I’ll be performing live with guitarist Chris Bailey at Mojo Coffee in Taichung this Saturday (May 3rd) from around 8pm. We have the honor of being the first artists to perform there, since it’s actually a brand new branch: Mojo Coffee RETRO – and located at Wu Chuan Shi Rd. Section 1, no. 116 (click here for a Google map), right near the art museum.

Chris and I last played together in 2005 with Rhythm Clowns at the Taichung Jazz Festival. Chris will jam with me on my set and I’ll be jamming with him on his. It’s going to be a goodie!!

Photos by Chuang Tyng-Ruey.

Em. and I were in Taipei on Saturday. At the invitation of Chuang Tyng-Ruey of the Academia Sinica and Creative Commons Taiwan, I did my “Jamming with Machines” presentation at the OpenTechSummitTaiwan2008 and also did a small performance later with PigHeadSkin, the first musician to release a Creative Commons album here in Taiwan.

The venue was ASUS Headquarters, and being a huge fan of the EeePC, I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store. I’ve been looking at one of these mini-marvels  for a long time now as a super-portable replacement for the current Ben-Q laptop I’ve been doing my live performances on. Essentially, the EeePC will have to be able to run one instance of a combinator in Propellerhead’s Reason, whilst playing a .wmv with my backtrack and backround visuals.

Though the EeePC is not necessarily intended for doing heavy duty multi-media tasks, I somehow feel confident that it will be up to it. Especially since the new EeePC 900‘s processor is capable of running at full 900MHz capacity with no fixed underclocking as was the case with the EeePC 700 / 701. It didn’t want to do too much fishing about future versions of the EeePC and can’t confirm any of the rumours of an Intel Atom based version or 10″ version coming soon.

What I do know for a fact, though, is that there is a later version in the works (ie. later than the just released EeePC 900) and that this version will come bundled with a couple of my tracks. HOW EXCITING IS THAT!!!

Honestly, ASUS have gotten it so right with the EeePC that I’m over the moon to be associated with it even in the smallest way. Deservedly or not, there’s long been this idea (even amongst the locals) that Taiwan is best at making copies of things rather than being innovative. Hopefully the slew of EeePC competitors that have been announced since its release will go some ways towards putting that notion to rest.

On the Amarok blog Seb Ruiz posted this pic of the very cool Mona Lisa in the lobby of ASUS HQ – made entirely of motherboard components.

I’m live in Taichung again for a change this Saturday, performing in support of Kou Chou Ching’s album release. I’ll be joined by Chang Jui-chuan for four songs, so it’s actually a collaboration set. Looking forward to it!

I’m thankful that the stress of preparing for it is behind me, but I had fantastic time at the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age (ACIA) in Taipei last Saturday (19th). I did a presentation on Jamming with Machines in front of a very distinguished audience that had me feeling a little out of my depth, but as organizer Chuang Tyng-Ruey explained, it was helpful to have an artist’s perspective in amongst those of lawyers, academics an device manufacturers. I spoke last in the morning session on Tools for creativity, collaboration, and communication that was opened by a keynote address by Harvard Law Professor, William Fischer, and chaired by Mike Linksvayer (vice president of Creative Commons). Also featured were presentations by Sean Moss-Pultz (OpenMoko), Ellis Wang (ASUS), Takeshi Honma (SONY) and Jon Philips (Creative Commons).

In the afternoon, I attended a meeting with musicians attending the workshop from other parts of Asia. The meeting was led by Pig Head Skin (Taiwan) who has released a number of albums under CC licenses, and attended by Lisa Diy from the Philippines, Sudev Bangah (Malaysia), Bust This (Korea), a hip-hop duo whose album was the first to be released under a CC license in Korea and Fan-chiang of Kou Chou Ching, who performed with me in the evening. It was an interesting meeting of minds, and we left with the resolution to create a collaborative album together, which I will probably mix.

In the evening it was time for the Asia Megamix Party at Riverside Cafe in Taipei featuring all of the artists who were at the afternoon’s meeting. It was a great way to round off the day’s proceedings. My great thanks to Chuang Tyng-Ruey for inviting me to workshop and for his hard work in organizing such a successful CC event. Many thanks also to Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan and André van Rensburg for joining me for performances in the evening. Here’s a video of my jam with André van Rensburg and Kou Chou Ching‘s DJ J-Little: