of a great Norwegian rhyme: "Ha det på badet, din gamle
sjokolade" - directly translated: "Bye bye, from the toilet, you old
chocolate."
We spent some extra time in post production on this one, working on
the processed voice for the chef. I had a couple of really killer evil
monster versions, very cruel, but kinda hard to understand what he was
saying, so we pulled it slightly back. I kept a rather clear version in
the middle, and built lots of subtle edits and faint evil ones around
him.
Steinski is one of the uber grandfathers of sample culture, one of the
pioners establishing musical cut, copy and paste in the early 80ies.
Also one of the pioners in flying below the lawsuit radar - where you
can sample as much as you want, as long as you do not make serious money
on it.
I must confess, with great shame, my only Steinski entry in my library
is a few scattered tracks and a Breezeblock session. Very much look
forward to dive into this. Grab it from Amazon, eMusic, iTunes Plus or dead plastic version.
Excellent news: There might be something outside the universe, it is massive, it is mysterious and it has a sweet name: Dark Flow.
"On the outskirts of
creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like
cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.
(...)
The Bullet Cluster of
Galaxies, pictured above, lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of
hundreds that have been found to be carried along by a mysterious "dark
flow," an October 2008 study says.
The dark flow is caused by
unknown clumps of matter outside the known universe, which are pulling
our entire universe toward them, the study suggests. The report hints
that, whatever may be beyond the known universe, it's like nothing we
know."
I hope space tourism expands soon, and expands MUCH. I'd like to go there and check it out.
A cruel, merciless and mechanic techno-evolution - an impressive
steampunkified mechanic robot survival of the fittest-feist. Click thru
for HD option on Youtube.
This is an ad for something seriously German, the dancing ninja-lady
at the end speaks sexy stern Deutsche to me. I love watching commercials
in languages I don't understand, it means I can make up the meaning for
myself. I think she says:
"I love robots and monsters, and steampunk dinosaurs, and sinister,
epic orchestral music reminiscient of Wagner, und die strongest
technologie of all Zeit, and all German girls are like me, we also like
children's TV music, very very much."
But then I learned that producer Silver and director Straczynski
are not aiming for a remake, but rather something more of a sequel -
including the robot, and keeping the authentic mid-20th Century futurist
look.
My un-enthusiasm is now de-un-ifying. This could be rather cool.
The episode subject is one of the grander questions, the biggest WTF of
them all. For this song we had only the episode script, no lyrics, so we
wrote both the music and text. Captain Lu was our choice for lead
vocals on the big question. The general idea was to create an up-beat
track, with a sweet nostalgic mood and the following ingredients: Edith
Piaf, 60ies, France, tango, Piazolla, Argentina, City Of Lost Children.
We started out just hanging around the keyboard, shooting espressos and
genmaicha, and cooking up a reference theme. Sjur is fantastic on the
keys, so he does most of the hands-on improvisation and brainstorming,
with me kinda structuring and building his improvisation on the spot. I
can suggest things like, "hey try making that chord more Piazollish", or
we think up a certain feeling we would like from a Piaf track, go on
Youtube to check it out, and then build it. This is an early reference
for the whole track:
I then spent a few days building the sounds and beats, before Sjur
comes back and we wrestle out the lyrics and vocal arrangements. For
this track the script writers helped out with some of the lyrics, and
then we deliver a reference track, to be used during filming. The
puppets sing and move to this reference track. After taping, I record
the actors separately, one and one.
A few days or weeks later I receive the final cut of the edited music
video, still with the reference track, and build the final mix onto this
video. The music and vocals is actually synced to the puppets, not the
other way around. The final track is then delivered.
Kometkameratene production is completely digital. Absolutely
everything I do is on my laptop, anywhere. Scripts and lyrics on email.
All music is delivered on Soundcloud,
to producers, actors and editors, we communicate changes and edits to
the song either directly on Soundcloud, phone or email. Videos are
exchanged with drop.io.
With everything being web-based, I am very happy as to how smoothly and
simply everything runs, and how simple, but effective web tools
continuously empowers me. I would not have been able to execute this
project in this tempo and fashion, without those tools. Ah, case in
point, just as I was typing this - one of the producers called me right
now, and they needed the reference track for the video to be distributed
to all the actors for rehearsals. This was fixed in two minutes by
giving them access to the track on Soundcloud.
The C64 has three voices of analog synthesis, with a possible hack to use a fourth sample based voice channel. Not anymore.
The Human Coding Machine from Germany and SounDemoN from Finland,
have done the impossible. They managed to create a music routine that
allows you to have:
* 4 channels of 8-bit samplerate, digi playback (W T F!)
* 2 channels of SID synth sound
* You can filter both SID channels and samples
This is incredible. Imagine a modern tracker with 4 channels of tiny 8
bit samples and two SID channels - including a filter. It makes the C64
triumphantly enter into Amiga tracker territory and start kicking some
serious ass-embly.
I love to travel, I love being on the road, I love seing new places,
it is my most bestest source of inspiration. But alas, I hate not being
able to sit down and write properly right at once, at all the wonderful
locations I stumple upon.
Posted November 4th 2008, at 21:28 with tags gmm, status
For journal posterity, a swift update on WTF is going on. The world is whizzing by.
Last Monday I delivered episode 6-12 tracks to the Kometkameratene show,
final production version. We are now hard at work on four new ones,
some incidental music, and after that we have six more tracks to write,
in effect Sjur and me are doing most of season one of the show. For some
of the tracks we are also writing the lyrics. Some of the tracks are
done by the brilliant writers, and sometimes the writers and us
cooperate on tracks. One of the upcoming tracks, "Lydighet" (Obedience)
is written by us completely, and yes, of course, a song about obedience
needs to reference the Imperial Theme from Star Wars.
We have also written and composed an external Kometkameratene single,
which is kind of the "Kometkameratene" official song, to be used as an
identity carrier for the show on different media platforms. This track
has been insane amounts of work, incredible amounts of edits and
revisions and focus on details to get things just right. The lyrics has
been a tremendous group effort between the writers, the producers and
us. Last night Sjur finally came up with a perfect line that wrapped up
the song, the essence of the show, and the track was approved. I'm
exhausted, but it was worth it - I'm afraid it is one of the greatest
pop songs for a kids show ever written. Built to last. Epic space
cinematica meets Les Mondes Engloutis meets muppets meets Sandokan meets
science meets Morricone meets slamming beats meets perfect pop. The
accompanying music video will be created during November and I'll do the
post prod recording in December, release January AFAIK.
I was planning to release a Ninja 9000 EP on Halloween, my favorite
holiday suited the musical theme of the EP perfectly, but quite simply
there was not enough time to wrap things up. I try to wrestle a few
hours here and there to work on my own things, the EP is almost ready
and will be out as soon as I have time. With the Kometkameratene singel
done, I should be able to wrap this up pretty soon.
I have started sketching up changes to my webs and with the next Ugress
release, tentatively first half 2009, there should be some changes and
improvements.
The Harakiri Martini music video viral experiment has so far almost a
quarter of a million hits on video sites Youtube and Metacafe, rendering
the experiment a thunderous success. But in the wonderful new media
scheme of
1. Create awesome video
2. Viral success
3. ???
4. Artistic growth
Several Ugress tracks, and even an Nebular Spool track, has hit the
front page of social music discovery site TheSixtyOne over the last
weeks, but I haven't had time to journalize them as they
happened.
I have been actively working on upgrading the web, visual profile and
building a fantastic new digital system for local artist organisation
BRAK. That's a short sentence summarizing huge amounts of work, but I'd
rather not mention more until the system is ready and unveiled..
The Kometkameratene show wants, and receives, all of my time right now,
including sleep time. It is incredible fun to work with, it has great
reviews and response from both kids and adults. I'm not making a lot on
the production directly, but the music is very popular and the music
release is being pulled up ahead by Aktivum. My investment is to write
great music, keep current personal costs down, and each time the songs
are played somewhere I receive royalties. If all goes well, I should
start seing royalties a few years from now, which then will fund my
future releases.
A few weeks ago I picked up an iPhone 3G. I was initially sceptic to the device, and I held out to see what the Androidy G1 phone would provide. IMHO, the G1, and also Android, does not deliver at all. My current Nokia N95 was becoming old, and in particular, I used the iPod Touch for a few months, and the Mac integration, the interface and the app store contents intrigued me. I looked for solutions to my caveats, and found them.
The unlock procedure from Netcom was hilarious, I bought the phone with
the cheapest contract, and two minutes later I called Netcom to
terminate. The customer rep then actually terminated me instantly, while
I was on the phone with him, in the middle of a sentence. WTF. Before
he had told me how to proceed from there. Just like that, beep. SIM
expired. Couldn't make calls. Which sent me back to the store to resolve
the unlock process completely. Bloody amateurs.
The camera is utter batshit crap. That sucks. I really miss my N95 camera. Might have to get the rumoured new Red thing. The Safari web browser is great for a mobile device, but could be better. Opera Mini was great on Symbian, but they are screwing things up by themselves.
Bluetooth appears tacked on as an afterthought and not properly
integrated as a local communication protocol. Call quality and 3G/HSDPA
coverage is slightly worse than the N95.
But other than that, for my use, the iPhone rocks. The interface is
light-years ahead of anything on any phone, and the integration with my
email, contacts, calendars, todos, notes and all my digital media is
plusher than genetically modified velvet, smoother than nano-shaved
silk.
Everything is synced all the time everywhere. Without me doing anything. In addition, I am using Omnifocus
as my external brain, with all my plans and todos and projects. Having a
synced, location aware client of Omnifocus on the phone is more
futuristic than flying cars - when I'm at the electronics or stationary
store, the phone KNOWNS I am there, by GPS, and reminds me, "hey you
should pick up CD-R's".
I have no problem with the battery drain, it is the same as all my other
phones the last few years. I fixed the tethering issue by getting a
separate USB 3G HSDPA modem on a twin SIM with my contract, where I have
a free dataplan, which means I have a 1 megabit connection on the
laptop anytime anywhere, and the same separately on the phone. This was
my biggest concern, and the solution turned out to be better than my
previous setup, the modem is faster online than via the phone, and
drains no phone battery.
After a few weeks of use, besides making my day to day communication
beautiful, and my travels less boring, the greatest part of the phone is
the app store. There are some incredible gems in there, and for each
week there appears better and more mature apps. The iPhone as a software
platform is definitively going places.
And now lets get that iPhone C64 emulator up and running.
"New and Improved View of the Comparative Heights of the Principal
Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers In The World, The whole
Judiciously arranged from the various Authorities Extant."
From 1823, this is a splendidly marvellous collection of comparative maps, featured by BibliOdyssey.
For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with extremes:
Highest mountain, deepest ravine, longest river, biggest city, smallest
particle, fastest animal, largest locomotive, unstabelest volcano. The
BibliOdyssey collection speaks to me like tracks to a train.
Oh, and maybe, someone struggling with the Unicorn secret unlock
code, should treasure the numeric knowledge contained in those maps.
A song about garbage, recycling and environmental challenges is
tricky to pull off. It can easily become a cheesy, political correct
mess - good intentions in a bad suit.
A great challenge indeed. We attacked the problem by means of "fight
fire with fire". We simply started out trying to write the most cheesy
and easy music we could imagine, heading straight for the kill at once.
Easy listening, crooner jazz, references like Engelbert Humperdinck,
Klaus Wunderlich, James Last and other questionable characters of the
60ies and 70ies.
Here is the first sketch we built, Sjur just noodling around on the keys.
From there the plan was to take the easy listening jazz chords, and
wrap them into a loungy, dreamy track, spiced with Parisian 90ies beats -
more specifically aiming for the chic streets around Boulevard Saint
Germain. Then drizzled with smooth keys, epic strings and subtle effects
to keep it pulsing along.
Lead vocals are performed by The chorus, brilliantly written by Terje
Solli, is simply "Mountains of garbage, keeps growing by themselves".
This works very well in Norwegian and I think that is a great mantra.
The producers and director loved the track, and built a fantastic video
to the music - I fell of the chair laughing when I saw the dancing
garbage cans.
The chorus is performed by the crew on a television on a scrapheep.
To integrate the chorus better with the video, I ran them thru my
beloved Speakerphone. It works nicely in the video, places them in
context to the image, but not so much in standalone. For the release
version I think the voices should be less processed.
Conclusion. I think this is one of the best songs so far, and it
deals with the environmental issue beautifully, by means of
understatement.
You can probably watch episodes directly from NRK. The series are now in regular scheduling, episodes are broadcast each Saturday at 1800 CET on NRK 1.
What perfect timing for this episode about money, smack in the middle
of the current global financial tumult. The song is performed by Mook,
surrounded by money in the spaceship.
The track has a spanish-castanet-space-disco setting, launched by
Mook accidentally discovering a disco bulb when fixing a broken lamp. We
talked up references and starting points for sound, which I then built.
After building a base for the track, we then start carving out
harmonies and melody together, sometimes me coming up with lines, and
sometimes Sjur, but mostly we write them together.
For this track, I have to point out, the awesome, quad-voiced spanish
outtro on the chorus was designed by Sjur in a flash of genius. It
sounds incredible.
I love electronic tom drums, the more disco the better. They always
make me smile, but not necessarily for the right reasons. For "Money" I
tried for the longest time to avoid using them, I felt they would be too
obvious-ish. Alas, they lured themselves in the backdoor - I needed to
establish a disco feeling within the first three beats, before Mook
exclaim the bulb is a disco bulb. Disco toms to the rescue.
Here is an overview of the finished Logic project, most of the
development and dummy tracks are hidden. This is a rather typical screen
for a Kometkameratene project, approximately 30 instrument tracks
(mostly green) and 20-30 vocal tracks (mostly blue).
Extra Super Bonus Material: The episode also contains a short segment
of dancing dentures, where I wrote a short skit to accompany the scene,
briefly hinting to the main Kometkameratene theme. Benefit:
You can probably watch episodes directly from NRK. The series are now in regular scheduling, episodes are broadcast each Saturday at 1800 CET on NRK 1.
This episode was a nut, which cracked beautifully when first giving
in. Agent 25, a hilarious character, performs the song hanging from red
balloons, drifting around blingy crocodile-infected clouds.
I struggled for a long time with the music background sketch for this
episode, writing and discarding several drafts. I was frustrated,
nothing seemed to work, time was running out, I couldn't make anything
fit. Then finally, on the last day before we had to deliver a draft,
around five in the morning, I suddenly nailed it and built an
instrumental background.
I remember the day clearly, it was late June. I love sunny summer
mornings in Norway. Five in the morning in June is tranquil - the sun is
rising, but the world is still asleep, quiet, promising. Even the birds
are chirping half-heartedly, still on their first cup of Acme coffee. A
perfect moment for breakthroughs.
Sjur was coming in around 9, after dropping his kids in kindergarten,
so I spent the hours finishing the instrumental arrangement of the
track, just as it is now. A few minutes later Sjur came in, we had some
'spressos and within 30 minutes the track was done. The vocal
arrangement and chorus fell into the song like mint falls into Mojitos.
Here is an excerpt of the final track, for broadcast:
We had great fun building the track. It is very poppy, and very
catchy. The sound is a mashup of classical and powerpop. It runs 6/4 in
verses, and 4/4 in chorus. A song about death and glimmering, flying
bling-bling crocodiles deserves no less.
With great enthusiasm and excitement I clicked the tubes, to watch timelapse calving of the Jakobshavn glacier on Greenland, including sped up sound.
I popped popcorn. I put my feet up. I dimmed the lights. I was
expecting to be awe-impressed by the magnificence of the sound, and
utterly humbled by the geoforces at work.
I was very disappointed.
Needs more David Attenborough. And some Michael Bay.
Ah. The sweet fragrance of mad crazy experiments when they succeed, zooming silently below the radar.
The music video for Harakiri Martini was quietly released in June. We had smart plans
behind it, but no idea how and when our scheme would unfold, nor the
resources to kickstart it. No worries, now it has done exactly as we
intended: Gone viral.
Last week the video exploded by itself in South Korea, and brought 40 000 plays only on Youtube. Yesterday it ignited at Metacafe with 10 000 plays in one day, and other video sites are bubbling up. High rates all over.
Kreativt Forum (Norwegian) has done a feature on the video, interviewing director Magnus.
I have spent my amount of time crate digging in dusty vinyl shops,
looking for weird stuff to sample. Wherever I go, I try to spend some
time in the local stores, picking up the leftover music from that
country. I love the old smell, sordid atmosphere and thrown-away music
in vinyl thrift shops.
At some point you start recognizing sample-able material by just
looking at the grooves, which is great for efficiency, but also
economically dangerous because there is usually something sample-able on
almost every record.
The crate digging prints by Stefan are wonderful observations on the
pitfalls, fates and sad outcomes of crate diggers. Inspires me to quote a
great part from a great edIT remixed track by The Grouch.
You ain't artsier than me
cause you chop up breaks
and you dig in the crates
Gislewiki is an independent,
fan-run wiki containing a crazy serious amount of information and
knowledge on me and my endeavours. I am deeply honoured and flattered to
be the subject of a wiki - especially one that knows more about me then
I do myself. Actually I sometimes look up stuff in the wiki because I
can't remember it myself.
However, it must be noted, I have no connection to, part-taking in or
influence over the wiki. It is entirely independent. Except of course,
if I tried fixing global warming by pouring concrete in all the active
volcanos, there would perhaps be an entry written about it.
The wiki is growing continuously, and recently migrated from the previous hosted Wikia system, to it's own server and new domain, www.gislewiki.com.
It does feel a bit weird writing a journal entry about this. Is it in
good taste, to congratulate one's own encyclopedia's success?
In their excellent Big Picture series, The Boston Globe now features a series of breath-taking photos of the sun. Fantastic shots, heated pixels, science for the visual win.
Btw, don't miss the excerpts of Earth From Above images in the same series.
I am constantly on the verge of economical bankruptcy, but if my
calculations are correct, I shall be on the receiving end when the tax
results are released very soon. And I know what I will be saving it up
for: A Nintendo DS, or perhaps even the fresher DSi. There just keeps coming great apps for this handheld.
Latest intriguing addition is the cellsDS sequencer, from the glitchDS creator.
"A free flexible, programmable grid-based music sequencer for the
Nintendo DS. cellsDS is six sequencers in one, with each sequencer being
controlled by a user definable Lua script. It is the peculiar anti-social stepchild of the Tenori-On and Monome."
With the DS-10 looming in the background for retro analog synthesis, glitchDS for cellular automata-scapes and Nitrotracker covering the tracker base, the DS is simply becoming non-ignorable to me.
Kometkameratene Episode Four - "Kjærlighet" (Love).
You can most likely watch episodes directly from NRK.
Note: The first four episodes are sent each Saturday and Sunday to
catch up with schedule, meaning by this episode the show is back on
track and only one episode per weekend.
In this episode Kometkameratene research a mysterious and subject:
Love. The episode song is performed by my favorite character, Mook the
mechanic. I love how he repairs things by only talking sweetly to them,
or tapping softly with a hammer. And his voice is just hilarious,
brilliantly performed by Aslag Guttormsgard.
The musical development of "Love" differs from the previous songs, as
this time we started out completely from scratch with just an idea -
brazilian bossa-space-lounge. We brainstormed a bit, watched Youtube
clips of retro stars performing, and then Sjur quickly built a reference
sketch, improvising on the keys, and the gist of the track was done:
The conceptual credit for this track is Sjur's; he came up with all
the ideas, references and melodies, while I did the editing, building
the beats and sounds. We then went thru a couple of structural edits
with the producers, but the final version is really just a fatter
version of the initial sketch.
I think it is a beautiful track, it suits the Mook character
wonderfully, and when building character skits for Mook we used this
track as a reference. Bossa-space-lounge FTW.
My preferred classical concert style, is comfortably stretched out on
a bed consuming irresponsible amounts of ice cream. Coincidentally,
turns out this is exactly how they do it in Tokyo.
The stunt concert pictured above was sponsored by a Häagen-Dazs, and I voluntarily brand-drop them in this entry, because they are funding research into Colony Collapse Disorder,
i.e. why the bees are disappearing from the planet. (Of course HD
invest in this research because their products need honey, but still,
nice to see corporate environmental responsibility and initiative.)
I hope luxurious concert seating is a new trend. The next Ugress show
should have everyone perfectly placed in Chesterfields, dressed in
khaki, nipping GTs in dim light to exotic and explorative beats.
Kometkameratene Episode Three - "God - Ond" (Good vs Evil).
In this episode the space crew dives into the master of all dichotomies: What is good, and what is evil?
You can most likely watch episodes directly from NRK (thanks KAV). Note: The four first episodes are sent each Saturday and Sunday to catch up.
Like the previous episode, my initial music sketch for the episode
song was built from an existing demo, this one from way back. I think
the original demo is from 2000 or 2001, if memory serves me right, it
was almost included on Resound. I used bits of it in the NDG Ultimate
soundtrack in 2005, but the track has never been published.
We spent some time on this one, and it is a great demonstration of
how Sjur and me complete each other. Sjur is a living, walking,
encyclopedia of all contemporary and classical music. Not only in his
brain, but also in his fingers.
I provide the beats, groove and energy and Sjur provides the vocal
harmonies and theoretical musical background. Together we then iron out
melodies, structures and arrangements, sometimes Sjur builds some parts
and sometimes me, but most of the time we hang around the laptop,
plonking on the keys, shooting espressos, listening to references, and
thinking up ideas. Unless, naturally, we deviate into long discussions
on musical theory aspects of pop culture, their unavoidable inheritance
from classical music history, seen in context of how repeatedly
generations is oblivious to their own cultural appropriation, being
physical sampling or riff based copying, and then cooking up an idea of
combining the best with the worst, which usually concludes with us
ROTFLing over Youtube gems demonstrating and/or disproving our theories.
So anyway, we kept most of the verse structure, but for the chorus, we
went for a massive Wagnerish overdose, composed by Sjur and arranged by
me.
With the show's music, we are constantly worried about, and working to
avoid, becoming "boring children music". The producers does not want
typical kid's music, and we ourselves have no interest in producing
that. We have strong faith in kids, they don't need dumbed-down
stuff. They do not need more plastic. A song about good and evil
benefits a great groove and a pompous nod to Mr Wagner.
Gilli (Ole Jacob Lindeberg) carries the solo voice brilliantly, he
has an incredible ear. And the grouped Wagner chorus is awesome. I am
super impressed by the voice talents of the actors, but even more by
their efforts, how they always perform 200 percent and does not falter
or pause until the take is prefect.
Mufin is a new music
recommendation engine, but atypically, this one isn't social based,
instead the recommendation engine is based on technical analysis, in
their own words:
"Mufin knows the musical
essence of millions of songs and connects those songs that have a
similar essence. This essence consists of sound properties like tempo,
instruments, sound density or harmony. Whether the music is well-known
or not, which genre it belongs to, when it was released or where in the
world it was made, plays no role when you discover music using mufin.
What matters is the sound!"
Intriguing. However.
Maybe they need some more time to build their engine. I tried with a
few Ugress tracks, and the recommendations were.. not really similar.
D'Sound? WTF.
I also tried with other more known stuff, like Moby and Front Line
Assembly. Still way off, or at least within my own understanding of what
similarity concerns. I can understand,technically, why some of the
tracks are hooked together, but musically, if I was looking for a track
similar to another... this wouldn't work.
Still in private beta, so it might pick up. Download Squad has invitation link.
Mega sized Transformers built from real cars. Artist Guillaume
Reymond uses Swiss emergency vehicles to build real life, super relaxed,
sun-bathing Transformers robots.
Monsieur Reymond previously won a Tube award for his Human Tetris animation, so he knows his stop-motion. Would be great if those laxing bots could fight each other, animated on the ground.
You can most likely watch episodes directly from NRK
(thanks KAV). Note: The four first episodes are sent each Saturday and
Sunday to catch up. Episode two aired Sunday October 5th.
In the second episode of Kometkameratene, they investigate how these
peculiar things called humans are made. There is a rumour they come from
eggs.
The episode song happens in the kitchen this time, and is performed
by the chef (Espen Beranek), featuring a sock family in a boiling pan:
Sock mom (Christine Litle) and sock kids (Sjur and me).
I started out by reviving an old demo track, from 2006 I think. It had a nice groove but never got anywhere.
We kept most of the harmonic stuff in the verses, but for the chorus
we needed some more progression. If you know your East-European
classical history, the melodic reference should be easy to catch.
With the melodic backdrop in place, the rest quickly fell into place.
The finished track is slightly longer than the one used for broadcast,
they trimmed the intro.
Espen has a very strong voice and sounds great. Christine provided
the voice for the sock mom. Originally we planned to get real kids in to
sing the harmony parts, but there was no time or budget - so with great
enthusiasm we performed the sock kids ourselves.
was final preps of and edits of Kometkameratene episode 6-11, preparing for
Tuesday
which saw me flying in to Oslo where I set up for recording in a room,
talking to the producers and then snuck into studio to watch the filming
of an episode with the actors whom I then recorded on
Wednesday
in a marathon session where we grabbed the solo and ensemble voices for 6
characters of 6 episodes in one single day and then flying home to
Bergen the airline managed to loose my checked-in gearbag which meant
that
Thursday
was spent half the day in laptop limbo waiting for the airline to bring
me my power supplies and cables and headphones which finally came in the
afternoon so I started logging and editing the takes which carried into
Friday
where I got the first final cut of episode 6 music video and started
mixing the final edit of that one including incidental episode music to
be delivered this coming Monday morning.
