Here’s the song “Vacancy” from Cosmik Debris’ live set at the Nyala restaurant in Vancouver on March 11th, 2011. I spliced together footage from my camera with another static camera shot from a friend’s camera.
I’m hopeful that I’ll eventually do some live visuals for Cosmik Debris, so stay posted.

It was good news back in the fall, when I heard that MiNdToUcH had released his first album, ToNight aT NoON (you can download it for free at Bandcamp I’ve been keeping an ear out for his music during the past few years, tracking his admirably steady flow of new tracks, in years past on Myspace, and more recently on Soundcloud. I first met him in my Seoul apartment back in 2006 when he came by my place to have a look at some gear I was selling. No transaction took place, but our conversation started.

I appreciate how he’s built and evolved his recording set-up. In a day and age when people (myself being one of them) get carried away with desire for the latest recording gear and functions, MiNdToUcH has so far taken quite a stripped down approach. Much of his music gets made on samplers, like the Akai MPC 3000, which would have cost a fortune in their early 90s heyday and are now affordable collector’s items to be found on eBay and used shops. But, far from being dated by the 90s gear, I find something very sustainable in MiNdToUcH’s approach to making music – it’s refreshing to see somebody recording machine-based music without being dependent on evolutions of Mac or Windows operating systems and the resulting upgrade-itis. He seems to have this love for his hardware, which makes him want to try different stuff out, but he doesn’t seem to stockpile stuff. All gear he has is used and part of his workflow, or else it’s quickly gone. There’s nothing flashy about his approach, no unnecessary gestures – watching him at his equipment you can’t help but admire the certainty of his hand movements, the lack of hesitation.

Seeing MiNdToUcH’s stacks of floppy discs, each disc containing one set of beats, makes me think of a poet and his or her stack of notebooks. Each disc holds 10s of seconds of sounds, not even a minute. He seems to begin with a process of disassembly – then, when all the suitable bits and pieces are treated and gathered, the assembly begins anew, but it is a different work that has been created. After getting everything ready in the sequencer and the right sound on the right pad, he records the output to an external device – he seems to be access most of the tracks from his album right on his Roland SP-4-4. Then, on another day, he can rearrange, refocus, and reconstitute the same fragments into another flow. What exists on these discs is not finished songs, but a set of sounds ready to breathe again once inserted into the sampler, possibilities waiting to be conjured.

It would do an injustice to MiNdToUcH to dwell too long on his gear or his workflow. His music is above its process. He happens to be a photographer par excellence, and, bearing this in mind, I can’t help thinking of him as a photographer of music, circling around the sounds that he samples, shining a light on what was previously dark, overexposing something, playing with the contrasts – some techniques employed later in the dark room and others at the time of shooting. Clicking, adjusting, rotating, freezing, tapping, releasing …

MiNdToUcH’s music does what the name promises – the music becomes part of a thought process – ideas looping, new ones joining, something remembered then forgotten, an idea modified over time, a new notion. This could be a soundtrack to finding keys and then looking for doors.

Having met him in Seoul, having lived in Seoul myself, I can’t help associating his sound with Seoul. When I hear it, I feel the stop-start rhythms of the bus that carries me through central Seoul, the random announcements – I see the little slices of everyday life and occasional drama that catch my eye through the bus window … the minor intrigue of someone getting in or out of a taxi, a couple side by side both on the phone, a kid restlessly waiting … being out too late, needing to get up too early.

On the day, I filmed the brief scenes in this video, I arrived at his place late afternoon. As soon as I got there, he said we’d go out for a drink, as he’d already spent ample time in his home studio that day. But I pried a bit, asking him about this or that, and in the process of demoing something, he stumbled onto some sounds he liked, and a new session started. Finally, one more disc was added to the stack.

A Korean friend happens to live down the hill from this impressive off-the-beaten track garden of sculptures. Located on the hill above a small town in Gimpo and in sight of North Korea, the garden’s leaflet states that the works shown here are based on the theme of reunification. I’d been here twice before seeing the leaflet, and hadn’t looked at the works through the lens of reunification. Most recently, I was here shortly before dusk on a cold December day. What few other people that were here were the typical exercising people you see on every Korean mountain. I like walking, too, and these sculptures seemed to attain such vitality, as I myself felt the vitality that comes with walking fast to stay warm. The park has at least 28 sculptures, made by sculptors across Korea, Japan, Europe, and America.
I present here a few of the works.

The process of moving reveals an ongoing war of attrition fought by objects. I filled this box with stuff I don’t need for at least 6 months. The question is how much longer than 6 months could I go without these things?

