frey

I’m in Lisbon, Portugal, which is warm, and beautiful.

I’ve done a couple of performances organised by André Gonçalves, performing with Pedro Boavida in the wonderful Estudio Bomba Suicida, and with some of the super-rad NIP folk on another night, all as part of a NIP – Sonic Scope – Upgrade! Lisbon event, last weekend. There should be audio from the night with Pedro and audio and video from the night with the NIP folk making its way here in the near future.

Also, a website reorganisation is in order. Per some advice from others I’m going to put the blog on a separate page; plus, I’d like a separate section dealing with upcoming performances and another just for documentation of said performances.

Over the last few weeks, through performing at Ars Electronica, and then coming here to Lisbon and sort of falling into a NIP workshop week, I’ve become reinspired about performing live as a musician, and I want to start developing that here in Europe a bit more.

More soon.

P.S. – do you all like Five? Comments appreciated, as always…

Comments are now properly re-enabled! Sorry if you’ve been trying to post and not having any luck. Comments pending moderation were probably eaten, because I was getting 200+ a day and sifting through the spam to find the real comments was too hard, so ended up just denying everyone.

I’ve now got a new nifty maths question that changes with each post to hopefully stump the spammers properly..

Thanks to the ever-awesome Kakariki for pointing out the brokenness.

ps, cycling got called off today because of the torrential rain forecast.. will be going tomorrow at the crack of dawn.

I’ve added a couple of new projects, documenting my work with Lumen Digital Studio in New Zealand (who incidentally are looking to hire a programmer, so if you’d like to work on these sorts of projects get in touch with them; Lumen is an awesome place to work)

• Mult-User Multi-Hand Tracking System
• Future Farming roadshow

Hello copious quantities of loyal readers,

I have been having some email issues of late, especially with messagse from Gmail, but my server admin has hopefully just fixed it. Would everyone please email damian[at]frey.co.nz to say hello and, if it you get an error message in reply, please forward the error message to damian.stewart[at]gmail.com.

Thanks!

Hmm. It looks like ChangeNotes doesn’t work: I never got an email when I updated this page.

Stink.

Done: application for a-m-b-e_r’07, emails sent to Chantier Public, CAMAC, Impakt, The Interactive Institute, and Haque.

Todo: enormous list of seven million other applications and emails.

Over the last little while I have been rearranging things, and updating some other things:

• Added Projects page, with nice sub-pages.
• Made a more proper page for Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound.
• Added an embedded version Into the Wandering Wandering, a film by Alouis Woodhouse that I made a soundtrack for.
• Cleaned up the Downloads section – now you can actually see what’s going on.
• Made proper biography and about pages. I might merge these in future.
• Added some contact details.

Hooray for updateage.

Take yourself and your gear seriously. Spend some money on a decent hard case to protect your things. You’ll thank yourself for it.

Right. After pissing around for far too long I have finally changed the way the spam blocker works. I figure spammers will have a script that just posts faux comments to wp-comments-post.php, so I’ve added an extra boolean value that will only come up if someone comes to the actual website to post a comment.

We’ll see if it works… edit: crap! It doesn’t work. Bugger.

I have been mucking around with BEAM robotics, solar-powered musical sculptures, and my Wiring board — working along with my friend Dan (Anaesthesia Associates/Elbow vs Knee/Intimacy and In.yer.face) a pair of vision-enabled robots (built from hacked RC tanks) are taking shape. I have also bought a Mac 250 Entour moving head intelligent light and an open-source USB-DMX512 box to control it with, so expect the Frey live show to start having exciting lighting.

Philosophy at the moment seems to be emphasising hardware. I’m going to retain the computer for listening and incoming sound analysis, as well as vision and lighting control (wip), but I’ll be looking to move more to hardware-based musical sound generation, because the scope for creating interesting sound in a live situation from first principles is much higher. The plan is to control home-made analog gear by home-made interface to the computer — so I can combine the sequencing and high-level logic possibilities of digital with the sound, tangibility, and baseline unpredictability of analog. Wish me luck.

Traditional music composition is suffering, unfortunately. I’m not feeling inspired to write at all, and what little creative musical energy I have is being spent on my school project, which is currently not going very well. Will let you know when the situation changes (it will). Stay warm and beautiful in the meantime, darling ones.

SPAMMERS ALL MUST DIE

Will fix comment spamming block thing when I get a chance. Life is full of more-than-sufficient circuit bending, and insufficient sleep.

Hello readers. Been a bit quiet lately, I know. Apologies. I have been busy making music, playing a gig or two, and getting a job.

I’m now employed doing Secret Things involving computer vision and alternative interface devices — ideally the skills I gain in the process of doing this work will be directly or indirectly applicable to my performance music making practise. Frey is Live Music with Computers, and that means I have to make the Live bit work.

Some new tracks will be coming very soon. I don’t have a stereo in my house at the moment which means no ability to edit or master or basically check anything about any of the music sitting on my harddrive. I don’t want to upload something that sounds awful you see.

In the meantime, I like how the ratings play off each other — as I kind of expected they would ;-). If a track gets rated as ‘awesome’ and then a whole bunch of people download it and think it doesn’t deserve that rating, then they’ll come and vote it down. But because it’s a median based system, rather than a mean-based one, tracks don’t just gradually drop through the ranks. It takes a lot of clicks to shift a track off ‘awesome’ if it doesn’t want to be there, in other words.

Vice versa — perhaps the ‘bollocks’ tracks might be being downloaded in a kind of a perverse exercise in pain, and it actually turns out they’re quite good — so they get rated back up again.

As far as I know this system is unique. I like to think it gives you guys as downloaders and listeners a bit more of an idea about which to pick. Your time is valuable, and I love you, so I don’t want to take up your time.