President Blair Live Shots

Over the spring and summer I was doing more PB gigs, and trying out a lot of new material. I don't at the moment have video or audio of these to share with you. I might. Let me check. But first I do have photos to share showing some of the most recent monkeying around with tapes and noise.

These shots were taken at Summerfest Sound Explosions at the Hovel in Glenwood, and were taken by Heather Chessman of Juice Machine. I lie. I think the ones with me in the Robin Hood hat were taken by Heather, and the ones in the bear hat were taken by William Haldane.

Making Art in San Francisco

Primarily my time spent here in SF has been devoted to job-searching, which has to some degree diminished my art and music time. But not entirely. After having a really wonderful conversation with Cara Vida, a collage artist/former commercial artist, and showing her a series of collages I did in 2009, I got inspried to start picking up the art stuff again. When moving down from Eugene, I couldn't bring my art stuff, just a small pile of raw materials. But the room I'm renting came with a bunch of art stuff already in it, and I've been given permission to use some of it.

So, as a relaxing activity, I've been queuing up a lot of the music I've gathered but never quite listened to and starting getting back into the collage again. here are some photos of things I've been doing.

Frames made from card stock and painted paper. The art to go in these will been happening sooner or later.

People in San Francisco are somewhat unfriendly at first, and often seem annoyed and irritated. This is a portrait of no specific person, but a sort of composite of people I encountered.

SF may be a big destination of gays, but that doesn't mean that they are free from gay stereotypes. I don't fit into those set models, so i used collage to express my feelings abut the worth of my individuality.

I use hell money a lot in my PB stuff, many times encouraging people to buy my merch with it when they are strapped for cash but want a new piece. The hell money you can get down here is really fabulous.

President Blair "Dyslexicon" Process Photos

I've been working on a new concept for PB material, that is combining the sound with a print element, a zine to be specific. The zine is an experiment in reused paper. the pages are made by stapling together sheets of Chinese newspaper between sheets of cardstock, essentially creating an instant 'scrapbook', if you want to use such gauche terminology. The CD will be included in among the pages of the zine, and various pieces of art have been glued in onto the pages. The experiment combines painting, found photography, taken photography, altered photography, collage and noise.

The audio component uses field recordings, text-to-effect processing, and other source material that references current events in the world. I don't suppose my work had ever had much of a political bent, but it seems to be going that way.

Anyway, here are the process shots from the making of this release.

Amharic Fusion Experimentation

As a big fan of Ethiopian music, I wanted to try my hand at cutting up some Ethiopian music myself and seeing what sort of edits I could make of it. In this piece, I used some contemporary Amharic music, sourced from Youtube. I'd certainly rather have worked from aproper made in Ethiopia recording,but if you don't live in that area, your best bet is Youtube, with the assurance that the quality of the audio in the video, usually considered too low to sample from by most, is about as good as you'd get from any other proper source.

What i wanted to do is to see if other 3/4 timed rhythms would work with the roundy, triplet-based Ethiopian rhythms, so i chose a particular favorite ingredient, zapateado drums from Mexico, and used these two elements in combination with one another, with an added touch of bass drum to give it some thump. The video below showcases the results. It's a nice mixture of things, I think.

President Blair "Scornfield"

Fellow DJ and electronics enthusiast Avitar Virgonian brought me by a couple of pieces of spare equipment he had lying around, a drum machine and an echo unit. I didn't get around to using them as extensively as I would have liked, due to the pressures of an upcoming move and some general laziness before said move was learned of. Using the equipment, along with some live audio mulch improv, I created the piece embedded here. Once you listen to it, you'll understand why I gave it the name. Pictured below are the pieces of hardware used.

 

Where I've Been and What I've Been Doing (instead of posting it here)

Though there hasn't been a proper MS blog entry since June, creative activities have continued at Media Sashimi HQ. In fact the change in location of said HQ is probably one of the biggest pieces of MS news; I have relocated from Eugene, Oregon to San Francisco. Creative activities have started up here, even though it's only been a week since I arrived. however with such a back log of creative activity to catch you all up on, I won't even be able to get to the SF creative acts for a few more entries yet. First, there's lots of President Blair related work that needs to be posted about. While i've continued the DJ activities pretty regularly, the noise stuff I've been doing has been more the forefront, and much more representative of the whole aesthetic I've been going for. So, now that you have my assurance that Media Sashimi won't be one of those blogs that flares to life, shines bright and flickers into nothing. I'll be here for a while. facebook can be a lousy place to try and keep proper documentation of one's activities. Thanks to all the Media Sashimi fans and supporters who come here to see what i've been up to.

Video Art Experiment Results

At last I have some actual live moving footage of my video art experiments to show you. This piece is one of the set of pieces I've been working on using the Vietnamese Buddhist DVDs. That project has taken on some interesting forms as I've strived to effectively work with that particular set of unusual abundant material. I had hoped to keep the set pure, in that what i did with that material would stay confined to a cohesive body of work related onyl the the source material and no other external sources. But it harder to keep art in a cage than you think. So here is the first moving video i have to show you. The sound is made of cutups of various things, Finnish newscasts, Telugu oldies, etc. Enjoy!

Video Art Update 061813

I've been busy again on the video art front, now that I have a little more time to devote to artistic endeavours. The focus has been to some degree the reuse of VHS resources I've been encountering. For instance, some of the tapes I found in the Goodwill's ten-cent bin were religious in nature, long two-hour tapes of sermons, and on some pretty nice tape too. They make for a nice big canvas to work with, as some possible uses for the video art footage I'm creating will be for extended background play in various settings.

