Thanks to Chuang Tyng-Ruey for the photos (used under CC Attribution license).
Nice! The Big Question performance went pretty much as planned. I was very impressed by the sounds Lee Chun (Pure Data) coded up in real-time and I hope we can do something together in the future. I did a twenty-minute solo set before being joined first by Chang Jui-chuan and then Kou Chou Ching. I love how adding more performers to the mix bumps up the energy levels. People were on their feet and dancing for Freedom Zen, so a nice first live performance there for Jui-chuan and me. And speaking of bumping up the energy levels, Kou Chou Ching really let rip! My big thanks to Jui-chuan, Fan-chiang, Fish Lin, and DJ J-little. We had a small meeting before the show and solidified some plans for a joint album featuring Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, DJ Point and myself to be released around June 2009 – watch this space.
The part I was most nervous about was doing the Ableton Live mix – live in front of people. Before the show I’d gone around recording random audience members, asking them to give me small sound bites to use in the mix. By the time I got to do the live mix, the audience had shrunk considerably and remaining audience members had had ample helpings of the Free Beer (ie. brewed according to a CC licensed recipe) – I was very relieved to have the pressure relieved in this way. I thought the live mix sounded pretty cool, thank you very much. Keeping in mind how I’ve been at it for less than two weeks. Unfortunately the recording I made ddn’t amount to much, so I took some time yestreday to recreate the mix using the same sample-pool. What you hear 95% the livemix with about 5% sweetening added because I couldn’t resist. I think it’s pretty cool to zone out to, so I hope you enjoy it too.
You can listen to the mix and download it on my SoundCloud page.
I’ll be performing live in Taipei again this coming Saturday at the party to The Big Question conference with Kou Chou Ching and Chang Jui-chuan. Jui-chuan and I have been looking forward to performing Freedom Zen together for a long time, so this should be great. I’m also looking forward to hearing Pure Data perform – should be cool to swap some ideas, and maybe we can even fit in a bit of a jam.
I’ve been asked to do some kind of audience participation, and to that end I’ve been having a look at Ableton Live again. I got a good deal on a Lite Version of Live (M-Audio Enhanced Edition) a while back, but didn’t explore a fraction of Live’s possibilities then. Having spent quite a bit of time with it this week, a whole world of live DJ’ing has suddenly opened itself up to me. I’m very much a novice still, but I think I’m on the right track. The plan is to sample the audience and throw some of these samples into the mix – fun, if a little scary ;^)
I’ve been working pretty solidly for the past two weeks on getting these six tracks ready for public consumption, so I do feel quite a sense of achievement with this release of the Stone Bell EP. Most of the work went into making the website at http://stonebell.moshang.net – since this is a digital only release, this is the place to pull these songs together as a unit visually. I took some color cues from Mark Forman’s photo that I picked for the album cover.
Releasing an EP is a bit of an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes with that. Someone has already gotten back to me with the comment that he “doesn’t do EP’s”. For all I know, that’s the general consensus out there, but I guess I’ll find out…
At the moment, I’m starting to get the feeling of a slate being wiped clean – you know, getting ready to start something fresh.
It’s not every day you get to set a world record, but that’s exactly how I spent my afternoon yesterday. If ever I needed more proof that I somehow ended up in the right city in the world after all, Taichung yesterday hosted an attempt at a Guinness world record for the largest saxophone ensemble – keep in mind too that the town of Houli not far from here is almost entirely dedicated to the manufacturing of saxophones. Anyways, we did it – the new record stands at 918 saxophonists all blowing at the same time and relatively in tune to boot ;^) I have a T-shirt and certificate to show for my participation, along with this vid.
After blogging about my work on it here many times, Tafubar’s Changeability has finally become available from Lemongrassmusic. You can read all about it and find purchase links here. I wish Tafubar much success with his debut release.
To coincide with the release of the album, this very fun video for the track The Man Who Had Bad Dreams has just become available, too. Gotta love that baby/pig/monster!
I’ve just finished the video I’ve been working on for my track Freedom Zen with Chang Jui-chuan. The track is off the CABACA album (more info and download links here) which has just also become available on CD Baby for those who want to support this and possible future collaborations by buying a copy of the CD.
I wanted Jui-chuan’s lyrics to play the starring role in the video, so I “textified” CC licensed still images I found on flickr, with the help of visual keywords that Jui-chuan provided me with. I animated the images in AfterEffects, and mixed them with some blue-screen footage I shot with a Xacti CG65 camcorder. I drew some images with blue permament marker and Emily kindly wrote the traditional and simplified characters for me. To save time, I rendered some sections and backgrounds online with animoto.
There’s a link to watch the video in high quality on the song’s YouTube page. The video is also available on Vimeo and there’s a link to download the original 150MB .wmv-file.
Unfortunately I have no pics from when we recorded Chris Bailey’s guitar for Freedom Zen, but here are Chuang Tyng-Ruey’s photos from the recording session in Taipei where we recorded Jui-chuan’s vocals and Bobo on the drums.
I learned about animoto.com yesterday – someone had used one of my CC licensed tracks in their video and it looked intriguing. So, I thought I’d try my hand myself.
Here’s an unreleased track, Distant Towns, after the Animoto treatment. The images are from my trip to Sapporo to attend the iCommons Summit – most of them from Moerenuma Park.
My good friend Viba in Taipei just did this cool acoustic mix of my track Easy featuring Sonja V. Download it for free from the link below. And do remember to check out Viba’s music, too!
I’m mixing the last two tracks for Tafubar, bringing the total tally of mixes for Tafu up to 28. It’s been quite an epic job, but with the end in sight I have to admit that I’ve really enjoyed the experience and have learnt a lot in the process. Tafu’s album (now entitled Changeability) will be released on the Lemongrassmusic imprint soon, but the collaboration has also yielded features on five new compilation albums:
The CABACA album is not only now available in shops here in Taiwan, but has also just been uploaded to Jamendo and is available for free download. It’s not quite the entire album (the full album has more than 50 tracks, including ringtones), but these first 11 tracks form the core of this collaboration album.
The website is still under construction, but you’ll soon be able to get all the information about the CABACA album and artists featured on the album from cabaca.org.
We’re also in the process of uploading a cappellas and a bunch of stems from the album to CCMixter.org. Grab those here (more to come):
