The cozy Z7

Hard-pressed to sell it out but with this catering, wifi and fresh-brewed coffee I’d almost book the place myself just for the experience again.

Milan last night was a bit of a bust for me. Possibly the band’s best performance on this tour and a great usual Italian crowd- soccer chants and singalongs abound. Some technical issues to say the least left me with some lessons learned. Be careful who sets up the hazer. Ask all the obvious questions despite the glare you might get in 9/10 venues, because when those obvious checkpoints haven’t been checked …oh my.

Here we go for load in.

Pretty great 20 days in Australia. Learned quite a bit doing these shows. For the band and crew, we proved to ourselves that a 20-minute changeover is not only possible, it can be done in style. With some innovative gear from Planet Waves, our setup and strike has gone from patching about 64 connections to 6. Awesome. Equally, I’ve got my video placement and launching worked out to a point that, so long as we’ve got a roof over our heads, I can have video up and running in about 5 minutes.

The new pre-show Ziltoid TV, featuring such gems as ‘Meatball‘, has also been a success. The videos disarm the audience in a powerful way and really open the environment up to the antics that come when the band hits the stage.

All the great shows and learning aside, it was a great trip with lots of cool sights and even an 8 hour trip into Hong Kong central during our layover home.

Looking forward to taking the next few weeks to work on production designs and dev for the coming summer shows and as-yet dated tours. Lots of work in personal realms of code-learning (Max MSP) and always working on a few music projects.

The sun is finally up in the sky, somewhere behind those clouds, and it’s not raining. Awesome.

This completes today’s non-linear stream of thoughts.

Last day of tracking in Perth, Australia. Last full day of the SoundWave trek. Heading back to Vancouver tomorrow evening with an 8-hour layover/adventure into Hong Kong. Cool.

It’s been a great trip. Will have to post pictures to revisit when we’ve been back home long enough for the rain to start soaking up all the good vibes created here! Looking forward to the west coast spring though Lots of writing going on, production towards some end-of-year touring, a bit of work with DTP on the record we’re tracking right now, and of course hopefully spending some time in the studio with ProJect before the summer kicks off.

Time to head out into the sun for a little power-up.

Came across this post today at Karan Arora‘s sweet Posterous site. Having seen a bunch of these stations in person, it was nice to relieve the feeling of discovering them through these great photos:

Check out her site here.

“…there’s something at least metaphorically beautiful about living inside a locked groove, dancing with nobody.” PF

Decided to work at a coffee shoppe by the beach today, despite the rain. It’s a bit of a commute, but I’m very much enjoying the change of scenery. Current soundtrack: The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond this World.

Heading to Australia this coming Tuesday for 18 days of warmly welcomed non-Vancouver weather, fingers crossed. Will continue working on the new ProJect demos and a new electro-live-something-or-other music venture with ‘ol Dave Young. Otherwise the focus remains an Ableton Live & Max/MSP powered light-control project that is almost a year in the making at this point, and a few giant leaps from completion yet. When it’s done though… oh yes.

Dave and I keep threatening to realize an immersive performance project, with generative/interactive visuals and unconventional display concepts but as yet the current 2012 schedule hasn’t allowed for elaborate forays into artistic dementia. …or has it, I can’t remember…

In the mean time, locked in a groove.

Big Champagne is a company that has ballooned since its inception a few years ago as the music billboard authority for an industry beyond album sales. They provide data analysis across social media, news, illegal torrent/file sharing, as well as the ‘traditional’ music-popularity fields- itunes, radio, spotify, etc.

BigChampagne’s NetVibes page then is a great tool to get a quick glimpse of all the music related news in the industry, with the ability to click through any headline and read about it etc. One of their tabs is dedicated to Bob Lefsetz, a blogger self-proclaimed “First in Music Analysis”.. another ‘outside the box’ thinker, he provides a lot of great insight and motivating talk (and heavily opinionated rants) on his blog.

A more recent post of his, We Are All Weird, describes some interesting points about the new era of the music industry, based on Seth Godin‘s recent interview on his own web-company website Squidoo. This 25 minute audio interview is a really interesting insight into how the business world is moving, or dividing from mass-produced, generic, and heavily-marketed products, to a focus on niche markets- embracing that people are embracing their individuality, and that because of the internet, forced-marketing no longer works and can even hinder a product. Instead, innovators are conceiving ‘remarkable’ products that sell themselves by word-of-mouth, which occurs when something, or a facet of it, is ‘remarkable’… ‘worthy of remark’.

But is ‘remarkable’ necessarily a positive characteristic of a product? I think there is a constant interplay between remarkability due to true innovation, or quality, and something being remarkable in the same way we tell all of our friends about the horrific clown-car pile-up, whether we know that to be what we were experiencing or not… I’m sure there’s a line there somewhere…

…that being said, I just finished a new demo and sparked a great solo-live concept that I think pretty feasible and pretty cool. so thank you, distractions?

edit: and so it seems in posting this I somehow deleted the previous, perhaps for the better… hmmm…

It’s been a pretty great few weeks.

A (beautiful) wedding in Scotland.
A bit of backpacking Amsterdam & Rome, including meeting an absolute Max/MSP guru. Talk about inspiration.
Stateless at the Union Chapel and Daedelus‘ Archimedes set, a European debut, at Koko, both in London last weekend. And of course, more hanging out with the newly-weds.

And now a week of hanging in Dubai. The United Arab Emirates are a very interesting part of the world. Quite the cultural diversity. Beautiful architecture. Amazing food. Insane driving.

Working out of the National offices for a few days where a co-conspirator spends his desk hours. No shortage of excitement though. Writing lots. More music soon.

…Is it ever hot out.

It’s been an adventure of a few months between a 28 date American tour with failing bus and razor-drone music (only the best), flying into a return headline performance at a favourite festival in Helsinki, stopping at family-home in Ottawa for a week of 7-months-of-life catch-up meals and drinks and walks; a brilliant festival first in Portugal (and an awesome day off in Aveiro) into a 3-man acoustic production- vj’ing for solo acoustic performance and comedy? -rolling through Brighton, Southampton, Newton Abbott, and from Exeter to Walton-on-Trent rounded out as a 4some of the nerdliest flock of pigeons in metal, to a redeemed return performance and great hangout at a favourite UK love-fest.

Arriving back to home-west, the city doesn’t offer the kind of palette I’m particularly interested in negotiating in the exploration of new music. So off to the forest we go…

The site was a little broke for a while but looks like we’re up and running again. Just finished a week long run of festivals and acoustic shows with the Devin Townsend Project. As usual, awesome guys, great music and a self-inflicted learning curve steeper than most scholastic institutions I’ve had the pleasure of funding.

Back to Vancouver tomorrow for the first time in almost 2 months. Soaking up the west coast city and forest for two weeks before rehearsals begin for November; then a wedding in Scotland! September’s looking pretty good!

Back on the road with the Devin Townsend Project! A week of festivals and an awards show in Europe (creating & operating lights & visuals) then a month in the USA! Summer is on…!

See you soon and feel free to drop a line and come hang out if any of the tour stops are in your town!