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.

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!