New vinyl

Got a (fairly rare) opportunity to head into Treehouse Records in Edmonton to buy some new vinyl on the weekend. YESS!!!! I love buying new stuff (btw - I dj under the moniker "cp style" and hope to start playing out in clubs every once in a while this fall/winter). I love walking into a tiny little record store with a seasoned DJ behind the counter who excitedly digs up a bunch of new stuff he "wants me to check out!", and I love sitting at a turntable in the store and previewing them all. I don't love paying so much for 12" singles, and I wish my collection could be way bigger than it is, but don't we all? And coming home and recording the records as digital audio files - one side at a time, all in real time - is a process that is both fun and frustratingly slow when extra time to do this is so precious as it is. But even with the advances digital music, iTunes, etc, there are just some things you can only dig up at a dj vinyl store like Treehouse or Foosh.

Have you bought any records lately?

cn

p.s. Oh yeah, so what did I buy this time? Underworld...Trentmoller...Rekorder...Oliver Huntemann...Depeche...

Ohama update

Just got word from my uncle Tona Walt that his special limited edition CD/DVD box set (including a track by me!) I wrote about earlier on this blog is now sold out/unavailable. Great to hear it has done so well, as it is fantastic music and a wonderful retrospective.

IF YOU ARE STILL WANTING A COPY --- you may be too late, but Walt says that the Minimal Wave website still has a few copies left. To find out more, click here.

cn

Caffeine Sunday dancing sexy!

Can't...stop...laughing....

Click here to watch us dancing to the latest Scissor Sisters single. Damn hilarious!

You can upload your own photos and customize your own dancers then let them loose on the Scissor Sisters site, www.dancesisterdance.com.

cn

In the studio - 17/09/06

Finished writing a second verse for 'Cubicle' and resang the vocals for real (for now), rerecorded the synth pad part and tweaked some mix levels, and spit the thing out again for more critical listening.

Also put together a one-hour radio show for cousin-in-law Jack in Kamloops. Jack was hit by a drunk driver a couple of weeks ago - actually he was rear-ended at a stoplight, got out of the car and marched up to the woman behind her and said "What's the matter with you, are you drunk?!" She replied "Yes." There happened to be a cop at the intersection, so Jack marched off to grab the cop and the woman peeled out into the intersection, hit Jack, dragged him 50 feet, hit another person on a bicycle and tried to flee the scene (but was caught by more cops). Turns out she was some high-profile Kamloopian (is that even possible?) , she's facing a big long list of charges, and the incident made the front page of the local papers. Well Jack is OK (aka, not dead), but is going to be laid up for a while so I wanted to make him a one-hour mock radio show with a bunch of new music he'd like and some messages of hi-and-get-well from relatives here. Turned out nice. Hope he enjoys it.

cn

Famous faces

I had to check out this site - www.myheritage.com - where you can upload pics of yourself and have them analyzed to tell you what celebrities you look like. Not an exact science by any means, but worth a laugh.

Who I look like depends on if I have my glasses on or not.



Glasses on: I apparently look most like Elton John, but also share a 53% resemblance to Spike Lee (Ryan and Mikesh will get a kick out of that one). And there's some guy named Chester Bennington that I've never heard of.



Glasses off: Jacques Villeneuve, Ritchie Valens, David Duchovny and John Mayer. Just off the cutoff point for the collage they generated: Zamfir. Ughhhhhh.

You should try it... who do you look like?


cn

By the way - I ran my dog Milo's face through the site too, and here's what it came up with. Hilarious!

In the studio - 13-9-06

Back to the cubicle - after listening to the demo mix for a while, I kept hearing 'Breath of Life' - one of my favourite Erasure songs. So I added a couple of Vince Clarkeish synths and changed another couple subtle things I've also had in my head. One of the synths is a straight-up homage to Clarke and I used something I hate using (but love hearing): step sequencers. Basically they are the machine that you used to (decades ago) have to use to program synthesizers to play notes on their own. They are archaic by today's standards but give a sound that's different than recorded-by-playing-a-keyboard sequencing. Reason has a step sequencer that I've rarely ever used just because it's so slow to enter the notes you want etc (not Reason's fault - it's a module that pays tribute to the old step sequencers by keeping fairly authentic to their "ease of use") but I wanted that Clarke arppegio sound... and eventually got it. This song is definitely steering into the analog synth dance area, rather than the big loud new orderish sound of songs like waiting for a whisper...

cn

Vintage finds ;-)

Check out this tape I found on e-Bay selling for $69!
Actually it's a photo generated at a fun little site called 'Says-it.com Cassette Generator'. You enter a couple of fields of type and it renders an image of an old cassette with your type on the shell. Very cool! Try it yourself here. The site also lets you make your "own" vinyl records and concert ticket stubs.
Have to say - in these days of iPods iPods iPods, it's easy to forget just how much tapes sucked. There is a nostalgia factor for me, but that's because I'm not spending my time winding mangled/eaten tape back into the cassette using a Bic pen to wind one of the rollers... and don't get me started on the sound quality!

cn