Been tired all week, not sleeping too well.

Probably will head to Winston-Salem this
weekend to catch the Japan Air/Tommy Gun show
at the garage. Good excuse to get away from a computer
for a day or so.

The evolution of pants

and other assorted band photos

Def Leppard
to play Fayetville Wal-mart opening. No idea if it’s for real or not.

While perusing the web page for Pure Data stumbled
across the site for dorkbot-nyc. Basically
a user group for people who do weird arty things with computers/electronics. Too
bad theres not a dorkbot-rtp. Not that I would have anything to contribute, but the
meetings look interesting.

Some of the folks presenting include Leon Gruenbaum
and his Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeee.
The interesting part is that the controllers selects pitch offsets from the last/current note instead
of absolute pitches. Ie, hitting +7 will result in playing a note a fifth higher than the current note,
and pressing it again will go another fifth higher. Simple, but really freaking clever, as I
cant think of any other instrument which can do that. The mp3 samples are pretty cool.
I didnt even realize I already own a cd with him playing that on it (Vernon Reid’s Mistaken
Identity cd…)

Another interesting project linked from dorkbots is Pocket POOL
or Performance-Oriented Oscillation Looper. Which is basically a Compaq iPaq handheld running
linux and custom software.

Did very little over the weekend despite needs to do lots (like say, porting up2date to the new
rpm api…)

Instead spent saturday hitting used cd/book stores. Picked up two Umberto Eco
books (“How to Travel with a Salmon” and “Travels in Hyperreality”), the
book version of “United Sates” by Laurie Anderson.

Handful of cd’s as well… progday95, shift – get in (crappy major label
release by a previously good indy band), killing joke – pandemonium,
two greg howard cd’s (shapes and sol), a space rock compilation,
a Eat Static cd, and a capsize7 cd (know a guy that used to be
capsize7, figued that was as good a reason as any to pick up a cd)

Read though “How to travel with a salmon’ and got started on
“hyperreality”. Headed out to the baamph!, but between
not seeing anyone I knew very well, and feeling a bit sick,
left while the first band was still playing.

sad, yet oddly fascinating story of the day.

I really wish the version of up2date in the beta had worked. A new version
of a lib it depends on sneaked in and busted it, now I get about 10 bug reports
a day that are completely useless to me. Ah well.

Missed this earlier. Jesse Ventura
proclaims Indivisible Day

Rode up to the casiotone/xiu xiu/kill me tomorow/japan air show with badger.
Casiotone was interesting for what it was (ie, a guy playing weird songs played
on an assortment of casio keyboards). Xiu Xiu was trying to do something different
and interesting, but couldn’t quite pull it off live in an interesting fashion. Too many
long pauses between songs for seemingly needless instrument switching. Kill
Me Tomorow was pretty interesting. bass/guitar/percussion trio. Percussion
was kind of a standup kit augmented with a few korg electribes. The
songs tended to be be fast tempo, distorted mushy guitar, vaguely tribal
drumbeats, and biting distorted bass lines played with lots of energy. All
in all, pretty good. Only odd thing was they only played maybe 25 minutes.

Japan Air played a slightly stripped down set (no keyboards or samplers).
So they tended to the simpler less proggy songs ( where simple and
less proggy means only 30 or 40 changes per songs… ;->)

Much conversing about weird music was done.

need sleep…

doesn’t look like there are any interesting shows this weekend.

the “down from the mountain” tour apparently plays the ESA this
weekend. Emmylou Harris, and Alison Kraus, plus others… That
could be interesting. Seeing bluegrass at the ESA might be a bit
weird though.

bleah. Think I got a couple hours of sleep between about 10:30am and
1pm. Don’t know why, just couldn’t sleep at all.
From looking though the friends list, that seems to be the trend today.