Tachikoma NYC patrol.

On patrol here, blogging from the VIP Filmmakers Lounge of the TriBeCa film fest. Shit is mad going down in the hizz. Jason is not a good enuf producer of himself so I have been elected for the role of unpaid promoter/consumer of free burritos.

Top Ten Unexpected Things About Tachikoma In New York:

10. It's not asia, but I'm there.
9. Jason is currently squatting in his apartment even though he makes more money than I do.
8. Filmmakers (such as me) in TriBeCa can hang out in a lounge with OPEN BAR EVERY NIGHT OF THE WEEK.
7. I got another show here (other than Knitting Factory show) at an art fag show on Saturday.
6. I went to texas, but I chose not to mess with it.
5. NYC actually kinda reminds me of Taipei more than I thought. It's the rusty train stations.
4. NYC peoples really like to use Blackberrys and mini-cell-puters. Even in nightclubs. For Actual. You may be wearing cooler clothes than me but you look like a nerd.
3. We are living off of free shit. Or very cheap. $1 Empenada shop near Jason's apartment.
2. It's sunny and the air smells nice.
1. On my first night here we got dropped off in Harlem at 3 am and we went to Dunkin Donuts. We are currently still alive.

That is all for now..... tachikoma signoff.

Signal and Noise and Tachikoma.

Come out and support or heckle Tachikoma at his big live electro-show.

11pm is the Tachikoma set.

100% Non-New Material!! Tachikoma is reliably identical to himself.

Tachikoma: Live In Two Countries.

Tachikoma Big International Tour 2006 is starting soon:

APRIL 27, Vancouver, BC

Tachikoma is playing at 11pm, somewhere in a big long building on Granville Island, as part of Signal and Noise 2006, organized by Video In. Come and hear Tachikoma singing and using the theremin-like "AirFX" box, pretending he is a J-Pop singer, sampling anime tracks, and improvising on 2 Gameboys simultaneously! It's an Art Fag experience like no other.

MAY 3, New York, NY

Somehow, Tachikoma bribed his way into a gig at the Knitting Factory, a famous place in New York which has as much Rock as it has Yarn. Probably the set will be kinda stripped-down, just MP3player and AirFX. But it's NYC baby. Plus there'll be Tachikomamusic in the Tribeca film festival, which is during the first week of May. Lucky.


That's the whole tour, but still, come out and support the Tachikoma Crappy Anime-Sampling IDM Rock Experience if you can!

Superflat Single #34 / Harpoon

~~~
For the last couple of months there have been dubby, electronic, confusing, space-cowboy jam sessions in my apartment. Tachikoma plus The Boats plus an independently wealthy Lebanese gentleman add up to: HARPOON, the most violently-named band in a 4 metre radius. This track is a sprawling indesign file of mad digital improv. The bass lines are rubbery and hypnotic, the drumming delayed and bitreduced, the synths all bendy and cheesy sounding. Way too many Brass patches for anyone's good. Tachikoma pieced it together from 3 separate jams and stuck in a couple of gameboy landscapes for good measure.

We haven't jammed in a long time, because The Boats were finishing up their dual Ph.D.'s in graphic design and advanced pork processing. But now they are all done with that and we can get back to the task at hand: unpredicable randomized space-cowboy dub. Good thing we are releasing this now so we can listen to it ourselves and remember we're awesome.

Oh wait, that's the whole reason for this blog.

See you, space cowboy......

~~~

Listen to blipsandifs034.mp3 - 22.4MB

Etherworks collaboration with Blipsandifs

The process has begun and the product is ready. The first of a series has been posted at Etherwork.ca. My good friend Brett Gaylor has taken an unreleased blipsandifs single and added a video blog. All very exciting...we'll do up a real nice post explaining all of this very soon.
Etherworks VLOG "Moving Beijing" featuring music by [710W3].

Superflat Single #33 / Tachikoma

Back when I lived in Taiwan, I'd ride the train from the middle point of the island, where I lived, to Taipei in the north. Programming my gameboy synthesizer with a pair of headphones, I'd gaze at the industrial parks unraveling with the landscape. I remember seeing gas flares at the top of ominous chimneys blazing uselessly in the middle of the night. The enormous, now redundant Hsinchu Industrial Park was the inspiration for many train-programmed songs.

These days, condemned to live in paradise, I often get nostalgic for the days when industrial dinosaurs towered over the cityscape, so much more inspiring than the modest socialist half-highrises I'm surrounded with now. This track, recorded in the paleolithic era, will probably be the last fossil excavated from the Blips and Ifs archive for a while. We gotta move forward like a big stupid brontosaurus. In the coming weeks there will be new, anti-nostalgic tracks, video collaborations, Electroplankton improvisations, audiotoy experiments.... anything so long as it's new. I gotta shed my skin. So do you.

Listen to blipsandifs033.mp3 - 7MB

Superflat Single #32 / slogic

Another Superflat Single from the analog troubadour, slogic. A fantastic single indeed. Entitled 'idrum' it's considered by the author a B-side to db92(a track we released last month. This freshly mastered track a prime example of the slogic style we know you'll love.
Listen to blipsandifs032.mp3 - 4MB

Winking tonight.

Tonight at the Wink, vegetario restaurant!

Hidden Agenda feat. Tachikoma!

Tachikoma will be playing walkin' jazz bass during standup comedy from the man who lives in the butchershop, Ehren Salazar.

How..... unlikely!

Reference Point: electroplankton.

For those of you who have difficulty figuring out exactly what the AudioToys are all about, let me point you in the direction of Electroplankton. I don't agree with most of this GameSpot review, but the screenshots and description are useful for explaining the concept to newcomers.

Electroplankton is a 'game' for the Nintendo DS which lets you interact with sound-generating, quasi-random software synth and sampler modules. Rather than coldly programming a track, you play with the toys and see what kind of music you can collaborate on .... with an AI, rather than a person.

AudioToys are like an online Flash version of the same thing. We came up with the concept first, but Toshio Iwai, programmer of Electroplankton, is already developing a hardware version of a similar product with Yamaha . Then again, AudioToys are free, so.....

Audio Toy Field Test #4

The Audiotoys are developing nicely. In the lab I have been working on the technologies to make our inventions come to life. The seeds of a brand new song. We now have two fully functioning components at Blipsandifs Audiotoy Source Files Page. These files may seem to be missing substance. What they lack in being interesting they make up for in being useful. These field tests become our building blocks for the Audiotoys.
The tests are made with FlashMX, a multimedia web program. All that is needed to view the components, and the future Audiotoys, is the Free Flash Player. Blips and Ifs is not only publishing the Flash Player(.SWF) files, we are also releasing the FlashMX(.FLA) source files for those who have Flash and wish to use or learn from them.
All in all this is pretty nerdy stuff. The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. Audiotoys WILL be crazy, super-fun, and chock full of the concepts, sounds, images and ideas that we like to call Blips and Ifs.

blipsandifs #031 / tachikoma

Again and again!

This track is from the old school. I always thought it was one of my best tracks, and I put it on demo CDs in 2002 that I sent out to indie labels. It didn't make it onto my "Gentle, Amoral Robot Music" album, but that's because it contains a sample from a track which is just too well known. In many ways it's a nuclear track, because I notice that techniques I use regularly were implemented for the first time in this production. For example, a lot of the percussion sounds are hand-created glitch samples, and the way that the vocal sample is twisted in an attempt to mimic scratching.... those are 'classic' Tachikoma techniques.

Which reminds me.... I gotta get some new techniques.

Listen to blipsandifs031.mp3 - 2.8MB

blipsandifs #030 / slogic

Com.... pu...... tor. Computor music. That's what we have here. Nothing new for Blipsandifs; but usually the computors involved are PCs or Macs. In this case, the computor is an Atari ST. First built by neolithic man in an attempt to improve upon simple tools like the wedge and the wheel, the Atari ST remains popular among British anoraks who like to kick it old school.... extremely old school. Thanks to slogic (pronounced "slogic") for this track, and for his continuing dedication to outdo Tachikoma in antiquated gear revival....