I’d had these freeze-pops in the freezer for ages with no intention of eating them and an empty frame, which I’d been intending for ages to try to make a random, melting painting. With one week to go before moving from Kamloops, I finally got it together to put it all together. At first, some promising patterns and colors started to develop, but the syrupy colored liquid was quickly absorbed into the cardboard, and the final piece ended up looking like lightly-stained paper.
I derived many of the sounds in the soundtrack by playing the free “bees” sound-pack, put out by Tonehammer, and available at: www.tonehammer.com

This is footage from the birthday party of Vaughn Warren, a Kamloops-area artist, who organized the warehouse parties (amongst tonnes of other stuff) which I VJed at a few years back. He gave me the call to VJ again. Soul Patch, a legendary Kamloops live act, played a reunion show. I love it when I have the chance to VJ for a live act. My VJ booth was located conveniently above the stage, and I pointed my camera at the stage, while effecting it and other footage through my VJ mixer and setup. I loved how it came together at times. I took a few excerpts and taped them together to make this video. In all the multitasking I was doing, I didn’t get around to changing the tape in the camera, so no other footage from the night.
It was an awesome party. Happy birthday, Vaughn!
Check out the flyer, too:

About two weeks before I filmed this, I had a dream of a black bear. In the dream, myself and the bear were in pretty near identical positions. The bear was on the edge of a clearing, upslope from me. I think I was walking near a stream. Suddenly, I saw the bear and for a moment I felt terrified, but quickly calmed down as I realized the bear seemed totally satisfied doing its own thing.
I’ve looked online to see if any particular meaning is attributed to a dream of a black bear. I read a few things, but nothing seemed to relate. I think it may be as simple as the fact that I’d been thinking about living in the Yukon lately.
But, this film is not from the dream. Here we are, on the side of a highway, with lots of cars badly (and dangerously) parked on the side of the highway between Squamish and Whistler. The bear seems to pay no mind, except when it hears a car honk. The funny thing is we drove to Whistler, ate lunch there, walked around, and drove back 3 hours later, and the bear was still there in the same spot, eating. Must have been it’s first meal in a few months.

A month before, I watched the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony, and was awestruck by some of the projections, such as the whale swimming along the stadium floor with actual water coming from its blowhole. For a bargain price of $30, I was able to get a seat for the Paralympics Opening Ceremony – I made the mistake of assuming I wouldn’t be able to bring in a camera – I could have get a lot of good footage, but instead all I got was this low-quality iPhone film. There were a lot of awesome projections, some of which I show in the brief clip above. Particularly impressive were these balloon/spheres that drifted across the stadium floor with images being projected onto them.
Using a 3D design program (Kinemac), I wanted to see if I could achieve something similar. This is just a practice test, but the results aren’t bad – five ascending spheres with looping images on them:

I visited the Urban Lights installation outside the LACMA museum in Los Angeles. As I walked around it, I had the idea that I could do a mock-up of it in the software Motion. So, that’s what this is – basically, a challenge to myself to create something similar to the Urban Lights within my software. Just took a couple hours – couldn’t really find good-quality images of old lights, but didn’t look very hard either. In no way, did I try to be exact in matching the exact type of light or number, just wanted to very loosely and quickly set up some lights in a similar fashion using a replicator. The actual sculpture has more than 200 lights with 17 different types of light used.

Here’s some raw footage of the actual sculpture site (by Chris Burden, 2008):

There’s a very good multimedia presentation of this sculpture, which I downloaded at this page:
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=161897;type=101

This is a visual remix of the Burning Man show presented by Vinny Vancesco and the Scarecrew at Fandango’s 2009 Halloween party. I mixed in video camera footage of the fire dancing and burning of the scarecrow with some of the visuals I used in that night’s VJ sets.
Additional raw footage of the burning man is available at this youtube link:

Thanks to the Fandango farm, Vinny and the Scarecrew, and the Fluid Fire dancers.
The music used in the video was found at ccmixter.org. Here’s the link:
http://ccmixter.org/files/7OOP3D/22020″> 7OOP3D
The track itself is a remix of DJ Vadim’s “I Want To Shout Out,” featuring Sabirajade.
The VJ equipment I used was the Arkaos VJ software and the Korg Kaoss Entrancer visual FX machine. Some of the image sources come from the included content in the Motion software, and also some jack’o'lanterns I nabbed from Flickr. Here’s links to the Flickr images:
www.flickr.com/photos/flickr-member/262924512/

www.flickr.com/photos/rogerlynn/280993867/

www.flickr.com/photos/lonecellotheory/282752592/

www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyhuh/284438332/

www.flickr.com/photos/43411679@N00/285184232