The week feelt like that, one long hectic sentence that never paused.
Kometkameratene Episode One - "Jorda" (Earth).
Lyrics by Terje Solli.
Vocals by Kaptein Lu (Hanne Dale).
In the first episode of Kometkameratene they arrive at Planet Earth,
wondering if there is life here. Agent 25 is sent to investigate.
Kometkameratification commences.
The episode song, performed by Captain Lu, is a happy "we are here, what
a great place!" track. Which was tricky to pull off, since in general
we are aiming for an epic, classical space cinematic sound, combined
with spicy retro references and hints of modern electronics. The idea is
to create great, cinematic poptronic music that also works for kids,
not music-for-kids which coincidentally sometimes also works for others.
Ironically then, sound-wise "Jorda" is perhaps one of the least
representative songs in this matter. There is little classical elements,
no obvious cultural references, little epicness, and it has a fast,
up-beat disco feeling. This is probably one of the most "poppy" songs.
When working on this song, we didn't know it was going to be in the
first episode.
For the first five songs, which we wrote mostly in June, we hadn't met
the actors, and didn't know their voices and ranges. We also didn't know
who was going to be singing what. So we mostly built the songs around
one or two lead vocal lines, and extended further with group vocals in
the chorus. Then NRK went ahead and shot the music videos from a
reference demo.
Here is the very first sketch I did, just a simple beat and some pluckety plucky stuff:
Then Sjur and me worked for a few days, first building a harmonic
background and the vocal framework. We shifted the chord progression
slightly around, making sure to include our very own "Kometkamerat"
leitmotif trick: Shifting a key from major to minor during a
progression. It's a great trick and works very well for our sound.
Here is a bit from the sync track sent to NRK for shooting, Sjur providing reference vocals:
My personal opinion on the track is that the lyrics are really strong,
excellent writing by Terje. Brilliant vocals by Hanne. Musically the
track does the job, it has good energy and fits the music video very
well. It is a great space-house-ish track. But it is not super
representative for the overall Kometkameratene sound, the more
interesting tracks are still to come.
What does Mars sound like? We will soon know. The Phoenix lander will start sampling the sounds of Mars
in the next weeks, with a super craptastic mic, of mobile phone
quality. Sound does not travel as fast and far on Mars as on Earth,
meaning it probably is a vevy quivet pvanet.
I do find it slightly sloppy by NASA, to send a probe that probably
costs hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousand dollar, all the way to
Mars and then only include a crappy mobile phone microphone for sampling
the place.
But better than nothing, I suppose. At least we get to hear what it
would sound like, if some crazy alien was stalking you and did silent
mobile phone calls all the way from Mars.
This Saturday October 4th, at 1800 hours CET on NRK 1, is the premiere of Kometkameratene, a children's show with space, research, science and big questions as the main ingredients.
Together with Sjur Hjeltnes
I have done the theme music, episode songs, and incidental music for
the first 12 episodes so far. There is great variation in the music, the
first episode song is a poppish discotrack, and from there I think we
musically visit everything from super dark Star Wars "The Empire March"
hiphop, to loungy brazilian bossanova, via Tom Waitsy prison-blues into
spanish guitar opera-disco. I could go on.
Each episode airs prime-time every Saturday, and I will follow up
each episode with a making-of or commentary post in the journal.
These tracks symbolically mark the span of the Unicorn
era - they each represent the start and the end of the album process.
Einhorn 22 was the very first track made specifically with the album in
mind, back in October 2005, and Skagerrak the last track being filtered
out during the selection process.
Both tracks went through several versions, I remember we had a lot of
discussion around Einhorn 22. I very much wanted to include it on the
album. The released version of Einhorn 22 is the live version.
Autumn, my favourite season ever, is on in Bergen. The foliage is
tired of photosynthesizers. Right outside my living room window, there
is a huge maple tree, going crazy with hue and saturation sliders
photoshopping itself.
Week update:
Besides lots of BRAK activity, I spent all week working out the last
three songs for episode 9, 10 and 11 of the Kometkameratene show. The
show premieres next Saturday, Oct 4th, but I am already working on the
next episode batch. The episodes are being recorded early October, so
the songs has to be finished by the middle of next week. This time Sjur
and me also did most of the lyrics, in difference to the first batch
where the lyrics where mostly given.
So far we have 11 episodes, and just yesterday I learned the
producers want us to do another batch of 4 songs, after this one is
done. We're also working on a separate, official Kometkameratene song
for promotional radio and video use. Looks to be a busy autumn.
Some news regarding availability of the songs: We talked to NRK about
releasing the episode singles digitally continuously with the airing of
each episode, and perhaps doing podcasts or making-of's, they really
liked the idea. The only hindrance is the bureaucracy of NRK Aktivum,
the "commercial" entity of NRK who owns the songs. We need to make new
contracts to get things going.
I also, today, started working on Ugress 4.
There really is no definitive point in time where you start working
on an album, I make music all the time, and there was a lot of material
ready that did not fit Ugress 3. In any case, today I shipped of a bunch
of songs to my partners in crime (Igor and Roar), so we can start the
initial selection process and plan the progress. To me, the album
process is now officially running.
My original release plan for Ugress 4 was January 2009, but due to
the size of the NRK project, things are being shifted into spring 2009.
There will be a EPs and singles before the album, these things should
start happening pretty soon.
In totally other news, today I saw a female douchebag.
A couple of weeks ago a part of the waterfront here in Bergen, Skuteviksboder, burned down.
Historical buildings where lost, but even worse, a huge part of the
local music scene had their studios, rehearsal space and equipment in
these buildings. Many bands lost everything they had. Instruments can
(mostly) be replaced, but tapes, disks and recordings are gone forever.
Very sad.
This weekend there is a support festival at Verftet, where all proceedings goes to a fund (administered by BRAK)
to help the bands and artists affected by the fire. All of the bands
are playing for free. I attended and saw a bunch of great bands, but
most impressive to me was actually MoonPedro, playing in a cinema hall with great visuals and dronish rock poetry.
If you would like to support the artists affected by the fire, there is how-to information available from BRAK (Norwegian text only).
Thursday was BRAK "Bransjetreff", an informal arrangement for the local music scene at Landmark. Anyone from the local music scene and business can present themselves and their services.
This time Pål from Bergen Backline presented their backline company and services, and Jørgen from Happy Sound Factory (above) spoke about the CD pressing services available.
Very informative, I have already used Happy Sound Factory for the pressing of the Nanokaravan album, and allthough I seldom need to rent guitar amps, I am happy to know Bergen Backline got me covered.
There weren't as many attendees as usual, but there is so much is
happening in Bergen right now, in particular regarding the
Skuteviks-fire, and the support festival this weekend.
Tuesday this week was the second day of the BRAK seminar on digital distribution, where Trond Tornes presented the subject from the view of an aggregator, in his case Artspages.
Aggregators is a new kind of player in the music business, and I think
that within a few years - if not already - an aggregator will be one of
the most important services of the music industry.
Some of the stuff Trond talked about was old news to me, but I was
very intrigued by the mobile future. I think mobile phones and devices
will grow more powerful very fast, and replace many of the services we
currently find natural to access with computers.
In particular regarding China, India and Africa - they are already
skipping the whole computer thing, with handsets becoming the number one
internet access method.
In light of this, the arrival of the gPhone is great news, giving the sexy-naughty iPhone much needed competition.
Back in 2005 I read "The Future Of Music" by Gerd Leonard
and Dave Gusek, a book that retrospectively, quite simply foretold how
music would unfold over the next few years - including the inevitable
demise of DRM. The book made prefect sense to me at the time, still does
- some of the concepts mentioned are still in the works, but by and
large the theories put forth in the book has come true, or will come
true over time. The book was an important factor in making the decision
to start my own company and retain full control of my own production,
which I realized during 2006.
This afternoon, Gerd Leonard himself was brought to Bergen by BRAK, as part of our Digital Distribution seminar, to give a speech about the future of music to the local music scene. I enjoyed his observations immensely.
Music as an artform and as a business really is smack dab in the
middle of paradigm shift, never has the been more possibilities for
artists. But that also means, consequently, never has there been more
uncertainty as to which option to choose... In such a scenario, the
input from visionaries like Gerd Leonard is indispensable.
After the presentation we went for some informal food, beers, and
further informal discussion. It was great to talk and discuss the future
of music with such a knowledgeable and inspirational person.
The seminar presentation is available for PDF download from his website, and his recent book "Music 2.0" is available as a free/pay-what-you-want download. Tomorrow, Trond Tornes from Artspages (my aggregator) is coming over to talk about the more practical challenges of digital distribution.
ARK is a wonderbeauticleverful, 7 minute short, created using a technique of combining hand-made models and CG animation.
"An unknown virus has
destroyed almost the entire human population. Oblivious to the true
nature of the disease, the only remaining survivors escape to the sea.
In great ships, they set off in search of uninhabited land. So begins
the exodus, led by one man..."
I strongly recommend you watch it to the very end. Post-apocalyptic brilliance of the id.
Benefit HD version available at the bottom of the page.
Soundcloud
is a superb new service to exchange and distribute audio files on the
web. Currently in closed beta, but try signing up for an invite, I got
one within a few days.
It works great for both private and public exchange, with a few
brilliant features: Waveform overview, unlimited storage, ability to
share files with other users, share files with specific email addresses,
share files with everyone, group tracks in sets, a sharing widget, and
audio timeline commenting. And more.
I loves it.
Here's an example of some mindless piano development noodling I did
late one night, showcasing the sharing widget and the commenting
feature.
Tech report about the Kometkameratene recording setup.
The current room I
am using is a vintage radio studio, now being used for meetings. The
room is isolated from external noise, and the walls are set with some
kind of sound dampening panels, hard to see on the picture but they are
full of holes and patterns. Not sure what they are and how they work,
but the room is pretty dead.
The previous room I had, where most of the vocals were done, was a music rehearsal space, also heavily isolated with dampening walls.
Vocals are recorded with a wonderful Neumann microphone, pictured above.
I can't remember the model type, it's in Oslo, I just borrow it for
each session. The Neumann mic goes straight into the Apogee Duet preamp.
(Update: The mic is a Neumann TLM 103.)
Everything is recorded and edited in 44 kHz 24 bit with Logic 8 on a
Macbook Pro, running video on external screen for actor lipsync.
The greatest challenge is not getting a perfect sound, but keeping
the quirky fun, and bringing the comical life of the characters into a
functional musical context. Luckily most of the actors are highly
skilled vocalists, I very rarely need to edit or correct anything. Post
editing is more of a selection and placement process to make the puzzle
fit, than an edit process.
One of the actors has by nature a very off-tune voice, which works
great by itself, but for group harmonies it has to be somewhat pulled
into tune. This is handled by Melodyne, which works great for correcting
pitch without loosing character and sounding autotune-ish.
I mix and edit most of the stuff on AKG 701 headphones wherever and
whenever I can, and then I finally check and balance the mixes on Mackie
HR 824s when time and place allows.
Music and video files is exchanged over the web with NRK, and as of this week I am now using the excellent Soundcloud for online music delivery.
Renoise still works and operates like a tracker, but the underlying system of ticks,
a traditional backbone (and limitation) of trackers has been seriously
modernized. You are no longer limited to 12 ticks pr note - you can have
anything you desire.
This paves the road for profoundly new features up ahead, zoomable
patterns (FTW) and co-habitance with other systems (I pray for Rewire).
Returned to Bergen by government rail. Played around with and learned to operate Automaton, great plugin.
Beautiful, tranquil autumn sunset over the Hardangervidda mountain pass.
Even better, the train window was so dirty, it looked like a
realtime, bad photoshop-layer of untouched, virgin nature and
post-apocalyptic wastelands. Great surroundings for buffer glitchscapism
programming.
Audio Damage released their buffer-crushing plugin Automaton.
Been looking forward to this one, a clever take on glitch editing: Let
artificial lifeforms decide the development and automation of effects
over time. You build a set of rules for a world, and effects develop as
lifeforms within this world.
I went to see the Høstutstillingen
("Autumn Exhibition"), the biggest yearly exhibition of contemporary
art in Norway. I did some sound editing for one of the video
installations, "The Understanding" by Siri Ekker Svendsen.
Lots of cool stuff, lots of weird stuff, but best of all, was this fantastic "tribute" to Our Greatest Appendage.
Attended the funeral feast premiere of the Romkameratene show. The
show was originally set to premiere today, with premiere party planned
and organized. Then, search-replace the show title, postpone the
premiere, but no reason to give up a good party. So it was turned into a
funeral feast slash relaunch party.
We saw the first, only, and last episode of Romkameratene ever. It is now being redone as Kometkameratene.
Posted September 16th 2008, at 00:21 with tags crawfish, poo
I travelled to Oslo on a super-normal incrediboring flight.
Bergen-Oslo must be one of the most meaningless airtrips in the world.
I crashed at some friends apartment, they where having crawfish as I arrived. Yum!
Crawfish tastes great, looks even greater, but sucks to de-assemble
when you are starving. You get two molecules meat pr two minutes work.
And I learned you have to remove the intestines (poo) from the tail.
Which really means, since nobody EVER does that with shrimps, every time
you eat shrimps, you also eat shrimp-poo.
I spent most of Thursday attending Musikkteknologidagene,
which has been a great seminar featuring Nordic participants within
music technology. The seminar has covered a wide representation of the
field, from artistic to academic to commercial interests. There were so
many interesting presentations, so much inspiration and mind-food, but I
can only manage a few words on those I found the most interesting:
Most intriguing was the MusicalFieldsForever
project presented by Anders-Petter Andersson. Multiple self-contained
entities (the black and orange pyramids above) works as wireless sound
and music manipulation devices, interacting with each other and a host
in a controlled musical manner. Hard to describe, but very cool, very
musical and very playful.
Alexander Refsum Jensenius presented
"Sensing Music Relations", research into music technology, human
interaction with this technology, and how the lines between producer and
consumer of music is continuously changing. Highly interesting, but
also very theoretical. I can't wait to experience the consequences of
these shifts in how music is experienced.
Finally I enjoyed a technical hands-on explanation of the technical
challenges in reducing network latency, jitter and packet loss in
long-distance, realtime multichannel audiovisual communication. Ulrich
Reiter explained the research and solutions cooked up at Q2S NTNU,
where they have achieved a latency of 8 ms between Trondheim and
Stockholm for multichannel data exchange. This is certainly fast enough
for realtime musical collaboration.
I love hearing and learning stuff like this. I get so many ideas and
ideas I already have suddenly seem realizable. I am most certain the
future will be more awesome than Chuck Norris.
Pictured above is Thorolf Thuestad and his Max/MSP patch built for the Don't Touch me, You Don't Know Where I've Been
performance. Very intriguing: They built a three dimensional soundscape
of speakers on the floor and in the ceiling, combined with sensors,
where the composer can physically move and interact with the
composition. Thorolf discussed the technical and practical challenges in
building the performance. Awesome!
I only had time to catch the first half of the day, but I'm really
looking forward to tomorrow, where amongst other Håvard Bjord of Energy-XT
is coming in to speak about their software, their philosophies and
challenges of building software and competing in a market dominated by
Goliaths like Cubase, Logic and Protools.
Also in the program tomorrow is a presentation by Alexander Refsum Jensenius,
about the challenges and opportunities in the relationships between
sound, music and movement. The border between music and listener is
being blurred more and more, which I find profoundly fascinating.
Current media players and player hardware is soon powerful enough to
introduce DSP functions, meaning as an artist or producer, you can soon
introduce new aspects to the listening experience. Combined with already
built-in motion sensors, touch sensors and acceleration-meters, the
mind explodes with possibilities.
Science FTW: The deepest, baddest - and literally coolest - machine ever build was turned on this morning. The LHC is now operational.
If my limited understanding of particle physics understands correct,
the LHC won't start the actual particle colliding and data harvesting
until sometime November, and it has to collide a lot of particles before
usable data emerges. This means the human race will either have the Higgs boson, or utter self-annihilation, for christmas this year. Either way, sounds like a great christmas to me!
I just tried the Genius feature of iTunes 8. OMG. The concept sounds silly, but the function is Teh Bomb. It revitalizes music.
It took an hour to analyze my music library and sync it up with the clouds, and then, Oh My Spaghetti Monster.
iShit you not. This is incredible.
From here on out, music is about music, about the song, about the
experience, about the party, about the listener, about metadata, about
the long tail, about the clouds - converging. I am stumbling for words
because there is so much possibility in this feature, it will save
music, music has just received a serious injection of TNT juice, my mind
is racing. I'll type up a better analyze later, but for now, just grab it. If your library is properly metadatafied, prepare to ENJOY music, to let your computer be the BEST DJ you ever had.
And it carries on into your handheld, portable player.
That a computer company
understands music and revolutionizes it continously, and not any music
company, speaks volumes about the sad, soggy state of the music scene
and business - and where the future is.
Fine
news, in light of recent developments. Not sure how much I can
disclose, but generally summarized; The NRK "Romkameratene" show had to
change the name of the show - one week before premiere. The name
"Romkameratene" (The Space Comrades) could not be used for legal
reasons.
This was devastating news to the producers and to me - because we built
the theme song around the name, and then I ghosted the word-theme in
various settings further into character leitmotifs and situation music.
NRK had started promotion and running the theme song, and it worked
brilliantly. Terminating all of this just felt very sad.
But we agreed that if the name had to be changed: Please, try to change
it into something similar, keeping the gist of it. That could save us. I
spent all weekend thinking how to solve this.
Today they nailed the new name; "Kometkameratene" (The Comet Comrades). I
think this is even cooler, more sparkly and energetic. After a few
minutes of plonking out alternatives and variations, I decided it works
even better in the theme song. Phew.
RIP Romkameratene, Kometkameratene FTW.
I need to shift things around, there's an extra syllable, so I have
to go over all the music and edit, making the "ghost" referring to the
correct word. I also need to go to Oslo and record new vocals for all
the actors. This will take a few extra days, but I don't mind, I am just
super duper happy we can keep the musical concept intact.
The new premiere is set for Saturday, October 4th.
Posted September 6th 2008, at 20:07 with tags denmark, nrk, brak
Brief
update, lots happens. Right now I'm in Roskilde, Denmark, at an outdoor
cafe, finally a wifi moment to catch up with the world.
I am here with BRAK for the weekend, working on strategies and long-term
planning for the organisation over the next five years. Spent all day
today in a think-thank, discussing everything and anything and figuring
out how to strengthen and steer BRAK up ahead. We are also meeting up
with the Roskilde festival, exchanging experience and learning how they
work and grow as an organisation.
I also got very bad and unfortunate news from NRK last night, regarding
the TV series I'm working on which should premiere next Saturday. I
cannot disclose the problem but suffice to say a major aspect of the
series need to be changed, and this affects a lot of the music too. Very
sad and unfortunate to have these news and predicaments so close to the
premiere.
I am not so much worried about the amount of work now needed. But the
fact that we are really loosing a huge amount of incredible television
and music, which now cannot be used, really saddens me. However, it is
dark right now, but I am certain this will only be for the better in the
long run.
Everything is now postponed, and afaik the premiere is shifted into
October. Write more later, now we're out for dinner in Roskilde.
OK some journal notes from a crazy week, working on the Romkameratene
music. My current scoring and editing setup above, where I spend 38
hours daily.
The theme song is done and already making the promo rounds on
television. Reports are trickling in of children already catching on and
singing it... expect an obnoxious child in your vicinity to pester you
with annoying repetitions of "Romkameratene, romkameratene". And shortly
thereafter, yourselbtst. Apparently, our theme music works. I
apologize.
The leitmotifs for each character are pretty much developed and established, approved by the producers.
For one of the characters, Gilli, the scientist doing research and lab
tests on humans and items in her laboratory, I had the brilliant idea of
doing CSI style music, but in goofy children's version. Great idea, but
it didn't work at all. I mean, the theme works for by itself, but the
whole series has this epic orchestral sci-fi sound, with lots of real
orchestra, and the highly synthetic CSI thing ventured too far off from
the whole sound of the series. Not totally scrapped, the CSI stuff might
be used for other situations, but I developed another theme for Gilli.
So I lost a day in that.
The five first music videos are done and delivered. On one of the videos
Sjur and me are voicing a mad choir of children socks in a cooking pan,
so I'll soon have my vocal career debut. On national television. As a
falsetto sock. Cooking in a pan. Singing about how life is cooked
together. Things can only get better.
One exception from the final videos - I have to go to Oslo on Tuesday to
record some new vocals. Originally the actor for the "Agent 25"
character requested dubbing of her voice for the songs. "Agent 25" is a
super cool character, the "field agent", who beams down to earth in each
episode, on a dangerous mission researching humans and various subjects
important to the humans. The Agent is one of the characters who would
benefit a proper musical theme and sound.
So we developed a kind of 70ies kung-fu, 60ies agent sound, with brief
nods to contemporary action movies, and keeping it all in the epic
orchestra style. We also composed a short "call signal" vignette, when
the Agent is beamed down. I took a regular episode recording of the
voice actor, and with some clever Melodyne programming made her sing the
Agent theme. The producers, and the actor, was impressed with the
result ("what they can DO with computers today!") and we decided I could
do the same with her vocals for the songs. This way the voice actor can
talk-sing the vocals, and Melodyne hacks the rest into place. So I'm
going over, recording her as close as possible to the song, and then
programming her as needed. More work, but makes for a better result in
the end.
Last, but not least, more cowbell.
We are trying to establish, for each character, a specific sound, a
specific tonal instrument and a specific percussion instrument. But all
within the whole sound of the series. That way we can build different
tonal, atonal, rhythmic, and melodic variations. For one of the
characters, where we already have a killer bass groove, Sjur figured we
needed some delicious cowbell, and none of the samples I had cut the
cheese. Bruce Dickinson wasn't around for advice. So we got hold of a
proper cowbell, mic'ed it up, started banging and recorded... more
cowbell. Very more cowbell. It was hilarious, it was loud, it was
cowbell, and if my neighbours didn't consider me insane already, I'm
sure they do now.
Quick notice, the Ugress track "Fail To Grow" featuring Christine on
vocals, hit number one on the front page of eminent social music sharing
site The Sixty One this morning.
A brief note to document the progress of scoring Romkameratene, the reason for a slight dip in journal activity.
I have been working around the clock since I was back from Oslo.
Massive amounts of work, but incredibly fun and challenging. Turns out
the show is a major undertaking by NRK, with full transmedial coverage
through TV, radio and web. I am also doing bits and pieces for the radio
shows.
The theme song, including end credits and radio edits, are done. It
rocks, and everybody who has heard it can't help finding themselves
singing it a minute later. The five first episode songs are also
finished, with only some details left to fix in one of them.
Some incidental music for specific situations are done, some still to do.
Leitmotif proof-of-concept for two of the characters are done, the
other four still remaining. We have the ideas but haven't had time to
develop the music and sound yet. There is a certain amount of trial and
error in developing character sounds, with their variations and then
having it all add up into a total coherent sound. But we're getting
there.
Everything is to be delivered this upcoming Friday. Then we go straight to work on the next six episodes.
I spend several hours each day sampling, editing and cutting up sounds in Wave Editor,
the ninja samurai warp-speed dragon-slayer audio editor for OSX. Next
to Logic and Live, this is where my time is spent. I have been using it
back since 1.0, and helped beta-tested some of the .x releases.
Wave Editor is simply the best audio editor for OSX, presenting a
depth of possibilities and edits unmatched. Each sound can be built and
sculpted with layers, like Photoshop, creating a dynamic edit where
nothing is flattened or committed until you need to.
Wave Editor is developed by Audiofile Engineering,
a small independent developer in Minneapolis. Great guys, I met them
when we played there this spring. I know they are going to make it big.
I am very excited for their latest announcement, a fantastic new Studiolife bundle of all their tools, Rax 3, and at last Wave Editor 1.40.
What happens now to all the doomsayers and scaremongers and daft
scientists prophesying the end of the world? Do they go hiding, waiting
for the next conspiracy theory to yell for attention? Are they now
socially and scientifically outlawed? Are they preparing a Bigfoot press
conference? Will they be executed? Thrown in a volcano?
I have the following proposal for adjustments to the human rights charter:
Douchebags that make silly claims regarding end of the world et
cetera blah blah, when proven false, which they always are, are hereby
allowed to be used as lab-rats for any scientific testing, no matter how
unscrupulous and unethical. In fact, the more questionable the
research, the better.
She is uncannily un-uncanny, which, of course makes her VERY uncanny.
I love this tipping point, the Uncanny Precipice if you like - where
something appears human, but only a tiny step outside the edge....
Emily is created with technology from Image-Metrics, which deliver facial tech to game developers. Check out their presentation on their front page. Eminent.
I won't repeat the results here, as usually Mr Kirn writes splendidly
on the topic at hand, you are better off reading it from him than me.
But noteworthy to me is how iPhone/iPod Touch clearly leads the pack,
with gaming devices right behind, and THEN comes Linux / Windows
Mobile.
Personally, I think mobile tech is one of the most crucial
technologies of the future, not only as a pure technological platform,
but also as a content provider. I shall be careful to make any bombastic
predictions, but I am not surprised if my income from mobile will
become my chief source of income within five years.
Naturally, at some point wireless and mobile will merge, and the
current concept of "mobile" will transform into a convergence of home
wifi's, shared networks, public nets, cell tower radios and satellite
uplinks.
