improvisations

this one i did yesterday... mixing a drone i made in the TX modular synth with my rhodes...



last week it was the frohmage plugin from ohmforce that pleased me so much... with the rhodes...



and then a month ago, a week after the 1st i did (this time around)... rhodes & voice...



and while i'm in a youtube place... this rhythm tree i made as a reference for my students:



x

october improvisation

so today... after a weekend of setting up my new G5 computer (a mac)...

& indeed spending time with someone new... who shall remain nameless for now... but who is playing her trombone right now (used to be mine - then it was monty's - now it's hers)...

i got the m-audio sound card thing talking to logic in the G5... put the karma mics up under the knight piano...

and hey presto - a 9 minute improvisation -

enjoy x

youtube with uncle colin

once more i'm the last one up, about 3 glasses of sherry in me this time, chatting to uncle colin with his wealth of music memories...

after awhile i picked up the laptop and we started watching youtube video's of the artists he was talking about, and you know how long that can take, one minute you're watching del shannon, then it's the everly brothers, sammy davis juniour, neil diamond, hank williams, gillian welch (that was from me)...

uncle colin being of a generation who don't understand computers and the internet... but with his love of music from a certain period i think the internet would suit him down to the ground...

if he could get used to it...

of course it's quite possible he won't ever get into the internet...

but then maybe by next christmas he'll be commenting on the facebook fan page of my cat balthazara...

maybe...

x

reading on public transport

i'm reading the book thief...

i'm really enjoying it...

so, 3 tiny moments on public transport with the book thief:

last thursday, coming back from work i missed my stop on the picadilly line, had to go one back, too deep in the book,

then this thursday i was concious of that happening last week, i looked up at one point and saw we were at my stop so i jumped off, went up the escalator, through the barrier, only to find that i wasn't at my stop, but the stop before...

again, so deep in the book i couldn't tell that manor house is not turnpike lane...

and i didn't realise until i'd gone through the barrier, paid my money, so i wondered a bit through finsbury park, the nice end, took a long bit of video of a swan and signets on the new river.. (how long would it take me to connect my phone to the computer, move the video over, upload it to youtube?)... then got a 29 back home...



and the night before i'd been rehearsing with TC, preparing for our clapham grand gig on august 1st... we lost track of time and finished with not much time to spare before the tubes stopped... K (drummer) offered to give me a lift to the station, and it was one of those strange situations where, if i'd have walked to the station (keyboard on my back) i would have got the tube home, but because he drove me...

he didn't take me to kennington (the nearest station) he just started driving and we discussed that he was going past earls court, on the picadilly line, so we decided he'd drop me there...

then we got stuck in a traffic jam for 30 minutes...

so in the end he dropped me @ trafalgar square and i got the 29 home...

on the 29 i got out the book, and also my headphones, i've taken to listening to ornette coleman to block out conversation while reading, somehow his style of playing the saxophone - so similar in places to laughing and talking - is just right as a backdrop to fiction...

"this is a 29... to enfield" said an electronic woman at every stop and there was a small group of young men who, for most of the journey, would answer the lady with an "ennn - field" falling in pitch, en masse, again, mixed in with ornette, it seemed just right,

just before turnpike lane a man had got on who was singing at the people on the bus, he started with frank sinatra... i stood up and started strapping on the keyboard and i asked him for another frank tune, whereupon he asked me for a frank tune and i gave him a verse of "you've brought a new kind of love too me", a tune he didn't know... but which i was glad to be reminded of, as i'm going to sing it @ the 90th birthday party i'm playing @ tomorrow,

and as i've got to get up and practise before the singer picks me up @ 1 i'd better be off to bed...

x

broadcast2000

i emailed the competition and they said i had until midnight to upload the finished video to youtube and email them the link...

it's rendering now, i think it might take 30 minutes... i would have liked to have had the chance to change it once i've seen it, but that's not very likely...

once it's uploaded i'll obviously put it here so you can see it... i can't decide if it's great or not...

and also, i haven't yet put titles on it, so i'll have to title it on top of the rendered version...

a race against time...

