I was just lamenting to a good friend that the DC Music scene offers few options for viewing the kinds of artists we regularly listen to and whom we hear are performing elsewhere at places like Mutek or the Decibel festival. In fact, except for very occasional visits by David Sylvian (every 15 years or so), Robin Guthrie (about 5 years ago), or a recent stop by some members of Hammock and Stars of the Lid back in May, pretty much what you get around here are Pop, Country, cover bands, and “flavor-of-the-season-alternative-but-actually-pretty-mainstream-and-owned-by-the-labels” acts.

Where are Loscil, Sakamoto, SND, Murcof, Richter, BOC, AES Dana, Brook, Kiln, Noto, Budd, Isan, Eno…? Well, they aren’t around here. (Hell, most of them don’t come to the States now that I think about it…or if they do it is to New York, San Francisco, maybe LA or Seattle.) 

Anyway, I just came across some info today about a “Festival of Experimental Music” right here in DC!

The emphasis seems to be on Noise and Avant Noise Experimental type stuff. It’s not of the stature of a Mutek or Decibel (except for Matmos, I don’t recognize the names listed on the site), but, hey, you gotta start somewhere and it’s GREAT that there even IS something like this around here.

Just a quick note to let you know that Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro and Rapture are available for $99 each through October 31st. This is a special promotion by Cakewalk with select retailers. More details are here.

“—Owners of Apple’s Logic Pro and Garageband, MOTU Digital Performer, Steinberg’s Cubase and Nuendo, Digidesign Pro Tools LE/HD, Ableton Live, Image Line’s Fruity Loops, and Magix Samplitude Pro can purcahse Dimension Pro or Rapture for only $99 at select retailers through October 31st—”

A dealer locator is available on the announcement page.

A word of warning: My local Guitar Center didn’t have a clue about this promotion. The staff was great and very helpful, but getting the software involved 3 trips to 2 different stores, a call to Corporate, and the intervention of the manager. Apparently this is the stealthiest promotion in history. I suggest you print out the flyer at the link above, and take along some sort of proof of ownership of one of the DAWs mentioned.

Artificial Audio has released Obelisk, its new spectral multi-effect for Mac OS X. It is a combination of a Spectral Delay, a Spectral Filter and a Spectral Gate.

Obelisk puts many, many effect parameters under easy graphical control. It has 2-dimensional LFOs for setting up interesting modulation possibilities to enable endlessly changing sound layers of the processed signals. It is also CPU-friendly.

It costs €99, and is available in the Artificial Audio webshop in VST and AU plug-in formats for Mac OS X.

Obelisk Main Screen

Functionally it reminds me of iZotope’s Spectron, but a lot more intuitive. Be sure to check out the cool video tour. I’ll report back in a few weeks on what I find.

Just wanted to post a quick update on my efforts to get some tracks done.

As I say in the About page of the blog, one of the reasons I am doing this blog is to “Increase my accountability to get it done!”. And one of the ways to do that is to report out on what’s going on with my projects… 

26 (!) days ago, I posted Actify to SoundCloud.* I have since been working on a couple of tracks and in the last 10 days have really dialed into one with a working name of “Mehdi”. Rather than doing my typical, get it half-way there then move on, I’m really trying to get this one into near final form.

However, to prove to the world (and by extension myself) that this thing is real, I’m posting an excerpt…

…and now I have increased my accountability to get it done! (EDIT: I have also posted this to SoundCloud. Now I really have to get this done! )

(Hey. Whatever works, ya know?)

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* – That was the first time I had posted a track for public comment anywhere.

Due largely to Peter Kirn’s occasional series of articles over at Create Digital Motion (a daily stop of mine by the way and highly recommended), I’ve had my eye on taking the plunge into learning about Processing. For those unfamiliar, Processing is an open source programming language and environment for programming images, animation, and interactions. It allows you to create your own code to realize computer generated visuals — digital art and video if you choose — for use in your own projects. The programming language is supposed to be fairly accessible to non-programmers…

Today Kirn featured an article about Glen Marshall’s new Processor realized video Metamorphosis. Totally generative and set to Boards of Canada track Corsair from Geogaddi, it is beautiful. And according to Kirn, Glen considers himself a “noob programmer”.

“i can just about understand my own source code, let alone others, i’m still a noob programmer believe it or not.”

I might have to go with the “or not”. Glen’s newest creation is absolutely, positively, unquestionably beautiful. And it is all generative. He programmed the parameters then let it run free. A M A Z I N G.

…in every TV show and movie soundtrack over the next couple of years. 

Just received Omnisphere last night. It comes on 6 DVDs and each DVD takes between 22 and 30 minutes to install. Just had time to “needle drop” on a few presets this morning before getting to the day job.

You are so gonna hear this thing every place. It’s got that Spectrasonics “made for the screen” sound. 

More soon.