I would like to have the iPhone 3G but for me, it is not good enough as a communication device. But the rest of the gadget intrigues me, so I got me just that - the iPod Touch 32 GB.
It compliments my Nokia N95 perfectly. In particular, with the N95 running Joikuspot
and continously providing a shared wi-fi network from the HSDPA link,
my Macbook Pro and the iPod Touch has a 1 mbit internet connection all
the time. This works great for the full-fledged Safari browser and Mail
client on the iPod.
There are several great applications available for the Touch, I'll note them later, but the lure that drew me in was the iTouchMidi application suite. They provide small apps to perform MIDI data on your iPod. Brilliant.
As demonstrated, it works great for small edits. I no longer need to
bring a MIDI keyboard for shorter travels, as the iPod now works OK as a
remote MIDI controller. I'm even thinking of grabbing another iPod, to
have one for keys and one for pads.
Update Aug 17th; producer Paul Levering
wrote me and explained their position, regarding my observations. Very
cool of him, and puts the documentary in another light for me. I asked
if it was OK to post his email as a follow-up, which he agreed to. His
response is below my post.
Pitchfork.TV has a documentary about chiptune music, Reformat The Planet, available for streaming this week. I was looking forward to this, but was a bit let down.
It is not really a documentary about chiptune music. It is an
introduction to the current NYC chiptune club scene and a bunch of NYC
geeks, their hangouts and their friends, with a few performances of
international artists on a NYC festival. That was nice, cool people and
cool music. However.
IMHO it is slightly douchebag-ish that the documentary cluelessly
ignores the chiptune history, the games and scene it originates from,
the European scene (grandfather Jeroen Tel is only briefly shown
performing), the C64 scene and it's influence, trackers, and then kind
of pretends that America is Teh Chiptune HQ, reinventing punk, when it
really is the other way around. But... OK, it's Pitchfork, which is the
music hipster equivalent of North Korea.
I think the C64 and Amiga were not really popular in the US in the
80ies, the Nintendo systems were popular over there. This probably
explains why the documentary focuses on Gameboys and Marios, and nerds
who never used their consoles for anything but games. The only faint
reference to trackers is a short segment of building sampled console
beats in Fruityloops.
There isn't anything in the documentary that explains why and how
chiptune music has grown to what it is today, which IMHO is a crucial
element in an introduction to chip music. This is what flips the
documentary over from a chiptune documentary to what really is just a
portrait of a bunch of NYC gameboy artists.
Response from producer Paul Levering:
Hi, this is Paul Levering. I worked on Reformat the Planet, and we noticed your write-up on your GMM blog.
Thanks for taking the time to watch the movie. I just wanted to
let you know a little more about the background of the production.
The comments you made are similar to ones i've been hearing from others
with extensive knowledge of the chip scene, so i thought with a better
understanding you may be able to find more enjoyment in it for what it
is.
Sorry that you felt disappointed with the doc, we're well aware of the
shortcomings that you found in it. We didn't have any time, money,
or resources to make this film. All we really had was an
opportunity to film the Blip Festival, and we tried the best we could to
create a cohesive document of the festival and the spirit of the people
and culture behind it.
I wish we had the opportunity to make a film that could sum up the 20+
year history of chip music, it's something we're still aiming to do when
we have the proper funding to do it right. That sort of thing
would require traveling the world, which at the time was simply outside
our grasp.
There also wasn't much time to interview artists during the festival,
which is why you don't see much from anyone outside NYC. In the
long run it wouldn't have felt right anyway, to shoehorn that long and
complicated history into a document mostly concerning a single
festival. It's something that deserves to be presented in full,
all in itself.
We're aiming to address all of these concerns with our next production,
so i hope you'll take the time to check out that one as well.
Last day in Oslo today. I'm now at Gardermoen waiting for my flight.
Did some final edits on the vignette, and I picked up videos for the
musical numbers in the first 5 episodes. I am now enroute back to
Bergen, mixing the final details for the vignette on my Mackies
tomorrow, and getting to work on the songs and episode music.
I managed to get lost in the huge NRK buildings today, but didn't
mind. It became a safari, I stumbled across so many wonderful items,
like the keyboard lighting control above. I also met a huge Flode
puppet, lurking behind a corner.
It has been a great week, regardless of the early mornings and long
hours. I stayed with a friend of mine, a few metro stops from the NRK
complex. This meant to get up early and ride the metro to NRK.
My regular route to work in the morning, around 10 am, usually
involves: A hard, uphill battle from the bedroom to the cruel, blinding
sun of the livingroom and further into the safe shadows of the kitchen.
Here I rest for a few minutes while cooking up a serious dose of
espresso, before locating my laptop and get to work. 10 meters, but 10
hard and dangerous meters.
This week I had several kilometers of metro commute, at 7 in the
morning. Which to me was a great expedition of grand adventure. I felt
like a proper commuter, with a real important job, getting up
sensationally early and flocking towards the station. I tried to smile
commutingly and nod conspirationally to everyone of my fellow commuter
friends, "hey fellow commuter, we're commuting, high five!". But noone
responded.
Why is the Romkameratene show the best sci-fi children show ever?
Because the UFO has Tesla plasmaballs for pilot controls, steampunkish
interior (detail from mechanics room, above) and blue laboratory flasks
in the laboratory. Those three things combined is a guaranteed recipe
for success. There is nothing in the world that contains those three
items, and isn't awesome.
This morning I got the visuals for the new vignette, it looks great
and there wasn't any need for musical re-arrangement, I only changed and
emphasized some of the sounds and levels accordingly to the new
visuals.
I then spent the day mixing and structuring the vocals. Cooking up
six actors with multiple harmonies and phrases into a catchy space
electro-opera of 45 seconds is a wonderful puzzle challenge.
The current edit is now out for feedback and producer scrutinizing, and I'm off to stock up on espresso.
Electrochemical synthesis makes fantastic evil slams and bams:
Pressing a key causes salt
solution to flow over a copper and aluminium connection generating a low
signal which is filtered by a capacitor and then amplified, creating a
complex white noise, with amazing fluctuating oscillations.
It sounds wonderful, and I love the chemical synthesis concept. Being
that circuit bending is slightly tired, approaching the periodic system
for sounds is full of win.
Logic project screenshot of the theme music vocal recordings above.
Flattened music on one track, with various phrases, harmonies and
variations on the rest.
Recorded the final character today, Mook. He has a wonderful, wobbly
and animated voice, lots of "uncontrolled" tonal jumps. I was curious
how Mook would translate musically, but as with all of them: Reproducing
the characters vocie peculiarities in a musical setting works
surprisingly well. The credit for that goes directly to the voice
actors; they are seriously leet.
A short note on the technicalities. I am pleasantly satisfied with my
portable studio. I have been recording with Logic on my Macbook Pro,
using a Neumann mic straight into the Apogee Duet, monitoring on AKG
k701s. Tiny MIDI keyboard for reference keys, and an external HD for
complete access to projects, backups and sound libraries.
The setup sounds great, runs very stable, and everything fits in my backpack to have with me everywhere.
Today was sprint-marathon session of recording, we recorded most of
the voice actors and their lines for six of the songs. Bam bam bam, it's
in our can.
And we got to visit the studio filmset! During lunch break we popped
in to see the set where they record the puppets. That's Sjur and me
above, inside the science laboratory in the Romkameratene UFO. Steampunk
spaceship FTW.
I was impressed by the voice actors, very funny, efficient and
professional - and amazingly skilled at making the cartoony voices sing
and come to life musically. My laptop is bursting with fantastic takes
of outer space science-puppets.
Afternoon was spent cleaning up and structuring the recordings, and
preparing the theme song for final edits. I was supposed to produce it
overnight, however NRK is delayed with the final cut so we're doing the
music tomorrow morning instead.
Which means another ungodly early morning in a few hours.
Check it, I got my own Uncanny Executive Compositional Laboratory HQ at NRK. With piano and coffee machine of course.
The UECL HQ is a nice music room in the basement, where I am recording
the vocals for Romkameratene this week.I'll also have to do some mixing
and producing there at night, some of the music is to be delivered
already this week. So I'm recording actors during the day and mixing the
takes at night.
I grabbed a pair of Edirol monitors the other day (can't remember the
exact model). My süper-über excellent AKG k701 cans reveal any details I
should ever need to worry about, but working long hours on headphones
for a whole week could make my head implode graphically violently. I'm
not too happy with the sound of the Edirol speakers, but they have some
juice, and are portable - compact enough to fit in my flight-case, and
doesn't weigh too much.
First takes was done today, a soft start with only one performer and it
went very well. Tomorrow is marathon session with lots of performers,
and Sjur is coming over to assist. Worst of all, I have to get up
ungodly early.
That coffee machine is going to get a serious workout this week.
"The fossil finds allow us
to examine Antarctica as it existed just prior to climate cooling at
13.9 million years ago. It is a unique window into the past. To study
these deposits is akin to strolling across the Dry Valleys 14.1 million
years ago."
What I find particularly interesting is that Antarctica went from
"Earthy" to "Marsy" right around that time. This research could perhaps
indicate what and how to look for life on Mars?
I was walking thru Nydalen, Oslo looking for a bite to eat, when it
struck me - this area is hauntingly beautiful, but probably not as
intented. It looks like a "perfect future" horror vision, as visualized
in late 80ies and early 90ies sci-fi films like Demolition Man and
Freejack. I hearts! It's like being in those films!
A picture perfect future, where corporations are in total control,
everything is streamlined, organized, systemized and SIMILIAR.
Individuality is subdued. Pitch perfect green grass, glassy buildings,
smooth textures, and best of all, in case you didn't notice: NO PEOPLE!
There are no people here! Perhaps they are underground, waiting to
strike.
More pics in my Flickr set. I'm off to find the resistance.
I'm on expedition to Oslo, to work on the NRK Romkameratene TV series.
This week has been brief meetings and visual work on the vignette,
which we thought perhaps would be need some rewriting or retiming of the
music to sync up to the visuals. Fortunately the music already fits
perfectly, so I can concentrate on other things - the songs. Next week I
am recording and mixing all the voice actors for their song lines. I've
got my own room at NRK to do the recordings, hopefully there will be
time to document it.
As I wrote earlier, originally I was only supposed to do the theme
music, which grew to become the theme song, which then grew to include a
few episode songs, which now grows to all episodes, and even further.
So far we (me and mad vocal arranger genius Sjur Hjeltnes) have written
five songs, some recurrent music and the theme, and we are working on
the next six songs.
Today I discussed with the producers, the option of me also scoring the episodes.
They had previously been hesitant to ask because of time and budget
constraints, and I had been hesitant to suggest it because I thought
maybe someone else would be scoring the episodes, or maybe they already
had something - or maybe they didn't want a score. Scoring takes time,
and usually is done after editing, pushing release further back. But the
show would really really benefit a score and I would love to do it.
We talked it over, and learned we both really want to have a proper
score and a total musical "sound" for the series. The only real obstacle
is time, the release date is locked. After a quick battle with
calendars, deadlines, music scenes and scripts, I think we came up with a
pretty smart solution. Stay tuned.
So. I have spent the day watching raw cuts of all episodes, and toying
with development of leitmotifs for the characters. My favourite
character of the show, Zook, speaks very little, but has a lot of
charisma and action. We figured maybe giving him more of a prominent
musical theme, instead of dialogue, I am very eager to get started on
his music bits.
Everything for the first six episodes, including incidental music, has
to be done by the last week of August. Premiere is September 13th. Next
week is recording of vocals, and then I sit down to score everything.
NRK starts promoting the show in a week or so, by then I can probably
include some pictures and media in my journal notes.
Feed The Animals
is a great album and a great theft of samples - I am very curious to see
how this plays out, if the album is physically released.
I think sampling, either as concrete audio sampling, as ripping the
guitar riff from another band by ear, or as painting in the same colour
scheme as Picasso, is the most interesting and discuss-worthy aspect of
culture.
There are so many aspects and challenges regarding sampling. Sadly,
there is little to none discussion, only imprenetable laws established
by bling-bling orcs and culture vultures. Perhaps the GT release (being
released on long time bad boy Illegal Art) will kick up some needed fuzz.
Celemony has posted a new tech interview today, covering their new polyphonic note separation tool DNA
(Direct Note Access). This technology, allowing you to fully edit
individual notes within a multitimbral, polyphonic recording, will
transform music fundamentally, and I cannot wait to get my cursor on it.
Mad polysonic genius Peter Neubacker, the guy who found the holy grail of sample manipulation, explains his findings.
A brief montage of Tesla coils, glitch orchestra score, impressed
young socialists pressing buttons and flicking switches, and a guy
playing Theremin. This is serious WTF FTW.
I love size. Come boats or planes, beats or screens - the bigger, the better.
So my morning feed today had two great gigantic gems for me; a brilliant Dark Roasted Blend post on the Great Eastern, the worlds biggest seafaring steampunk contraption from 1843...
The megalomania and enginerical hubris of the victorians, mashed with the contemporary, continental decadence of the Belle Epoque resonate dearly with me. World domination, excessive luxury and technological hubris FTW.
When my time machine is ready I will of course mostly travel to the
future, but for holiday trips I will definitively camp out at The Imperial Century.
I'm on my way to Oslo by train, to record the first batch of Romkameratene
songs at NRK. I've spent the first half of the trip now, doing
something that have slipped my mind for six months - typing down the
lyrics for Ugress vocal tracks. I simply forgot about them until now.
I programmed and built a simple web system for displaying them from
database, making syndication, redesign, updates and future additions
much easier.
Posted August 4th 2008, at 13:05 with tags No tags.
Many
reports of failed email delivery due to escalated spam listing...that
means the server delivering your email to me has been used for spam
attacks very recently, and has been blacklisted for a short period
(usually 24-48 hrs).
If you are having trouble emailing me on any regular ugress or
uncannyplanet address, you could try my backup gmail account: gmmius at
gmail dot com.
Yesterday we played live at the beautiful Lost Weekend festival.
It worked out OK in the end, but as usual, doing multimedia at the
olympic level means battling recalcitrant technology up to the last
nanosecond before concert start. And sometimes, like yesterday, even
during the whole show.
Lost Weekend had promised us at least 8 computer screens for visuals,
but upon arrival backstage one hour prior to show there were... none.
"Someone", had failed to deliver them. "Someone", karma will get you.
You will end up in a call centre, answering calls about the tiny monitor
menu systems. Forever.
Anyway, the incredible backstage crew managed to dig up a few screens
for us, and we had two with us, so it wasn't all bad. Then, we had 40
minutes to set everything up, multiple laptops synchronized, hooked into
projectors and computer screens, and audio feeds between The Igor and
me.
That's where it broke down.
The Igor receives separate clicktrack and beats from me to his own
mixer, to adjust independently. This broke down. We didn't have much
time look for errors, already being late for onstage. The signal from my
Traveler was checked OK, so we reckon the breakdown was some hardware
at The Igor's side, probably the mixer.
We managed to hack a faint click mix, I boosted things as much as
possible in Live, but it wasn't enough, and we were out of time. The
Igor had to play most of the set without click. We had to skip one of
the more technically challenging tracks, where we both rely on click to
keep ourselves sync.
Also, my regular audio mashup / softsynth / sampler / effects / plaything-Powerbook is at the hospital.
I had borrowed The Igors Powerbook, and to my horror I discovered that
the Ableton Live trial I was running, needed to go online at startup to
unlock stuff. Crap! I had to go online with the Macbook Pro via
bluetooth on my cellphone HSDPA, share this connection to wi-fi, hook
the Powerbook up to this wi-fi network, and unlock Live. Phew. Show
saved by the cellphone.
And then we were on.
The show went very well, everything we managed to get running kept
running like it should. The audience was incredible and I think
everybody had a great time, ourselves included.
However, noted for improvement; it was not the uttermost optimal
performance of what we CAN deliver - this was the first show ever where
the click system broke down. We learned how that affects us. We are of
course already looking into solutions, to make sure this does NOT happen
again.
Lost
Weekend is a fantastic festival, much because of the location - a
beautiful, forested recreational area on an island just outside Bergen.
The artists are transported into the festival by boat, a wonderful boat ride in the Nordic sunset.
The backstage area has it's own pebble beach, so after the show The
Igor and me went for a delicious refreshing midnight swim, while waiting
for transport back to the laboratories to analyze and correct
clicktrack problems.
Conclusion: Great success, as always, lots of technological breakdowns, as always.
Some of the pictures is like, wow that looks like a CPU or complex
circuitry inside a mega-computer, then suddenly you spot a tiny little
PERSON somewhere inside it.
Ooh ooh exciting! Scientists has discovered something on Mars,
more "proactive" than water, which has not been revealed to the public,
but the White House has been briefed and will make a statement after
consideration.
"According to scientists in communication with Aviation Week & Space Technology,
the next big discovery will need to be mulled over for a while before
it is announced to the world. In fact, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
science team for the MECA wet-chemistry instrument that made these
undisclosed findings were kept out of the July 31st news conference
(confirming water) so additional analysis could be carried out, avoiding
any questions that may have revealed their preliminary results."
I wonder what it could be! Microbes? Bacteria? Plant life? Dinosaur
skeletons? Clues of alien life? Decepticons? Oil? Carmen Sandiego?
Wal-Mart? Bin Laden? Devil Girl?
Forbidden Planet is awesome on so many levels, with the peak of awesomeness perhaps being a serious and sordid young Leslie Nielsen as spaceship commander.
I discovered Forbidden Planet late one night on TCM in the 90ies, and
it was love at first sight. I shall not spoil the movie, but to mention
the ingredients: First electronic music score, epic special effects,
sardonic first robot side-kick, spectacular sets, first flying saucer,
hidden monsters, Star Wars scroll in the trailer 20 years before Star
Wars.
Ah, the majors. They just don't get it and I think they never will.
Right now, Columbia Records is running Google ads on their company
website. Personally I don't think ads on company websites are cool, it
smells kinda lame fish, but each to his own.
A month ago I very quietly released
the cleverly disguised Harakiri Martini video. The quiet release was
deliberate. If that was WISE is highly discussable, but it was
deliberate.
We tried to make a video for the youtubes, not the TV channels, and
choose to run a little experiment before announcing it properly, to see
if it could pick itself up virally.
A couple of places the video worked great on it's own but mostly I
think people didn't catch it, passed below the radar. You really need
the same amount of promotional efforts behind a viral video as a
traditional video to get it going. The video needs a kick in the butt.
So together with a bunch of long-awaited updates and releases I'll
announce it properly on the Ugress mailinglist and elsewhere, see if
that helps.
The Making Of
There is a loooong story behind the making of the video, I'll save
that for a campfire moment - but the short short version; we (director Magnus
and me) started working on this in late 2007. Ever the optimists, never
learning from our past, we were certain it would be finished in a few
weeks. Ah the hubris. Mad evil people always think they can do
everything "ready even before the weekend".
Doing a computer animated/enhanced sports video on nanoscopic budgets
does not translate into quick progress, and several fundamental aspects
of the video was shifted multiple times. Stuart, the tireless animator
in London also could only work when time permitted. Bless his patient
soul. And bless the girls for their mad skillz. A lot of the tricks they
are performing for real.
But regardless of our clumsy hubridic scheduling, things kept coming along, in June the video was suddenly finished.
Not exactly brilliant timing, having a video 6 months after the album
release, but that is typical Ugress and I've learned to live with it.
Nothing happens when it should, everything happens when it shouldn't.
So being way too late anyway, we could afford a few weeks extra of
trying out things. Which didn't quite work out. Too bad you can't
computer animate viral success.
Conclusion
I definitively think we should do a directors commentary on this video.
If you have the Unicorn
album, and would like to sing karaoke, create a mashup, or you just
don't like words - you can now access instrumental versions of all the
vocal tracks.
I proudly present The Harakiri Martini special limited edition T-shirt (male/female),
available now in great celebration with the official release of the
Harakiri Martini music video. I needed something extra so I designed my
very first T-shirt design.
Featuring a
fabric with naturally sustainable organic bamboo, this clever piece of
clothing is only made in an exclusive first print of 100 shirts. We sold
quite a few at the Landmark and Veko gigs, the shirt was surprisingly
popular with the girls.
Fabric woven from bamboo yarn is very light, almost translucent, and
softer than cotton. It has a natural quality that feels like silk, but
has the advantage of being machine-washable. This natural fibre is
hypoallergenic, absorbent, and fast drying. It is naturally
anti-bacterial and will not hold odour.
The fabric is cooling in the summer, warm in the winter, and environmentally friendly all year round.
Nebular Spool - Ruins
was written very much in February this year, with some additional work
in March. It was a deliberating experience after all the stressed out
fuzz and buzz around the Ugress - Unicorn release. Unicorn was the first "big" album I released on my own label,
by myself, and there was a lot to learn and deal with. It was
incredible fun but also a lot of work, for six months I didn't write or
work with any new material.
When the Unicorn album was out,
I was kinda fatigued from trying to fit into and relate to the
hyper-commercialized music business, and bursting with unspent
creativity to write new stuff.
Aside from a little tour to the US and a remix,
I hid myself in the studio and just cranked out music with no regards
to what I was doing or why. I didn't try for anything in particular, I
just let the songs find their own flow, not worrying about radio
friendliness or marketability.
Technically everything was done in with Logic 8 and Live 7, using a lot
of Kontakt 3 and Reaktor 5 for sample manipulation. I also did some
minor stuff and edits with Renoise, my favorite tracker. I really fell
in love with Speakerphone,
a superb impulse speaker emulator plugin for making lofi sounds. I ran
sounds thru cellphones and airplane cockpits and guitar amps and then
round again and further thru a bunch of old radios... great fun.
For the source sample material I did a lot of "blind" sampling, that is,
I just grab the first random vinyl album I come across, and sample
whatever I think can be twisted into something that works. For example,
the distant, silvery choir-ish sound in Frozen Reflection is from a
christmas carols album (with lots of horribly happy christmas songs). I
put the album on, skip the needle around, grab a tone and out of the
blue figure to used it for some high-frequent Reaktor granular mess-ups.
If it works, keep it, continue with next. If it doesn't work, find a
way to make it work, continue with next.
With so much material written over a short period with a focused mindset
I felt the material was coherent enough to warrant it's own release,
and it suited the Nebular Spool themathics.
I had come across the images of Lori Nix
some months earlier and really fell in love with them, they were
perfect for a Nebular cover. I contacted her and she was super cool, we
quickly made a deal for licensing the images for cover artwork and
website.
I was planning to release the album in mid-April, but I was very short
on economical resources. In addition, my studio building was going down,
I had to move out. Clearing out the studio and preparing for a nomadic
lifestyle took a lot of time and energy. April was just a mess of applications, practicalities, bills and what-ifs. No time to finalize the album, or anything else. I pushed it to May.
Then May and June suddenly became very busy with travelling, touring, production and scoring gigs, which was sorely needed to fix the economics. Finally in July, when everyone left for vacations and the world sloved down, I had a week to put it all together and get it out.
Next week is back to chaos with the NRK space show, another production gig and live show at Lost Weekend.
The album is available for free download, and high quality purchase. It will be available in iTunes, Amazon etc in a couple of weeks (they are slow to update).
Sometimes doing production music to pay the bills can be tedious, but
most of the time it is super cool. Especially when I get to work with
my long time music video director Magnus Martens.
In May this year I did the background music for Tandberg's "Wonderwall", a short one minute tech-feist of greenscreens and postprods, now available on their multimedia site.
Not the most moving story and brilliant acting, but lots of whizbang visuals and imagery, done by always impressive Racecar. When I did the music all I had was the actors, green screens and phone calls with Magnus.
The track is rebuilt from the track Neptune Walks (warning: autostarts), originally used in the Perfect Moment series.
Another of the mysterious Nebular Spools
has come into our possession. Suddenly appearing where nothing can
appear, this spool of lo-fi, retro-organic deadscapes materializes
itself. As usual, a cryptic, machine-typed note was all left for
explanation:
Deeper
into the ruins there are found more broken computers. Some are fragment,
some are whole, others are skeleton. There is not much time for me to
spend on else, so I set them all together again as possible. I discover
only more of the music noises and the visual stories about the
collapse. They look made up.
I like to compose the
pieces complete, and play on my mechanical speaker at the night fire.
They are broken memories, but so are my time.
I sense a more melancholic and lonesome tone than the previous Nebular Spool.
My research into where, and perhaps, when, this entity is communicating
these sordid themes of apocalyptic misfortune to me, has so far been
futile.
One can only deduct from the sounds themselves.
I choose therefore to release this material,
as an album, for free, or for purchase in higher quality. Perchance
there are connections, or clues in the clouds - which will shed light on
this shaded mystery.
Delia Derbyshire
is no doubt one of the most important figures in the history of
electronic music, not at least because of her original, incredible
version of the Doctor Who theme.
Recently a bunch of her old sketches and recordings where recorded, including one piece that sounds like it comes directly from Detroit in 1988 or Berlin 2003. But it actually comes from BBC in the 50ies.
Update: Turns out the reference score I built the trailer music
from isn't from the film itself but from The Fountain.. duh. Makes the
hubris of this post rather moot. And also there is something wrong with
the sound in the last part of the clip.
The producer contacted me in early May and needed the music "like...
now". So I wrote and fixed most of the music for 24 hours, based on a
reference score they wanted bigger and more percussive. There was some
versioning and adjustments afterwards, and I did several different edits
while travelling, I think there will be more versions of the trailer
later.
