Audio, Video, and Noise Toys

Here in Ottawa, the art-tech festival Electric Fields is going on. It started this past week and goes until this weekend. It is a similar concept to the Send and Receive Festival hosted in Winnipeg as it presents an array of experimental audio and video performances with a focus on creative use of electronics and technology. Needless to say what I've seen so far has been quite inspiring, as I love festivals like these.

The fantastic Carrie Gates was in from Saskatoon performing on Friday night in a very special collaboration of Carrie's no-input video feedback with the circuit bent audio of Ottawa's Squelchbox. One of the innovative features of the live performance was using an array of photo resistors suction cup'ed onto an old commodore 64 monitor split off from Carrie's video feedback which directly modulated various portions of Squelchbox's audio rig. Squelch's audio also directly drove - or overdrove in some cases - Carrie's video signals. Very cool to see live. Hopefully some portions of the video recorded at the event will make it onto her site.

One of the other performances Friday night was the Montreal based group Tvestory. Their audio is directly generated from what's displayed on the screen - so you're hearing 60Hz based music, and since white and black offer the most contrast on a screen, the audio follows suit. A very intense experience when you are presented with 3 large vid screens and a set of 6 smaller monitors in a darkened church with a nice sound system. The youtube clips just don't quite do it justice!

Hopefully I'll be getting out to the "Dorkbot" workshop tomorrow which is a showcase of a few people who do 'strange things with electricity.' Hopefully at lest one will focus on building strange sounding audio generators...

Calibrated Records

The Calibrated Records site has now been officially launched.

Calibrated is the new sub-label of Blizzard Tracks focusing on hard acid techno represented by my alter techno ego, phaXis.

As a result, this blog is now serving both websites as a repository for the Igloo studio activities, be it freeform, techno, or whatever might be getting worked over, torn apart, or reassembled.

Samples for the first six releases are up on the site, along with a couple techno mixes from a while back.

Working on the details for a couple digital stores sorted out in hopes to have the releases available before the end of the year.

Studio Sorted

The Igloo is put back together, and in a slightly tighter and more efficient setup.

Updated pics and gear list are here.

Nice November weather means one thing...

Well we have a string of +17 degree days with lows that are good enough to keep the basement windows open. Since this is probably the last warmish set of days before winter really hits, that means only one thing: tear the studio apart and give the carpets their yearly clean!

Torn down studio

Storage room full of gear

Oh yes, and some pics from the Winnipeg Halloween event here.

Back to Ottawa

Sitting at the Winnepeg airport, waiting for my flight back to Ottawa. It was a solid event on Friday. Both rooms were rocking and sounded great. Props to Soundwave for their production of the night! Tight crowd for the freeform set, and the techno tag set with Rayne was no different. New tunes in both sets were well received. A good variety of creative costumes as you'd expect from a hyped Winnepeg crowd! Will post some links to pix when some galleries go up after this weekend.

Halloween Preparations

I've finally decided to start up a blog for Blizzard Tracks. I was hoping the new NuEnergy Collective site would have a blogging feature for the artists, but although the new site rocks, it's blog capabilities are not as full featured as what the Google empire has put together/bought out. And don't get me started on Myspace.

Regardless, this will hopefully allow for more of a freeform format (pun intended) for info about what's going on with Blizzard Tracks that really isn't suited for the "News" section. Since we all know Blizzard has never really had a high volume of releases, the blog should give some feedback to all of you about where Blizzard is at with tracks, artists, and gigs, as well as other random hardcore ramblings.

So, I'm getting ready for the Halloween event in Winnipeg on Friday at Soundwave's Scream event. I'll be doing a solo freeform hardcore set followed by a phaXis acid tech tag with Rayne. Looking forward to both. Haven't played back in Winnipeg for a good while, and the last couple of times were only techno sets.

I'm finishing off a new Blizzard tune for the event as well (as well as a couple tehcno tunes). The freeform track has a techno-ish foundation dropping to a huge trance breakdown. Here's a sample of it so far for you all!