Author: moshang

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MoShang Live

Live @ The Big Question (Taipei)

The Big Question Party
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 Lee Chun 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 ;^)

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News

New arrival: Stone Bell (EP)

I’ve been working pretty solidly for the past two weeks on getting these six tracks ready for public consumption, so I do feel quite a sense of achievement with this release of the Stone Bell EP. Most of the work went into making the website at http://stonebell.moshang.net – since this is a digital only release, this is the place to pull these songs together as a unit visually. I took some color cues from Mark Forman‘s photo that I picked for the album cover.

Releasing an EP is a bit of an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes with that. Someone has already gotten back to me with the comment that he “doesn’t do EP’s”. For all I know, that’s the general consensus out there, but I guess I’ll find out…

At the moment, I’m starting to get the feeling of a slate being wiped clean – you know, getting ready to start something fresh.

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News

Largest Saxophone Ensemble

It’s not  every day you get to set a world record, but that’s exactly how I spent my afternoon yesterday. If ever I needed more proof that I somehow ended up in the right city in the world after all, Taichung yesterday hosted an attempt at a Guinness world record for the largest saxophone ensemble – keep in mind too that the town of Houli not far from here is almost entirely dedicated to the  manufacturing of saxophones. Anyways, we did it – the new record stands at 918 saxophonists all blowing at the same time and relatively in tune to boot ;^) I have a T-shirt and certificate to show for my participation, along with this vid.

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News

Tafubar – Changeability

After blogging about my work on it here many times, Tafubar‘s Changeability has finally become available from Lemongrassmusic. You can read all about it and find purchase links here.  I wish Tafubar much success with his debut release.

To coincide with the release of the album, this very fun video for the track The Man Who Had Bad Dreams has just become available, too. Gotta love that baby/pig/monster!

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Video

Freedom Zen

I’ve just finished the video I’ve been working on for my track Freedom Zen with Chang Jui-chuan. The track is off the CABACA album (more info and download links here) which has just also become available on CD Baby for those who want to support this and possible future collaborations by buying a copy of the CD.

I wanted Jui-chuan’s lyrics to play the starring role in the video, so I “textified” CC licensed still images I found on flickr, with the help of visual keywords that Jui-chuan provided me with. I animated the images in AfterEffects, and mixed them with some blue-screen footage I shot with a Xacti CG65 camcorder. I drew some images with blue permament marker and Emily kindly wrote the traditional and simplified characters for me. To save time, I rendered some sections and backgrounds online with animoto.

There’s a link to watch the video in high quality on the song’s YouTube page. The video is also available on Vimeo and there’s a link to download the original 150MB .wmv-file.

Unfortunately I have no pics from when we recorded Chris Bailey’s guitar for Freedom Zen, but here are Chuang Tyng-Ruey’s photos from the recording session in Taipei where we recorded Jui-chuan’s vocals and Bobo on the drums.