diversity is my university
A week and a half ago, I played the main stage of the Victoria Electronic Music Festival (VEMF) on Sunday, from 4 PM – 5 PM. This is the set that I played on that day – dedicated to the volunteers of VEMF and our dear friend Nigel Haze. Enjoy!
Photo by Andrew Dodd Clippingdale.
You can also see video on the Livelab page.
Yesterday, Nigel Haze passed away. I don’t know the details of his death, but I do know some important details about his life. So indulge me for a moment, I’m going to get into them.
Nigel Woodward AKA Nigel Haze was not just a fantastic person, but also the first person to show me how DJ mixing actually worked. I remember walking into this house party near McKenzie and Interurban and I was going to do one of my ambient-mixing sets. That’s pretty much all I had been able to figure out at that point. I had played one party before and folks there would beatmatch but not quite at the level that Nigel displayed that night. He locked two records and would create something new out of both of them by cutting and manipulating bass and hi-end sounds – it was the real deal.
Of course, I my jaw was on the floor because I had never been this close to a display of talent like that. We were in my friend Jay’s basement kitchen, turntables set up on the countertop. I bothered him with flattery but he would have none of it. Instead he shoved the headphones in my hands and said “It’s easy – you try it!” I did. It was not easy. But with a little help from him and Tim (who I also met at that party – and eventually started 3 radio shows with), it became second nature soon enough.
My friendship with Nigel evolved after that – we would go on to headline raves under the Etheric Link banner, share a club residency together with Yoseff at Neptune, and of course share the occasional beverage at the Rooftop patio. He was always upbeat and knew how to make jokes work at seemingly impossible times. Nigel will be missed dearly, but will live on through his influence as a musician and a genuine, real person.
I’ll keep playing tracks with woodblocks for ya bud.
A good friend of mine once said that if you’re good enough at what you do, people start doing your marketing for you.
Certainly that is true in the case of the Vancouver Canucks.
Their regular season was full of hard work, gelling, out-skilling and out-working their opponents. Their game has consisted of their own agenda, but that agenda also involves cracking their opponents at their own game, whatever game they may have.
Now it’s the part of the season where they find themselves competing for the Stanley Cup. I remember watching in 1994, which ended in a riot, but I prefer to remember how exciting that playoff run was. This one has been just as exciting and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I don’t know how this Stanley Cup Final series will pan out (this is why we all watch – because we do not know), but one thing is for certain: they have been incredibly entertaining, and then some.
I opted out of getting cable for the playoffs, and instead decided that a more social experience at the neighbourhood pub would be worth exploring. I’ve been watching at The Beagle in Cook Street Village, watching with another good friend fairly consistently, and it’s been an excellent experience. I hope that, one year, AppleTV will add an NHL app (like they just picked up for some other major league sports), but for now I am very happy being a part of the community in the village.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this yet, but here’s a preview of something. made the image through my usual capture and visual trickery methods. I like how dwarfed the girl is by the cell phone tower, and how the tree seems to reach out to her with its “posture.”
I did a lot of work on the threshold to make the sky narrow in on her, like a reflection of land versus dusk. The colour change is 100% accurate of where the sky shifted from one blue to a deeper blue. Perhaps this will end up being the next sunset sessions image – I’m not sure. I miss doing the Pacific Front Recordings release art / design.
Usually I keep this kind of my work to myself, but this time I’ve included a large version (click) in case anyone wants to use it as a desktop image.
I haven’t used my Technics 1200 MKIIIs in quite a while. Not more than a handful of times since I moved back to Victoria. A few factors have been involved:
So when the offer came for the turntables earlier this week, it made complete sense to sell them. And sell them I did, to my old friend Tim, who had in fact taught me how to DJ in the first place. Now they’re in good hands, and they’ll be used a lot more than I ever did in the last several years. There’s no sense sitting on a depreciating asset if you are deriving no utility from it. The most utility I would say I was getting out of them was that they were a very fashionable interior accessory. But they’re slightly way too good to just be that.
Speaking of Tim, he now hosts an internet podcast named Control Freq Radio, which he runs with a bunch of awesome people (including the voice of all that is good, Ben Malcolm). I was lucky enough to be their first guest as AFK. The tracklisting looks like this:
The episode MP3 is available for download here:
AFK – Control Freq Radio Guest Mix 2011 – right-click or control-click, save file as whatever you like.