-------------------------------

and right now it's 5 minutes to 12 and it's uploading to youtube... i can't believe how nervous i am...

what if gets past midnight and it hasn't finished uploading yet?

aaaaaaaaaaaargh

@ 11.59pm i sent the competition guy an email with my youtube page saying it'll be there any minute now,

@ 12.00am exactly youtube finally finished uploading the video,

@ 12.01am i sent the competition guy an email with the video address, even though it hadn't yet finished processing...

but it has now (12:30am) so here it is, my attempt:

dangerous script proust

last week i was carrying my cards around in the proust book, this on the days when i was wearing trousers with no pockets...

then i lost my oyster card on the day of the gig @ ULU, bought another that came with a plastic wallet, you know the type,

so now my cards are all in the plastic wallet, and what do i do yesterday?

of course, all those eggs in one basket, how could i not lose the wallet...

so anyway, i didn't have a crowd of money on me, no oyster card, no debit card... i had to get home, so i decided to walk from london bridge to where i could get the 29 bus... also i was kind of wistful and it was late in the day, the sun still up...

so i got onto the thames beach just past blackfryers rail bridge (i think) and i walked all the way to waterloo bridge down there, the sky beautiful... windy but lovely...

i reach the southbank and pop in to use their loo and i find a sound sculpture interactive thing called volume, that wasn't as good as it looked like it would be, but probably worth a second look one day...



in time got to the 29 bus and set about finishing this current proust book, at one point a couple got on and sat beside me, insisting on talking, so i had to recourse to the piece of rhodes music i'd recorded to shield me from my neighbour's sound, now shielding me from these inconsiderate fellow travellers...

anyway i reached the end which was lovely, volume 2, it'll be a little while before volume 3 comes round to play... we watched dangerous liaisons last night which - as well as being absolutely delicious - was also ringing several proustian bells for me, at one point keanu reeves passes a note to uma thurman saying "i love you"... just as albertine passes a note to our narrator (the young proust) saying "i like you"...

i was a little confused because i'd seen a korean version of dangerous liaisons quite recently and couldn't work out whether i'd seen the original or not... it is just simply wonderful...

ok and scripts...

this is a little bit techy...

i do certain things every week, or every time i make a cutup film, over and over again, and i'm finding out about ways to automate certain of these tasks... (like changing the velocity envelope in a certain way to deal with my old camera's waywardness)... it turns out that vegas (my video editing software) allows the use of scripts, taking a repetitive action and assigning it to a single button, greatly reducing time spent on these tasks...

exactly what i need, for quite a few different things i do...

but my needs as a video editor are (i think) different from other video editors needs and so i may have to create a script or several scripts for my exact needs...

but creating scripts is really a programming thing, they're programmed in C++ or Jscript...

so this is it, do i plunge into that world of writing my own scripts? am i not so special after all and the scripts i want are out there on the web somewhere? do i carry on in my labour intensive way without scripts?

i've emailed D - who i'm going to see on friday as we're gigging up in leamington spa,

(indiana jones music as i look upon this scripting mess in despair and all of a sudden:

"Do Not Fear non-programming brother, I, D, Programming Brother Will Help You!")

x

cycle maps predestination

ok, so it's been a nutty day of cycling long distances and i must sleep but i wanted to share this great place with you, i'm interested in the greater london journey planner and i haven't looked further than that but i suspect there is more to them than just this...

i was visiting felinity & G in there new pad tonight after college and i used this website which outputted a list of roads, how long to go down each one, what the next turning is... and it was surprisingly easy to cycle the 9.45 miles from shoreditch to earlsfield using it...

one needs a printer to use it really and it would have been nice to have a map bigger than the one given but i have to tell you i think it's really great,

oh and this video, which i took in july 2006 one hot and random sunny day cycling in south london, turns out to be right by where felinity and G have just moved into...



kookie huh?

