The garoffice came together today. It is more or less complete. Hoorah!

It features two music spaces. The first is for my Arp Odyssey and X-Station. The X-Station will run Live, as it has for the past couple years. The laptop will fit on the upper shelf between the mixer and Kaoss pad. So awesome. This will probably be my primary composition and rehearsal space. This is where I will work on the SPP and oRSo and My Special Porpoise and SleepWalks and FW? and Kenton Camerata stuff.

The second music station is more focused on My Daddy Ate My Eyes and Copy Lake, bands wherein I don’t use the computer. That station is super old school, with equipment that goes back to my early 90s music days in Carnival De Carnitas and Meow (and Suplex and Pale Ghost and DragKing and oRSo.) It’s all motors and toys and contact mics and bent tape players etc. I really look forward to playing with all that awesome goodness again. And working it into my other rig.

While on the topic ogf music, I worked on SPP4 a bit more today. Remixing Wich-i-tai-to twice. The way Nobu and I mix the SPP records (living on opposite coasts as we do) is a little bizarre. I mix and upload. He listens and calls. We debate, discuss and argue. I make a new mix based on our conversation. And upload it. And then he calls…

About the only other newsworthy 23E/MVM news is that the primary video editing computer, my desktop, was booted up today. It is imperfect. It was a great machine for many years. But ever since I was evicted in November 2007 from the Green Door Studio, it has been unreliable. It won’t run two monitors. It drops external drives. One of the RAID sets has disappeared now (but not one with any valuable data, fortunately.) This makes me sad as I obvs can’t replace this machine and have to log and edit Disembody on it.
Tomorrow, troubleshooting the dual monitors and RAID issues!

But now it’s time for more Vile Dead research. Buffy season 3, a zombie episode entitled, the Zeppo.

The garoffice is well on its way to being bigger and better than ever, I’m delighted to say. The big news is that the Torus Trooper arcade is up and running. So, now the 23E office has that most modern of corporate requirements, a rec room. Only it’s more of a rec corner, but whatevs.

In other arcade news, Nightmare City will be in LA this weekend and they are taking their arcade back home to the sweaty city council offices.

In SPP news, this evening I made a new mix of Wichi-tai-to. It is now off in the ether for my compatriots on the fourth record to sound check.

Other music news, plans for Copy Lake and My Daddy Ate My Eyes to tour this July are moving along. Though I haven’t done any of the FW? recording I need to do for the Copy Lake demo. FW? are guesting on the cassette being released by Nightmare City records.
On the tour I’ll being playing bass and cymbal and home-made tchaudiotchkes (pronounced cha-dee-oh-ch-kees). It will be a return to my pre-Ableton days. Weird. And super-exciting. The new garoffice will feature a rehearsal space with my Arp and tchaudiotchekes and X-Station to hang out in. The porch will function as the work space for building tchaudiotchkes.

And now to wind out the evening, I’m watching some Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Vile Dead research.

Gods!
It turns out blogging and group socializing are alike in my psyche - I can’t do either unless it’s my job.
Which points to, perhaps, one of the defining traits of my character, my infinite capacity and adaptability for work stands in stark contrast to my constant struggle to function in realms outside the definition of “work.”

I have no idea what that says about me.
Other than that it is a good thing I lead a life overextended.

So, yeah, the 122 Days trip. It was excellent. But hardly something I could bring myself to write about, apparently. Well, I microblogged the pants off it, of course…

I got back to San Francisco exactly 122 Days after I left San Francisco. That was maybe three weeks ago…
I’ve spent the past three weeks working to pay my May bills (I arrived here with nary a cent to my name, as planned), and writing the essay to finish my MA degree in VCS.

I also squoze in a rehearsal with my SF band, the Modern Jazz Duet.

I threw together the sequencing of the CD for Marcella Faustini’s MashUp Show at NOMA gallery. I have the nagging feeling the music will be revisited and remixed and resequenced, because I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, and the many imperfections have really been nagging at me.

Today I’m returning to mixing the Stowe-Pembleton Project’s fourth CD, which we recorded in DC in January. I’m really happy with it.
Speaking of which, the second SPP CD, Confusion Bleue, which is AWESOME, is out this month on Black Saint/Soul Note/CAM. It will be distributed in the States by Rykodisc, I think. So, we may get some new US fans…

In April, SleepWalks, my new project with Andrea Williams, opened for The Parasitic Fantasy Band at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. It was fabulous. We were joined by Todd Shalom, whose vocal work really spread the SleepWalks sound out to new vistas. It was a great show. And then I had the pleasure of seeing The Parasitic Fantasy again at ATA in SF a few weeks ago. They are superb new friends. Totally inspirational film/sound performers.
At their SF shows they played with Metal Rouge, who are also superb artists and people. It was really great to be able to spend time with all of them.
Metal Rouge are LA based, so I’m really hoping to get a chance to see them again, once I’m finally back home.

dang, I’m just not very good at blogging regularly.

Whatevs…

Today I sat in my Uncle Peter’s apartment in Boston and managed data. I uploaded to flickr. I tagged and dated and geo-tagged pix. I meant to upload video and sound recordings, but ran out of time.

I emailed the friends I think i’ll have time to visit in NYC next week.

I ate two bags of maruchan ramen and a 32 oz bag of frozen mixed veges.

I talked to Amy. I paid my monthly tax bill.

It’s 4:30pm and in two hours I head to South Station to catch a greyhound to Holyoke, where I’ll be crashed at the Holyoke Research Institute for a day and a half. They accepted a proposal I made, so hopefully tomorrow we’ll work the details for a residency there.

Yesterday was my only full day in Boston. It’s cold here. Today it’s 13 degrees F. Yesterday it was 6 degrees F. And windy. And I had the brilliant idea to go for a ten mile walk making field recordings along the water line. My uncle lives on the water. So, I wanted to walk the coast from UMass to downtown.
This was a terrible idea.
First of all, when field recording I take forever to get anywhere. I’m constantly stopping and standing stock still to get a good sound. I stand for at least five minutes in place not moving, wearing binaural mics. This is just a bad idea in six degree weather on the Chesapeake bay.
Plus, I always think the best sound will inevitably be someplace inaccessible, so I inevitably get wet and sandy or dirty or…
So, after two hours I had some great sounds, which I will upload later, but I had hardly made it more than a few blocks along my ten mile route. And my feet were wet. And my nose and hands hurt so much I was hyperventilating.
So, I totally gave up and went back to my Uncle’s to drink tea and warm up.
I shot some video, and took a few pics, but, it was just too darn cold to have my hands outside my pockets operating gear for any substantial time, so not nearly as many pics as I would have liked.

In the evening I took the T (commuter rail) to MIT and met my friend Craig. He and Will Pappenheimer created a beautiful work of art at Fringe last September, Virta-flaneurazine SL. Craig and I chatted and enjoyed Melanie Smith’s art. He introduced me to his friends Sasha and John, as well. I look forward to checking out there work in the coming days.
here are a couple links he suggested to me:

Shift Space

The Networked Performance blog