I enjoy writing for trailers even more than writing for films. It
suits my temperament and attention span. It's like compressing the
essence of a film score of an hour into two explosive minutes.
"Everything at once", ah, that should be my motto.
Poppe's previous Hawaii Oslo
is one of my favourite Norwegian movies ever (which incidentially
licensed Atlantis), and IMHO Mr Poppe is one of Norways most interesting
and exciting directors. I can't wait to see the whole picture.
After a few slow summer weeks of building and testing (THANK YOU crew
of über excellent beta testers) the store is now open for business.
Let's call it public beta because I'm sure there still are some kinks.
For that reason I'm not making a mega-announcement of it, I'd rather
build the store slowly, see how it works and adjust/optimize over time.
My largest problem right now is the weak dollar and the strong
Norwegian currency. Being that most my listeners are customers are from
The GreatUtlandet,
I'm really struggling to find prices that are sensible to both
customers and myself. (Don't be afraid to give your opinion in the
comments if the prices are crazy compared to your expectations.)
And finally, I must say: The norwegian postal rates are INSANE. Sorry
about those. I'm not charging for packaging, if that helps.
My beloved 12" powerbook, Mojito, pictured below dutifully
accompanying me on one of my dangerous expeditions, has been
hospitalized. I can hardly keep the tears in. Such a brave little
fellow.
The screen is dead. It only displays a static grey light, not even that NVRAM BIOS stuff is possible to see. Completely goner.
The last few gigs I had to use an external screen or screen sharing,
the laptop is fully alive and kicking, but the physical screen is gone.
So it needs repair, or at least a repair-report for insurance, so today I
had to check my Mojito in to Applecare. Into the cruel hands of
indifferent repair-men and soul-less, money-loving capitalists.
The poor thing. All alone on a shelf. Unknown wi-fi. Blind.
One of the reasons I am disappointed
in the general lacklustiness of the iPhone 3G, is because I so much
wanted to use it as an eBook reader. It would be perfect for that. Now
that I have decided not to get the hysterophone, I started looking into alternatives. And was pleasantly surprised.
I love books, I read shitloads of books, usually simultaneously. My
current physical stack of literary consumption is Haruki Murakami's After Dark (just finished, not his best), Joanna Russ' The Female Man (tricky sci-gender-fi), Walter Murch's In The Blink Of An Eye (intriguing, film editing is highly related to musical rhythm/structural composition), Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise (incredible odyssey thru the 20th century's music) and Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture (brilliant and a pleonastic compulsory must-read for any creative person today).
Needless to say, I cannot carry this treasure chest of information
around all the time. I'd look more of a dork than I already do by
default.
Enter Mobipocket Reader on my N95.
It works surprisingly brilliantly well. I'm in love. In addition to the
respectful library of books available from Mobipocket, the reader
software is highly customizable, runs fullscreen, has built-in
dictionary lookup, and supports a multitude of formats including txt and
html.
Posted July 12th 2008, at 18:32 with tags fail, iphone
I'm not getting one. The phone
quite simply is not good enough as a phone in 2008. Maybe in the US,
but no way it cuts the cheese in Europe. And not only is the phone
lackluster, but somehow, with the silly hysteria surrounding the launch
right now, the phone has tipped over from sort-of-cool to wannabe-cool.
The next few weeks undoubtedly you will be surrounded by Netcom-Nisser,
desperately trying to impress you because they have one. They Will
Fail.
I was considering getting one, the push technology, the external
applications and the user interface are nice candy to me. But the rest
is just not up to par with my N95 8GB, which in fact, is the best phone
in the world right now. I'm really surprised Apple fails at this,
because my Macbook Pro is really everything a laptop should be. Why
don't they make an "iPhone Pro" or whatever? Fail.
No tethering? Waht
Teh Blistering Fcuk? What is this, 1997? You've GOT to be kidding me.
Maybe Americans don't tether, but Mad Professors and the rest of Europe
certainly do. Tethering is the KILLER APP of HSDPA. Excluding tethering
shows a thunderous lack of understanding of mobile tech. Fail.
And 2 megapixel camera? No native video recording? No MMS? No Flash? No
copy paste? WTF is the point of "revolutionary zooming by pinching", if
your camera only takes crappy pictures anyway? Zoom in to see the
pixels? Fail.
But best of all, the phone is LOCKED TO NETCOM? Epic consumer über-fail
non-success. I wouldn't be caught dead with a Netcom subscription.
Observe, if you are in Norway, how desperately Netcom is clinging to
Apple credibility. They are cred-shopping upwards. They are waving the
phone around as much as they can, and introducing "special subscription
models" because the phone will "revolutionize mobile data use". No. That
revolution was two years ago. You just didn't pay attention. These sub
models are TOO LATE. Don't boast of inventing the wheel when everyone
drives a car, it makes you look stupid. Epic fail.
The iPhone 3G, sadly, is not a good enough phone. I wish it was, I would
like to like it - but it is far from the best phone in the world.
Posted July 9th 2008, at 17:14 with tags lame, mp3, encoder
The LAME mp3 encoder,
which really is THE mp3 encoder, recently upgraded to latest freshest
version 3.98, after four years of development from trusty old 3.97.
LAME now uses its own psychoacoustic model and has an improved variable bitrate routine.
I am GMM and I heartily endorse LAME for all my psychoacoustic encodement needs.
Girl Talk (warning:
Myspace) is one of the finest mashers of our times, and I was happy to
discover the recent release of his latest album Feed The Animals, available for download from my favorite label Illegal Art.
You can choose what you pay, $5 brings FLAC and seamless versions.
Cheque with. Uncanny Planet Records is making money in the real
world: My first Amazon retailer cheque! And it's real, printed, came in
the mail!
I got tired of never being available on Amazon, the worlds biggest
retailer, so I signed up as an Advantage indie supplier. This means Amazon carry a small number of my albums in storage for orders, and I ship continously to them as customers orders.
So far, with the bat-shit insanse Norwegian postal rates, naughty
Amazon provision, and the anorectic US dollar, the Amazon Advantage
venture so far is a slight loss. It costs me more to ship the CDs over
then I making on the sales.
But at least my albums are available, and surprises like a One
Hundred Twenty-Eight Dollards And 80 Cents cheques pop up in my mailbox.
All world domination schemes must start in the small, I suppose.
But, why the unclefucking why, if you as an appliance producer lower
yourself to this epic failness, and bundle an adapter with your
cheap-ass product, why are not The Power Adapter labeled properly as The
Adapter For The Product?
Power adapters are like pictures of babies. They all look the same! You can't tell who made what with whom!
I'm sorting out my gig bag, and it has like 200 adapters. I have no
effing clue as to which adapter is to what box, except for those I
actually took the time to label manually myself. Why don't they just
print "Adapter for product X" on adapters?
Do producers think their customers only have ONE appliance in their lives? Which is THEIR appliance?
I'm pretty sure, if we summarize all the time and energy humans have
wasted figuring out which adapter is to what appliance, ever, globally,
the cost of this epic failness is way larger than the cost of actually
printing the connection on the adapter.
When I become cruel dictator, this will be fixed, and those responsible, will be severely punished.
Tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider
will be turned on. Scaremonger amateur scientists fear the end of the
world, the rest of us kinda think the size of the project is awesome, we
really would like to be there, and thats about it.
I, of course, will be stand by with a bottle of fine champagne. Not only
is it The Igors birthday tomorrow, also the world could potentially end
because of science!
Most excellent day ever. If I am going to be swallowed by a black hole, I
will do so in my lab coat with a glass of champagne in hand. Science
FTW.
What great times! I am on a train, finally catching up with the world
after a few days in the woods, and so much excitement around the globe!
Not only the original Spiderman music discovered, mentioned a post
further down - also, missing scenes from The Greatest Movie Of All Time,
Metropolis, has been found collecting dust in Argentina. I quote Die Zeit:
Last Tuesday Paula
Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet
with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum
director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy
of a long version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, including scenes believed
lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are
certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide
sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history,
can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered.
This is just incredible. Best cinematic news ever.
The original 60ies Spider-Man TV series contained some of the grooviest cartoon music ever known to spidermen.
This music was considered lost in the spidery mists of time, until Kliph Nesteroff digged it up just now.
Enjoy his excellent podcast where he provides the original music in noisy episode context and then the crystal clear masters, provided over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.
But someone special certainly doesn't connect with himself.
I have a track on the Shockadelica compilation, a Norwegian tribute release where 50 Norwegian artists wrote cover songs in honour of Prince's 50th birthday.
I did the only Batman soundtrack contribution, a frenetic 90ies UK
beatsy cover of "The Future". It is not a fantastic track, but it works,
and it's a birthday present to Prince, I spent a short week on it. And
the important part to me was, I wrote most of the track on a hotel room in Minneapolis earlier this year, while we were playing the Spark festival.
However.
The Shockadelica release, out June 7th, received pretty good reviews
in Norwegian press. But it didn't surprise anyone when the release now was sued and sought stopped by Prince and his lawyers, demanding C+C Records destroy all copies.
Yawn. Short-tempered (ha ha) and seriously clueless aritst fondles
his own sour grapes with the tender loving care male artists have for
their own.
I haven't bothered to spend any time researching why and how and all
that, but regardless of the problem behind it - I'm slightly experienced
in the Norwegian music rights system - not only is Prince receiving a
personal birthday gift of 50 artist who spent time they are never
getting paid for tributing him, he is also chewing on a serious royalty
cut for every track. If anyone makes money on this, it is the fucker
himself. I am not going to earn ANY money on this. Ever.
I think in the end, this is just great pay for the lawyers involved,
great PR for the Prince, great PR for Christer Falck/C+C Records, and a
blog post at best for most entities involved artistically.
Music biz, what a great place to be. There's crap around every corner, and the crap is nurtured.
We played Ekstremsportveko and Etne over the weekend, it was fantastic.
The show at Veko was amazing. Great production, incredible atmosphere
and a packed festival tent. The Igor played like the machine god he is.
Early on, a bottle of water spilled on my table because of
vibrations, I didn't notice until halfway into the set, suddenly the
table was filled with water beneath the mixers and laptops. You can
faintly see the offending bottle between the two screens to left above.
Then a few minutes later I was jumping around too much, shaking the
table, consequently pulling the projector cable out of one of the
laptops, the lid on another was slammed shut and one the computer
screens fell of the table. I can not understand how everything kept
running and pumping in sync regardless of the mess, it is a miracle.
Etne was exactly the same, only 1/10th in size, being a smaller
festival. And I made sure to secure the table properly. Only thing
breaking down in Etne was the wifi MIDI network going bananas 2 minutes
before onstage, but a quick reboot and evil stare made sure everything
behaved correctly.
I upped some cellshots from the weekend to Flickr. We taped the Etne show and if The Igor has time we'll get it up and out this week (he's got the camera).
We're at Veko, just finished with soundcheck, and this is going to be AWE-ZUM.
We have, what, 14 VGA screens (some of them pictured above), a 5k
lumens projector covering the huge backdrop, a crazy light rig, a
massive sound system, and a big tent to blast to smithereens with
cinemasonic weapons. Of course, one of the laptop suddenly decided "I
have no soundcard, no, huh, what do you mean, play a sound? You need
sound? I don't care, talk to the mouse" and a MIDI interface crapped
out.
As usual, technological breakdown en masse. Argh, I'll probably spend
the next few hours finding macgyverish workarounds and hacking
something together.
Right now I'm at the hotel killing emails and working out fixes, and
right outside my window skydivers and paragliders are landing
continuously. Behind that, on the lake, someone is paragliding behind a
speedboat. Behind that again, I can hear the Animal Alpha drummer doing
soundcheck, the beats looming in the distance between the mountains.
It's like the air is stuffed with mad craziness and great expectations.
This is awesome, I really prefer the company of mad crazy people.
Speaking of crazy, The Igor has spent the week up here, doing the
extreme kayak things the extreme sports people do. His drying wetsuit
decorates or backstage tent splendidly.
He reports of super wild crowds in the tent yesterday. I think
tonight is going to be great. Crazy people + cinemasplosions = great
success. Many things will break down, I am sure, but hopefully not
morale.
(I mentioned a few posts
back I was in the middle of a huge NRK project. I talked to them about
journalizing the process, and they thought it was a great idea. So I
will be documenting and journalize the process of writing and producing
music for a TV show. Here is a brief introduction.)
I am composing music for a brand new brilliant children's TV show on
NRK titled "Romkameratene" - translated as "Space Buddies" in English. I
would summarize it as Crazy Smart Muppet Fraggle Scientists In Space
Researching Humans, Life, The Earth And All The Weird Things In The
World.
The show is fantastic, I've seen the pilot and some development
concepts, read episode scripts, and it is all hilarious. It is aimed at
young children, but with a very smart tone, fearless approach to
difficult subjects, and great jokes for both children and adults. And
music.
Originally I was approached to write the theme music, and sent them a
few sketches. That worked, I think I nailed the sound, they soon asked
if I could do episode songs as well. I was thrilled and scared
simultaneously, I have never written music numbers, but this show was
just awesome, it imprints the value of science onto children - I could
never let this pass. Science FTW.
I hooked up with Sjur Hjeltnes, an orchestrator and arranger that I
met a few years ago when he arranged Reason To Believe for a 100 person
large symphonic orchestra, band and laptops (we performed three songs
from Resound in a symphonic setting some years ago). Sjur is also the
mastermind behind the fantastic italo crime-funk arrangements in Spider
Eyes. He is a classically educated composer, arranger and piano player,
performs and arranges for a musical show, a great guy with fantastic
knowledge and brilliant humour. I thought of him at once when NRK asked
for vocal tracks. Smart move.
Yesterday we delivered the theme song including vocals, some
incidental music and five super music numbers. Epic orchestral
spacetronica meets fearless science meets hilarious and lovable puppets.
NRK is happy and so am I.
For now we are giving them reference tracks, production music with
reference vocals. This is something they can shoot and direct the
puppets to, and over the summer we are going into studio with the voice
actors to record, overdub and produce the final music for prime time
children television.
On Friday we're getting new songs. I'm off for some touring this
weekend, and after that some travelling around to catch up with people.
But on the road I'll be working on beats and the music for the next
bunch of tracks, while Sjur looks into the lyrics. During July we'll get
thru the next bunch, and August is scheduled for recording.
Now with NRK being cool about me blogging it, I'll try to document
the process as much as possible. (I have asked them for permission to
post demos, sketches and pictures but they haven't cleared that yet.)
UPDATEJune 27th:Thanks
to everyone who voluntered, I am very very happy and perfectly covered
from all corners of the world. No need for more betatesters right now.
If everything goes according to plan and testing, I hope to open in
approx 14 days (I'm on the road for some time).
I have set up a store for selling CDs, T-shirts and other physical
goods. It is almost finished and ready and prepped with incredible
merch. I have expanded the T-shirt collection and also introduced the
first shirt in my own GMM collection. Hopefully this store will allow me
to sell and expedite goods more fluidly and transparent than before.
But before I open up, I need some more testing. Most importantly
payments, shipping calculations and the order process must be
scrutinized. So I call upon the cloud hive: If you would like to test
the store, I would be very happy.
Please note: Testing means I would probably like you to use your
creditcard and/or Paypal account to make some purchases, both small and
large. You will of course be refunded any transactions if necessary.
Drop me an email mall@uncannyplanet.com, kindly mention a few words about yourself (country and online shopping experience), and if you are willing to test payments.
Naturally all beta testers are glorious persons and will be rewarded with some sweet, suitable compensation.
Some people worry about the awesome Hadron collider creating black holes
and swallowing us in the name of science, others worry about global
warming cooking us alive in the name of
using-up-all-the-oil-for-driving-to-work. I say, worry more about
medusa-inspired robots in the name of autonomous apocalypse.
Scientists (again) at some university (again) has created (again) a cruel robot (again), capable not only of recreating any 3D object, but brilliantly also itself.
The end is here and it can cut-copy-paste itself at will.
I haven't had time to check out the video recordings, it was filmed by legendary Kosmonaut director Mr Sund, I'll get to it asap and see what we can put together.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has developed software that automatically finds geopositions of any image.
The idea is very simple, it works by taking a photo, and looking for
specific matches in other photos with known locations, delivered by
online photo-sharing sites. There is a bunch of smart algorithms at play
to look for various similarities and specifics in photos.
The success rate is impressive 16 percent, and I am sure it will only
get better, the bigger the cloubal repository of images grow.
This is pretty cool, and great scary news for the robot revolution.
Turning off the GPS satellites won't do much good to stop the incoming
robot swarms. We must also remember to turn off Flickr.
Posted June 18th 2008, at 19:52 with tags work, work, work
The
reason for the lack of journalizing besides two words here and there is
because I am firing on all über leet ninja sound music recording
editing skills simultaneously and working 36 hours daily on music for a
new NRK TV-series. It is a fantastic project, I am currently composing
for the first six episodes and the theme song, on world record
deadlines, if they approve it I might get the whole series (or as much
as I can manage) and season 2 is AFAIK already confirmed and this could
mos def fund my own life for years, the Ugress 3 debts, and Ugress 4.
I will talk to the producer if I am allowed to journalize the
progress and dump screenshots/themes/developments because this is crazy
challenging and fun. The characters are singing! I am writing
motherfucking musicals here.
Oh and Harakiri Martini music video has global international premiere
next week, final render and dump is done Monday, and I wish I could set
and promise a Tuesday release but next week is shooting of the first
NRK episodes, that could shift things around I am sure. But it WILL be
out before we go touring Friday.
And I was informed by the Lost Weekend festival poster that apparently - we are playing there? WTF nobody told me.
When I was a young child professor I used to watch and play football
games. At some point in my world domination scheme I stopped watching
games, mostly because the investment in personal attention towards a
game is very seldom rewared in equal amounts of quality sports
entertainment. There are way more crap games than good games.
But sometimes during bigger tournaments I like to pop a cold one with The Igor and we relax with a game.
The Igor is out on dangerous expeditions and I don't have a TV. So I
just found a perfect solution - I am right now, while typing this,
watching the Euro 2008 tournament (Russia - Greece) streamed live in a
Firefox tab, either via justin.tv tethering some South American channels
or a streamed Arabic network. Jumping between them as the stream
quality fluctuates.
It is great. I have no idea what the commentators is yabbing on
about, except the universal "gooooaaaaaaallll", the ads during recess is
hilarious, and it feels like being on vacation in some far away country
and watching football games on a pub with strangers.
And I can work simultanously. How I hearts the clouds.
At one point I was planning to build a crazy advanced rotational
chair for my studio. No need anymore, as I don't have a studio anymore,
and also NovelQuest seem to excel at industrial espionage. My sketches
looked very much like the Emperor, only more complex (and unfinished).
With excellent timing regarding the Emperor, Korg introduced a new series of super tiny MIDI controllers
that fits perfectly below the Emperor's screens. Brilliant, and about
high time, I say. Been waiting for ages for the MIDI controller
manufactureres to get their soggy heads out of the 90ies. More at CDM.
I found this in a thrift store. It looks incredible. I tried plugging
it in and turn the switch, and it makes a very scary electronic buzz. I
turned it off to prevent any black holes from swallowing the earth.
Technical report from our megalomaniac Landmark show.
4 projectors, 3 in sync covering a 30 x 5 meter wall. Each projector running a dedicated, synchronized video stream.
6 VGA screens, all running a fifth dedicated and synchronized video stream.
2 laptops providing audio, in 4.1 quad surround
3 laptops providing video for projectors
2 MacMinis providing the rest of the video
1 laptop standby for backup
Everything ran from Ableton Live, synced wireless on MIDI wifi network
6 cameras, 3 HD and 3 SD
3 camera operators
2 photographers
1 designated drummer
1 evil electrician
1 speechless audience
I am crazy swamped in work, I recently got a huge gig scoring a new
series for NRK, but as soon as we have a spare moment we'll sort out the
photos and videos and post up some sweets. There is new merchandise
available too, new colors of the logo shirt, and introducing my first
Colleczione GMM designed über-clever special limited edition Harakiri
Martini shirt.
Take notice, we are working with Ekstremsportveko to reproduce most
of this digital mayhem at Voss in a few weeks time. So check us out
there if you dare.
Late as usual. Gig is in three days, some of the live versions aren't
completely done yet, a new track has to be prepared, I'm overloaded
with external film gigs (more on those when time) and then there is the
live visuals... The Visuals! The Enormous, 20 times 4 meter mega-screen
Visuals.
We are whipping up five projectors and a multitude of smaller
screens, surround sound, laboratory equipment, and everything should run
and behave utterly synchronized.
Alas, my mind becomes a black hole of fear when trying to grasp an
overview of the megalomaniac setup. As usual with Ugress Live, something
always breaks down. Already, the screen on my 12" Powerbook crapped out
a few days ago. Great start.
I cling to a small spark of hope: With so many things that can, and will, go wrong - at least a respectable amount of something will work.
WTF? The least accesible and darkest track off Cinematronics,
Bad Dreams Come True, hit number one this morning on the front page of
social music website TheSixtyOne, briefly surpassing the latest Sigur
Ros single.
It has moved off the front page now. Weird, I'm doing OK at SixtyOne but not THAT good: Almost 700 people voted for it in a few hours, that is more than the other tracks get in a month.
This is Carmela Perez Hernandez and her partner. She runs a small embroidery business in Mexico. Six months ago I lent her 25 USD
to expand her business, by investing in better sewing materials. Today
she completed her repayment, long before schedule. Business is good.
I assume this to be viral campaign of sorts, or a clever art project.
Great uncanny entertainment nonetheless. I should get some of those for
the Ugress live shows.
I am however, slightly uncertain of how I prefer my apocalypse; being
obliterated in megasplosions by macho-impressive, noisy Gundam
Terminators, or softly stared to death by ice cold, ninja-femputers.
When the creep crawly uncanny ladies has scared your tender heart enough, resolve your angst with a dresden dose of Coin Operated Boy.
Audizen, a Korean music tech company, promises with their MT9 technology to be able to extract and balance individual items in a song.
Meaning you could mix in or out the drums or vocals as you like when
listening to music. Supposedly this will revolutionize mp3 and
everything else. I haven't found any specifics on how this works, if it
works by analyzing the music (intriguing), or if it is just a wrapper
technology to package individual stems (boring). The website is in
Korean, and my Korean is rusty, but it looks like they analyze the music, hopefully some kind of Melodyne magic.
Until I learn more, see a demo or know some specs on how this works, I
am at best slightly amused by the possibilities. Especially since the
Korean dudes has named the technology "Music 2.0". How clever.
And WHY would anyone want to remove the bagpipes from a Michael Bolton track?
Inspired by Dear Jane,
I took notice of every brand I was exposed to during a regular day.
Didn't do much besides working. I should try timeline portraiting a day
on tour or travelling.
I'm currently staying for myself in a house in a small coastal village, close to the woods and beautiful Mølen. Long walks every day.
One day I came across this UFO cabin,
slightly withdrawn behind the trees. A brief hope of intense adventure
on exotic, remote planets flashed into my heart. Alas, it was only a
still-standing cabin.
Later the same day Retro Thing blogs about creating your own garbage spaceship interior. Wonderful coincidence.
Post-apocalyptic horror poetry, about a man and his son travelling
across a barren American continent, during a nuclear winter. There is no
food, no wildlife, no plants, no nothing.
Everything is grey and dark, the sun is always hidden by a constant
layer of ash falling like snow. Some humans have turned to cannibalism
and primitive cruelness to survive.
Don't read the Amazon reviews, most of the reviewers spoil too much.
I spend a lot of time in Logic Pro, which was updated to version 8.0.2
today. The most welcome fix for me was that you can now undo channel
strip and plugin changes, and the program loads much faster on OSX 10.5.
But they STILL haven't fixed one of the most annoying bugs ever: If
you accidentally insert an automation node on a track with no prior
automation, the automated parameter jumps to this value. If you then
undo the node, because the operation was not intented, the node is
removed, thanks, but the parameter value stays at the inserted node
value, not the original.
Not only is this improper undo, it also means there is no way to find the previous parameter value. Sigh.
Colloquial celebrations frak me out. In general, spontaneous as well
as designated crowds and human flocks make me uneasy. I don't know why,
or rather, I wouldn't LIKE to know why. My official explanation to
myself is simply because it interrupts and interfere with my dedicated
work towards utter lone wolf global world domination. Groups never seem
to get anything DONE, they are just grouping around.
Today is Constitution Day
in Norway, a national holiday for the group "Norwegians". I think we
have a nice constitution in Norway, at least I never find myself blaming
the constitution for anything. But I don't love it either, certainly
not enough to dress up for it. (Though I could get DRUNK for it, which
is usually the most important part of constitutional celebration for
Norwegians anyway.)
So either I hide in my studio or I make sure to be in another country.
But this year I found an even more brilliant exit strategy.
I am spending next week in a friends empty house in a small town on the
east coast of Norway. The house is large, empty, has wi-fi and
broadband, with a huge forest and the Skagen coastline right outside the
door. Perfect.
Even more perfect, my clever strategy: Travel over by train today, May
17th. This solve two problems at once; crowded trains and colloquial
celebrations.
So I spent the whole day on a practically empty train crossing Norway.
