I want to give you an audio tour of  the Taichung City which is my home here in Taiwan. To put you in the picture, Taichung is located roughly in the centre of Taiwan and it’s is the third largest city after Taipei and Kaohsiung. I’ve been living in Taichung since I arrived in Taiwan going on 7 years ago.

Download Songs for Taichung for US$ 1.33 (256kbps mp3 – highest quality):

00:00 Part 1 [Construction]

We start at my home which is on the 4th floor of an apartment building in Dali City, itself a suburb of Taichung south of the city center. I’m on the balcony and capture the sound of construction going on next door. Our neighbor is a pretty unsightly parking lot, but if you look at satellite photos of my neighborhood on Google Earth, you’ll see that what is now the parking lot used to be a rice paddy – probably until about 5 years ago or so. That explains the water tower and small pond under my my window.

07:05 Part 2 [Cycling]

Let’s get out and about. I invite you to hop on my bicycle with me as we brave the traffic and head out into the streets of Taichung. We’re armed with a sound recorder to capture anything of interest, so let’s see what we can find. Ready? Here we go.

12:10 Part 3 [Recreation]

Our first stop is Taichung Park roughly at the center of the City. The idea is to get out of the noise and traffic for a bit. My nerves are a little frazzled from the trip here, and I’m also a little frustrated that thus far we haven’t found too many useful sounds. While, I ponder where I should take you next I beat this tattoo on some exercise equipment the City Government kindly provides in most of Taichung’s parks.

16:53 Part 4 [Golden Years]

A little further along Taichung Park we come across some old folks who have gathered in the shade of the trees to play Chinese chess and to chat the afternoon away. Let’s stay a while and eavesdrop.

21:12 Part 5 [Commerce]

Hunting sounds like this is hot work – let’s quickly pop into a 7-11 and get something to drink. By the way, if you ever come to Taiwan don’t make the mistake my friend did and use a 7-11 as a landmark – there are literally hundreds of them everywhere in Taichung and around Taiwan.

27:08 Part 6 [Market]

It’s time to visit one of Taichung’s popular night market streets, Yijhong Jia. Hey, it’s only 3PM, but already Yijhong Street is crowded  – there’s no way we can ride through the throng. Better to get off and push the bike.

32:54 Part 7 [Teawhistle] from Made in Taiwan (2004)

After a visit to Yijhong Street, it’s time to head back home. To my first apartment in Taichung, as it turns out, where an old gentleman used to come round every night with a with a big kettle mounted on the back of his bicycle. You can hear steam escaping from it with a whistling sound

Running Time: 37:00

I do hope you’ve enjoyed this small trip around my city. I haven’t come close to showing you everything, so maybe we can do this again some time.

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

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A big thanks to David Carboni for tipping me off to the cool synergy between my tunes and the hypnotic visuals from the Electric Sheep screensaver – or rather, “collaborative abstract artwork” as its creator Scott Draves describes it. In short, rather than just displaying the visuals each computer running the screensaver forms part of supercomputer and renders individual frames for these spectacular animations. Even better, the resulting visuals are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 (USA) license, meaning I am free to make this mashup with my music.

For this video, I grabbed some rendered animations from Sheep Packs 3 & 7 and dumped them into animoto.com, along with an extract from Live Online #24 – cool timing, since animoto.com has just added the video uploading feature in the last couple of weeks.

This mashup is similarly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 (Taiwan) license and you can download the original animoto renders here:

MLO24-ELECTRICSHEEP.mp4 [high resolution - 139MB]

MLO24-ELECTRICSHEEP_DVD.iso [image for burning a DVD - 322MB]

MLO24_ELECTRICSHEEP.3g2 [320*240 cellphone version - 17MB]

Owing to internet gremlins (or possibly the mild typhoon that’s just leaving Taiwan), I had streaming problems in Second Life today and had to cancel the show at Substance. This week’s episode was recorded at Mood Lounge on Thursday.

Starting this week, there are more listening and downloading options. I’ve started archiving these sets as 24bit masters and can now offer a higher quality mp3 for a small fee. You can still download a free version at 96kbps (the same quality I use for streaming these sets live). You can also listen to a medium quality version at play.fm. I welcome your comments on this arrangement – keep in mind that it’s not an easy task to balance spreading the music as far and wide as possible with my eventual goal of making a living from it ;^)

This recording was made at Mood Lounge (Second Life) on June 14th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #14 via play.fm (128kbps – medium quality).

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

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

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Lucky no.13! This week’s recording starts off really chill, but features some new drum & bass elements later, as well as a stretch with a strong Asian feel – playing the cards close to home.

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on June 14th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #13 via play.fm

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

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Back in the groove after missing my show last week.

Good news! Chris Bailey and I met yesterday and made a date for doing a Suncake Lounge album launch in Second Life, and after today’s SL performance we have a venue, too:

MoShang & Bailey Live Online @ Substance (Second Life), Saturday June 27th, 9pm – 10:30pm

It will be the first time I have someone in the studio with me for a Live Online performance, so color me excited! And with that, here’s MLO #12:

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on May 24th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #12 via play.fm

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

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It was crunch-time last week with work on “Kou Chou Ching presents: Unsung Heroes” – unfortunately I had to cancel SL shows to accommodate the workload. So, we time-travel a bit for this week’s installment to a previously unreleased SL recording from April.

I recharged my creative batteries last night in Taipei at a performance of Ennio Morricone’s music with the Italian maestro himself conducting a 100-person orchestra he imported from Hungary, and a 110-person choir from Taiwan. Amazing, moving stuff!

Last week I promised a sample pack of my original loops from Live Online #1-10 and here it is:
MLO Sample Pack 1
It is a 193MB .zip download containing 78 loops in 24bit, 44.1kHz stereo quality.

Like the Live Online Podcast, the sample pack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Taiwan license, but a commercial license is available here for $9.95 USD in case any producers out there want to make use of these loops in commercial tracks.

That was quite a mouth-full, but here’s Live Online #11.

This recording was made at Greenies Home (Second Life) on April 8th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #11 via play.fm

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

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We’ve reached a landmark – ten episodes of Live Online, and almost 10 new hours of my tunes floating around the interwebs. Just amazing how time flies when you’re just chillin’.

I’ll be making a sample pack available of my original material from the first ten episodes soon. I’m not so sure it will be this week though, as I’m working hard to meet a deadline for “Kou Chou Ching presents: Unsung Heroes”, an album I’m working on in collaboration with Taiwanese artists Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, and DJ Point.

More good news is that printed copies of Suncake Lounge Vol. 1 arrived today – order yours on the Suncake Lounge website.

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on May 24th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #10 via play.fm

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

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I particularly like the way this one came out, but I’ll let you be the judge.
Atomic Gaffer did it again with another great shot of my avi taken during the show.

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on May 17th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #9 via play.fm

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

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Continuing to explore new sonic territory – watch out for a sample pack of original MLO material coming in about two weeks.

This recording was made at Substance (Second Life) on May 10th, 2009.

Alternatively, listen to Live Online #8 via play.fm

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

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