*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.

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/

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.

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)

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.

I've been to this conference quite a few times over the years and, whilst it's normally great, this year was exceptional.

I'm going to blog in detail about this over at my "professional" web geek blog but the main thing I wanted to say here was just that I feel so excited about the current state of digital things in a way I haven't for years. It's making me want to learn, to code, to explore different media and different ideas, and to work with different people.

I don't know what the output will be yet, if anything at all - this is kind of more for myself and my own creative fulfillment (which tbh, I haven't felt since we finished the album nearly two years ago!).

Tell you what though, there are some awesome people doing awesome work at the moment and I definitely want to be a part of it:

[youtube]H_tOJDUUcuI[/youtube]

Andre Michelle @ FOTB 09.

Sorry I haven't written much recently, I'll do more in the future.

Seriously though, music has taken a very back seat position whilst I've become a father. The two weeks around the birth of our son is, without question, the most surreal, emotional ride I have ever experienced in my life. It's been nearly three months and I still have to wonder if it really happened the way it did. From the stress leading up to it, to the impossibility of getting straight answers from the medical profession to the worries to the heartache of seeing the one you love in pain. The euphoria of the birth, the way that seeing into the big hole in your wife seemed perfectly normal, the exhaustion and, more than anything else, the relentlessness of the whole thing still marvels me.

...and it turns out the cliches, the really horrible cliches that made me cringe, really, really are true. The immediate sense of love and protection for the little one is overwhelming. I have never loved anything so intensely and so immediately in my life. There was a moment, two days after he'd been admitted to Intensive Care with breathing difficulties, where I was sitting by his incubator and just weeping tears of fear and sorrow. It's pretty undescribable.

I wonder if there's an album in it somewhere...

So since then, life has defaulted to routine really. I can bore for England about fatherhood now - speaking to my dad-friends is quite funny now, and disgusts Josh. Whether or not there is time for the intensitiy of focus that I tend to need to write is unsure at the moment. It's been a moot point anyway cause Samy is touring a lot right now. What we really need is a week or two away from it all, but that's probably out of the question at the moment. I've been messing around with a few things, and I definitely know what I'd want another album to sound like, but frankly, I can't see it happening until next year now.

More importantly though, I think i'm coming out of the period of bitterness I've had about music. Will post about this in depth another time, but I think it was just something I needed to get out of my system.

enjoy :o)

*********************************************************
I've got a theory...actually I've got a few, which have been boring the electronica forums of the internet for some time now, but this is my current favourite:

There are now more people making electronic music than buying it.

I've no empirical evidence for this statement of course. It's just a feeling, an acid test if you will...dipping some universal indicator paper in the solution of the internet...But there really does seem to be an awful lot of it about and the problem, especially for an ardent music lover like myself with a disposable income and a strong desire to "do the right thing" when it comes to supporting the struggling artist, is how to filter it all. The feeling is fueled, largely, by myspace.com, the defacto standard solution for announcing your staggering musical genius to the world. I'm a big fan of the internet. I've made my career in helping build it. My "discovery" by the fledgling Toytronic records was thanks to mp3.com. It's been a powerful tool in helping me get tunes from where I make them to the ears of them that might like them. At some point, though, a balance was tipped in what producers might term "Signal vs Noise". By this I mean to say that the sheer volume of very well meaning youngsters dabbling in computer music, plus the cheap availability of some staggering powerful hardware and software has led to a massive influx of new electronic music. To paraphrase Dr Malcolm: "your musicians were so preoccupied with whether or not they could release albums, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Time was, we had systems in place to filter the signal from the noise - Record labels, an informed, interested music press, DJs as informed tastemakers and champions, a balanced radio spectrum with a specialist show for everything, and independent, community-orientated record shops. Post-Peel, the musical landscape is pretty bleak and now that we can't even sell records anymore, everything has been dropped to a level playing field.

Many will argue that this is a good thing. I can't help but extend the analogy to consider what happens when millions of people trample across the same playing field all day - it gets so muddy that you can't play on it anymore.

Of course, who am I, or anybody else to say that someone's music is worthy of being released or not? That surely is a job for market forces and their own tenacity...but in this level playing field of the digital music industry, it's getting really, really hard to find how who the next Aphex Twin actually is and just who is saying they are.

So until John Peel comes back from the dead, Alex Petredis stops fucking about and gets a job at a decent music paper or the kids put their cracked copy of ableton down and start buying records again, I shall continue to rely on my custom formula for myspace electronica browsing: Quality != electronica acts as influence + number of tracks finished per month + use of caps when announcing HOTT NEW TRAX + image based comments left.

More soon on why I can't be arsed...