Kou Chou Ching must have liked what I did with Black Heart and Tiu Tiu Ssu Hsiang Chi, because they’ve asked me to mix and master their new 12 track album. As was the case with Chang Jui-chuan’s recent Resurrection album, Kou have received a grant from the Taiwanese government for the project, but unfortunately the grant comes with some serious time constraints, meaning that I have about a month to work on my contribution to the album. Considering that my remixes for them took about a month each, it stands to reason that I won’t be able to do the same kind of make over on these 12 tracks. On the other hand, this is also not required – it is Kou’s album, so I consider my job to be to make what they’ve given me sound as good as possible. Possibly with some creative addition or substitution here and there.

I’ve just started serious work on the project (back from a long-weekend break in Kenting at the southernmost tip of Taiwan), but right now it’s rather boring technical work moving all the multi-track projects from Nuendo into Sonar, my preferred audio-midi sequencing package. Somehow, I couldn’t get OMF-export to work in Nuendo – the OMF format usually makes transporting multitrack mixes between packages a doddle – so, I’m stuck doing it by hand. It’s taking quite a bit of time, but I should be done with it today or tomorrow. Can’t wait to get creative on the tracks!

What a great evening the Taichung launch turned out to be! I had more than my usual moments of panic when I had to leave home and couldn’t get my newly made videos to work. The idea was that I would do two sets to frame Viba’s performance, and I had to scramble quickly during the last couple of days to get my first short set together. An emergency re-encoding of the short set did the trick eventually and I arrived in the nick of time for the setup.

The evening started out slowly and by the time I went on to do my first set, we had a tiny audience of about 10 close friends. Thankfully, people kept coming in throughout the evening, and we eventually managed to to give away 90 copies of the album at the door as people came in.

I want to say a big thank you to Viba for making the trip down from Taipei with his family – it wouldn’t have been half as much fun without his contribution. Viba eventually did two sets for the enthusiastic audience. A big thanks also to Patrick and Roger of Grooveyard for hosting us (Viba and I will probably be back at Grooveyard in October) – you’ve got to love a venue run by professional musicians; their passion for music shines through! And another thank you to Mark Forman who came with his son Kevin and made a very cool video of the first part of my set – watch it here. I’ve added some pictures from the launch here.

With the success of the Taichung launch, I’m looking forward all the more to the Taipei launch on September 29th. It’s bound to be a great party with performances by Viba, Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan and myself.