Postponed show - special 2 hour mix by AFK. To air at noon PST on Proton Radio.

Posted by davin at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A week and a half ago myself, Caroline, Graham, Dee and Steve went for a photogroffee/hike in East Sooke Park. We parked at Pike Road's parking lot and then went straight for the view point on the ocean. It was spectacular. The trails ended up being somewhat treacherous as we headed east along the coast so we cut in towards the old copper mines before climbing partially over a mountain on the way back to the parking lot.

Cool stuff:

• You can see Caroline's photos from the same walk on her website - penguin graphic - and also be sure to check out the fancy photo she did of me at the bottom of the home page!
• Bergamot Studios development continues.
• VEMF continues to roll ahead with planning and marketing for August 2nd and 3rd. Demo applications for artists are pouring in and the application will continue to be open until June 8th.
• My good friend Justin (you may know him from his Shiloh project) has started up a music making business called moreh and zuhr - composition and production with a colleague named Zuhr and they're already off to the races. They're represented by Four Bars Entertainment, who are responsible for the music in games such as World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero III, Gears of War, Lord of the Rings, Shrek the Third, The Da Vinci Code, etc. This is a huge advance and I'm very excited for them.

Look below for sixteen more photos from the photogroffee session.

Posted by davin at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Lineup to come..

Posted by davin at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a number of things going on right now. I guess I better make a list:

• The photo above is of one of our African Zebra Cichlids. Yes, those are eyes inside its mouth. There are fish swimming around in there - it's a mouth brooder.
• The Victoria Electronic Music Festival is happening on August 2nd and 3rd. I am now the Creative Director of the festival and a big chunk of the responsibility is in organization and things that have nothing to do with Creative Direction. So I updated the website last night here - www.vemf.ca. The Artist Application form is open until June 8th - we pushed it back a week to give more folks an opportunity to apply, so please do so if you're intending on playing this year. We also have the volunteer application form up for those who want to apply to join the team that puts on the event - please have a look if you are so inclined!
• The GDC Rock Awards are on Saturday and I am excited to be going to the gala event. Should be a blast to hang out with a ton of designers for a fine dinner and recognition of great design.
• Google has started showing products inline on certain people's google accounts when they do searches. What does this mean? Well for me, it means that AFK is showing up in searches in a more meaningful way. Have a look at AFK and Dustin H here, and AFK at Juno Download. That means that I can provide more meaningful links to buy my music now, instead of deeplinks into a Beatport flash-based store. This also means that Beatport has some work to do, as compatible sites start to have their products indexed by google. This has everything to do with the principles of Data Portability and I love seeing stuff like this roll out. If you snooze on stuff like this, and you have a big store, you will ultimately lose out as this movement continues to grow and gains momentum. Sure everyone surfs for music at Beatport right now, but that may change soon enough in the future as standards for music clips and music stores on the web begin to emerge, and multi-music store browsers emerge to gain popularity. I have many more thoughts on this subject, but they'll have to wait.
• My appearance on Proton Radio today has been postponed until Thursday of next week - May 29th at noon PST, or 3 PM EST.
• The Sunset Room is having an anniversary party on Saturday the 24th and I'll be DJing at the stroke of midnight. Hope to see you there!
• My AFK remix of John Morgan and Kevin Shiu is coming out on Powerplant Music soon. Both the original mix and my remix will be in my mix next week on Proton Radio, so have a listen to that show if you want a sneak preview.
• You can now use gravatars on my site - this means you can automatically have a photo appear beside your comment each time you leave a comment. Gravatars work on many sites and the way it works is you associate an image with a verified email address, which Gravatar then uses to identify you in blog commenting areas. If you have a blog and its powered by Movable Type or Wordpress, you can use this on your own site as well. Installation of the plugin is dead simple and I was done in about 5 minutes.
• I turn 30 on Friday
• Matt Darey has been spinning Seismic - the track I wrote with Dustin H. He appears to like the Shiloh remix. Neat to see someone who has been so influential to me (partly via Lost Tribe) return the favor around a decade later.

Okay, I really have to go now. Ciao!

