Happy Year of the Rat! Being a rat myself, I’m kinda hoping this will be a good year :^)
I’ve just returned from a short trip to the east coast of Taiwan – I’ve been meaning to go there for the last five years, but somehow never got ’round to it. So happy I finally have. It’s as beautiful as I’ve been told – some parts really reminded me of the Cape, my home in South Africa.
I’ve uploaded a new YouTube video with some ocean scenes captured in Hualien. The track is called The Light of a Firefly and is a lot more orchestral than the stuff I’ve been doing lately. Hope you enjoy 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.
Em. and I shot through to Taipei by Taiwan’s High Speed Rail on Wednesday the 16th for the launch of Kou Chou Ching’s new album, “Kou!! It’s Coming Out!!!”. Since I’d been heavily involved with the double-disk album, I thought it important to be there. I did a short set and had a mini heart-attack when my MidAir midi wireless system stopped working just as I started – luckily I had a backup wired midi system in the T-box that performed flawlessly. No idea what’s up with the MidAir – seems not to work off battery power anymore :^( I’d say you get what you pay for, but the Taiwan made T-box was really cheap, too. I did a couple of tracks with Chang Jui-chuan, too – nice preperation for the performance on the 19th.
Kou had a really cool turnout for the event. I had a great time finally putting faces to many of the artists I had heard while mixing the album.
I’m featured today in the Vinyl Word column of Taipei Times, one of the largest English language newspapers in Taiwan. Thanks a lot to Tom Leeming of Vinyl Word for the interview and article.
Just want to point out that my performance with Kou Chou Ching at their album launch of “Kou!! It’s Coming Out!!!” will be this coming Wednesday (Jan. 16th) at Underworld in Taipei, not tomorrow. I’ll be doing some tracks with Chang Jui-chuan as well – good practice for the CC Asia Megamix show on the 19th ;^)
Komuso and I did another performance in SL yesterday in our continued “beta-testing” of the collaborative show. Thanks so much to Osprey Therian for creating this very cool machinima of the performance.