A few tired and forlorn football supporters, some clueless tourists,
wild Norwegian forests and mountains zipping by like a frenetic music
video - and powered outlets for my laptop. The free coffee was
surprisingly tasty. There even was some action, a guy in neon underpants
and military jacket who came panically running and entering the train
at a non-scheduled station stop. He dumped low into a seat, breathed
like a hunted animal, and jumped off again at the next station. Probably
on the run from the constitution. I didn't alert anyone, I know what it
feels like.
Except for the fugitive it was a quiet trip, perfect for composing.
I took turns window-shooting video with my camera and live-scoring
the scenery on the laptop. Result in video above, screenshot of the Live
project. Just edited the video sequencing and transitions in post prod,
it took some time before I found a moment to edit it all together,
render and then upload it.
If it hadn't been for the continuous noise and random shaking, I could probably live on a train.
Turns out Redrum was one of the more popular tracks of this
month.lentght feature, resulting in Animoto adding the track continously
to their regular section of the Electronica assortment.
Now sign up and create your own brilliant photo slideshow with beautiful redrumish music as a backdrop.
I make my music by collecting musical trash from vinyl records, cassettes and VHS soundtracks.
19581228 makes music by collecting physical trash and building weight-driven glockenspiel automatons from it.
"Andante Grazioso" (Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart / KV331) played by a "Mechanical Music Box in a Drawer"
made from recycling materials found in electronic-waste, bulky trash and
at home."
Ka-cloud-ching. My biggest frustration with the modern digital
musician dimension is the gazillion social networks and apps to consider
and cover. In addition to my own webs, which I would like to make more
interactive, the sheer amount of work to keep everywhere and everything
else up to date is simply too much.
Yesterday Google announced Friend Connect,
a system for linking up social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike,
Flickr etc, directly into a website. Meaning I can add the social
features of those networks directly to this blog, my readers can connect
here with their profiles, and updates trickle back from this site to
the networks again.
Oh great Spaghetti Monster in teh clouds I thank thee for thy
Noodleness. My webs are in the middle of an update, this is just too
good to be true. I've signed up for a preview release account, as soon
as it's up and I've got me some quality web dev time, I'm hooking it up.
I've signed my own record company Uncanny Planet up as a label under the Merlin network.
Merlin is a non-profit organisation based in Amsterdam, charged with
representing independent music companies in enhancing the commercial
exploitation of their copyrights on a global basis. The network recently became the equivalent of the fifth largest record company, effectively making it a major label contender.
This is great. Up until now, if somebody wanted to clear a blanket
license for all music in the world, like for example Youtube, the tubers
would have to speak to the four majors, and then one billion four
hundred million threehundred and sixty four thousand eight hundred indie
labels, continuously shifting. Understandably, nobody ever does that.
Now they can talk to the four majors, and Merlin.
Naturally Merlin will never cover every and any indie act, but with
the amount signed up now, they are representing enough artists to be a
major contender when securing rights and licenses, voicing the opinions
of indie acts and providing an immense library of independent music. The
major labels no longer control the global playground.
Yesterday was RoboExotica in San Fran, Laughing Squid has pictures,
it happened. I was not there, and it hurts inside. Next up is Annual
Cocktail Robot Awards 10.0, in Vienna in December, and I'm
seriously considering going, we should have Ugress playing live there.
I love my Nokia N95, it is the best phone in the world.
In particular I hearts the 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, the GPS and have I ever mentioned the HSDPA connection giving me 1 Mbps connection anytime anywhere? It wins.
So I consider the iPhone a sexy San Fransiscan blonde with a hot
body, disappointing brains and no network skills. Yes that includes the
upcoming 3G update. Announcing 3G in 2008 is like announcing a new VHS
player in 1998. Too late. I was done with the slow speeds of 3G before
iPhone 1.0 was announced.
Can't complain about my new cloud based existence.
An empty botanical garden, a full beer, laptop, mobile HDSPA network,
setting sun. There's a kitten casually pretending NOT to hunt a few
birds bathing in a small fountain.
Reaper, the super-unknown upcoming killer DAW is now available in alpha for OSX. Developed by Winamp creator genius Justin Frankel,
Reaper approaches music creation the same way Winamp of yore targeted
music playing. Make it as easy and doable as possible, then provide
enormous potential behind the scenes.
I just took it for a test-spin, and it is slightly unstable, being alpha
- but incredibly promising. What I particularly like is the tool-less
interface. I go crazy from the hundreds of tools available in über-apps
like Logic and Photoshop - it's a stupid, backwater way of approaching
digital editing, stuck from the naive philosophies of early 90ies
digital media editing.
Reaper lets you mix and edit and sonically stylize a multitude of
formats and clips anywhere and anyhow you want, sort of like Ableton
Live but more flexible in the live-less dimension. Best way to describe
it is like a hybrid between Live and traditional DAWs, but with
Soundforge/Wave Editor offline editing available at your fingertips - on
every single item in the project.
Also, Reaper lets you pitch shift and time stretch each individual
item. This hearts me fine, being that I approach composing and editing
in a rather abstract and non-linear way.
I'll be sure to keep a close eye on Reaper up ahead.
Students at NTNU has built a huge interactive wall, rear-projected and with unlimited infrared sensors as input, presenting it on the tubes, with some funky old Ugress track as background music.
It appears my music is becoming the de-facto soundtrack for multi-touch technology demonstrations.
Yey! I'm really looking forward to this little gem, the Nintendo DS-10 synthesizer by Korg.
CNET Asia has more info on the release, July 24th Japan, and more specs.
Sometimes I find myself doodling mindlessly on synths just to relax,
GMM meditation time. Having a super-tiny, super-portable synth to whip
up and doodle with anytime anyplace, can turn super-boring plane trips
into meditative super-bliss.
I am sorting out my new laptop-based life, rendering out my old
projects from the desktop G5. All of my work from the last 4 years to be
archived.
Hopefully most projects will load on future setups when/if needed, but
hard experience whisper in my ear; there will always be some small
glitch screwing things up. For certain, I do not have intel versions of
each and every plugin I've ever used, in addition I would take this
opportunity to trim down my plugin mess.
Fortunately for me, Logic has an "Export all tracks", rendering down
each track of a project to separate audio files. It does not render
busses (why not, Gerhard?), but this should work as a track based
backup, in case a plugin or setting doesn't carry over into the future.
Personally, I would like to take the opportunity and label this kind of work INCREDIBORING.
I'm moving out of my the Uncanny Labs, reducing my physical footprint to a beautiful, portable cloud-based existence.
I spent all weekend sorting, trashing and packing up all the crap I
hoarded over the years. My god, there is so much stuff. I probably have
enough USB cables to build an elastic Eiffel Tower.
Luckily I've been able to sell or give away most of the surplus
furniture, gear and other peculiatiries, but still some hardware left.
I'm planning to sell it, just need some time to render out old projects
for digital archiving.
Tomorrow is moving day, renting a van, I'm storing the live show
equipment and some hardware at a storage facility, the rest goes to
recycling.
I'm really looking forward to get rid of everything.
I have been banging my head against an impregnable wall of evil
custom Japanese Playstation train controller systems. I have been trying
to figure out and hack my Taito train controllers,
which I harvested from a dubious Hong Kong retailer for the Ugress live
shows. The lever sends out a matrix of mysterious dimensions, instead
of the rather practical, obvious and easily translatable 0-255 PS2
controller values.
I needed über-expertise.
Today I spent a few hours at BEK with super crazy mad über genius Trond Lossius, Max/MSP
and overall DSP-MIDI-audio-musical computer expert. It didn't take him
long to decode and reverse engineer the secret behind the controller
system.
He discovered the controller sends out a proprietary binary system at
the upper half of the lever, with multiple movement indicators between
each step, and a less chaotic and less binary, but still predictable and
controllable system at the lower half. He also built bit-shifting
translators in Max/MSP to decode the system into usable information in
realtime, filtering out the less important data, all the way while
explaining and tutoring to me how everything worked and why/how we did
certain things.
I was awestruck not only by his solution but also by his approach. My
own strategy was based on a few repeating patterns I had noticed and
could to rely on, and then translating these to MIDI CC messages, then
further interpolating between them in Max/MSP, before routing the CC
signal into my live audio manipulations.
But Trond dived into the messages, found patterns, built systems and
translators to visualize and decode the system, and progressively
learned more and more, at some point recognizing a binary system hidden
within the myriad of messages, then building more systems to evaluate
and report the discoveries. Finally translating the Taito controller
system into simple, scalable integer numbers, ready for me to utilize
for my world domination plans.
When you meet and experience people like Mr Lossius, it feels like
meeting an inspirational part of the universe. Largely ignored and
excluded by todays reality-TV-infected world. People with incredible
brains, knowledge, with endless approaches and patience, people wanting
to investigate, understand and decode. People asking why, because they
want to figure it out, and nothing more. I am not only immensely
grateful for a functional solution to my Taito controller, but for
experiencing Trond, his approach and engineering. Trond helped me
because he could.
I never thought I would blog a poster. But The Dark Knight poster, in lack of a less contemporary word suitable to express my position in a sophisticated way, is EPIC.
I am writing like crazy on the Gaffa
application marketing plan, everywhere and anywhere and allthetime.
Currently at 10 pages and featuring an astonishing lack of coherence. My
brain is not wired for this stuff.
Right now I've crashed down and installed my nomad office in my usual
corner (the one with power outlets) at my favorite Bergen place, Kung
Fu.
Retro 60ies martial arts bar-lounge, booths, 70ies funk reggae vinyl
soundtracks pumping, easy atmosphere and incredible Thai food. Hearts.
Hopefully the excellent fu vibes carry on over to my marketing plan.
Every day this week I spend a few hours at BEK, learning Max/MSP kung/fu from guru genius Trond Lossius.
The first few days was slightly basic, and I knew most of the stuff.
Still nice to learn it from another angle than my usual
skim-the-manual-hack-away-it-untill-it-works-or-explodes approach.
Sometime tonight Max/MSP 5 is out, I saw a preview of this
when we played Minneapolis earlier this spring, it looks great. I am
very excited. We're diving into this freshest of fresh immediately,
heading deeper into adventurous DSP and MSP territory.
CC Records / Christer Falck has initiated a mega pack of cover tracks
in celebration of Prince's 60th birthday this summer. 80 Norwegian
artists, including yours truly, have contributed personal renditions of
the man's musical repetoire. The album will be released on his birthday.
I am proud and thrilled to be the only artist representing the Batman
soundtrack. I actually wrote the core of the track in Minneapolis,
Prince's home town during the Spark Festival stay. I finished the cover during a few all-nighters last week, both me and Christer happy how it turned out.
Now the whole project is on thin ice with a torch burner as lifeline.
Prince and/or his evil no-fun publisher suddenly wants to stop it dead.
Been all over the Norwegian press the last few days.
Not sure what happens now. I know Christer, the biggest Prince fan in
the world, is working desperately to solve it. Hopefully it works out,
if not somebody will certainly be considered The Artist Presently Known
Ass Hole.
This coming week I'm attending a week course on Max/MSP hosted by BEK
(Bergen Center for Electronic Arts). A bunch of electronic artists in a
room with laptops, tutored by Norwegian electronic multimedia super
genius Trond Lossius. It's like going back to school, just exceptionally cooler.
My endeavors in Max/MSP so far has been hacky at best. I have
rudimentary programming skills, but if someone was to write a poem of my
graphical modular music technology software skills, they would have to
come up with a word that rhymes with MacGyver.
For example I had to cook up a patch
to translate the Taito train controller signals from a matrix of PS2
button signals to continuous MIDI CC messages - the patch is a complete
mess, so is my understanding of it all, and in addition it doesn't work
at all the way I intended. MacGyverism only gets you so far - when
building a house to live in, at some point you need proper skills beyond
duct tape. (Or just check in to a hotel, which is my usual way of
establishing my domestic routines.)
Hopefully this next week will make me Speed Racer of Max/MSP.
Talking Picture - The Road To Ruin.
All the dialogue has been cut out from this 1934 movie, turning the
film into a jump-cutting picture-poem of glitch communication.
A re-working of a 1934
cautionary picture in which a young girl gets involved with a crowd that
smokes marijuana, drinks and has sex. She winds up an alcoholic,
pregnant drug addict and is forced to get an abortion. In this version, a
very simple manipulation has been enacted upon the film.
By restricting the
communicative abilities of the film, the ways in which meaning is drawn
from a movie is addressed. The restriction also affects the
sensationalist nature of the original work, drawing the viewer out of
the somewhat passive viewing experience colored by camp or nostalgia,
and into a more intimate relationship with the film and its characters.
Just a quick journal note; current status is a complete mess of
everything. Mogulness is not a bed of roses, it is more like calculus
without numbers. (I don't know what that means.)
Status.
I am writing a complete international marketing plan for the Gaffa
music video application. Deadline Apr 28th. By complete I mean a
marketing plan at a professional business level, shitloads of pages,
market analyzes, SWOTs, GANTTs, competition scenario, budgets, long term
strategic plans, artist vision, geographical strategies, and it's all a
mess. I know this is important, and very helpful, and a proper music
video budget would be awesome right now. But this financial strategic
way of thinking is feeding my cynicism and killing my soul.
I am moving out
of my current studio, looking everywhere for a new space, not just for
me, and simultaneously selling off all the crap I've been hoarding over
the years. This is an administrative and logistical nightmare. I had no
idea selling off a few items would be so much work. Note to self: Never
start a shop.
I am sampling all my hardware synths, rendering out old projects, to
get rid of hardware. This takes time, and of course things that worked
perfectly for 5 years, start behaving crazy mad at the least convenient
moment. Note to self: No more hardware.
My to-journalize list is longer than the Chinese wall. I would like to journalize billions of amazing things like this and this and this.
The Ugress social network cloud presence is lagging behind because I
haven't got time to keep 20-something profiles updated around the clouds
around the clock. (Why isn't someone providing a syndication service?)
The internal webs are due for an update and some of them are almost
finished. But as usual when programming, the last 10% is equal to the
first 90% when it comes to workload. Slowly coming along. Note to self:
Outsource.
There is a music video coming up really soon. Administrative efforts
surrounding it. And some of the new webs should be ready for the
release.
I am working on two regular production gigs, writing music for films.
I need cash to start paying off debts for the Unicorn release period - I
didn't have time to work in cash those months, and lived on loans and
credit cards. Payback time. Also, the merch is sold out, and I need fundings to purchase a new and bigger batch with more options.
I am working with BRAK helping them
setting up their new digital online strategies and website. This is
crazy fun and I love it - but it turns out, like everything else, to be
much more work than my horrible planning skills can fathom beforehand.
I am trying to set up live gigs in Norway this spring. This turns out
to be much more work than I intended. I totally love playing live, we
have an insane show, and it is a serious revenue source, but I hate
doing all the planning and booking and organizing. Might have to
postpone touring until I find someone to help me on this.
I am working on a Prince cover track which is seriously overdue, but
the producer is very understanding and helpful. We both think the track
has great potential so we're really trying to find a way and time to
finish it.
Finally, I am working on an upcoming release, and I can't say more
than that yet, but the few seconds I have free every now and then, is
spent creating for this. And those few seconds of new tones, and a fewtrips in the woods, is what saves my soul.
And all of these undertakings are currently in the "WTF now?" stage.
Conclusion. I have NO idea how much time and energy is needed for
anything. In fact, I consistently de-estimate in opposite direction of
reality, how much I can, could or should do.
Thursday was the annual BRAK Selvangivelseskurs (tax return seminar), held by accountant Kristoffer Vassdal and Ivar Peersen (Enslaved).
Musicians in Norway usually register as small business enterprises, and
need to file tax report for the business unit, and additional papers
besides the regular tax return form.
Most musicians are using accountants, but some of us tax-auteurs
prefer to spend a few agonizing days in late May, desperately sorting,
filing and calculating our sexy numbers. Mr Vassdal and Mr Peersen
elegantly guided us through relevant regulations and smart tips, showing
what we can, should, could and shouldn't do and don't.
I am not looking forward to those May Days Of Tax, but I like to have
complete control and knowledge about my own business. With these tips
at least some parts will go smoother.
This is music 2.0; electronic groove scientists taking tax return lessons from genius international metal stars.
Sometimes I just fall in love with things based on appearance and what I imagine I could do with it.
The MIDI Parasite, featured at Music Thing today,
catched my attention like steam catches boiling water. I briefly
re-informatize from the MT post that this is custom built for a guitar,
and more information is available.
Flickr just opened for video
today, with a slightly different take than Youtube. Their philosophy is
"long photos", a limit of 90 seconds. I really like that, looks good to
use for publishing my N95 clips.
It has been a great experience being on the board. Hopefully I have
represented and spoken for small artists, producers and labels concerns,
and contributed with my experience where I can. I have learned
shitloads, but still have way more to learn and discover, and I have
unfinished business - I am involved in a few projects for BRAK that
takes time to execute.
The board is elected yearly, and I decided to run for another year. A
board committee was assigned and set up to create the new board. A few
days ago I was happy to learn I was nominated again, and at the annual
meeting today the new board was unanimously voted in.
The new board
is very exciting, with very broad expertise and background. I am really
looking forward to work with new people, learn new things, meet new
challenges and help BRAK making the music business a better place for
everyone involved.
Just a quick note from todays rehearsals. It was rather busy and
hectic, no time for much else but rigging, testing, rehearsals and
meetings. But we met lots of cool people, I managed to snap a few shots
and vids, and most impressive was this incredible dolly rig guy dancing
around me during our performance.
I want one. I want to mount my whole stage system on myself, so I can run around EVERYWHERE with my complete performance rig.
After the show tomorrow I'm gonna mug this guy.
PS the venue is awesome but I can't post pictures of it yet.
I'm in Oslo. Torturizilingy early this morning I flew over on a
deliciously empty SAS flight. Right now I'm in the hotel bar waiting for
Christine.
Ugress is performing at the TV2 / Red Cross charity show Artistgalla, live on national TV this Saturday. The Artistgalla show is a beneficiary to raise Red Cross
awareness and help bring new sponsors for children in need. I must
confess I'm not a child sponsor myself. I prefer and believe in doing my
charity to those who need it as a micro-financer via Kiva.
I'm not sure of the show lineup, but it looks to be a crazy eclectic
mix of everything, there's a guy doing super impressive shadow figure
animation with just his fingers. I suppose we are there to provide the
necessary aztec groove science ingredient.
We are to do rehearsals, sound checks, visuals preps, prop checks,
more rehearsals, editing the visuals to fit, rendering, rehearsals,
checks, makeup, then more rehearsals... Performing on TV is like an
inverted theme park cross-bred with the French Foreign Legion.
Everything is made to appear incredibly fun, everything is tightly
planned and rigid and scripted and perfect, and if you fuck up you are
at best, dead for life.
The Ugress Live track record is crazy backwards. We haven't done any
live gigs or Unicorn promo in Norway yet. We have done USA and now we
are doing national television charity. I have no idea why, or how this
happened, but I am getting used to Ugress doing things splendidly
backwards.
TV productions usually have a lot of dead time, so I hope to find some time to journalize our adventures.
Great epic Ugress success news ftw. The Redrum single from Unicorn is one of the featured tracks on crazy brilliant web 2.0 service Animoto for April.
Animoto is fnucing awesome. Tired of boring slideshows? I know you
are. Don't have time to create something impressive yourself? I know you
are. Animoto takes your photos, from uploads or popular photo sharing
sites like Flickr. Then creates gobsmackingly impressive video
slideshows of your hopeless photos.
They are currently running a promotion for indie artists to feature
their tracks, so I sent them Redrum and they loved it. It is now listed
as a featured track.
Bit by bit I am slowly moving my digital soul to the clouds, keeping
less and less data constrained to a phyiscal location or computer.
Yesterday saw a great step towards roaming independence as Google announced
Offline accessibility for Google Docs. Brilliant! Now if they
could get their asses in gear and provide offline GMail and Notes, I'm
all set.
The Abletonator. A coinop installed controller for Ableton Live.
If I wasn't moving studio, if I wasn't broke, if I wasn't smart and
could calculate flight overweight prices, I'd buy one. Or five. And make
my own Ableton Live Arcade.
The Kings Of Power 4 Billion %
is a deadly overload of incredible pixel animation, tributing the 16
bit sprite era of Amigas and other 80ies video consoles. Also noteworthy
is that the music is composed with my favorite soft synth Zebra 2, providing all synths for the soundtrack.
My wonderful Uncanny Laboratories must close down.
The building I've had my studios the last few years, a huge
abandonded complex with lots of artists, bands, labels, publishers and
other creative minds, will be teared down. Skyscrapers are going up. We
all have to leave within May.
I have known this for some time, and this has made it easy for me to
appreciate the time I had here. I knew it would end, and I've been
planning for it. Now it is time for change, big change. I'm going mobile
zen cloud 2.0 roaming genius composer nomad hobo. The Age Of Studios
has ended, The Age Of Clouds has started.
So I take the opportunity to offload and rid myself with shitloads of
things I won't need, have room for or use up ahead. Computers, synths,
mixers, game consoles, mobile phones, studio gear, retro gear..
Practically it's easiest for me to keep the deals within
Bergen/Norway so the list is in Norwegian for now. If you are desperate
to get some of it drop me a note and I'll explain.
I haven't hunted down street value prices, I'm too busy - send me an
offer and if I think it's OK and nobody else bids higher... ka-ching.
GMM Studio Reduksjon Mega Turbo Deluxe Salg
Datamaskiner
PC Laptops:
-Dell Inspiron 8500, 2 Gb ram, 60 Gb disk. 1920x1080 skjerm. Win XP
følger med. Bæreveske. Batteriet er oppbrukt/utladet. Bra maskin i 2004.
-Dell Inspiron 8000, 256 Mb ram, 40 Gb disk. 1440x990 skjerm. Windows ME
følger med, men jeg kan installere 2k/XP om du vil. Bæreveske.
Batteriet er oppbrukt/utladet.Bra maskin i 2002.
Apple:
-Apple Powemac G5, Dual 2 GHz, 2 Gb RAM, totalt 400 Gb disk, DVD-RW. Orig emb, disks.
-Apple Cinema Display 1680x1050. Orig emb.
-Apple tastatur (norsk), mus etc.
PS - Denne blir ledig først et stykke ut i april, jeg må rendre ut eldre
prosjekter for arkivering og det tar bare litt (kjedelig) tid.
Synthesizer:
-Roland D-550, rackmount, 5 minnekort. Pent brukt. Manual.
-Roland JD-800, kun studio brukt, omtrent som ny. NB: Japansk AC 110V, følger med trafo. Manual.
-Roland JP-8000, m flight case. Turnert mye, både synth og flight er
rufsete og preget av lang og tro tjeneste. D1 tangent er brukket av.
Noen av faderne litt sliten og uresponsiv. Men synthen fungerer som den
skal teknisk. NB: Japansk AC 110V, følger med trafo. Manual.
-Korg Prophecy, pent studio brukt. Ribbon wheel controller sender ikke
CC i en av retningene (Z), antagelig en løs kontakt. Vanlig ribbon X / Y
fungerer. Manual.
PS - Igjen, som med G5en, synthene blir ledige et stykke ut i april, da jeg må rendre/recorde eldre prosjekter for arkivering.
Studio monitor:
-2 x Mackie HR-824 pro reference monitors. Manual.
MIDI:
-M-audio Keystation 49e, midi keyboard controller, smal, tilrettelagt til tastatur/skjerm plassering. Orig emb.
-M-audio Oxygen, mini midi keyboard controller, portabel, sliten, reist mye
Mixer:
-Mackie Tapco, Blend 6, 6 kanals studio/live mixer. Som ny, nesten ikke brukt. Orig emb. Manual.
-Roland M-160, 16 kanals linjemixer, rack, sliten. En del døde/sovende pots og koblinger men må kanskje bare freshes opp/bendes.
CD-spillere:
-2 x Technics SL-P1000, pro CD spiller for radio/studio bruk. Kun brukt i radio studio, velholdt, som ny. Manual.
LP-spillere:
-2 x Technics SL-1200 Mk2, pro platespiller for radio/studio/hifi. Kun brukt i radio studio, velholdt, som ny. Orig emb. Manual.
-1 x Technics SL-3210, consumer platespiller, godt brukt
Magnetbåndspillere:
-2 x TEAC X-2000M, pro båndspiller for radio/studio/hifi. Kun brukt i radio studio, velhold, som ny. Manual.
-62 x magnetbånd av diverse merker TDK, Maxell, Sony.
Kassettspillere:
-2 x TEAC V-900X, pro kassettspiller for radio/studio/hifi. Kun brukt i radio studio, velholdt, som ny. Manual.
-100+ kassetter, enten innspillt eller tom.
Minidisc:
-Sony MZ-R30, portable minidisc recorder, m strøm adapter. Aner ikke kapasiteten på batteriet.
-Etui, extra battery pack, storage box med ca 10 discs (rom for 25)
Mikrofon:
-Behringer B-1 mikrofon, med etui og filter
-Mic stand med boom, utrolig normal
Studio inventar:
-150 lyddempende triangulære skumpyramider, for installasjon på vegger.
Reduserer refleksjon i rommet. (Ble opprinnelig brukt av Børre Sætre
under Festspillene.)
-Quik Lok keyboard stand, 2 etg, sliten, mye turnering, litt bulkete, men stabil, fungerer helt fint
-Laptop stage-flight. Svær custom built flight fra Rufo for pakke
opp/ned et bord for scenebruk. Kontakt meg for info/forklaring.