So here is a hpoto reel of some of the most recent sessions. What you're seeing is photos of the screen in action. Since the mix is laid down to VHS tape, and then digitized later, we don't get the benefit of live screenshots until the processing is done, so these will have to do!

Some of the scenes, even those they were made up of a lot of 'spiritual' source material, came out kind of evil looking in places.

New Video Art Experiments.

I recently came across a video mixer, and I've been busily working with it to create different kinds of video art experiments. in fact, I've been so busy doing them that I've not had time to report on them yet. here's a short report with some pictures of the setup and some of the results. Soon i'll have some of the results in a more digital, viewable form, but for now, here's what I've got to show you.

A Quick Hello, In the Midst of Much Activity

HI all, it's beena pretty busy past month and a half or so so I last updated this blog. This is largely because I'm crazy busy with the last part of design school. But there has been considerable activity here at Media Sashimi HQ, and soon I'll be making posts to document them. I've been getting my hands dirty in a lot of different creative forms, some visual, some audio, some digital, some meatspace. Check back here soon, and see what I've been up to!

Vinyl Experiments 03/13

Lately there have been a lot of the University of Oregon library's old 78's in the ten-cent bin at the Goodwill over by my house. There were a lot of language instruction records, some classical music, and some poetry and english lit records. I picked up a chunk of them to play with, and tried an experiment I used to play around with ten years ago or more.

The process involved placing a 10" record over a 12" record, and then a 7" record over that, all on the record spindle. What this does is force a lock groove onto the record that's playing, by virtue of it bumping up against the edge of the record just above the one that's playing.  I set up two turntables with a tower of vinyl as I described above, and played around back and forth with the loops the process created. There exists a recording of the session, but it will be part of a larger composition that's in progress.

What I did next was: I added into the mix one of the 30 second answering machine looping cassettes I have, and used it to record loops of the live mix to then add back into the mix. The way I had the mixer set up caused a feedback loop between the mixer and the tape, which was controllable by way of the EQ. The end result of all this got made into a video, which i posted on YouTube. And here it is:

Now I must backtrack, because before I did that experiment, I did a different one that involved exploiting a found lock groove on an acetate i found at the same Goodwill. The tracks on this disc didn't link up to each other, so at the end of each track there was created a lock groove. I let it run and added other similar elements on the other turntable for a live minimal dirt-groove dub. It's a little repetitive, but that's in the nature of the experiment. EQ was used to highlight and birng out the rhythm in the clicks and skips.. Here this one is:

 

The plan next, based on what I've learned is to start creating a number of videos of varying length, each using different modified junk vinyl or forced skips or tape loops, whatever. I want to make the videos as a set of 'compositional bricks' (-Goodiepal) and then assemble them into different webpage based configurations that allow the whole composition to be assembled at will by the viewer, while all the while letting YouTube do the heavy lifting or online storage. The same potential exists with Archive.org as a potential host, but I'll start with YouTube for this next spate of experiments.

Diggin Deep Pisces Birthday Special 030813

We rocked it again at the Astoria Bar on Friday for our birthdays. The 8th was midway between my birthday and Ian Lawless's and guest DJ Mr. Daddy's birthday was that weekend. So we joined forces and had a hell of a great time. James Meyer (Mr. Daddy) brought a lot of great funk and rare grooves we had heard he had, so it was especially nice to hear his selections. Here's the photo reel for the night:

Cuts & Edits "dusk rider"

I put together a video from images I've been working with lately to accompany a track I wanted to promote on YouTube. This is a track from last summer's prolific sessions, where I gave myself free reign to mix and match as much as I wanted in the pursuit of interesting trackmaking. The African and Latin edits mentioned in a previous post are part of that summer's sessions.

This track is the psych blues hip hop track that was one of my very favorites of the summer. It's gone by several different names, but in the interest of getting it up tonight, I gave it its new name, "Dusk Rider".

Diggin Deep 022213 with guest DJ Tigerstripes

Diggin Deep this most recent time was a special one, we had a guest DJ from out of town come spin with us for the night. Matthew Kenneth, aka DJ Tigerstripes, treated us all to a selection of midtempo boogie, italo, disco and breaks, all mixed up together very smoothly. Our usual crowd from CD World were there and they definitely appreciated the different tunes Tigerstripes brought to the tabel.

Now admittedly, our mixing style at Diggin Deep nights is based largely around quick cuts, since we're aiming to span genres and time periods in creative ways not originally intended. So it was very nice to have Tigerstripes' well-blended, precisely mixed tracks as a complement to our usual glorious, uproarious mess.

We all had a good time, and there ended up being no problem trying to mix all the genres we had on hand for the night. We plan to get DJ Tigerstripes to come and play with us again in the coming weeks, which will be a real treat for everyone yet again. I may even bring out more of my house and disco collection, which has languished, rarely played since the last time I had a club night.

Here's the photo reel, courtesy of JD Casten.

Order of the Mixtape Party 022213

We had another good time at the Order of the Mixtape party this month. I mean, it's not like I'm going to tell you we didn't heh? But this was our first since the record convention, so we hadn't really seeneach toher since then. To whit: Josh Burrington and Boots Mallomar were especially pleased to see me happy after having lost my wallet in a somewhat traumatizing incident at said record convention. So it was definitely good for everyone to confirm that everyone was okay.

Here's the photo reel for the night. Captions later.