Chris Bailey and I had a fun performance at Mojo Retro here in Taichung on the weekend – playing with Chris is always a pleasure and something I hope to do more of. Chris and I had our best audience to date – but then again, Retro is a small cozy place and it doesn’t take a large crowd to fill it. Nice to see Mark Forman and his son at the show. Mark’s photography graces the cover of Chris and my Suncake Lounge Vol.1.

(photo: Scott Chen)

Today’s episode takes its name from a technique US composer Steve Reich pioneered (big fan over here!). I’m always struck by how easy it is to set up Reich-like phasing patterns in Ableton Live. Listen out for it from about 30 minutes into the set.

Enjoy Live Online #24: Phasing Pattern

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on August 30th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #24 via play.fm (128kbps mp3 – medium quality).

Download this mix for US$ 1.33 (256kbps mp3 – highest quality):

This mix is made available under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Taiwan (more details)

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After an absence of some months, Chris Bailey and I were were up to our old tricks (and some new ones) at Mojo Retro here in Taichung on Saturday. Below is an MP3 of the improvised section of our set, me on Ableton Live and windcontroller, and Chris on the guitar.

Thanks to Em. for the photos!

Thanks to Chuang Tyng-Ruey for the photos (used under CC Attribution license).

Nice! The Big Question performance went pretty much as planned. I was very impressed by the sounds Lee Chun (Pure Data) coded up in real-time and I hope we can do something together in the future. I did a twenty-minute solo set before being joined first by Chang Jui-chuan and then Kou Chou Ching. I love how adding more performers to the mix bumps up the energy levels. People were on their feet and dancing for Freedom Zen, so a nice first live performance there for Jui-chuan and me. And speaking of bumping up the energy levels, Kou Chou Ching really let rip! My big thanks to Jui-chuan, Fan-chiang, Fish Lin, and DJ J-little. We had a small meeting before the show and solidified some plans for a joint album featuring Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, DJ Point and myself to be released around June 2009 – watch this space.

The part I was most nervous about was doing the Ableton Live mix – live in front of people.  Before the show I’d gone around recording random audience members, asking them to give me small sound bites to use in the mix. By the time I got to do the live mix, the audience had shrunk considerably  and remaining audience members had had ample helpings of the Free Beer (ie. brewed according to a CC licensed recipe) – I was very relieved to have the pressure released somewhat. I thought the live mix sounded pretty cool, thank you very much. Keeping in mind how I’ve been at it for less than two weeks. Unfortunately the recording I made didn’t amount to much, so I took some time yesterday to recreate the mix using the same sample-pool. What you hear is 95% the Live mix with about 5% sweetening added because I couldn’t resist. I think it’s pretty cool to zone out to.

You can listen to the whole mix and download a copy from the SoundCloud player below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The Big Question Party

I’ll be performing live in Taipei again this coming Saturday at the party to The Big Question conference with Kou Chou Ching and Chang Jui-chuan. Jui-chuan and I have been looking forward to performing Freedom Zen together for a long time, so this should be great. I’m also looking forward to hearing Pure Data perform – should be cool to swap some ideas, and maybe we can even fit in a bit of a jam.

I’ve been asked to do some kind of audience participation, and to that end I’ve been having a look at Ableton Live again. I got a good deal on a Lite Version of Live (M-Audio Enhanced Edition) a while back, but didn’t explore a fraction of Live’s possibilities then. Having spent quite a bit of time with it this week, a whole world of live DJ’ing has suddenly opened itself up to me. I’m very much a novice still, but I think I’m on the right track. The plan is to sample the audience and throw some of these samples into the mix – fun, if a little scary ;^)