Finally, no more Tachikoma shows at vegemarian restaurants on Main Street. Now I got a show in a real, actual "dive" bar.... haw haw.... a nautical joke, folks.
TACHIKOMA LIVE ELECTRONIC PERFORMANCE:
Where: The Marine Club, 573 Homer St.
Date: Tuesday, May 23
Time: About 8:30 pm
Cover: 5$? I'm guessing.
And of course it's part of Hidden Agenda. Word to Ehren Salazar.
This is the gauntlet dropping! Tachikoma is now officially an actual Vancouver band. True Story.
Way way back, in the curly, sexual, delicious mists of time, I came up with this track. It was about a cat with dreadlocks, I think. Perhaps. There was already a song by Mark Braude I think which was about a dread cat. That was the catalyst.
Unlike so many of our singles, this was not just hastily slapped together in Reason, but rather painstakingly drag-and-dropped in Acid Music (I think I had version 1.0). It was such a learning experience, that program: this was one of the first tracks where I learned how to make "drum'n'bass" breaks and also managed to come up with some halfassed "turntable effects". The final track still sounds musical to my ear: but these days I would never attempt to splice together The Specials and Bob Marley into a single track. That's what the Malchiks were for, anyways.
Listen to blipsandifs035.mp3 - 5 MB
Tachikoma was succesfully shipped back to Vancity from NYC and is now recuperating from sudden free promotional item withdrawal.
Looks like no superflat singles were posted in my absence but I will get on that ASAP. Looks like readership went up during last week what with my constant posting and all. I'll try to cram more data into the datahole in future.
Vancity is warmer but the cherry blossoms have falling. Haru wa ii ne.....
Did I mention I saw famous peoples? John Malkovich and Richard Gere. True story.
But other than that I am running out of things to say. Naturally I dont wish to return to Vancity but duty calls.
The bloglabel will be posting more MP3s when I gets back I guess. Less of this constant textual stimulation.
Gotta go to the awards ceremonies and wrap parties now.... peace.
Only two days left in the decadence parade known as .... well, we call it the Tribeca Food Festival cuz we steal so much food.
Went to another screening, a horrible French horror movie called "Sheitan," and did more out-on-the-town exploring. Lots of good photos but unpossible to make with the uploading right now. Hanging out with Japanese makeup designers, Canadian documentary producers, Irish actors and directors.... even Swedes who tried to convince me that smoking tobacco was illegal in their country (sorry, I don't believe it).
It's a great festival because you can pick up almost anyone by asking "so what film did you work on?" Write that down, it's gold. I'm gonna use it at Vancity Int'l Film Festival next september. Because that's the followup; Jason will be back in Vanshitty for his master's degree, and he'll probably get a film into VIFF, and we will duplicate our bender precisely.
Bet on it.
Art-style. A little mini tachikoma show in NYC. Guitar stuff, electro stuff, poor quality comedy; the show had it all. I gots the photos but they will have to wait. So glad it all went well, and especially glad that NYC'ers that I didnt know came up and made with the compliments afterwards, grooof.
Kudos!
today they celebrated 20 years since expo 86.
i got to city hall when the Mayor and expo ernie were talking to the
press
and city officials and elementary school class.
i asked a question right away about his name infront of everyone, about
his
first name transpo the robot. he denied it.
i stuck around after slowly everyone left.... eventualy it was just me
ernie and his assistant. we hung out just outside the mayors office for
almost an hour. we chatted about vancouvers past present and future. i
asked
him if he thought bc place was holding vancouver back. if he's ever
worked
for the cops and done profile checks. he chatted about crazy expo days.
i
told him i never got a chance to meet him during expo but always looked
so
hard for him.
the assistant said that he'd like to come see little mountain
studios... i
also told them the story about how i had tried to invite ernie to
hidden
agenda, and my converasation with jimbo pattison.
i asked him too if he ever thought to be the 2010 olymoics secondary
logo,
that he could return gold platted jut like johnny 5 in short circuit.
he
thought it was a good idea.
his assistant took a picture of me with him on my cel phone after.
on such a windy day in vancouver, i finaly got to meet Expo Ernie.
Got another Tachikoma show coming up on Saturday. Big long ambient microsound installation set that will be instrumental and accompany ZERO CAPITAL: (the art collective that makes art with no money). Appropriate place for an aleatory Tachikoma show, grooof! I'll dub out some serious gameboy soundtracks.....
Went to this show last night, at "Forbidden City" - saw an amazing puertorican salsa (or similar genre) band. Unreal. Like the merengue version of The Slackers. Mad vocals. Danced foolishly and was served sake in a box. The best part is the box.
Gotta go back to the world at large now and scrounge more film festival free shizzle.....
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.
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 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!
~~~
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
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].
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
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
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!
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.....
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.
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
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