My mix begins about 15 minutes in, after they feature a few new tracks for you to check out. I encourage you to give those ones a listen, I heard a couple I really liked in there. You’ll see that my new track (Megatech) is in after the Faithless track. Hope you enjoy it!
I took the above photo of my good friend Casey Jo, just before she was about to say ..
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As time goes by, and I create more and more through many different platforms, programs, and processes, I’m beginning to notice which are most successful and why.
At one point I believed I just “wasn’t feeling creative” when I sat down in front of my computer and failed to blog the 150 photos I would take with my DSLR from the weekend past, complete with descriptions, post processing in photoshop, upload via FTP, and a written summary of the experience. I also decided I wasn’t “feeling motivated” to write music, which meant sitting down and composing, arranging, effecting, mixing, and sometimes mastering a track, all on a computer screen.
Some time around September of last year, I picked up an iPhone 4. It has a couple cameras on it, both vastly inferior to the DSLR I have, much like the Sony Ericcson phone I had before it. I made some notes on the difference between taking photos with my iPhone and DSLR/Computer. Nothing from that has really changed. But all those steps involved with the updating from DSLR suggest a higher level of impedance to my artistic expression than the iPhone. For that reason, I quite often use my iPhone more than my DSLR.
Applications like Instagram, MoreLomo and Tumblr get heavy use even though they are not as technically full-featured as alternatives on the desktop. In these cases, less process is exactly equal to more creative output. That is to say, less steps equals more usage. There is less impedance between my creative experience and the subsequent expression.
Extending this lens to music making, there are remarkably far more steps to writing a compete song in Reason than there are to singing a song and recording it. To be clear, I am not saying one is easier or requires less skill. There are all sorts of classes one could take in singing to hone the expression of it. However, the state of expression largely will remain the same (just more refined and sophisticated). The same cannot be said for an art form which is proportionately more technical in nature, such as electronic music production, which is at the mercy of the software developers and how they interpret our workflow, if we are lucky enough that they do so at all. Relating it to singing, this means that there can be many busy-work computer-based steps before intent meets voice. Impedance.
Recently, as an experiment, I tried making a song in Ableton Live from start to finish, instead of the back and forth I usually do between Ableton Live and Reason. While I am very proficient in Reason (and in my opinion, that software is really, really well thought out), I found I was spending a lot of time (and process / steps) in Reason getting sounds that I really liked, whereas I was spending relatively little in Ableton Live. I ended up finishing a song I was happy with in 3 sessions over a weekend; compare that with the 1-6 month process I spent in Reason on each song, and you get the idea.
I find the longer an idea takes to express, the more it is at risk of losing its raison d’être; that is, each idea has a reason for existence – an essence. Each revision can either make it deeper and better, or wider and weaker – less focussed. A lot of musical and design ideas have depth in simplicity from the get-go, and more time spent on it can be equal to the gradual destruction of the idea itself. Does this sound silly or does it sound like science? I’d be curious to hear other people’s ideas on how to preserve idea integrity for maximum expression.
I realized that when I had been thinking about this topic over the last two months, it’s pretty deep, and I likely will not be dropping it after I make this post. I am sure I will be revisiting this as I apply the concept to different areas.
One area it got me thinking about was today’s Federal Election. I saw some numbers from the previous election which mentioned there were more Canadians on Facebook than there were at the polling booths. That said a few things to me:
That list could go on. I’m sure there’s lots to add. Having voted in the Advance Poll last week, I am not standing in lines in the rain to do so today, but I can see how unappealing that would be to a lot of people. Last week I went to the wrong polling station and barely squeaked in before 8 PM to the correct polling station, a 15 minute walk away from where I was (which was 5 minutes from my home.) I don’t consider going out to vote to be a big deal, but with everything else online, why isn’t voting yet? I get the points about security, but I’d counter with the fact that there are some pretty smart security experts out there who could get it done right. I figure that the less steps there are to formally expressing yourself in a modern democratic nation, the better the process will reflect those who it must serve.
