Got back from Bloc yesterday with a head buzzing with things. I'll crosspost what I wrote on ninja about the weekend here with more on the last point to follow:

*loved* antipop consortium. set of the weekend for me. really tight and beautifully done. empty room mind. I think we had more people for agt.

highs:

Placid for kicking our weekend off good and proper and for playing probably the best actual tunes of the festie

AE for basically taking hardcore and sticking it through their algorithms and playing the resulting mess real, real loud. got proper lost in it.

Both of our sets, particularly Digitonal where I tested out a load of new stuff and really got off on it. AGT was great fun as well - started with an empty room and filled it in about 10 mins. great vibe in there - scrappy set by our standards, but the energy was tiptop.

Swimming pools, lazy rivers and general chillage with fine company.

Mixmaster Mike and the shoddy work. This was gloriously entertaining provided you weren't taking it too seriously. if your *thing* is to be a turntablist, then I kind of expect you to be able to bring a fucking beat in on time. and yet somehow he gets away with it by being able to hold the crowd, despite sub-student level skills on display (that said, when he gets it right, it was breathtaking). I suspect trying to do too much at once and not having a grasp of serato yet.

Fails:

Too much dubstep, by far. seriously, I've tried with it I really have but it's just so fucking boring.

Flying Lotus. Seriously didn't get that and I was way hyped for his set. We lasted about 7 or 8 minutes and then thought fuck that. Apparently there were sound problems.

The general, relentlessness of where dance music is right now...

Listen kids, noise is great. banging beats are great. dirty synths and filthy basslines...all good. but you need a bit of contrast to make it work. otherwise (and I realise I sound like my dad here), it really *is* just noise. you're all so busy trying to out fucking filth each other that forget to put in a tune and without that, my friend, it really gets pretty boring pretty quickly. Anyway, mho, naturally but I'm pretty sure that's why our set got such a passionate response.

I made a beautiful discovery today:

The multiple artist ambient project

I'll not dwell on the "worthiness" of the project and the open source ethic and the power of collaborative work, but just to say that it's beautiful. Really, really beautiful. I've been happily listening to it for a good half hour now as I type just letting the sounds wash over me, and mixing things in and out.

I really want to work on a nice interface for it with generative controls. Speaking of generative things, I've nearly finished my virtual christmas card. I'm trying to learn a lot about generative art, pattern making and algorithms at the moment, partially for work and partially for pleasure. I can see it being a cornerstone of my work in the next decade.

eta: whilst looking for visual inspiration for this, I came across this beauty: http://ku-schneider.com/

Ok, I'm here, which means that worked. Despite an almost amusingly useless tech support chat with my otherwise awesome hosts:

Sally: which browser you are using to login to your control panel ?
Andrew: I've tried both Chrome and Firefox on PC and Firefox on Mac
Sally: I would like to recommend you to use windows operating system
Sally: and check the same using another browser such as IE or mozila
Sally: the problem you are facing due to browser

So I've updated the site CMS to B2Evolution 3.2.3 which adds a few nice features, most notably the ability to update Twitter with my posts. Which is nice.

Actually, I'm quite into Twitter now, having finally "got it" at a developer's conference earlier this year. Whilst my laziness in keeping this site in check probably gives it away, I am actually a web developer by trade (although I'm in management now so my l33t skillz0rz are way out of date). You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/digitonal - it's mostly personal nonsense, abuse to friends and the odd bit of tech news, but I'll also be posting anything and everything about gigs, recording and releases next year through that channel.

ttfn.

Anyway, we're back, we're in good shape, I did a bit of writing this weekend gone, it was quite nice and I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break to get some serious work done.

I'm excited. Really excited.

Cause tomorrow I'm going to, in my AGT Rave Cru guise, be DJing at Heaven, in support of 65daysofstatic. I'm mostly excited cause 65 are probably the people that I respect most in music right now, as well as being very treasured friends and a night with the chaps is always a laugh (plus they're going to be playing lots of new material which will be something to get excited about). But I'm also excited cause there's a funny full-circle thing about doing this gig, at this time.

It was 1994 that I first moved to London from the small North-Eastern rural village that I'd spent my frustrated teenage years in, returning home in many ways, after eight long, formative years in the North East. In short, I had a lot to get out of my system and, shaking off the standard grunge rebellion that fitted me awkwardly at the time (good tunes though - Pixies have never been bettered), my colleagues at the Empire Cinema introduced me to dance music.

The story goes a little like this - one night, we're cleaning up the massive, 1,500 capacity cinema, after the Virgin Club Awards have been held there. Someone finds a load of aftershow tickets at the Hanover Grand. We rock up - it's mostly shit. I hate the music (that insipid branch of "funky house" that still bores bars the country over). Shit that is, until H steals an entire crate of Virgin Vodka from behind the bar and we proceed to have the best night of our lives.

A week later, barely over our hangovers, we decide to do it all again and, rather than go to the usual boring pub, one of our more enlightened colleagues invites us to his regular haunt, a central London gay club called Heaven.

Again, cutting a long, epic story short, I go to the club (it's a Friday night session called Garage), someone puts something small and white in my mouth and I share a moment of epiphany at the hands of DJ Blu Peter and, I later find out, Cygnus X's The Orange Theme. After this, it's techno, electronica, ambient, minimalism (I first heard Steve Reich at a back to mine after one of these sessions) and pretty much everything that now shapes my musical output.

I continued going to this night religiously for 3 years, before other (Sunday) Social's called me away and time passed. It's funny to think of things going full circle - that almost exactly 15 years later, with a wife and child and my very own records released, I'll be taking to the decks in that very club. It's going to be a moment of utter nostalgia for me. Although I'm not really in touch with anyone from those days, those nights were to shape me so completely and utterly, it's quite daunting going back. Phaedra, Trel, Max, Adrian, H, Didde, Steve - wherever you are, this one will be for you. I will, of course, be playing The Orange Theme.

:o)

"I like these calm little moments before the storm" - Sgt Stansfield

Things, such as they are, are ramping up. Firstly, the AGT Rave Cru project that Josh and I have been nurturing over the last couple of years, seems to be getting busy, with an early booking for a major festival next year and lots of other good things in the pipeline. Secondly, and this is the biggy, Samy and I have started working on a new album. I say this with some trepidation because, as anyone who has tracked this band for a while will know, this is normally an agonisingly slow process for me. Couple this with the family and paying the rent etc and the general slog that is getting from one side of London to the other every day, and there's not much time for creativity. But that said, I'm feeling really good about things for once.

Reading back to earlier posts, especially the indulgent "state of the industry" posts, I can't escape the feeling of overwhelming negativity that I've had about music until recently. Now, however, I'm resolved to suspend caring about it all for a while and get back to what I actually enjoy about being a musician - making music. Samy came over last week and we played together for the first time in ages. It was awesome. He's possibly been doing a bit too much jazz lately, but that's ok.

No idea of the shape of the album yet, but I'm really looking forward to freshening the sound a bit and getting stuck into it all.

To reflect this, I'm going to start tidying the website a bit. I've made a few minor cosmetic changes and you'll see lots more of these in the near future.

I'm also going to keep updating Twitter with the latest news.