Went and saw “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” at
the Rialto yesterday. Pretty good. Enjoyed it.

Got a new toy yesterday. A Roland GR-20 guitar synth.
It’s fun. It tracks a lot better than I expected. The
built in sounds aren’t bad, but not very tweakable.

Running the midi out into the computer for softsynths
seems to work really well. Played with some
linux based softsynths (amSynth, zynaddsubfx) and
got some interesting results. Then fired up wine
and “vsti” to try running some windows VSTi’s.
Playing guitar and having the sound generated by
an emulated SID chip from a c64 is way more fun
than it should be.

Went to see the The Dynamite Brothers Friday night. Good show.

Saturday, narrowly avoided buying a mustang. Nice car, 65,
289 2v, automatic, but the engine and trans needed work
and when I went to check it out it wouldn’t start. Bad
sign. And the owner wanted too much.

Stopped by badgers place for the gathering. Nice crowd.
Consumed too much food. Again, more geeking about.

Sunday header over to badger place again
for Phasmatodea “practice” (is it practice or rehearsal
when your just making stuff up?). Good session with
lots of interesting noises. Some melodic bits, some
ambient bits, some weird alien monster from another
dimension is communicating to me with tachyon rays bits.

I forgot to mention it, but www.gimp.org finally
got a facelift.

Me and Jens Lautenbacher originally designed the site
way back towards the end of 1997. We did about 90%
of the original content on the site.

Then he went to grad school, and I got a job. And
the site remained basically the same for, gasp,
almost 6 years. Content would be updated occasionally,
but the design never changed. The old site is
still up at classic.gimp.org
if your curious.

I’m more than happy to see the old site finally
gone.

Looks like Phasmatodea (aka, me and badger) have
landed our first show. It’s being organized by some of
the folks on the 919noise list.

Come one, come all. Weird noises to had for the enjoyment
of everyone.

Should be interesting, since its been more than 10 years
since I’ve played in front of people*.

Place: Bickett Gallery
Date: April 29th

[*] That would have been while still in school, playing
with “Butt Nekkid & The Flaming Jesi”/”Space Monkey”, featuring
some Joe Levinski and Josh Bradley. Geez, that was a long
time ago.

Saturday, decided to pick up some c++ books, since I’ve been
poking at a c++ soft synth thingy. So I did.

Made a little progress hacking on it, added a new waveform
to the oscillator object, thats about it. My DSP skills are
pretty weak, so…

Sunday headed over to badgers. Played for a little over
two hours. Two (or was it three?) long pieces. First
started off both on stick, kind of melodic, morphed
into a huge wall of modulating delay loops I love
so much, then eventually morphed into a warbly bird
chirp meltdown.

After playing, headed over to Go to see Don
Cabellero. Continent, a Raleigh band, opened
up and did an excellent job. Kind of sludgy
math metal/rock.

Don Cabellero was very cool. The lineup was
a bit odd, as the only original member (or for
that matter, the only member that appeared on
any of the albums was the drummer, Damon Che).

However, it is more or less a band built around
his drumming. There set was a bit short (about an hour)
because he was sick. For a guy that looked like he
was about to fall over dead between everysong, he
played the crap out of the drums. Don Cab songs
are _very_ drum heavy (not to mention plenty of
stops/starts, odd times, polyrhythms and general
weirdness) so this was an impressive feat.

Excellent show.