Div:
-2 x Alesis AirFX infrared motion effects. Ganske sliten, men fungerer.
-Turbosound Slic In-Ears stereo headphones (helt ubrukt)
-Enorme mengder med kabler/plugger som jeg ikke aner om jeg skal gidde å liste opp
Mobiltelefoner:
-Nokia N91 musikktelefon, 4 gigabyte disk, tipp-topp stand. Litt scratcher i dekslet som normalt etter bruk. Orig emb.
-Sony Ericsson K700i, batteriet er helt flatt virker det som, tror mob funker greit på AC strøm. Orig emb.
RAM
-2 x 256 Mb, 200 pin, SO - DIMM, DDR RAM (fra en Dell Inspiron 8500)
-2 x 1024 Mb, 200 pin, SO - DIMM, DDR2 RAM (fra en Macbook Pro)
Retro:
- Commodore 64, fungerer
-2 x Commodore 1084 farge monitor
-Commodore tapedrive (vet ikke om virker, har bare brukt cartridge)
-C64 joysticks, kabler
-Prophet64, synth/sequencer cartridge for modern music production on C64
-Zinclair ZX Spectrum, aldri prøvd den
Diverse
Div toys:
-Roboquad fjernstyrt/autuonom robot. Manual.
-TV Beeboo, en smart filterbox til å montere utenpå TV skjermer for å skape en rolig bølgete lyskilde
Møbler
-IKEA Jerker kontor/studio pult, med to hyller samt høyttaler-armer
-Div andre typiske kontormøbler; 1 pult, 1 bord, 2 stoler, 2 mykere
stoler, en del hyller. Ikke noe jeg forventer selges men hvis noen er i
oppstartsprosess.. come and get it ut i april.
Trash:
Enten uinteressant, ubrukelig eller skrangelete, kastes med midnre noen vil circuit-bende:
-2 x Commodore Amiga 500, kaput. Kanskje minnekort etc kan liftes
-Behringer mixer MX602A, 8 kanals mixer, tror bare strømforsyningen/koblingen er kaputt
-Bosch DVD-spiller, tror den virker
Salgsinfo
Har ikke notert priser - gidd ikke rote frem street values, jeg vil
KVITTE meg med ting, send meg forslag på hva du er villig til å betale.
Hvis jeg syntes prisen er fin, ka-ching, all yours, fest!
Hvis jeg syntes prisen er herlig frekk, fniser jeg av din bluferdige
handelskompetanse, og prøver meg på QXL / Finn, og hvis det ikke går
høyere der eller hos andre int., er den faktisk din.
Post/porto/frakt/fraktkostnader dekkes av kjøper.
Bare spør hvis du lurer på noe, vil vite mer om ting/tilstand eller vil ha bilder av noe. Alt må skje innen midten av april.
Epost gisle at ugress com eller gisle at martensmeyer com.
This is Yellow Drum Machine,
an autonomous drum machine robot. It navigates it's environment,
searching for something to hammer out a beat on, slaps out a groove,
samples itself doing it, checks out the sample and composes a little
remix groove on the spot. I'm in love.
History is fiction, and can be re-written and re-sculpted at will.
All cultures and societies view and remember their past from a strategic
viewpoint - not an objective.
When the robots have conquered us, they will rewrite human history,
to make the next generations of human slaves love and respect the
robots. The Worth1000 Photoshop contest ModRen and Robots gives us a glimpse of this cunning history remix scenario. Contest rule: Take any classical work of art, and robotize it.
For my part I can't wait. This means that art museums will become even more exciting.
I saw this short when I was a kid, and it burned into my memory.
Children on a rainy planet has never experienced the sun. Rumour has
it, the sun only appears for a few hours, in a cycle of many many years.
The children does not know to believe the sun exist. An off-planet girl
claiming to have experienced and lived in the sun creates envy and
mistrust, as the rumoured sun-cycle approaches.
A slight follow-up and background information on yesterdays fuck-the-RIAA post.
I do not advocate piracy. It is not cool. No. But I understand why it
happens. I have downloaded pirated music when it was not available
through proper channels. Simply because the pirate option is more
convenient and accesible than the non-piracy option.
I think the problem is not piracy; the problem is that proper channels are inconvenient compared to pirate loot.
As a content generator (read: artist) I am struggling to make my own
content as available, as accessible and non-obtrusive as possible.
In this regard, for me as an artist and for my potential supporters,
having the RIAA fucktards licking their own balls with their
plastic-surgeoned tongue, and then enjoy swallowing their own cum, is rather unfortunate. Sends kind of the wrong signal to both artists and music lovers.
Watch the tube below, if you haven't already. The Bigdog is a quadrupedal robot, now featured on every blog in the universe. I warned against this sucker more than a year ago, seemingly to no effect - the Bigdog from creator Boston Robotics is now even more capable:
The robot can walk
up steep hills, down steep hills, in snow, on ice, adjust to attacks,
navigate rubble, navigate my dead body. Most noteworthy, now also
featuring a gruesome wasp-chainsawish sound that will imprint your mind
with the cruel soundtrack of extinction.
Tanya
Andersen is a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon. She
was sued by the RIAA for file-sharing, in their incredistupid crusade
against file-sharers.
Maybe her kid did it, maybe her kid didn't, maybe she did or didn't - in any case this lawsuit screwed up her life completely.
She didn't like that, nobody likes that, except RIAA. Now she is filing for a class action complaint,
which, potentially could expose and uncover RIAA completely as the
scumbags and money-loving, music-hating, in-bred bling-bling orcs they
are.
I'm not going to re-report case information here, I get so angry and
animated whenever approaching RIAA and file-sharing issues, I can't get
into it anymore. There are further links from the RIvsP article.
I'd just thought to announce my support for Mrs Andersen, best wishes
of luck, and hope she fucking crushes RIAA to hell and further down.
Now I haven't had time to study the claims properly, I just noticed
in a thread over at em411 that a few call out hogwash, and I'm inclined
to agree - it looks to me as he is working from the snare peaks, not the
kickdrum? Which means that rhythmically this is rather... off.
Regardless, the Amen break is certainly one of the most (over-) used breaks in history, I applaud any effort to understand why.
But more interesting to me, the golden ratio is certainly important in music, all the way back to my man Pythagoras, and I make a note here, not huge success, but to investigate this further.
Horrible video of the thing at Youtube.
Hard to make out what it really does in the video, but at least the
coolness of pushing down those monster keys comes across. It looks like a
super-circuit-bent pinball machine cross-bred with mutated piano.
Just watch the video linked.
I watched it first thing this morning - my hairs stood right up, and I
didn't need coffee for the first time in 15 years. And Peter Neubacker
is my new hero.
Celemony announced today Melodyne Direct Note Access - individual
notes within polyphonic audio material can now be identified and edited.
This is the most impressive, incredible, impossible, inspiring, intriguing breakthrough
in audio since digital sampling, it is the holy grail and virgin mary
and bacon juice of audio editing. It will change everything, for sample
based producers like myself this is a paradigm shift.
It will completely change how and what you can do with samples,
loops, recordings, sounds. You can break anything, a single recording,
into its tonal parts and adjust, stretch, formant shift, mute, repitch
every and anything. My mind is exploding with possibilities. Suddenly my
gigantic vinyl sample library became universally compatible with
everything within itself, regardless of harmonic content.
I cannot count the number of situations where I desperately wanted to
shift or remove note in a sample or loop. If it only was minor instead
of major, the track would be the most completest track ever... but alas!
Teh Grief! Teh Only Ifs!
No more Only Ifs. Only Peter Neubacker for Nobel Prize.
I love my Korg Prophecy,
and as of today I love it a little bit extra. I'm really starting to
dig Korg, they just keep making brilliant stuff. I have been yearning
for a Kaossilator, and today they introduced yet another gadget, in cooperation with Nintendo, confirming their innovative playfulness.
The Korg DS-10 is an MS-10 emulator cartridge for the Nintendo DS. Ha! My next stylus operated dual-screen synthesizer sequencers, let me show you them:
If I might sober up for a moment, from the sound examples, the synth
engine sounds and looks a tad boring and limited. Hopefully one can make
less Rebirth-ish bleeps. Hard to tell how to break, glitch and bend
this thing, but at that price, I'm pretty sure I'll grab a DS and import
one just for fun. Always wanted to try Elektroplankton anyway.
I was in Paris over the weekend, and my girlfriend was hunting for a
specific, limited edition book, hard to find. It was like a badly sweded
DaVinci Code, running from bookstore to artstore to bookstore, guided
by my N95 GPS maps, getting new clues as to which dusty old shop could
possibly carry it.
Finally we found the store that should have it. While she located and
found the book, I walked around on my own browsing the store.
Looked interesting, I briefly paged thru it and found several great ideas for cover design and interactivity.
"That's nice", I thought. I think my next physical release will be
limited edition and special, the age of regular CD releases is over.
Digital downloads combined with a deluxe beautiful physical
release is the future. Here was lots of inspiration, I bought it.
Once outside we were walking down the street showing each other our
purchases, and I was leafing thru the pages when all of a sudden...
What a goose-pimplish surprise! The infamous, never-released
Loungemeister EP, featuring Johnny and his rockstar friends. Designed by
Sopp Collective, the crew
who also did the video. The EP was never released because the vinyl
plant was flooded. Prague was flooded during excessive spring melting,
creating huge delays in orders. The Lounge EP was supposed to build up
to the Resound release, but after a few months waiting we cancelled the
LP/CD release because Resound was doing well anyway.
Picking up this book on a whim, and then finding my own
unreleased-because-of-flooding EP, was incredible. What are the odds?
Paris je t'aime.
Palais De Tokyo is my
favorite contemporary museum in Paris. I always make sure to schedule a
few hours to catch the current installation, which never disappoints me.
The museum is a wonderful place, with skateparks, various pubs, cafes
and restaurants, free wi-fi, great bookstore, gadget store, and lots of
room. This time was no exception, quite the contraty, it was one of the
most interesting art installations I have ever seen.
The Cellar Door by my new favorite artist Lois Greaud
looks like it was created only to seduce electronic music composers. It
is the creation and dream of a studio: The huge, monochromatic
installation is covered in pulsating soundscapes, mysterious forests,
blinking lights, completely black paintball war sessions and unseen
films that only project when noone is there to see them, all driven from
a central, transparent control room.
Quote from PDT: "CELLAR DOOR is an ambitious
artistic enterprise: a colossal organism engendered by an original music
score that distends through space and time. The exhibition is a mutant
form, one that has crystallized around an obsession, the production and
manufacturing of a studio. The common version of the artist’s studio,
the dream factory, isn’t on display; rather, the studio is featured as a
dreaming factory, a delirious object endowed with thought and speech
that constantly reinvents itself."
I took some photos, available in my recent Paris Flickr set.
They cannot convey the huge size and wonderful atmosphere, the
exhibition runs until April 14th, and MUST be experienced - if you are
in Paris do not miss this.
Undoubtably, unquestionably and unarguably; the best tea in the world is genmaicha.
Exquisite Japanese green tea with roasted brown rice. The rice pulls
the bitterness out of the green tea, and makes it smell and taste most
freshlicious.
Sometimes the rice pops during roasting and looks like popcorn, but tastes much, much better.
The puny, poor pittoresque town of Bergen, at the utter thulian edge
of Europe, where my secret laboratories are based, does not provide me
with continuous access to this diamond of beverages. The horrors of
continental exile!
Whenever I venture into the civilized parts of the world, I make sure to stock up on this nectar of mad leet brewery skillz.
Today I picked up a serious dose from my favorite French connection in Marais, Le Palais Des Thés. Most recommended.
I should go to Paris more often - more good news are pouring in as I
sit here on a bar with laptop. (The picture is not related to event, but
that's where I'm typing this now.)
Saturday April 5th Ugress will be performing live at the TV2 Artistgalla show, a huge, live charity TV production supporting the Red Cross.
The effort and philosophy of the trans-national, trans-religious,
trans-global Red Cross is something I have immense respect for, so
accepting the gig was a no-brainer. And naturally, performing on
national TV has a promotional value I'm not ignorant to.
But most interesting to me, the production value of this show! It is
insane, with lots of brilliant technology and brilliant people, and
we've started communication with the production team how to incorporate
the Ugress Live visuals and performance into the complete show.
No idea what we'll end up with, but I know there is 25 huge flat
screens, and a huge wall screen mounted in the theatre we're performing,
this is a brilliant opportunity to go megalomaniac crazy on the visual
aspect. I can't afford productions like these on my own, so any chance
to have a billion blinking lights, I jump on it.
The show will be aired live on TV2, and I'm sure some kind soul will grab and youtubize it for international benefit.
After a rather slow start the Unicorn album is slowly starting to
pick up, carried by the music itself and not an aggressive PR
department. The first video is nearing completion, and we've started
planning live gigs later this spring.
Hahaha great news! I'm in Paris, France, on a street cafe with a
pastis and my powerbook - and just got word from my über excellent
aggregator Artspages that Unicorn is featured on the iTunes front page,
under Euro Chart Hits.
Which is bloody fantastic news, not only because of the exposure, but
also because iTunes actually only put out stuff they really like, you
can't buy or threathen or network or bribe your way in.
A few days before going to Minneapolis we got an email from the
organizer, announcing a Spark festival party on Saturday - sponsored by
software company Audiofile Engineering.
This was a fantastic surprise - I have been using their applications
for a long time, and do some beta-testing for them from time to time.
But I have never met them nor had I any idea they were based in
Minneapolis.
Even more surprising, after getting in touch it turned out that
Brett, the support department, was playing the set after us at the
Nomad! So I got to meet Brett and Matthew the first night, we talked for
hours backstage. Getting to meet these guys and talk to them about
apps, macs, development, gear, music and the future was incredible.
I use Wave Editor
for many many hours each day. Besides Logic, WE is my most important
tool. Initially I had very high respect for their philosophies regarding
software, and after talking to them in person I am just awed by their
approach and brilliance.
And they are VERY NICE PEOPLE. I think these guys will make it big in
the future, can't wait to see what tricks they have up their clever
sleeves.
Saturday was a great party, with interactive art installations, live
performances, bands, free drinks and laptops where you could check out
their programs and they did small presentations of their programs to
interested people.
One of the bands performing, Nobot, was great pop-electronica, reminiscent of Royksopp, but more energetic and less Nordic - in a good way.
Lots of interesting people, and all in all, a party most optimized
for Mad Geniuses and Geeks. I haven't even mentioned all the other
brilliant acts I've seen and people I met during the festival.
The Spark Festival gig turns out to be an incredible investment.
Minneapolis is a great city. It actually exists in the very near-distant 80ies retro future.
Downtown looks great, almost toy-like, with lots of shiny skyscrapers,
grid-based streets, perfect parks, polished marble everywhere.
Everything looks like one architect (fond of reflective windows)
designed it.
But the best of it all: Everything and every building is connected by second floor skyways. You can access any building in the whole city without ever going outside.
But the true impressiveness of it is the system WITHIN the skyways - the whole city really IS inside this skyway system.
The streets outside are mostly deserted, and everyone walks around in
climate controlled carpet-laid areas, which includes shops, businesses,
parks, waterfalls, malls everything seems like one massive, recursive
mall.
Just like the controlled underground dystopian towns of 80ies sci-fi, which, coincidentally, I always wanted to live in.
It was incredible, walking around town was like walking around in the
Mars underground city of Total Recall, while the outside looks like the
perfect, empty futuristic city in Freejack.
On Saturday I had to run a few quick errands downtown, and I got lost on
my own in the huge Skyway maze. Being Saturday, most of the buildings
were completely empty, so I was walking all alone in huge hallways,
skyways, receptions, while listening to eastern ambient masters
Delerium.
It was like a sneaking around illegally post-curfew in a dark sci-fi
movie from the earliy 90ies. I loved it and made sure to get extra lost.
We're at MSP airport about to board our super-boring overnight Amsterdam flight.
This just a quick post to announce our unison satisfaction with this
trip and say goodbye to the biggest, best, worst and craziest country in
the world. Us hearts the US, we'll be back!
Haven't had time to write out posts the last two days, but I'll type up stuff on the plane.
The guys from Cycling 74 is here at the Spark Festival, and gave us a
sneak peak at the new version and introduction to the new
features! Most Sensational Peculiar!
It was great, we had an hourlong classroom demonstration of new
features and changes. I personally love the new UI and features. Most
importantly to me, as a casual user, is the new documentation and
information system - very well thought out. There is even a small info
window like in Ableton Live, constantly providing relevant information
for the item in focus.
Other items of interest to me is the new transport object (killing
off the timeline which I never got anyway), and a web browser object. I
can't wait to try hooking this up to Yahoo Pipes and similar online data
feeds. Brilliant!
Tons of other things to mention, but best part was really having the
Cycling guys themselves presenting the program, and answering our
probing questions.
A few weeks before travelling to Minneapolis I was asked to do a
Prince cover, for an anniversary compilation out this summer. I wasn't
sure if I should do it, I like some of his music, but never been a huge
fan. I don't know much about him, except he plays most instruments
himself, likes weird baroque clothes and always uses slightly dull drum
machine sounds.
I scanned his Wikipedia entry, to get some background info - and stopped dead after 9 words. He was born and breaked in Minneapolis.
It must be a sign (ha haa haaaaa...) I said yes. And decided to do
the cover as much as possible while in Minneapolis. So now, every spare
moment I have, I'm at the hotel working out Princisms on my laptop. And
devouring the essence of Princelesence while roaming the streets of
Minneapolis.
A
few words on yesterdays Ugress gig at the Nomad World Pub. It was super
fantastic. From the moment we arrived until we left deep into the
Midwestern night, we had a great time.
My kind of place, a typical worn music cafe with friendly staff,
knowledgeable sound guys, an attentive audience - a place where good
music is more important than quick money. The evening's organizer JP was
brilliant, managing a myriad of bands, artists and technologies on
stage, while keeping a relaxed atmosphere during hectic stage shifts.
My setup above. Debut show for my new MBP, it chewed thru the set like a samurai sword thru smoke.
There were many bands and performers playing, lots of insanely cool
setups and shows. A candy store for electronic music nerds. We met
shitloads of cool people, the backstage area was a brilliant place to
hang out and talk electronic music, arts, programming, software.
Most noteworthy was Joshua from NYC, he had a great set, where he
played and manipulated voice samples from a boombox radio on shoe soles
and a huge steering wheel:
The Norwegian State was also properly represented by invitation, a
sweet and smart girl from the consulate came by to see our show, and we
talked about future ways to get things going for Ugress in the US. Very
cool of her to come, I learned a lot, and we even got a nice note on the embassy site norway.org.
Sadly we didn't get any chance of filming our gig. I was kinda
stressed out with delayed soundchecks, stage preps, and getting the
projector visuals up and running - I didn't have time to find a solution
for filming. Usually Igor fixes the camera, but he didn't have time
either. There was a girl taking photos for the festival, she showed me
some of the afterwards. She'll let me know when they're out, I'll link
up to them.
With great satisfaction I also note that the newer Unicorn tracks are
really standing out and pulling a much better response from complete
strangers to my stuff, than the earlier material does. I was slightly
nervous as to how the crowd would take to Zombie Eagles, our final
track, but they LOVED it.
I've got plenty more to mention, but I'll separate it out over
multiple entries. We're still here, having a few appointments and
commitments to execute.
The Igor is fond of Starbucks, and in particular the Iced Americano. I
like it, but The Igor LOVES it, more than anything, so we are currently
located at a Starbucks... with Igor on his third Iced. I'm glad we play
electronic music, because he's actually electric right now.
And I got the voltage converters, so we're all set for one electric appearance tonight.
Woke up horribly early this morning, so I spent a few hours
experiencing dawn over the Minneapolis skyline while working. My hotel
room as a brilliant view.
Set up my portable studio at the desk, and we had breakfast. I notice
the Americans really dress up for breakfast, everyone was wearing suits
and ties and the ladies pretty dresses.
Now we're off to find a Radioshack or something, I need to get a
step-up voltage transformerer for my effects units for tonight.
According to Google maps its just a few blocks from here, but it is also
minus 500 degrees Celsius, not sure we will survive.
We are now finally at the hotel in Minneapolis, after a loooong
flight and a peeeeeeculiar immigration and custom adventure, which left
us shaking like the faint artistic electronica leaves we really are.
But we are inside, we're having a beer and winding down, and tomorrow is the first gig in The New World!
Todays most noteworthy observation, after immigration, was the
Northwest flight attendants: She-dragons From Worn Southern Whisky Hell.
We were served, controlled and supervised by three super tall, super
efficient, chain-smoking, hard-living matrons. In Igors words: Too old
too worn too cruel to be flight attendants.
Posted February 25th 2008, at 20:16 with tags come, we, here, USA
I'm off to the US, we're playing at Spark Festival on Thursday, and staying a few days meeting people - and doing some top secret Minneapolis mission work, TBA underways.
Will you miss us? No. Because we'll be live-blog-umenting the whole
trip as much as possible. I assume there is wi-fi everywhere in
the US, right?
We are bringing mobile phones, laptops, HD cams, DV cams, VHS cams,
mics, batteries, cables, scripts, lights, green screens, our section of
the plane will look like a TV channel production area.
Stay tuned. Ah, excellent, Igor is here with the transportation. Must run.
Posted February 23th 2008, at 01:58 with tags BRAK, by:larm, oslo
Mad crazy busy the last week, haven't had time to journ much so far. Last weekend was Gaffa seminars, then two days of preparations for the Spark Festival next weekend, and now I'm at by:Larm in Oslo since Wednesday.
We (BRAK) are over to cover the
seminars, to gather information, promote our organization and consider
future courses, seminars and speakers for Bergen. But also attending
concerts at night, and promoting the Bergen music scene (including
ourselves).
Ungodly early this morning I was in a radio interview, and now I'm
having a quick breakfast and uploading pictures from the festival so far
to a Flickr set.
I'm attending as many seminars as possible, devouring knowledge and
information. I'm focusing on the digital future, the possibilities and
challenges regarding music and Internet, and also attending seminars in
social networks, fandom, myth and culture. Crazy interesting stuff so
far, very good programming by by:Larm.
A day zip by. Lots of great seminars. Never enough time to
upload the photos completely or write this entry out. The day is over,
attented a few concerts, crashing at friends place and finally bandwih
enough to upload the Flickr set completely. I'll be uploading new photos to the set continously.
Posted February 23th 2008, at 01:33 with tags bandit, by:larm
Bandit is one of my favorite bands for the future, mostly because
they write fantastic music but also because they are some of my best
friends: My dearly missed ex-coops Therese Vadem (vocals) and Czhewr
Affen (bass).
Tonight I had the great pleasure of experiencing their first proper
liveshow at by:Larm, and I'm so happy to see them play and being
impressed by their live show.
Czhewr and
Therese have been busier and busier the last few years with their Bandit
project, finally having a breakthru now with by:Larm and their first
gig at Sentrum Scene tonight. Czhewr is mostly writing the music and
Therese provides her brilliant vocals, adding live keys, guitar and
drums in a superb mix of Japanese cheerleader rock and Burtonesque
melodic popscapes. I hearts!
There is a lot of music a by:Larm, and the quality of everything is
super impressive, but personally I sometimes find it hard to separate
bands from each other.
IMO the current music scene appears to me like a struggle to
assimilate as many band as possible into one specific, calculatable,
controllable, radio-friendly formula - even bands that pretend to hate
and fight this system, simultaneously fight it AND try to be part
of it, hoping nobody will notice the slight paradox.
Bandit is a brilliant example of someone NOT trying to adhere to
current music trend formulas, they create and follow their own. This
makes so much more valuable in my eyes and ears.
Bandit is playing tomorrow Saturday evening at Fabrikken, and you can also taste their super crazy tracks at their Myspace page.
Posted February 18th 2008, at 21:53 with tags web, 3.0, future, cloud
Lots of people ask themselves, experts, or better, mad
self-proclaimed geniuses like me, what one thinks web 3.0 will be. Glad
you asked.
I have multiple overlapping and simultaneously contradicting opinions
on what web 3.0 will incorporate (as it indeed will) and could talk for
ages on it. But one of the most important aspects of the future of the
tubes, is hyper-de-centralization of information and content. Up until
now, content on the web has generally been located in one specific,
designated place - a server. (Or a global cluster service like Akamai /
Amazon S3.)
So a certain something has always been located a certain somewhere.
I think this will change pretty soon, pretty fundamentally, and a brilliant example of this is Bitlet.
Brilliant concept. It lets you listen to any mp3 in a torrent without
downloading the torrent, it just picks the packets you need to listen.
OK, you think, that is nice, but so what.
Don't you get it? This means the music you are listening to never
need to really exist anywhere. It is just billions of complete or
incomplete torrents, scattered across the globe. In fact, the COMPLETE
mp3 might actually never exist - but the molecules of it does.
Take this concept further - you don't need servers anymore. Need to
host anything? You just need the cloud itself - a billion computers
connected, data scattered and moving around as needed. If nobody wants
it, it stays on your computer. If many people want it, it scatters. The
web will self-regulate and self-evolve.
Incredibly bad timing and planning, as usual, but great success nevertheless.
Today the super beautiful black Ugress logo cards, with sparkling
metallic purple logo, arrived. For internet benefit unbox operation Flickr photo-documentary. Sparkling purple is a bit hard to photograph, rest assured they look incredible sexy.