Listen to blipsandifs030.mp3 - 5.1MB

S and N.

Well, I forgot to apply to NewMusicWest this year, but I remembered to apply to Signal And Noise 2006. And somehow, I got in. The list of artists has just been posted - Lee Hutzulak is on there too, that's the only other artist on the bill that I'm familiar with. Which is good, probably.

For that show I'm definitely going to be doing the Live Tachikoma With Singing and Synths. Gotta work on that tonight..... must .... stop.... playing ..... real time strategy games.....

No Jacket February.

Well I was wrong... they proved me wrong.... people did come out to the show! And it was good.

Also, I was wrong because I thought I was gonna play granular synthetic clouds but instead I just sang and played guitar.

It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Anyways, another succesful Tachishowma. Thanks to Ehren Salazar and Hidden Agenda.... hope I get to play Hidden Agenda again....

Show tonite.

Got the details.

WHERE: Wink, a Vegetarian Restaurant
EXACTLY WHERE: 151 Main at 8th near Broadway
WHEN: Tonight, 9pm - 11pm
WHAT: Electronic improvisation and anarchy
WHO: Tachikoma, de sho? mochiron yo! Tachikoma no 'biggu show" de arimasu....
HOW: Lots of electronic gadgets on a big table
WHY: I cry alone

And no, it's not going to sound like today's mp3!!!

blipsandifs #029 / tachikoma

Tachikoma provides another soundscape for our lives with the 29th Superflat Single from Blipsandifs. I listened to the track and heard the sounds of ship on the high seas. Something like the Bluenose. It could be any sailboat, but I thought a large Canadian one felt right for me. I'm not sure, but knowing Tachikoma's influences he may have created this track to sound more like a traditional Asian classic. When I heard it I was off the shores of Nova Scotia. You?

Listen to blipsandifs029.MP3 - 1.6MB

SuperConfirmed.

The show is confirmed! It's on. Let's do it to it! Tachikoma combining power engage!

It's at Wink, the vegetarian restaurant (Kemal, you hear that?) near Broadway, on Main. 9pm-11pm: a microshow.

This'll be another one of them "secret" shows for my "secret" fans who "secretly" prefer to listen to Coldplay. That song "yellow" is good. But actually, you should come out..... to this show... but who am I kidding? Those who go to the show won't read this blog post and vice versa. So the less I advertise, the better the turnout will be.....

This is all takin' me back to the time when I used to DJ for a roomful of ghosts, including the ghost of Phil Hartman. Good times.....

Tachikoma live (again).

Wink, and you'll miss it.

On Feb. 22, Tachikoma is playing a cute miniature show at Wink, the vegetarian restaurant located on Main St. near Broadway. Curated by Ehren Salazar, the show will feature 5 performers doing 12 minutes of music each. The show will begin at 9 pm and end at 11pm.

A small show, but a good one. I'll be performing using a table-full of bizarre audio toys.....

That was a close one.

The good thing is, we're not on this list.

710W3-LIFE #2

I was listening to Portishead while walking home one evening. I noticed their sound is so clear and intense. I even had to turn the volume down, which was odd for a walkman. It got my mind contemplating collaborations vs. individuals in relation to art. The music behind Portishead is quite foreboding. Place Beth Gibbons in front and it takes away the creepy edge and just makes it cool.

I take pride in my solo work, I believe it to be very unique and fairly interesting as experiments if not art. Thought it's through collaborations that I find some of my greatest reward. It's that I can enjoy things made with my friends with less self indulgence. I may like my sounds and art, but I prefer them applied with others.

To me mixing artist is the best production. My career as a composer for films and videos has brought much satisfaction. Creating covers for the superflatsingles has also been pure enjoyment.

Blipsandifs is now discussing a fantastic collaboration with video blogger Brett Gaylor of Etherworks. So stay tuned...