x

Dawn Project videoblog week 53

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marble run with felinity

here it is, we had such fun x

Dawn Project videoblog week 42

we came back to london last night to balthazara's delight, she who was licking my fingers earlier on today after i'd had about an hours sleep after the dawn project,

another video brewing, the results of me & felinity's efforts to build a marble run over christmas...

x

packing up longcat's room

here it is, the photo project made flesh...

when we were packing up the old room (documented here) we went through G's stuff that had been occupying the two top shelves in my room all the 4 years i lived there...

in amongst a few different things was a tin can with (i counted them today) 31 pounds worth of old 50p pieces...

so one of my out of the house tasks today has been to find out just how to convert old money into new... no luck so far, the bank of england are the way it seems, a trip into town therefore... one of those subjects you'd think it would be easy to research on the net but i'm getting nowhere...

last night me & dinah met with felinity and co for a night of karaoke madness... pretty wierd setup but with a certain amount of alcohol it was damn good fun, bohemian rhapsody a surprise hit...

x

yr2wk22 rhodes & guitar with P + DawnProjectVideoblog

i so cannot wait to get out of this house...

currently there's a custody battle for my balthazara going on, certain people in this house - one of whom does love balthazara very much - but the other 2 are the 2 who form the negative reason we're leaving - they don't think i should take balthazara with me, essentially, of the 7 people that live here, 4 of us agree that she should come come with me & dinah but there's a meeting tomorrow night with the others... around 9 o'clock, do send me love for balthazara at that time (GMT) if you can x

in other news though it looks like googlevideo have resolved their issues, they've been rubbish for a couple of weeks and T's improvisation with me last week has never worked on googlevideo which is why i posted it from youtube instead,

basically D's improvisation with me a couple of weeks ago started off alright but stopped working after a few days, it's almost 25 minutes long so way too long for youtube and i didn't know what to do but it started working again about a week later, by which time i'd uploaded T's improvisation with me, which as i say never worked, but at under 9 minutes youtube could deal with it,

so it was with some trepidation that i uploaded P's improvisation with me on friday, coming in @ over 15 minutes so beyond youtube & even facebook, i was more than a little relieved just now when it finally worked... and there it sits at the top of this post...

he came round on friday and he's a lovely player, we had a couple of go's at the improvisation, the 1st one never quite worked, a very real risk when playing with someone for the 1st time, but this 2nd one worked out really well i think...

i've also posted another dawnproject videoblog, this one encompassing the last 3 weeks, ever since the clocks changed..:

yr2wk21 piano & voice with T

T being a student of mine with a wonderful voice... this on youtube because googlevideo is messing me around at the moment...

x

dawn project on dinah's birthday

love you boobelah x

ovingdean

that's me & grace wandering into the sea from this saturday x

sun on unmade bed

short on sleep and if the sky is clear tonight i'll be up until about 3 looking at the meteor thingy...

i'm into this summers weeks work, going well, with lovely J who used to be my apprentice...

cycled into town early to accompany dinah but also to check out the BFI's archive thing and it was shut (as it is every monday),

then after work i went to the same place and lost two games of chess to the bookseller...

short on sleep... off now, enjoy the film,

x

2 haircuts

john coltrane playing "countdown" from "giant steps", dinah cutting my hair (twice), me having my hair cut (twice) and messing with the video's x

mesa of lost women

i bought this DVD with 3 films on it because of the 1st of the 3, carnival of souls, which is excellent,

every now and again when me & dinah are stooging around for a film to watch i suggest watching mesa of lost women which is the 3rd of the 3, and over the weekend she succumbed and we watched it...

as she has said it would have been much better if we'd been drunk or stoned or hungover...

anyway this dance from the film is just amazing, amazing for it's badness as well as something else than i can't put my finger on...

so i've put it on youtube, not sure if i'm allowed, but i have x

dawn project videoblog week 6 a little late

i just noticed i hadn't made this and it's almost time for week 7, so here it is, week 6, last thursday, very bleary eyed... x

dawn project videoblog week 5 + blossom + wet place