Today, I’m not so sure the lack of online voting is a problem, but it might be a part of a Gladwell-esque tipping point scenario. At this stage of my life, most of the friends who I’ve talked to who do not vote are doing so to make a point – they do not believe in the system or the process. I’m not sure how much I do either, but I do see the opportunities for improvements.
Not so long ago, in a land known as The Internet, I was approached by a digital music maverick by the name of Jay. We spoke at lengths about electronic music, remixes, and so forth. The previous time we did this, it resulted in the release of my original production, “Lush,” which was a Good Thing indeed. At the end of this particular conversation, he signed me up to do a remix of Benz & MD. I did two, and they came out on US based Proton Music.
As the Times Colonist duly noted, Alzu’s has closed it’s doors for good.
For better or worse, I knew what Alzu’s was. It was a 24 hour restaurant on Bay Street. Lets get one thing out of the way to begin with: Alzu’s was not fine dining. Are we good with that? Let’s proceed.
Victoria’s seen only a handful of 24 hour restaurants. QVs (still open, but not all night), Paul’s Motor Inn (same deal), Denny’s (still does as advertised), etc. As a night owl, a DJ who plays the latest of late night gigs, and a general coffee-consumer at non-traditional hours, I knew Alzu’s fairly well.
Alzu’s was home to all sorts of clientele. Headbangers from Langford, taxi drivers from all over town, skaters, Victoria’s version of thugs, some folks who were true believers that they were Vampires, World of Warcraft (or whatever online game – take your pick), and us, the pre-internet internet nerds.
I once saw Alzu himself in the restaurant. I asked if I could take his photo. He was confused as to why I would ever want to do that – it likely didn’t occur to him that his name was part of our freenet culture.
I wonder if the ownership of Alzu’s realized they were being talked about on the Victoria Freenet’s IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in the mid-nineties by a bunch of teenagers. We liked it because it wasn’t Denny’s, and it was pretty laid back and comically accessible. We knew the safe and unsafe menu items, we knew when the post-bar rush zoo would occur, and we would not likely be seen there when other things were open. But at night it was one of only a few options, and the ordinariness of a family restaurant was what attracted us to the place at night.
There was a waiter there that we referred to as Dave Babych, the ex Canucks hockey player, but he was not at all Dave Babych. His similarity was somewhat uncanny, at least it was to us, over and over again at 3 or 4 in the morning. He had a laugh that we believe he laughed at while laughing. Why do I bring this up? Because Alzu’s was that kind of place – home to characters.
If I went through my unposted digital archives, I could find quite a bit to post to an Alzu’s museum. Instead, I’ll leave you with this image to remember it by:
John Morgan and Kevin Shiu have long been good friends, amazing DJs, and producers to boot. I have many fond memories of hanging with them both on Vancouver Island and in the legendary Lotus nightclub in Vancouver’s downtown area. When they offered me the opportunity to participate in a release on Powerplant Music, I jumped at the honour.
The original track is a pretty dark progressive tribal house piece that would not at all sound out of place in a Sasha or John Digweed set. My remix takes the deep, creepy melodic bits and sticks them in a progressive house + breaks adrenaline rush. One of my favourite remixes to work on – so many great parts to work with.
I’ve made this a free download – full quality if you’d like, since it’s no longer for sale. Enjoy it in your car, or at the gym, or just really loud. DO IT!
Botanical Beach is located in Juan De Fuca Provincial Park on Vancouver Island, really close to Port Renfrew. Port Renfrew is one of the first places I remember going camping with my family, and I remember buying some really terrible Gatorade Gum while I was there – it was called “Gator Gum” and I discovered that, yes, even something as seemingly indestructible as gum has a half-life. Also, we caught fish on the beach and cooked them over campfires. It was rad.
We didn’t bother with the town on this particular trip – we drove from Victoria straight to Botanical Beach.
I remember a wrecked school bus crashed down near the beach at some point. That or I am mis-remembering. I was quite young when we last went. Was that ever there? Does anyone remember? I didn’t see it there. I looked for it.
Maybe I dreamt it.
In any case, the lighting was great, and as you’ll see, the ocean was pretty active that day. The mountains you’ll see across the water are in the United States, the north west tip of the northwestern Washington state. The map below can elucidate relative positions.
View botanical beach in a larger map
Anyway, here are some photos:
