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.

Mail Art Piece #2, prep stages

I've been coming across various sized stacks of paper and printouts from a time period about 8 years ago when I was doing a lot of graphic exploration, mostly using non-Adobe methods. I've been working these earlier pieces into new compositions, including a new mail art piece. Mail Art Piece #1 is still in progress. I'll make a separate blog entry about it.

Mail Art Piece #2 is based around some old mailers I found that I wanted to make use of. Mailers are great, you can put anything in there and it becomes a package, plus the mailer itself becomes part of the art. Simple principle, it all depends on how you want to expand upon it. So here are some photos documenting the progress so far.

The mailers themselves. There were four of them, so that was the determining factor for the edition. Mail Art Piece #1 was a run of about 20

Three pieces of photocopied collage, which were put on the scanner in eight random combinations

The eight page booklet which was made from the eight random scans

A glitched photo was desaturated and printed onto gold heavy weight card stock, then cut into four pieces.

Adhesive paper printed with patterns of fish and people.

The back sides of the mailers, with the label paper affixed.

 The whole piece will include the booklet, the gold card, a 30 minute cassette tape and a DVD-r. The content of the tape and DVD still have yet to be determined, but they will include elements and compositions that will vary in complexity and interactivity. The DVD will be both an object for viewing video content as well as a vehicle for other digital/data content.

One of the things I want to explore through the packing/packaging of this piece is using the surfaces of the physical components as ways to include content not directly associated with the primary content. A lot of different things will make reference to one another, and some content will be derived from other content within the package.

More details on this project as it continues!

Diggin Deep 020813

Once again we had a great night at Diggin Deep. Our guest Dj was Donovan Worland, who brought a nice stack of records and treated us to a variety of stuff. Donovan is one of the DJs in the Up Beat, the eugene Northern Soul guys. I'm a big fan of them and their approach, so it was definitely nice to have one of thier guys play with us. Here's the photo reel from the night. Photos by JD Casten.

New Video Projects

I've been inspired lately by a number of different avant garde film and video artists whose work I've seen lately, inlcuding the works of Fluxus filmmakers, the work of whom has been archived at http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html

I've also been successfully glitching photo images, now that I found out the quick and dirty way to glitched images. There's a youtube video explaining how to do it that I'll post a link to later. Having done so, I sequernced the images up into a simple video using Windows Movie Maker, then went about layering that video onto it self in different ways, attempting to make creative use of WMM's fairly cheesy palette of effects and transitions. Here's what i came up with so far, just a tester with no sound. The idea is that this will become part of some new projection art for future DJ or noise performances.

Also I've finished a long-form President Blair video called "Pink Noise/Geo Derm" which will available on dvd-r in the near future. here is the promo video for it.

Diggin Deep 012513

We had our second new night of Diggin Deep of Friday night. It went well, there were a few more people than last time, which was great to see. Honored guests this time were Gary Wilder, a local filmmaker and Ariana Blanc, one of the Ghost House DJs and the one who sold me the turntables they used to use which we now use for Diggin Deep.

Musically we covered a lot of ground, which is the plan generally anyway. I was excited to play the Whitefield Brothers LP I'd picked up earlier on in the week. Ian and Avitar's selections were right on spot as well. One of the things I like most about DJing with Ian is that he usually takes it off the rails right from the get go. A lot of funk/soul DJs would much rather that 'punk DJ's' keep their thing very far away. Ian's not solely punk, but he brings that to the table along with garage, soul and ska. So we've been finding that it all works pretty well together. Next time I'm going to try and get a recording, one way or the other, so that you guys in places far off can get an idea of what we do. Now for the photos!