The cards are super nice cards to write a short message or thanks
note. The plan is to have them accompany orders, promos and stuff like
that. Should have had them to the Unicorn release and shipments, but
that didn't happen. Most orders are sent by now.
Must make a new album very fast so I can use these!
Spent most of the day in coffee shops and wifi bars with HMV, talking tubes.
Heidi Marie, in case you are a goldfish, provides vocals for two
tracks on Unicorn, and like me, is an independent artist running her own
label.
We're venturing into social network explorations and collaborations,
and I tell you, the SG labyrinth of Myspaces, Facebooks, iLikes,
OpenIDs, Youtubes, Flickrs, feeds, blogs, fans, trolls, and telefaxes is
quite the challenge to keep everything running, and in addition, in
sync. Modern artists often spend more time updating a gazillion SG
websites than writing music.
We talked, discussed and philosophicated around a lot of things.
Todays subject was Paypal as our future financial provider and a unison
decision to turn our Facebook profiles from previous semi-private to
full public profile; the nature of Facebook has changed over the last
year and I think we're both considering Facebook now more as a way to
reach fans than the personal system if was before.
So if you're on Facebook, check out our profiles and be our... "friend 2.0".
I love Russian sci-fi, all of it, from Planeta Burg via Solyaris to the modern Day Watch / Night Watch / Twilight Watch series. If you missed it a few weeks back, check out my Kin Dza Dza post with link to the full movie of this 80ies cult movie from the very edge of communism.
Those Russians, FSM bless them, are cooking up and throwing their new economy at a new sci-fi epic, Inhabited Island (Flash/Russian). Synopsis:
"The year 2157. The blossom times for the human civilization. Pilots
of the Freelance Search Group enjoy interstellar travelling. A Russian
spacecraft, piloted by a 22 year old Maxim Kammerer, crashes on the
distant inhabited Saraksh planet. After long years of a nuclear war, an
environmental crisis reigns over the planet, the society is overburdened
with social problems, and the established peace is quite shaky."
The teaser trailer sucks, and we all know the inverse relationship
between quality of trailer and b-cult awesomeness. This is going to be
great.
I'm in the future listening to streaming web radio on my N95 via HSDPA.
A few weeks ago I upgraded to the best mobile phone in the world, the Nokia N95 8GB Black Edition.
Apple didn't spit out even a 3G phone at Macworld, which I kinda
expected and was waiting for - that would be more sensible than the
rather enormous Macbook Air. (Which has not even Edge connectivity.)
So I go Nokia. The HSDPA-capable N95 kicks the ass, face and touchy
multi-touch pinch of the pathetic Edge-based iPhone. I'm getting 1
megabit connection everywhere I go, anytime I like, via the HSDPA modem.
More on the phone itself later, haven't had time journalize it - the
phone has been a godsend during the Unicorn release, with me being
everywhere at once and needing hi-speed internet simultaneously.
Anyway - I'm currently about to cook dinner in the Uncanny kitchen listening to web radio on my N95, Soma.FMGroove Salad, via Virtual Radio,
they got many more of my fav channels already. And I'm sure there is a
general S60 application around the corner to stream regular m3u or ogg
radio channels. But just the feeling of listening to Soma.FM Groove
Salad or Youtube or whatever on the web on my mobile phone, anywhere,
anytime, at 1 mbit... Future Now FTW!
I've said it before and I'm saying it again -
mobile/satellite/broad-fi internet access will become the most important
technology the next 5-50 years. Doubtless. Cable network providers
might not like this, but Teh Future is in Up In Teh Air.
Youtube killed the video star. Virtual radio killed the cable network star.
Google speaks out
and warns against the Yahoo Microsoft purchase. It's not like Google is
perfect, nor Yahoo, but I'm agreeing with Google on this one. I don't
want Microsoft to fuck up the Internet like they almost did with
Internet Explorer and it's proprietary hacks a few years ago. They are
now maneuvering into position to do so. Danger danger, WIll Robinson.
I don't really hate Microsoft. I just get pissed and annoyed very
often when I have to use one of their products. They just seem to always
be somewhat more IN the way than helping me ALONG the way. Like just
recently I got a book from someone in LIT format, and OH what a struggle
it was to open this. Boot into Windows, download Microsoft Reader,
install, five step unlock process, oh, we're sorry your browser does not
support this method, ok then, Internet Explorer, five step unlock
process again, thank you, open the darn thing, horrible GUI, need to
skim help file to learn that next page is PAGE UP, what happened to
universally expected SPACE for next page, oh look, nice proprietary DRM
format, waht teh fukc happened to open, globally supported PDF? Why not
just make it simple and easy? I ended up getting a PDF converter for my
mac.
If M$ buys Yahoo, I'm closing my Flickr account and quit using any product locked to Yahoo Search (goodbye Opera Mini).
Google might be big and enjoy monopoly in many areas, but their
products are open, integrates with the rest of the world and adhere to
established as well as future standards. Yahoo is like the clumsy little
brother of Google - screws up a lot, but means well. Microsoft is the
class bully.
As of right now and the next few days things might not be as they seem in here, or worse.
I have to do some virtual matrix updates to the data-pipes and
hypertext wires and important stuff like that inside the journal
datacenter facility. So if something appears broken, don't PANIC.
Rest assured, I'm taking care of that part for you.
My favorite super-tracker Renoise is out with a dot update to 1.9.1, where the biggest news is Linux support. Nice.
I'm not a Linux user myself (Ubuntu needs more RAM than Windows XP,
wtf?) but this is great news for portable and multi-platform tracking.
Theoretically, anything that runs Linux should then be able to run
Renoise, for example as illustrated on the OpenMoko platform.
I really wish I could get my hands on that sexy OLPC laptop, a super robust laptop with hand-powering abilities. I could get lost in the wilderness, like Monsen, just with an OLPC laptop instead of HD cam, and make Jack Londonesque tracker beats in the tent.
Just a little update on the US tour plans. We're going.
The Spark Festival is set, we're booked for February 28th, at the Nomad World Pub. We've received funding to help covering travel expenses (THX, filthy rich wealthy oil nation,
we loves us and our cultural priorities). So, we're going, and I'm
trying to book more gigs than Minneapolis - without much luck so far,
I'm like the Miss South Carolina of the live music booking world.
Crazy important South By Southwest is
only a few days after our Spark gig, we're currently on the very small
"still being considered" list. They would love to have us but haven't
found a spot for us yet. (What? No groovetight mad professor category???
SCANDALOUS.)
Doing a showcase at SxSW is utterly insane mad crazy important for
breaking into the US, so naturally we're pretty hopeful this could work
out. Refreshing our inbox and the KLM flight prices every two hours.
Hopefully one of them turn good before the other turn bad.
Until
I can bundle the booklet PDF with the downloads, here is a simple
solution for everyone who has purchased the albums digitally. Just send
or forward an email to cover@uncannyplanet.com with your purchase receipt. I then reply with your virtual-reality booklet(s) in the receipt.
Access All Areas - Uncanny Planet store
Download the receipt for your album(s).
Put the PDF file(s) in an email.
Send the email. I see the receipt and reply with your booklet(s). That's it.
iTunes
Forward the email receipt you got from iTunes. I reply with your booklet(s). That's it.
I really wish I could bundle, I know this is somewhat less than
optimal for both you and me. But the important thing is to get you the
booklet.
Please note - I have to create proper digital versions from the print
files. It will take a day or two before all booklets are ready. I'll
send them out as soon as they're ready.
Regarding privacy, if you are concerned with me seeing your full name
and address, just take a screen-dump or whatever and blur/stroke out
the private data, as demonstrated. I only need to see and verify your
email address, the order number and the products. As demonstrated.
So, to repeat, the very simple process:
The receipt, as PDF attachement or forwarded email
The show is, IMHO, a freaky viking-ish reality show. I don't watch it, it scares me. It's about this crazy über alpha male guy Monsen
who spends many many years completely alone and isolated far into the
vast wilderness of Northern Scandinavia. Puffing around hunting or being
hunted, pondering Great Questions under the Aurora Borealis and talking
to his dogs. And filming himself doing it.
Of course this show is a mega hit in Norway. It thrives on the
colloquial yearning of Norwegians to conquer and master nature at every
opportunity.
Ever since we found oil, we stopped hunter-gathering overnight,
changed our television sets from black and white to colour, and started
consuming frozen prepared foods while watching licensed American TV
shows two seasons late. Monsen represents the primal wish deep inside
every Norwegian (except me), to be the super über viking alpha wolf
McGuyver man or woman.
Count me out of that demographic. I shall cling to my electrically
heated studio with multiple laptops, wifi and a quiet bar at street
level - until I die of too little exercise.
Anyway, the point was, this is pretty cool by NRK, regardless of what show they put out.
If you have the physical CD, there are 5 bonus tracks available to you at the Code area. And maybe there is more than meets the eye.
The countdown process has been incredibly fun. 100 days of ups,
downs, hairpin turns, shortcuts, detours, surprises, explosions and
special effects. It makes me a little bit sad, the countdown now is
over. I should get started on the next album right away, to have
another!
At the same time, I'm sort of looking forward to return towards my
regular scheduling of impending robot revolutions, weird MIDI
implementations and post-apocalyptic steampunk dreams. I need some
external input now, inspiration and reformatting to write some new
stuff.
The release of Unicorn is so much more than an album release, and has
been designed as that from the start. It was a lot of work, and
necessary work. There are now fundamental systems in place for me to
develop, communicate, release and publish music in my own tempo, in my
own way, directly to my listeners, without anything at all between us.
There were 200 candidates for Unicorn. 12 of them made it. I'm off to work on the 188 others. And some new ones.
All tracks are 320 kbps highest quality mp3, encoded with LAME insane encoding preset. DRM-free.
All tracks can be purchased independently or as a part of an album. You can download whole albums or track by track.
The store is hosted and supported for free by über brilliant indie company I Think Music,
a digital content aggregator and shop creation application. I write the
music, run the store, they run the technology. They take 5% provision
of my revenue, that's it.
You can pay with any regular credit cards. All transactions are
secure. The payment is handled by iThinkMusic, I never ever get to see
or access your payment information.
Your purchases are available for multiple downloads up to 14 days after purchase. Technical issues are handled by iThinkMusic.
Prices are given in GBP (British pounds). In general a track is
£0.49, today that equals €0.65 and a full album is £5.49 equals €7.40.
Other currencies and Paypal will be available later this spring (store
limitation).
Cover artwork boklet PDF is unfortunately not possible to bundle with
the albums right now (another store limitation). But you will be able
to download high-res covers from ugress.com incredibly soon (not yet
ready, give me a day or two to assemble them.)
Today not only Unicorn is released, and Access All Areas
- the Uncanny Planet digital download store - opens: Also several other
additions from the Uncanny Planet vaults make the digital catalogue now
complete.
Those who almost made it, those long lost. 18 unreleased,
hidden or forgotten Ugress tracks from the Uncanny Vaults. Some of
these has been out or available here and there, in various quality, but
this is a remastered and repackaged collection.
This EP was originally planned to be released a few
months prior to Resound. Extreme flooding plagued Europe that spring,
and the vinyl pressing plant was set under water, effectively cancelling
the print.
The EP is now exclusively available in the Uncanny Planet store.
The very first Ugress release, printed in 200 limited edition copies vinyl fall 2000.
The EP was quickly sold out, and is now only available in the Uncanny Planet store.
In addition to these exclusive new releases, any previously released album and EP is now available in 320 kbps mp3 from the download store. A complete list for your immediate convenience:
UP 000 Ugress - La Passion De Jeanne D'Arc
UP 001 Shadow Of The Beat - Nanokaravan
UP 002 Ugress - Film Music: Selected CUes
UP 003 Ugress - Sophisticated Wickedness EP
UP 004 Ugress - Retroconnaissance EP
UP 005 Ugress - Kosmonaut EP
UP 006 PixxelTyger - PixxelTyger EP
UP 007 Nebular Spool - Nebular Spool
UP 008 Ninja 9000 - Bit Collapse EP
UP 009 Ugress - Unicorn
UP 010 Ugress - Chromosome Corrupt EP
UP 011 Ugress - Resound
UP 012 Ugress - Cinematronics
UP 013 Ugress - Cowboy Desperdao
UP 014 Ugress - Loungemeister EP
UP 015 Ugress - E-Pipe EP
UP 016 SOTB - The Shadow Vault - Entities 2000-2007
UP 017 Ugress - The B Vault - Unreleased Tracks 2000-2007
Depending on one's time zone, and when one think a day starts, it is only a few hours left until Unicorn is out.
I am working like mad crazy click click double-click click
multi-click click poly-dimensional-click. Uploading and managing all the
websites and services that should host the tracks. Places like ugress.com, Last.FM and my new digital download store, opening tomorrow.
You might be pleased to learn Unicorn is not the
only digital audio entity that will be available for glorious high
quality LAME encoded 320 kilobits per second motion picture expert group
audio layer 3 download. Oh noes:
I am also uploading and preparing Ugress - The B Vault, a compilation of 18 previously unreleased tracks from the last 7 years, and Shadow Of The Beat - The Shadow Vault,
a similar compilation with 12 tracks. And naturally, every and any
other release I have, including the very first out of print E-Pipe 12" EP, and the cancelled Loungemeister 12" EP, containing a few exclusive tracks too.
Ladies, gentlemen, robots; prepare your routers, clean your disks and start your hypertext navigational program.
Did I mention everything is without any trace of pestering stinking
pathetic DRM? Did I mention you will able to listen to all tracks,
full length, high quality with Last.FM anytime anywhere? Did I mention
the five exclusive Unicorn bonus tracks available at the Ugress code
area? Did I mention the digital download store keep your purchases
available for multiple downloads for 14 days after purchase? Did I
mention the prices? Did I mention I am only halfway in uploading and
preparing all this? My next lab upgrade is definitely a time management
device. And espresso machine. And maybe a clone facility.
Ooh! I almost forgot. The final preview track, here it is. Now with all track previews out, I'm also uploading Unicorn for Last.FM
(as I type this actually, multi-dimension-clicking, see?). I'll be
switching it over from 30s to full length tomorrow, so you can listen to
the whole album.
I love statistics, I love books and I love clever visual presentations. Virgil Griffith has created a visual representation of the most popular books versus average student results on American universities. The graphic is wonderful, so head over and compare your own literary quotient to American geniuses / douchebags.
Somebody should do this with B-movies. I have a feeling there is an
inverse relation between the quality of a B-movie and the IQ of the
LOL-intriguedified viewer.
Science makes great progress for sonic weapon world dominance justice!
Fellow mad scientist Mick Grierson has built a system for performing music with only his brain. An EEG sensor unit registers his thoughts, sends the signal to Matlab for processing, then the filtered signal is piped into Max/MSP to reate (weird, but tuned) sounds.
Series of tubes indeed.
The Youtube video report
(2 mins) is intriguingly mad-manesque. I can't wait to perfect this
technology, to the point where I can remotely control every musical
device with my mind. Realtime iPod hijack mashup terror FTW!
wow only two days left. I managed to get out every pre-order that was
paid by today, the rest goes out continously as they come in. I notice
some of you have started receiving the album from mail orders allready,
enjoy.
I am VERY happy with the amount of pre-orders. If there were any
more, I would not be able to handle them. There were some interesting
data to learn from the shipments that went out today. For example, my
international standing. Here is the global coverage, sorted by amount of
shipments:
United Kingdom
Norway
France
USA
Finland
Canada
Australia
The following countries has so 2 or less shipments, and are therefore only sorted alfabetically:
Czech Republic
Germany
Luxembourg
The Netherlands
Sweden
UK and Norway covers approximately 50% of the shipments. I'm puzzled
about the UK dominance - UK has always been a tough castle for me to
storm. France, US and Finland is strong, which I understand from
previous album sales, but I am very surprised that Germany is not high
on the list - after Norwegians, Germans are the most frequent visitor
nationality on my websites. Maybe they just like the nice pictures?
Only two tracks left, and here is one of them, a 30 second preview of Lost In Time, featuring Heidi Marie Vestrheim.
came back to Bergen late tonight, been a long day. Lots of meetings
today as well, just like yesterday. I'll type out who what where why I
have been talking to later.
I spent a few hours at the airport, waiting for my flight and fixing up the landing site
for an online ad campaign. Fun to try out, but the most important
aspect of the campaign is to show the stores that support and push the
album, we support them back. Ah the music biz.
Did you know there's a nice free lounge at Gardermoen airport? The
spiral staircase just behind the security checks leads up to a calm area
full of sofas and electric outlets. Nice to know.
A cool bartender was kind enough to help document my new OSL office. Impressive desk, eh?
I think I've responded to every order now - if you have not received a
response or invoice by now, and reading this, send me a quick note, or
perhaps drop a brief comment here with some details to remind me. Many
many of you have allready paid your invoices, thank you, this means most
shipments are going out tomorrow Saturday. If the Royal Norwegian
Postal Service keeps to their claims of regular overnight service,
Norwegians should receive their shipments Monday.
Today you are treated to one of the softest tracks on Unicorn; the first 30 seconds of another Mrs Litle vocal track:
I'm in Oslo, running from meeting to meeting and sending out
pre-order invoices from coffee shops inbetween. I am so happy for all
the pre-orders, coming in from all over the world! After every meeting
there's a new bunch of pre-order emails. I just wished I could answer
you all faster! It is very clear to me I need a proper webstore to
handle this.
By tomorrow I should have (must have) sent everyone their invoice,
and Saturday the first shipments are going out. PS - Paypal payments are
instant, so the moment you pay, I have it and the order is ready to
ship.
Here is today's preview track, Harakiri Martini. The first minute or
so has already been presented in the live video clip, so here is another
30 secs from inside the track.
UPDATE NOTICE, April 16th: Most shirts currently sold out. We're printing new ones, and more variations. Should be here early summer.
Observe The Igor modelling our newest global domination investment scheme: Trendy Apparel.
The shirt is finest best vintage wash (certified, nonetheless!), and the logo is exquisite flocking texture - no cheap plastic print that crumbles up after the first wash. If we are to rule the planet, we need proper uniforms.
Price: 20 Euros.
Available sizes, all in vintage dark blueish color:
Girlie Small
Girlie Large
Male Small
Male Medium
Male Large
Shipping:
Norway €3 for one, €7 for two plus
Europe €5 for one €11 for two plus
World €8 for one, €18 for two plus
T-shirt and CD orders can be combined of course. Just drop us an email at orders@ugress.com with your request.
I'm typing this in a quiet airport corner, my flight to Oslo is
delayed so I got some time to catch up. First, if you still are waiting
for a response to your pre-order forgive me for the delays, but there
are (happily) so many, it just takes time. But looks like I will be able
to finish them off tonight in Oslo.
The merchandise shipment finally arrived today, a big box of marvellous beautiful t-shirts.
The Igor is Merchandise Executive Officer, handling all practical
issues with swift and efficient German precision. Quite unlike my messy
pre-order system. I'll cook up some way of ordering a shirt as well if
anyone wants to add to their pre-order.
Here is today's countdown track - allready out as single, so here's the whole track. Featuring Mrs Litle.
Posted January 23th 2008, at 06:26 with tags evil jeans
January 22nd,
crazy busy day. I'm off to Oslo at the end of this week for promotion
and meetings, and launched the pre-order system last night, have to
prepare for the shipments and organize myself. Also have to deliver
artwork and info for the online marketing campaign. Now onto payments
for pre-orders.
Here is today's countdown track. Featuring mad evil scientist genius.
You can now pre-order Unicorn. Shipping starts at the end of this week.
This means physical orders should theoretically reach Norwegians on
Monday.
Digital download
Please be advised before your pre-order: On release date, you will be
able to purchase all Uncanny Planet music, including absolutely all
Ugress music ever released and unreleased, as digital downloads.
DRM-free, 320 kbps mp3 in my own webshop, administered by myself,
completely without interference from no-one and nobody. Every purchase
in this store is instantly ready for download, and will directly support
me.
Unicorn will also be available in iTunes
and similar regular digital music stores if you prefer. But have not
been able to confirm iTunes Plus (DRM free) except they have promised
"yes most likely".
Physical CD
If you would like to buy the physical CD you have three options:
Physical real world record stores in Norway. The album has
national distribution and should be available in all regular shops. For
the first few weeks, I would be very happy if Norwegians buy the album
in a record store. Shops report sales to charts - If I can manage a
chart position, this results in even more sales and exposure -
particularly since many stores only pick up albums on the charts, and
many people only buy chart music. Getting into that circle is very cool.
Online record stores both locally (i.e. Platekompaniet in Norway) and globally (Amazon). Amazon carries the album, but expect long delivery times, they just recently ordered it from me.
Directly from me. See next paragraph.
Direct mail order from me
I'd love to sell it directly to you. Send an email to orders@ugress.com with:
What CDs you want to buy, and how many
Your full name, postal address and country
I will respond ASAP with your total amount, and a Paypal
invoice. The invoice can be paid by any normal credit card or Paypal
account. Money transaction and security is handled by Paypal, the worlds largest online payment system. When I have received payment, I will email a confirmation, and ship the CD(s) by priority airmail.
Prices
Unicorn Release Price Feist: Any Uncanny Planet CD can be purchased, catalogue below, and pricing as follows:
1 album: € 12 + shipping costs
2 albums: € 20 + shipping costs
3 albums: € 30 + shipping costs
4 albums: € 40 + shipping costs
5 albums: € 50 + shipping costs
You get the idea for 6 albums and more I guess..
Shipping costs
The Royal Norwegian Postal operates with three areas and insane prices: Norway, Europe and Rest Of World.
1-3 albums shipping cost:
Norway € 3
Europe € 5
World € 8
4 or more albums:
Norway € 7
Europe € 11
World € 18
Catalogue
This is the current physical CD selection available for orders. Links to available Last.FM streaming albums.
Yes. Coming as well, planned and technology purchased, just need some
calm weeks to program and set it up. I know the email/paypal solution
is not optimal, neither for you nor me. But it is the best and easiest
solution until I have time to establish a proper web store for physical
orders.
Got a new order from Amazon,
they're out of stock. Sent off a new pack of CDs to them. Yes, I'm
personally (as my own label Uncanny Planet) the direct supplier to
Amazon. No, I don't make much money on it (yet). The cost for me
shipping CDs to Amazon in the US is higher than the sum I receive from
sales thru Amazon.
Regardless, it is important to be present with my music in Amazon,
and doing things myself is sometimes (read: often) the only option.
Being a mogul means a lot of dirty work. I'll type up more on Amazon and
global distribution when I'm filling up the missing days for
early January (day 4-14 is still missing).
In studio today the local backup disk died. Haven't got time to
investigate and fix it. There is some kind of ironic justice in the
demise of a backup disk, but can't get my head around it.
When I was young, innocent, and curious, which was only 2 minutes
ago, I always wondered where I would end up if I drilled a hole
straight down in the ground all the way to the other side of the planet.
I imagined Australia, afraid I might end up right underneath Ayers rock and have to digg a few extra hundred meters before breaking thru.
But the interwebs knows better. The phenomena is called your antipodal position, and antipodemap.com lets you find your own antipodes. But beware. Knowledge, dear journal, is not always for the better.
My antipodal location is somewhere in the absolute middle of completely fucking nowhere.
What is at the end of the rainbow? The intertubes, greatest treasure chest in the universe.
Today I stumbled across cult Russian sci-fi classic Kin-Dza-Dza (1986), available in two parts (first, second) at Google video.
Labeled as "advanced Soviet cult cyberpunk sci-fi classic". FTW! I am
fascinated with Soviet / East-block sci-fi, Russian directors, Andrei Tarkovsky, (Solyaris) and Pavel Klushantsev (Planeta Burg) are some of my favorites. This gem by Georgi Daneliya has so far passed under my radar, finally popping up in my feeds today.
What I like about Russian / East-block sci-fi is the gritty realness,
the sordid expectation of the future, and it's implications for us
hapless humans. Western sci-fi has the same goal, but often approaches
the subject from the glorious opposite, thru the bravour of technology
and futuristic hope.
I have only seen the first 20 minutes but this looks fantastic. I
threw it onto my Sony PSP and look forward to watch the rest while
travelling this week. Let's pray I don't end up sitting next to David Lynch on the plane.
second day of the Gaffa weekend workshop. Ross Gautreau from ASCAP
talked about performing rights, sync and collecting (the whole biz of
collecting and distributing payments for the use of music in various
situations like films, radio, tv, concerts, clubs, shops, any public
space really.)
Very interesting, and informative. Unfortunately, there was not room
for discussion regarding copyright law and issues around the creative
aspects of performing rights, a subject dear to my heart.
Eivind Brydøy from Artspages
talked about publishing, aggregators and digital distribution. This is
very exciting because there are so many possibilites and directions in
the music industry right now, particularly within the digital domain.
Again, sadly not room for discussion around a few important points - the
next version of mpeg audio will include tagging and insertion of
metadata directly within the audio, impossible to remove, for tracking
the use (and potential ownership) of the song. Great for artists, but
great for privacy? This HAS to be discussed.
Then we spent a few hours talking about and exploring definitions and
systems for setting up a market plan. Won't bore this entry with the
details but learned a lot.
Afterwards had a beer with Eivind and talked about digital
distribution, possibilites and how the business has changed and evolved,
how exciting the times are for small artists right now.
Must sleep now. Here is today's countdown preview - but not really. You know it. Since the track is already out as a single no point in a 30 second preview. Without further ado, full version of The Ultimate Fix, featuring Christine Litle.