Posted by davin at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Pure.FM is an all-house/progressive house station so I decided to have some fun with that limitation. I started off with the Formulate remix of me and Thor's Royal Assassin tune, "Turn of Twilight." Formulate's remix starts off pretty minimal but soon enough the layers come in a careful and clinical way. From there it's straight into the breakdown of Quivver's new "Surin," an unsuspecting but utterly beautiful production from John Graham - one of the gems of 2008 for certain. This leads to Matt Rowan and Jaytech's remix of Lush, my best selling track to date. Nick Muir's "Airtight" is next as we prepare to take things up several notches in intensity - the layers really start to build here, as does the atmosphere. Traveller and Quests classic remix of Ocean Wave's "Clearwater" gallops in and places itself square in the middle of the mix, emphasizing that yes - this will be four on the floor the whole way through. Another gem from the past, "Leaving Planet Earth," is remixed by Dousk from drum and bass into progressive house. Nice work by Dousk there. The atmosphere begins to peak out with a new track by Retroid and Fretwell called "Vertical Horizon." If you place all these track names together you get some sort of storyline here and it's kind of neat. One of the de-facto progressive house tracks, in my opinion, is this Tarrentella vs. Redanka remix of Andy Ling's "Fixation." It's pretty old - and it sounds it, but did you know it's 8 years old? That's older than it sounds. It has aged well, very well and fits nicely between that new Morphosis track and the new Pacific Front track, Seismic, which finishes off the mix. Thanks to Kennedy for having me on the show.

Tracklisting:

1. Royal Assassin - Turn of Twilight (Formulate remix) [Pacific Front Recordings]
2. Quivver - Surin (Original mix) [Boz Boz]
3. AFK - Lush (Matt Rowan and Jaytech remix) [Proton Music]
4. Nick Muir - Airtight (D-Nox and Beckers remix) [Vapour]
5. Ocean Wave - Clearwater (Traveller and Quest remix) [Vapour Recordings]
6. Talisman and Hudson - Leaving Planet Earth (Dousk remix) [Too Much Information]
7. Fretwell and Retroid - Vertical Horizon (Michael and Levan remix) [Morphosis Recordings]
8. Andy Ling - Fixation (Tarrentella vs. Redanka remix) [Hooj Choons]
9. AFK & Dustin H - Seismic (Original mix) [Pacific Front Recordings]

Posted by davin at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AFK will be featured for one hour on Organic Sessions. This show will air on May 12th at 12:00 Noon PST on Pure.FM with host Kennedy.

Posted by davin at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am not too sure what was going on here or exactly when this was taken. As you can see I was not holding the camera - I think Graham had picked it up and snapped a few shots while we were at Adam and Jessica's housewarming. What do you think we were being told when we had this look on our faces?

Posted by davin at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The internet is many things, and this very website is one of those things. The other things are somewhere else and I've been holding back a few links to those things for some time now - I've been waiting for an appropriate post to link from, however I have decided I am not interested in writing about all the stuff I want to link to - some of it yes, but not all of it. Plus I just don't have time to write about everything I am interested in. Since I am on an internet-related post, I think it's appropriate to link to some completely random stuff in no particular order:

• Fred and Sharon's Movies - Who needs a movie? You might. I have been sitting on this one for a while. This comes by way of Ken - who is so busy making websites for other people that he doesn't have his own at the moment. Yes, this is real.
• Silverio - yepa yepa yepa. Dance sensation. Apparently some people have not seen this yet. Occasionally worth referencing. Definitely worth knowing.
• Two new mixes by djfractal - The second mix is what I want to point you at: Vainglorious, is all massive progressive house and other and, as the title suggests, glorious and certainly a bit vain, especially considering I am linking you to it because of the tracklisting. The only thing puzzling me here is the absence of any Royal Assassin work since that would up the vain-listing a bit - Royal Assassin is our alias for making epic music of deceit, wonder and such and such.
• phonemyphone.com - This is a web service that will call your cell phone in case you lost it. This is most remarkable because of how completely exploitable it is. It looks completely and utterly abusable, but also looks like a useful service for the time that it will remain up. Quick, lose your phone so you can take legitimate advantage of this. Thanks to the superb lifehacker for the link.
• PlaysForSure - oh dear. The essay is titled "the day the music died," but don't let this dissuade you from reading it. If you know anyone who uses the Microsoft Zune or MSN Music or any of the "playsforsure" services, this is a must read. Don't wait til September to see baffled folks on the dinner time news complaining about this. It is happening and there is a date set by Microsoft already. Thanks to Darren for the link to the essay.

That's all I can think of right now. Looks like I had a few things to say about each one. There are a few other things I love right now but I'll leave them in 4chan for the time being.

Posted by davin at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I had the opportunity to do a question and answer session with Matt Thibeault, aka Matt What, who is a mainstay of the Victoria DJ scene, and is also currently serving as the Coordinator and Technical Judge for the Hush DJ Competition. Lately he's been taking things up a notch with his community oriented efforts and also adding some unique elements to his live performance, so naturally I wanted to find out a bit more about what he's up to and his general outlook on music, competition, and what inspires his efforts:

Thanks to Matt What for his time and also for sharing his thoughts!

Posted by davin at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)