DaDa Royale / Touring
We did our first event a couple weeks ago, called DaDaRoyale, and it went off low-key, but lovely. It was a nice atmosphere and great to get some friends together to put together what came to be a fun and eclectic and occasionally experimental atmosphere.
Artists represented where Tatsuya Oe AKA Captain Funk doing an "improvised" set with an artist called "PCM" and some freestyle rappers and a beat boxer. We joined them for their set and it was nice, with lots of "sound effects" to riff off of, and we were going to try the BPM looping with sound and attempt to mix in with their set but weren't able to prep fully and decided against it in the end.
Joseph Nothing (Planet Mu) put on a "song making" show where he literally made a track in Cubase (!) and finished off with the completed track... perhaps not a completely sucessful experiment, as it was a bit lacking on the entertainment side.
David Last joined us from New York with lovely dubby electronics. David's "Push Pull LP" is terrific!) David was joined by "SEQUENCE3" on live visuals (another rare user of Modul8 here in Japan)
Lastly Nacci Tranquilizer did a lovely little live set with visual aid from "HEARTBOMB" (http://www.heartbomb.jp).
We put out a call for projector aid and managed to get together about 8 projectors for the event. We had them placed sort of randomly at various sizes on the walls and it came off really nicely.
Our 3rd man "Sense" did a lovely live painting piece as well.
We took David and Joseph on a small tour to Osaka and Kyoto where we joined up with the folks from "Imagined Communities" a label in Osaka. Nikakoi was there as "Erast" at the Osaka event, and the Kyoto folks were a blast.
The stuff we usually do with Joseph tends to be silly and off the wall, crazy collage style, but we teamed up with a rather ambient artist named "Lambent" and went for a more minimal style and this was pretty enlightening.
Osaka and Kyoto crowds were fun, very enthusiastic and warm folks.
During the Kyoto show I had that interface blocking problem occur again, but had a really busy screen happening with certain layers on particles and a nice color setting going, and decided to see how far I could take the software just replacing footage with the number keys. It actually went pretty well oddly enough.
Apple Store Ginza then Shibuya?
We got a call from a multi-genre Hip Hop DJ friend "DJ Quietstorm" recently who was booked to do a date at the Apple Store in Tokyo's Ginza (apparently he's doing a tour of Japan's Apple Stores in exchange for some arrangement or other).
There were rumors that Apple execs were in town for the opening of a new store in Shibuya and while Quietstorm uses Apple equipment alot for music production, doesn't any in his DJ sets, and they felt that they needed a little stronger "representation." So we joined in.
With Execs coming into town and not knowing what was going to happen as far as questions and answers, hooking up with the Apple Store network, and whatever else, I decided to take the opportunity to start looking into Quartz Composer for some more sound reactive options. Its really a fascinating to try to figure out and managed to modify some of the example files to create a couple original sound reactive pieces. They worked perfectly within modul8, albiet the processing was a little heavy and there was a bit of latency.
We put on a really "junky" show (in the best possible way), and got some nice comments at the end. The Shibuya store folks are enthusiastically trying to encourage us to put something together at the Shibuya store, inviting Joseph Nothing or another artist perhaps, doing a full-on demo of Modul8, etc. Because M8 is Mac-Exclusive (so far) they see potential to convert PC-based VJs I suppose
Big Events
We may be doing a couple festivals overseas next year, though nothing is set for sure.
This month on the 8/27 we will be performing with DJ Krush at Metamorphose which is a rather huge Electronic music festival just north of Tokyo. We're going to try to do something really big, live, perhaps get Sense to do a live painting set with a 1.5 meter high paintbrush and shoot this all from above to pipe into M8 and process of course. We'll try to make some footage to play on this big and small theme, and perhaps do some "birdseye" view footage to interact with him as he paints, leave footprints, etc. It will be interesting to see how this all goes down.
Resfest
We got a video into the "Electronic Theater" at Resfest... its "Just Briefly" by Daedelus and it is viewable at the link on the dadakingz.com homepage. Please take a look and feel free to send comments/critique!!
More later!