“Butterfly …
What dreams does it see
Fanning its wings?”

A 17th century haiku by Chiyo-ni combined with some 21st century butterfly footage.

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.

#1. Cellular Jungle – based on “Roll Your Own” tutorial – first of all, I followed the tutorial, then I tweaked various settings – really like the techno-organic look of this clip, like some outer-space foliage.

#2. Bouncing Audio Circles – based on “Audio Oscilloscope” tutorial – followed the basic tutorial (used the same music, too) about using Motion’s audio/image-effect sync settings. I then tweaked the settings and came up with this. Really like it. Too bad Motion isn’t made for live video effecting, as this effect is cooler than what I can generate with my VJ software.

#3. Wall Peeling – based on “Holiday Mosaics” tutorial – followed the tutorial, but used some different colors and background image. Pretty basic, but has a neat look. Not sure when and where I’ll use this, but for sure it’ll be a nice element at some point.

#4. Flock of Birds tutorial – this tutorial was supposed to teach how to add a flock of birds to a still photo. I used a church in Koreatown Los Angeles, since the original tutorial also used a church-like building. Anyway, I screwed up somewhere, because these birds I made spin around strangely and don’t flap. I’ll try again later.

Tried to fill the screen of my video camera with as many screens as I could fit in. Managed to squeeze in 12 screens – an old rear-projection TV, another cathode-ray TV, three computers, an extra monitor connected to a computer, a portable DVD player, an iphone, an ipod video, a mini-TV and two projectors projecting onto screens. Filmed from three cameras. Plus, a few extra DVD players were needed to feed signals.
Our household happened to have a lot more electronics than the average one, but what with the proliferation of new TVs, mobile phones, MP3 players, and digital cameras – I’m sure many North American households have their own fair share of screens.
As to why I selected certain images to be on the screens, I’ll leave that to the viewer’s imagination … but I will say more of my energy simply went into setting up the room, and we were in the process of moving out, so there wasn’t time to really work develop the images or create the kind of dialogue between the screens that would have been worth exploring.

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?