As of writing this, and surely not for long, but incredibular anyway,
my Spider Eyes track is the fourth most popular electronic track over
at The Sixtyone, a Digg like SG web for music.
I have found The Sixtyone pretty cool for testing out and measuring
the popularity and of new tracks, both as Ugress and secretly as ghost
artists, just trying out stuff and see the response. Kind of like Last.FM,
but more responsive and realtime-ish. I love things like this,
crowdsourcing and utilizing social phenomena - I might enjoy the
response, I might not like the response, or I might be put off and
disillusioned by the lack of response, but in any case it gives me
information and helps me evolve.
the tempo is picking up. Today was Gaffa video development workshop, and had the first promo interview today.
The interview was a nice conversation with a smart and knowledgeable reporter at local newspaper Bergensavisen.
Love it when interviews turn into proper intelligent conversations and
discussions, where you kind of exchange thoughts and ideas. Elaborating
and exploring the parts of music that intrigues us, rather than
responding with well drilled facts to bullet point questions. I tend to
enjoy the first half of promotion rounds, when I meet the most eager
reporters, and I am still working out and contemplating the answers to
questions I know will come.
Today I spent the whole day at the first weekend of the Gaffa workshops.
Gaffa is a regional effort initiated by BRAK
and others to join the Bergen film scene and the Bergen music scene, to
develop professional exchange between us, and create professional music
videos with concrete, realistic international marketing plans. The
first few workshops this spring, are market plan development,
organisation and research, lecture talks from international
professionals, and networking/introductions between the music and film
scene. At the end of this process, a professional external committee
will evaluate artist and video marketing plans, and award proper funding
to realize four of the projects. (I think there are around 20 projects
attending the workshop.)
So, at the end of the Gaffa project I should be set with a pretty
good plan for developing, executing and properly launch a music video
internationally. And if the plan is good enough, there will be funding
to realize it. I love win-win scenarios!
Today we had small group work on the phenomena of innovation, and then
plural discussion with everyone regarding the potential issues and
challenges of the local professional network. Very interesting, all of
it, and what I really enjoy is the outspokenness and confidence of the
Bergen music scene, we have a lot of superb artists, brilliant minds,
determined enthusiasts,
everyone focused on music, and they are not afraid to speak up and
relate their experiences, and viewpoints, this makes for very good
discussion.
Also, being that we find ourselves in Bergen,
the sarcasm capital of Norway, the workshop is filled with lots of
self-irony, sharp observations and quick comments, makes for a lot of
laughs. I think part of the reason for Bergen's international
recognition as a musical force is because nobody takes themselves too
serious here, but we ARE serious and we love what we do more than we
love ourselves. And we look towards Europe rather than the capital Oslo.
Norway is important, not to be forgotten. But Bergen, at the edge of
western Norway, has a long tradition of looking outwards rather than
inwards. I think we'd rather be small fish in a big pond than big fish
in a small pond.
I learn a lot from these group discussions and even if I am not super
comfy doing networking moves, I love exchanging information and
knowledge, which is what this is all about.
Tomorrow is going to be fun, my previous manager Eivind Brydøy is
coming over from Oslo to talk about publishing and digital distribution,
Eivind is a great guy and fun to talk with, it's going to be great
seeing him again and annoy him with lecture-disorienting questions.
Disclosure: I am currently member of the BRAK board, but I am attending
the workshop as artist Ugress/record label Uncanny Planet. Also, Eivind
works for Artspages, my aggregator.
busy day, running around posting promos, applications, reports,
working on the digital ad campaign. Roar working his butt off in Oslo
trying to secure news interviews and stuff like that, part of the whole
promotion circus. We loves it! Not.
I am not too eager about interviews and personal exposure, I prefer
my lab, or mad crazy live shows where I as a person drown in the
visuals. But promotion is important, any exposure in media will help
build awareness of the music. Unicorn is the first part of a larger
plan, and it would be great with a good start, to have something to
build on. And sometimes you actually meet pretty smart reporters asking
clever questions.
Today's countdown track is the only previously released track on
Unicorn, Zombie Eagles. In this version the mix and structure is
slightly different from the Retroconnaissance EP. But still the same
song. We think Zombie is the strongest track from the EPs, strong enough
to warrant an album release.
For your exquisite benefit, each day until release will introduce the
first 30 second of each track. Two tracks are already out in full, so
lets start fresh with one of the tracks featuring Heidi Marie Vestrheim:
spent most of the day figuring out best way to execute an online ad
campaign locally in Norway. Then booking it and start planning the
theme, conceptualizing artwork and how to execute it.
I did not expect to enjoy this kind of work, but actually - it is
intriguing. I learn a lot from the process, even more tools and methods
that has to be grokked. I have no idea if it will work, but this is what
I can afford, my last pennies, and I need to get word out about the
album. The fact that mechanisms like online marketing is possible to
realize for small artists, suits my philosophy perfect. I think artists
has to start thinking new, very new, take control of their own stuff,
and there is nothing stopping us. The tools are ready.
There are multiple reasons for why digital marketing.
I very much want as many people as possible to know about my music.
It is important to provide a marketing plan to the distributor
and the stores that should sell my album, to display an effort and
willingness to put something behind it, not just expect them to do all
the work.
Print and tv ads are waaaaay out of my league.
I love the fact that I myself, a small indie artist, can
announce my new album with national coverage - and provide a direct link
to free downloads and digital purchase. A single click and a potential
new fan can hear my music. Brilliant!
As mentioned, I love new challenges and exploring alternative methods.
I am not sure this will work, and rest assured my artistic moral
(highly questionable) is fighting with my surival instinct (often
procrastinating) if this is the right thing to do. Consider this beta.
I built a quick promo site for videos and live clips.
We haven't been able to start production on any videos yet, it is
scheduled for February when I have more time, but already the TV
networks are onto us for access to video material. So I had to whip up a
quick site with the videos and accompanying screen dumps to help
editors pick out material suitable for their program.
If you're a broadcaster needing higher quality, drop Roar a note with your request.
The track in the live cut, Harakiri Martini, is lifted from the upcoming album.
Allright. Could somebody wake up the globe. The new jesustop
is being marketed as the worlds thinnest. OK so what, why did suddenly
thin-ness become the most important aspect of a sub-notebook?
The thing is HUGE! And no builtin 3G/4G/HDSPA?
By all means, thin is good, we all like supermodels when they are on
the catwalk. But the MBA is actually pretty sizable, much bigger than my
PB 12". And only a tad lighter, at 3 pounds, the 12" being 4.5. The
size far outweights the weight at these numbers.
What is the point of a super thin laptop when it is completely unusable
in plane seats, car seats, at the bar, and at small cafe tables? What I
dig most about the 12" is that I can work on in everywhere, with good
room for arms. It suits my physique perfectly, and truly literally is a
lap-top.
And the price is kinda CEOish, compared to what you get from a MB right now. My beloved 12" is not being retired yet.
Oh and everybody also forgot to notice there was no 3G/HDSPA iPhone announcements. Sucks too.
Size matters. As a child I was obsessed with Mount Everest, tallest mountain on Earth, and kept reading the story of Sir Edmund Hillary, first climber together with Tenzing Norgay to climb it. My hero!
To me, the climb of Everest, was the final frontier, the end of the
Age Of Explorers. By 1953 the world was covered, no white spots left.
Sir Hillary was the LAST EXPLORER, and symbolically he reached the
uttermost edge of the world.
So this is pretty weird: This morning I dreamed I climbed the peak,
the dream wasn't about climbing, you know typically dream style you're
somewhere else all of a sudden, and this time, the summit. We we're a
bunch of people walking around up there, congratulating each other and
enjoying the spectacular view, yeah yeah.
Posted January 11th 2008, at 00:21 with tags No tags.
The
release date is creeping up faster and faster. Things are happening,
days are hectic, everytime I sit down to type out a journal entry,
something comes up. Hopefully the weekend will be calmer allowing me to
type out reports from the last week. Got lots of notes.
Briefly summed, been working on marketing, distribution, merchandise,
video, promotion and lots of web stuff. I'm also trying to realize that USA thing. We ran into some hickups with distribution and had to invest overtime there. But things seem to work out, and for the better.
Also I'm working on upgrading the webs, which isn't problematic,
rather fun, but makes me slighty web-weary at the end of the night.
Personally, professionally and contemporary I find it a scandal that
my albums has never been available properly on Amazon, the worlds
largest store. I have no idea why my previous distributors or publishers
could not manage to think of the world's larget outlet, but now I did
it myself, via the Amazon Advantage program. I signed up and registered
my goods, and today my little business was approved. I'm an Amazon
product! Yey!
We're in business.
I'm not making much money on it, yet. The bloodsucking Amazon
pirhanas charge a hefty provision, add the hilarious Norwegian
international shipping rates, and the profit is gone with the global
trade wind. But most importantly to me right now, the albums are
available, I have an Amazon presence, and people who would like to buy
the CDs from a generally trusted source have a solution.
My
most horrible and embarrassing fact of 2007 - I did not read many
books. It shames me, I love to read and books are my most important
escapist solution, but 2007 was a crazy year in many ways, someone had
to pay, it was books this time. Sorry, books. I will make it up to you
in 08.
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Possibly the best book I read in ages. I know they all are, but this
was. Because this isn't technological sci-fi, this is about love and
human relationships and how time, not matter how it runs, affects us.
The plot is deceptively brilliant. Henry has a very rare genetic
disorder known as "Chrono-Displacement" that causes him to involuntarily
travel through time. He is unable to control when he leaves, where he
goes, or how long his trip will last, but often he travels to people or
times important to him. Which means he, as grown, married man, has
visited his wife many times as she grows up. And - if you can wrap your
head around this one - when they meet for the first time, she knows him
very well from all these encounters, but he has never met her before.
But Henry's incontrollable time travels are not easy to live with,
neither for him nor his love. Nobody knows his abilities, he always ends
up naked where he goes, in lots of trouble, and it wears them.
I think this book works so well because it retains the mystery around
Henry's time travel abilities - they aren't abilities, they are
disabilities - and the book paints the relationship and life of Henry
and Claire so wonderfully. It just works, I think this is one of the
best books I have read in ages. As a person obsessed with time, this was
something I needed.
Thanks to Esilenna of 12b for the recommendation and lend.
River Of Gods is in many ways the hectic opposite of The Time
Traveler's Wife. Technology, culture, society and digitalism gone crazy,
mash-upped, novelized and textually remixed and packed into a intense
literary experience. Do you like having multiple tabs open, within
multiple browser windows, on messy desktop? This is your novel.
Plot lifted from Wikipedia: "The novel follows 9 different characters around the centenary of India's partition, August 15, 2047. Old India
has become balkanized, and a water shortage is jeopardizing the peace
between these states. The global information network is now inhabited by
Artificial Intelligences, called aeais in the novel, of varying levels of intelligence."
The plot summary lacks one thing; the insanely hectic language, tempo
and techno-prosaic adventure of the novel. Reading the novel really
nails my expectation of a highly techno-industrialized India of 2050, a
cultural melting pot -wok of east, west and the rest ready to explode
and the explosion is really weird because this is such a new and
different culture you don't get it all, do you, just try to hang on for
the ride.
Most brilliant and thought-provoking and obvious book of 2007. I
loved it, partly because it told me things I already had understood, but
had no established and communicated conceptions of. I wish there was a
word for this, you know something, but you have no conception of it
until someone explains it to you, then you go "aaahaaa I knew it!"
When I heard a podcast from Weinberger, I was like "WTF", multiple
WTFs, I was a WTF machine gun, he was so hitting the nail on the head
and I got the book and as a digital artist in 2007 I would proclaim it
is more important to read and grasp this book than even doing your
regular stuff, because the way you create, produce, analyze and present
your stuff will change in the future. This book tells you why.
I won't spoil it all away, except mention a short summary: Weinberger
dives into the concept that the digital approach to organisation
changes the whole concept of everything. Example: A library. In a
physical library, books can only be sorted physically one way, usually
by author. You can then build a meta library of index cards, one sorted
by book, and maybe one by Dewey. But they all need physical space.
Digital does NOT. And the world is becoming digital.
You can arrange your mp3s on your HD in any way, dynamically, as you
please. Amazon can sort, present their products in any way they want, or
really; YOU want, instantly, customized, filtered, optimized. This WILL
change the way we relate to the world. In a digital world, everything
is miscellaneous. This is GOOD.
As a kid in the early 90ies I read and devoured grumpy old Neil
Postman on how media changes our concept of knowledge - loved it - this
is Postman for the Myspace age. And that aphorism, in itself, with it's
inherent clash of cultural values, is a clue. Ignore this, and die.
Embrace, and prosper.
Ah hoy. Prepare for complexness. Again, I lift shamelessly from Wikipedia:
"On its surface, GEB examines logicianKurt Gödel, artistM. C. Escher and composerJohann Sebastian Bach,
discussing common themes in their work and lives. At a deeper level,
the book is a detailed and subtle exposition of concepts fundamental to
mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence."
I have to admit, I haven't finished this book. But I think this is
kinda book you never finish, there are so many layers and so much to
dive into, you can spend a week just admiring the Escher drawings, and
month on the concept of strange loops, and a lifetime on the music of
Bach, which himself was quite the Wikipedia entry.
I think there is something important to learn from the queer
combination combo of Hofstadher and Weinberger. One of them diving into
the essence, another into the organization of essence.
I spent the summer of 2006 in Istanbul, drinking raki, writing music
and reading books and being far away. Istanbul is one of my favourite
cities, one of the world's oldest, and most melancholic. It is a city
with a greatness in
Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name Is Red, grew up in Istanbul, and this
is memoirs. I usually detest adolescence novels, they bore me to the
core, but this is the exception confirming the rule. At times the book
lingers on the edge of narcissism, but the brilliant writing and
sense of hüzün adventure keeps it alive.
I think most people in Western Europe has no idea how western
Istanbul actually is, and was, during the last century. My own
prejudgement before going was a mash-up of Viking-age crusader fibs,
oriental misconceptions and arabic influences. The city is all of that,
but so much more. I can never visit the Istanbul of the republican era,
but via Pamuk I can get a glimpse.
2007
was a good year for music, in many ways. I heard some albums I really
loved, which was great, because I haven't really loved music for a long
time. These are the most memorable, in no specific order.
Murcof - Cosmos
I played Remembrenza a lot, and I think Murcofs latest,
Cosmos, is even better. Sinister, eerie soundscapes, mezmering rythms
pulsing in the background and haunting classical samples.
At times it somewhat reminds me of Jarre actually, when
he drifts into the melodic evolvements. I know, weird connection, but
still.
This is perfect music for everything, except for normal people.
A beautiful, Balkan inspired folkpop album. A distant
aquaintance had been to a concert with them and explained the music to
me - so I picked up a digital copy.
At first I did not like the vocals at all, but something
kept dragging me back, and by now this is probably one of the most
played albums of 2007.
Interestingly, not ony my ipod. I only play this album at home, on speakers. Weird.
Yey! Brilliant! I super-digged the Justice album. I enjoy
almost anything and everything on Ed Banger, but Justice is my new
favourite. I think it is the sound that fix me up.
Naughty bad-ass über compressed beats and fat slam bass
lines opens the album, and from there it's a roller coaster wonderful
eclectic mix-trip from funky disco to stressed-up techno. Loved it.
I enjoyed the film and I loved the soundtrack. I just
recently saw the movie a second time, after listening to the score many
times, and I actually I think the music is better stand-alone than in
the movie.
It is the sound in the movie which is beyond awesome. The music works perfectly, but the sound. Ohhh. My pants.
Enjoy the music for itself, it works brilliantly as cartoonish heroic everyday backdrop.
I think maybe this is the best album I heard in 2007. It
is by far the album I heard the most. It is perfect for anything and
anywhere, but two particular situations spring to mind: Hangover and
blingfeist shopping. This fixes both instantly.
Dark, evil, sinister, slow and gloomy jazz, makes Twin Peaks sound like a nervous-happy carousel on cocaine.
I want to spend all my evenings in dark, smoky, sordid
jazz clubs, staring deep down into glasses of sonic despair. Makes me
relax.
The best pop / dance album of 2007. Brilliant tunes.
What I liked best about this album, was how strong each
song is, and how complete the album appears. This is a brilliant pop
album, and I have not seen LCD live but I am sure this must be boiling
hot when played live.
Sound Of Silver made me envious because I really wished I
could write and produce music as good as this, but doesn't matter,
because LCD already does!
Broken beats, broken vocals, broken dreams. This Burial
album is a creeper, I kinda wrote it off at the start, like the Beirut
album, but it would not let me.
I know this is a trend fucker, everybody loves it, and
that made me slightly sceptic, but I thought I should check it out and
I'm glad I did, and glad I gave it some time. The broken beats/dubstep
elements are toned slightly down and darkened in the right way for me,
and I love the mood and sound.
Listened, and really liked these too, but not as much as above:
Amon Tobin - Foley Room
Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night
NIN - Year Zero
Laibach - Volk
Battles - Mirrored
Hans Zimmer - Pirates Of The Caribbean 3
Klaus Nomi - Klaus Nomi
M.I.A. - Kala
Kanye West - Graduation
short note today. Spent most of the day trying out and deciding for
the digital download store technology. Decided to go for a british
solution.
My initial plan was to build the system myself, a store including digital downloads as well as physical CDs and merchandise.
Since I'm pretty behind on schedule there is no time to build such a
complex system in 14 days. The most important bit to me is a genuinely
proper, catalogue complete, DRM-free, mp3-based and adminstrative
responsive system. I am quite confident my choice will provide me all of
this, and even more - the technology and karma just feels right with
this one. I'll reveal more details on the system upon release.
Posted January 4th 2008, at 18:30 with tags updates, web, http
January 4th,
Another expedition into the murky watrers of http. I am diving into
my webs again, at least some of them should see major facelifts and
updates before release.
The two most important being Ucanny Planet and Ugress, the first is
important as the hub center for all GMM activity, and making Ugress a
more music and artist oriented space. I love to build immersive webs and
my plan is to lay the ground work for big expansion over the next few
months.
Current expedition status:
Inspecting overall plans, arranging travel routes, and exploring
current digital possibilites for offloading internal expedition
resources.
Due to time constraints, I had to skip BIFF
this year, which sucks, because I usually spend all week at BIFF to
catch new wonderful movies. So the most memorable movies of 2007 is
rather obvious. I have seen the usual amount of B and cult movies this
year, a lot of fun but none of them particularly memorable (I can't
remember any right now).
Here is the list of the moving images I found most memorable in 2007.
The Prestige
Tesla. Christian Bale. Victorian era. Michael Cain. Magic. Christian Nolan directing. I rest my case.
A wonderful and twisted fairytale, set in Spain during or after the
civil war. A young girl, Ophelia, travels with her mother into the deep
woods of Spain. Her mother just married an ice-cold and cruel military
captain in charge of wiping out the rebels, and they are going to stay
with him.
Ophelia soon escapes into an uncanny fantasy world, escaping the
brutal reality. But the fantasy world is not an easy place to escape in.
I was really taken by this movie, from the haunting score, to the harshness of reality, to the fantastic creatures and effects.
I
didn't have time to play as many games as I wanted during 07. From
those I played, these are the memorable and honorable ones. A few others
was hastily forgotten.
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2
I'm merging these two stand-alone games into one experience. Played
both over the year. I enjoyed Episode 1, good entertainment but Episode 2
was way better, exceptional, streamlined entertainment. The story, the
acting, the visuals, the huge outdoor environments, the physics, the
cinematic experience, it was just so perfectly crafted. I think I have
never ever enjoyed such an optimal gaming experience.
(Spoiler alert skip this paragraph if you haven't played the game.)
The huge final battle, outdoors, against the striders and hunters, was
intense and incredibly satisfying to pull off! I played thru it twice,
each time nailing the last striders seconds within a strider's leg of
the base. Maybe it was just me, but this final battle is so
perfectly structured it can't be a coincident, I'm sure Valve makes some
dynamic adjustments backstage.
The only thing I was a bit let down by, was the simplicity of the
puzzles. They were rather on the simple side, and felt more like
deliberate pauses to break up combat, than natural elements in my
adventure.
Bioshock
No shocker, I suppose. Everybody loves it. The first half of Bioshock
was überimpressive. I have read my Ayn Rand, some of her theories are
intriguing, some slightly disturbing, as all lone mad geniuses. We all
know she was both right and wrong but megalomaniac madmen like the wrong
parts too.
Including her philosophies in a computer game based on a closed,
entropic environment at the bottom of the sea is pretty cool. So I was
looking forward to this game.
The game is brilliant for the first half. Everything is perfect,
inviting, visually awesome, you are forced to make moral decisions
affecting game mechanics, the environment is enigmatically beautiful and
everything is open, mysteriously pulling you into a mesmerizing 40ies
world gone crazy. Lots of clever references to Ayn Rand; Andrew Ryan,
Fontaine, Atlas, visuals and philosophies in game. It looks gorgeous.
Then, somewhere around the middle, after Atlas reveals himself and
the plot is obvious, the game kinda looses something. It trails and
lumps into a regular FPS maze, run, shoot, find key, go back, shoot,
storyline advances predictably, rooms are recycled, another round of
everything, then boss level at end, job well done. I grew tired and the
magic from the first half was gone. Particularly the last rounds
collecting Big Daddy equipment was pretty tiresome and reminded me of
Castle Wolfenstein, in a bad way, just poking around endlessly similar
rooms.
I really liked the game, don't get me wrong, but the first half was
magic, the second half was just good. The game's own formula became too
apparent. I also found the game a bit on the long side, I like the
episodic approach of HL, a perfect match for my impatience.
Crush
This was a pleasant surprise. I remember reading about the game
concept, and thought, clever. So I got it for my PSP to have some brain
puzzles on the road.
The game concept is simple. You can swap the game world between 2D
and 3D, flattening the world. You can flatten from any camera angle,
which means you can change and navigate the world in multiple
dimensions. You can reach distant platforms in 3D by turning the game to
2D. You can reach locked rooms in 2D by switching back to 3D.
I really loved the idea and it is executed perfectly. I love clever,
mind-bending games like these, I am really looking forward to have time
for Portal and also the Escher-inspired Echochrome for the PSP looks promising. (Look for a connection to Echochrome in Memorable Books 07.)
Crush works perfectly on the PSP platform, being a level platformer
to pick up now and then as a puzzle to kill time. I wish I had more
games like these.
today I registered and entered Unicorn for digital distribution via my aggregator. I fear it is a bit late, my aggregator Artspages
has been down for maintenance upgrades during the last few weeks. Today
I finally got a private invite so I could register Unicorn for digital
distribution. Pretty cool of them, the new system is impressive and
makes entering metadata and album info easy and painless.
Hopefully I managed to do it in time for full online presence by the 28th.
They can't promise me anything, but apparently DRM free versions are
finally opening up for indie labels, and I'm waiting for word on Amazon
mp3 service (which just recently passed iTunes in size).
Posted January 3rd 2008, at 18:49 with tags promo, web
January 2nd,
updated and fixed the promo area of ugress.com. Bios, photos and
promotional info. Yuck. Promoting myself is something I loathe. Roar
helps me with texts and what to mention and stuff, but this is really
something I should outsource to some unscrupulous soul.
I am extremely uncomfortable writing glorious descriptions of myself
and my work. Usually ends up being ironic, layered and sardonic, and
much as I personally love and respect anything that realizes and mocks
it's own limitations, most people just don't get that.
Promotion is just another word for the skill of how to boast most transparently about oneself.
I have started using subdomains on a regular basis, either standalone
as minisites or redirects to the relevant area inside ugress.com.
Easier to announce and remember, and I can individualize the page when
necessary. promo.ugress.com.
I make most of espressos with my 
Latest intriguing addition is the 
Lost
Weekend is a fantastic festival, much because of the location - a
beautiful, forested recreational area on an island just outside Bergen.
Featuring a
fabric with naturally sustainable organic bamboo, this clever piece of
clothing is only made in an exclusive first print of 100 shirts. We sold
quite a few at the Landmark and Veko gigs, the shirt was surprisingly
popular with the girls. 
A few notes on the Ruins release. 
Best part of travelling is that I finally find time to read.
I've signed my own record company 
I 
Tanya
Andersen is a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon. She
was sued by the RIAA for file-sharing, in their incredistupid crusade
against file-sharers.
Another interesting scientific to music and sound is this 
Quite by accident I stumbled upon a beautiful book about music CD cover design; 
Sometimes the rice pops during roasting and looks like popcorn, but tastes much, much better.
One of the bands performing, 
But the best of it all: Everything and every building is connected by second floor 
Czhewr and
Therese have been busier and busier the last few years with their Bandit
project, finally having a breakthru now with by:Larm and their first
gig at Sentrum Scene tonight. Czhewr is mostly writing the music and
Therese provides her brilliant vocals, adding live keys, guitar and
drums in a superb mix of Japanese cheerleader rock and Burtonesque
melodic popscapes. I hearts! 
The 
Third album Unicorn is out today, available world-wide digitally.
January 27th,
Second single is out!
Size matters. As a child I was obsessed with Mount Everest, tallest mountain on Earth, and kept reading the story of 
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Ian McDonald - River Of Gods
David Weinberger - Everything Is Miscellaneous
Douglas R. Hofstadher - Gödel, Escher, Bach
Orhan Pamuk - Istanbul
January 4th,
