Carl Craig, Francesco Tristano & Moritz von Oswald @ the southbank centre.

First up, let me get it straight out the way, that going to what is basically a techno gig and sitting in seats and listening seemed like a weird idea to me. But I was willing to have a go.
The whole idea was about having techno artists perform live accompanied people playing other instruments and try and have this free form jam kind of thing.
Fortunately, there were warm up acts for the above three, who had more planned out sets. I will get to why it was fortunate shortly.
Ok so first up was Henrik Schwarz and his buddy on a piano, inventively called the Henrik Schwarz duo. This was wicked. Easily the highlight of the night for me. Basically really melodic and beautiful tracks, where the piano didn't over crowd the laptop twiddling or vice versa. Think Eric Satie with a beat and weird and beautiful electronic noises in the background and you wouldn't be too far off. They managed to have an interesting concept, but it wasn't just concept music if you know what I mean. It had the ups and downs of emotion that music should have, and managed in parts to be genuinely beautiful. The second to last track may have even made my eyes wet a little. Wow, I thought. This sitting and listening to Techno is rad.
Next up was Matmos. They began and for the first fifteen minutes I was waiting for a dwarf in a red suit to walk on stage backwards and say "Garmonbozia".
Disturbing visuals with disturbing noise to boot was the name of the game, until it became a pretty standard beaty affair in the middle and then returned to weirdness. I enjoyed them on reflection....at the time my brain hurt a little though.
Next up was the three we had come to see. The good things. Moritz Von Oswald certainly looks cool. So much no moving charisma. He took minimal to the extreme. I think I saw him move once. He also stayed on stage behind his laptop after everyone else had finished making us wonder whether or not he thought he was still going and had a whole bunch of silent loops still playing or sub bass so deep only animals could hear it. Funny.
Apart from that though it was a bit of a mess. Sometimes I think techno artists are so caught up in their "we are actual musician" hurricanes of self doubt that they feel they have to over compensate by trying shit like this. Bands with real instruments don't generally go and play a gig without practicing some songs first, and if they did it would sound like a me and my friends in the late 90s early 2000s, drunk and fucking around with noise and instruments we bought from the 2 dollar shop. Example here.....yes we recorded it.
The thing is, our stuff is supposed to be formless, because, well, we are shit basically. But that adds a dimension of fun to it. You can feel the fun leaking out the headphones can't you?
But if you try and make a jam session have form, and also be pretentious about it, and on top of that have the levels all fucked up whilst looking for this form, so like an interesting melody will start coming from Craig, and he seems to be looking around going come on guys follow my lead, but Sax man goes, Nah I am gonna play something different and louder than you, and then piano man does the same, and then Moritz goes, my bass is lower and ignores everyone....take a breath Greg. Well anyway it was a fucking mess. Like a pre-school concert you got dragged to or something.
There were moments where I thought it would come together and that just made it more frustrating.
You wanna know what weird is though?
This is weird!

The endless loop

So last night after upgrading one of my laptops to windows 7 (I'm a PC and a Mac, and have 2 laptops.....how much of a wanker does that make me?) I decided that I should try and hit the music production again. Having never really finished anything up to a decent standard, and never really felt the need to make anyone elses ears bleed with my musical meanderings, mainly because they are so diabolically shit or weird, or weird and shit, I felt it was about time I tried to finish something.
I sat down with Ableton, and cracked open an old file, lovingly called, Greg_Edit_Fucked_v020. Thats right version 20.
I was amazed, that when I opened it, I actually liked it.
Hit the fast forward button to hours in the future, and I am left holding my hands in my head. (I meant holding my head in my hands but I am gonna leave that mistake in because I like the visual imagery it brings....plus my head is massive so its perfectly feasible)
I hate that creativity involves computers so much these days.....or at least that mine does.
I spend so much fucking time looking at fucking computers and trying to solve problems during the day/night, that as soon as I get posed with a problem that is computer based on the outside world, I flip several hundred shits all over the place and then go watch some pile of shit on TV whilst necking spiced V8 juice and taking intermittent smoke breaks, where I wander round outside in the cold giving myself shit for being such a failure.
Anyway. One day I will finish something.
Here's a mix I made.
http://soundcloud.com/gregatronix/greg-dec-09

Dusty Back Room.

Well here is a copy of the music video I made for my friend Simon Beeston. I would like to say its completely finished, but I basically ran out of time.
There are supposed to be six more plane shots, which in turn would have padded out the end more, and the stop frame footage of the girl in the room was supposed to be shorter and take up less time. It was just unfortunate timing that right in the middle of shooting and beginning post on it, I became one of the lead compers on a massively under quoted tv job, which took 2 months out of video making time, and my spare time......which was when I had to make the video anyway as its a freebie. That left me with little under 3 weeks to do it all, and seeing as I don't produce my time very well, I ended up spending too much time on some shots, not enough on others and none on the said six, which really would have helped the edit, because as it was I had barely enough footage to cover everything. Anyway.
I still kind of like it, but would have loved to have had another 2 months on it. But, I suppose, what are ya gonna do?
Anyway, the track is called 'Dusty Back Room' and my idea for it was based around my trips back to NZ. Everytime I go back (which now can be over a year between trips) I look thru all the things packed up into boxes and usually covered in dust. On one of these trips I found a viewmaster. I love those things. This was a few years ago now, but I had been toying with the idea of doing an animation based around the flick when you pull the lever for a while.
Simon and I also share a common love of planes (and Top Gun, haha) so I figured with the orchestral sounding track and the idea of finding things in a room, some sweet looking ww2 fighters would be a go to place as images in the viewmaster.
Being in visual fx, I mostly get to work with Cgi, and never models, so I decided to do a shoot with 1.72 model planes. I choose so small because they were easier to move the camera around, and I had to set up a blue screen studio in my spare room and that couldn't have been too big. I tracked all the planes backgrounds and the planes themselves in PF track, painted up some propellers, made a big sky texture, got some 2d cloud elements and threw them all into a 3d scene in nuke.
I never wanted the planes to look photo realistic, I always had an idea that they would look like a 1950s Godzilla movie model, or at least a bit bung but stylized.
The stop frame animation for all the stuff with the girl (the lovely Lyndall) came from the fact that I thought seeing as she was seeing moving images in a still image based toy, it might be nice to swap it around so the live action was made up of stills. I also wanted the whole thing to look a bit jumpy and not too polished. Kind of like Fantastic Mr Foxes quirky stop motion.
Anyway, I am not sure how well it worked, mainly because I have not had any distance form it yet, and I am a little sad I never got to complete it properly!