Situation changed, No Planet Love for me - pisser :(
However I have a sneaking suspicion something else rather fun might be coming up shortly =). In other news DVDs are selling ok, the Kid Logic DVD is now starting to materialise, AcidTV is getting strangely busy of late too with a steady stream of viewers at pretty much all hours of the day \o/ :-)
We're in! :) The first copies of Hyper3 have gone out and the feedback has been excellent so far - chuffed! Advetising on Gurn.net should be starting this week and then hopefully I can get some sleep ;-). If you'd like to win a copy then there will be competitions with giveaway copies on both Gurn.net and Radio Free over the space of the next week or two.
I've also been invited to play help TBC out with Visuals at the Planet Love Festival at Shane's Castle, N. Ireland - My first international event! (er well technically still within the UK but I'll need to fly to get there ;-)).
After the fantastic feedback from the Machinochrist gig Anticulture Records are putting on more events in the coming months - hopefully first at a bigger venue in Npton but then also in london. Times and places TBC but I'l post details here as soon as I have them :).
Believe it or not we've actually got more original mixes lined up for the next DVDs - the next one to do is the "Kid Logic" chillout one followed by a Drum'n'Bass DVD set to the sounds of Root Cause. Fortunately much of the work for the Root Cause DVD has been done already so production time should be reasonably short - this was meant to be the 2nd DVD but problems getting the mix right meant that had to be put on hold for the time being. Kid Logic and Root Cause are signed to the RadioFree label.
Arg - things have been a bit of a mission of late - *so* much going on - all good though :-) The DVD is now edited, and 99% checked, I think we're only a DVD menu, a cover and some printing away from having a finished product. I'm not going to say more than that for now though ;-)
I've been very fortunate to have been playing with the latest pilgrim R2 betas over the last couple of weeks and _oh_my_god_ is it shit hot. I don't really know what other people expect from a visuals package but basically my ideal would be something halfway between max & maya which works all in real time... well basically that's pretty much what the latest betas of pilgrim R2 are looking like =).
In use I normally hammer pilgrim R1 quite hard so I seem to get more crashes than most but even that side of things seems pretty darn tight. They boys have totally taken on board all the (sensible) suggestions from the forums and then pulled some major sly manouvers out of the bag wich impressive results.
There's some quite drastic changes in how things are done but the decisions to make those breaks have been well founded and the new methods should provide much greater flexibility in the long run. The linking system is I think one fo the last major changes to take place and looks like it'll mean no interoperability between R1 and R2 in terms of reusing layers, but the way the new filter and mesh-effect structures work just redefined what's possible in a massive way.
I've not had time to really make anything capture-worthy in it yet with trying to finish the DVD etc but expect some clips reasonably soon...I'm having to deliberately keep clear of it or I'll *never* finish the DVD if I get sucked into R2.03x
More good news - I've also just recently been chatting to Adrian from hollowsphere and I should soon be stocking/selling his dvds too \o/. He's got two volumes of his Video textures on sale and they're along the same sort of lines as TUC but more structured for VJs to mix with.
Lastly - Machinochrist - vampire
This is a short sample of the video rehearsal before the Machinochrist gig at the Racehorse - this sample doesn't really do the tune justice but it'll have to do for now. Tom's got the full mp3's available on his site and has just signed to Anticulture Records - see the Machinochrist link on the menu =) - Warning - it's a bit fierce!
And now for somethign completely different.....
Friday was a bit of a mad one - although it's somewhat outside my normal scope of activity both in terms of music and also that it was all done live I provided visual support for a "Break-core" (really fast, intense breakbeat verging on gabba/industrial) outfit called Machinochrist. The gig was at the well know metal pub The Racehorse in Npton and was basically a bit of an experiment as to whether visuals and this sort of tunes can even work together live... turns out they can! Tunes-wise think Amon Tobin meets Trent Reznor and you won't be far off :-) Nice!
Tom (Machinochrist) hadn't performed live before and apart from anyone who's downloaded the mp3s from his site the tunes hadn't been aired before either but got a stonking response despite the primarily death-metal crowd (lol, I think so anyhow - lots of shouting anyways ;-)). We'd expected lots of confused looking metallers and whilst they were a bit stunned to begin with everyone got into it really quick. The guys on the door reported that there were lots of surprisingly good comments and people seemed to really be into the whole idea...so I guess it might happen again :-)
He's got some MP3s of his tunes to download on his website so give them a look. Having listened to them for hours on end whilst preparing the video footage I can honestly say the quality of the tunes is phenominal. That genre isn't really my main area of interest but Tom's drum-work is truly mindbending and I'm thoroughly looking forward to the next gig :-)
Big thanks to Steev from Anticulture Records who organised, funded and generally put the whole night together.
We got a bunch of video footage from the night but the sound's all fuzzed out but I'm in the process of editing somethgin together to put on acidtv.
I've also just finished the last programming job on my books so am now more or less code-free which will hopefully give me the time to concentrate on finishing the next DVDs (2 & 3). Skbz from RadioFree has also sorted the Root Cause Drum-n-bass mix so we should be good to get back up to speed on that one once 2 & 3 are sorted :-)
DVD #2 is mostly recorded and about 60% edited - the synchronsation between the music and the visuals is a *lot* tighter on this one. I think for the most part this is down to the new hardware I've been picking up over the last few months. It's a bit of a mission editing a whole hour to be beat perfect but the results are looking good so far :-) (demo clip soonish).
We have mix #2!!!!! It's *banging* too - Dom has really excelled himself here with fat, pumping tunes, plenty of acid filth with a hint of TDV all mixed beat perfect in one take. Nice one Dom :-) He's just in the process of launching his website - www.domalmond.com
Lots of updates - some good, some not so good....
I'm literally just packing up DVD#1 disc number 97! Considering the aim was to sell 10 I think it's been an outstanding success :-D The nice thing is it's encouraged everyone involved in the process that this does really work so we're all getting on with making more videos & tunes =) In fact there's a number of new DVDs in the offing and now my hardware has been upgraded sufficiently I can actually produce more than one DVD at once rather than having *all* my hard disk space occupied with 15gb avi files \o/
DVD #2 has been delayed for the moment - we seem to be having problems getting a mix of the Root Cause tunes together which everyone is happy with. Root Cause is signed to the Radio Free label and alas the people involved are all perfectionists so we can't go till everybody's happy with the final result. On the upside Dom (who did the tunes for the last DVD) has finished his next set of tunes so we might well be going with another mix from him (he was scheduled for DVD #3) while we sort the Root Cause issues (no pun intended!). Apparently the vibe is a bit harder and faster this time which certainly gets my thumbs up :-)
Somewhere along the way the concept of a chillout/ambient DVD has reared its head. We've found some excellent chillout tunes by a chap calling himself "Kid Logic" and I started tinkering in pilgrim and it actually seemed to "gel" much better than expected. You can see this test version on ACIDTV - it's been enjoying consistently good listener counts in the week or so it's been running. The layers are very slow moving which perhaps even suits those smokey [ahem] living-room environments even better than the more manic visuals =) The tunes don't exactly lend themselves to mixing so the audio production side of things should be relatively simple - expect more updates on this soon and check out the preview on ACIDTV in the mean time :-)
Seb Fontaine @ Sessions on 4th March effectively saw the launch of the new DVD subscription service - basically this is a slightly more streamlined version of my custom DVD service but will work out much easier to produce and thus much cheaper - An hour-long DVD of footage branded to your venue/event will set you back only £50 inc p+p - email if you want more info on this :-) Sessions are currently piloting the project and as far as I could tell everyone was very pleased with the outcome :-) The idea is that it should cost the same or less than employing a VJ for the night and you as a customer get to build up a library of visuals footage on DVD (try getting a DVD of the night's video off your VJ! lol!)
*Hopefully* I'll have time to sort the new site this coming week which will mean we can accept credit card orders online for DVD orders as well as offering a wider range of products. In the mean time ebay is still the number one sales spot accounting for over 95% of sales(!) - just search on "ACIDGFX" :-)
and there was much rejoicing..."
Verses 2-4, book of Timtim
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Click the logo to open the player window.
What's acidTV?
Well... over a few drinks at the NYE gig I was chatting to Skoobz from RadioFree and inevitably ideas started flowing... "so what if we hooked a pilgrim machine up with a load of tunes and a badass server... that would be like wibbly TV."
Well as it turned out we realised that we actually already had everything we needed to make it happen. So we did and here it is....
Please bear in mind it *is* early days - there's nothign even slightly resembling a schedule (nor was there intended to be!) but we are hopefully going to be moving over to some pre-recorded content rather than generating it all on the fly as now (the visuals react to the music in real time). Pre-recorded content should mean we can also utilise the server's full bandwidth capabilities... at the moment the output is throttled by my broadband upstream bandwidth.
It's an NSV/shoutcast internet TV stream - so you'll need the full (free) version of winamp (i.e. not the "lite" version) or the browser plugin which should install itself in IE.
Love it or hate it - please let us know
So.. the audio for the next DVD seems to be sorted, we have 60-mins (or so) of rinsing drum n bass from "Root Cause" and I've literally just had the provisional OK from DJ Shmoo that he'll mix it :-)
