Tonight I’m doing visuals at the 8static show in Philadelphia with chip musicians Cheap Dinosaurs and Starscream. If for some reason you’re not in Philly (i hate you), you can watch the live webcast tonight on Ustream or in the player below. I’ll be debuting my first visuals using the Open Emu QC plugins — wish me luck!

Update

The show lat night went really well. Paris and Outpt’s visuals were astounding, especially their set with Nullsleep: the work they’ve put into collaborating with Jeremiah really shows. I’ll put up some video of my sets this week. Technically, the Open Emu debut went really well — no crashes! Did have one hang, though (not sure of the cause), and two kernel panics (Bluetooth, when connecting the Wiimote). :X

8static: Starscream’s first song from plasticpool on Vimeo.

One video up, more to come: this is the first song of the first set of the night: Starscream (Damon on chip, George on drums) and my visuals. You can hear tracks by both bands on MySpace.

I generated the video live using the Open Emu QC plugins, which let me play original NES ROMs in emulation, live. I used two ROMs, one written by No Carrier and another called Polar Pinwheel by Chris Covell. These ROMs are being played totally live — no pre-recorded video — and partway through the song No Carrier picked up the controller and jammed with me.

If you’re interested in using No Carrier’s ROM, watch my blog and/or his site for its upcoming release (free and open source).

My friend Don (a.k.a. No-Carrier) got sick and asked me to sub for him this Friday at Lit Lounge, playing with Nullsleep, Anamanaguchi and Cheap Dinosaurs. Feel better, Don! Here’s the show flyer and info.

The Blue and Red 3D Spectacular
Nullsleep
Anamanaguchi
Cheap Dinosaurs

Friday, 9 pm
Lit Lounge (2nd Ave between 5th and 6th St)
$6 cover (I think)
Ages: 21+

Paul Owens writes to say:

Hey everyone, I just wanted to spread the word that the feature length documentary [Reformat the Planet] that I directed is now streaming off of the mega hipster site Pitchfork Media…

http://pitchfork.tv/week/blip-festival-reformat-the-planet

the whole movie. for one week only!

If you haven’t yet seen it, or have been waiting for a copy that I never got around to sending, please check it out now. for those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie, a little history lesson: i’ve spent the last few years documenting (with pals Asif Siddiky and Paul Levering) the Chip Music scene, which is an underground music movement based around using old videogame hardware (gameboys, nintendo, atari, etc.) as musical instruments.

Eventually we realized we had captured enough footage to make it into one of those feature length documentary-type things. Taking a year to compile the footage, we eventually premiered the film at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March. It also recently played in Melbourne, Australia and will be seen in Seattle, New York, and Amsterdam in the coming months. But who cares about that? Just go watch it now.

This Saturday at The Tank, we’ll be doing a live This Spartan Life show, hosting Pulsewave, the monthly chiptunes event. Is machinima. Is funny. Has live music. Hope see you there.

Info:

This Spartan Life Hosts Pulsewave at The Tank July 26 with 3 live chiptune acts!

Please note new address for The Tank, below

Damian Lacedaemion will be joined by AeroMC, Fyb3roptik, Dan O’Conduit, Amber of the Solid Gold Elite Dancers and 8 Bit Collective forum members, live on screen via XBox Live!

In gamespace, no one can see you sweat.

Pulsewave is the monthly live chiptune music event in NYC. This Spartan Life is the award winning “talk show in gamespace.”

Your host, Damian Lacedaemion enters the unpredictable multiplayer universe to interview various guests and luminaries all within the 3D gamespace of Halo 3 on Xbox Live.

This time, Damian and the crew from This Spartan Life will be on screen live to host a special Pulsewave with musical guests from the upper reaches of chiptune Valhalla:

8GB
Unicorn Dream Attack
Neil Voss

Visuals by the incomparable No Carrier!
Special machinima videos!
Live interaction between avatars and audience!
The bizarre and frightening world of the ub3r 1337 on graphic display!

All with a heavy dose of CHIPTUNES and EXPLOSIONS!

Don’t miss it!

Saturday, July 26, 2008 at The Tank
@ DCTV
87 Lafayette St @ White St
New York, NY, 10013
Cost : $10
Doors open at 9PM

Sept 27th I’m playing with Lance Blisters, stepping into the skin of Ilan Katin’s face-melting visuals once more.

Sept 28th I’ll be doing the visuals for Samita Sinha’s NAKED : a multimedia excursion, at NYU. Listen to some of Samita’s clips — this looks like it will be an interesting collaboration. Show info:

NAKED is a meditation on desire: the desire to belong and to express oneself, the desire for love and transcendence. For children of immigrants, these desires are informed by certain questions: what of our inheritance do we preserve, what do we transform, and to what degree? NAKED plays with these questions through a music performance of North Indian classical vocals fused with electronics, harmony, and global rhythms, against a backdrop of video of found visuals from classic Bollywood cinema, family photographs, and paintings. NAKED takes the nayika, the romantic heroine of classical South Asian art, as its departure point. Using the skeleton of her story– girl falls in love, breaks rules to enjoy and endure love’s trials, and glimpses transcendence as her beloved eludes her? The show describes what a post-identity, diasporic nayika sounds and feels like. Through 2,500 years of development in miniature paintings, temple sculptures, poetry, dance and music, the trope of the nayika’s quest has emerged as a complex metaphor for human desire. NAKED sets the nayika loose into the next frontier, the cracks between tradition and progress, for an enchanted journey that is as novel as it is ancient.

Friday, Sept 28, 7-9pm
Palladium Presentation Room A
NYU Wasserman Center
133 E 13 St, 2nd fl

Last night’s show at The Tank was fun. It was a bit of a struggle with my patch at times (lots of those texture binding errors) but I beat it into submission such that things started to flow, especially with Touchboy, who played last — and who I hadn’t heard before — great stuff. Asif and (?) from 2Player Productions (makers of the Blip Festival documentary) were there shooting some footage and posted a great duet by Glomag and Receptors on YouTube.

Straight from the Bit Shifter cosmic email blast to you, here’s the info for the show I’m doing visuals for on Saturday. Should be hot.

.: RECEPTORS, TOUCHBOY, GLOMAG, NULLSLEEP @ THE TANK :: 09 15 ::
.: NEW YORK NY US ::
This Saturday night features another senses-shattering installment of the monthtly low-/no-tech PulseWave event at The Tank, featuring Toronto Game Boy electro technician TouchBoy, and the intense, moody low-end crunch of Receptors. Covering fire supported by local legends Glomag and Nullsleep; cutting-edge visualist Dan Winckler dazzles your eyeballs all night. $10.00, all-ages. I’m not playing but I’ll be there, dancing like a spastic. With you.

:: TouchBoy, Receptors, Glomag, Nullsleep, & Dan Winckler ::
:: PulseWave @ The Tank ::
.: Saturday 2007 09 15 | 9:00 p.m.
.: The Tank | http://www.thetanknyc.org/
.: 279 Church St. | between Franklin and White
.: New York NY 10013
.: US
.: 1 (212) 563 6269
.: $10.00

.: PulseWave:
http://pulsewave.8bitpeoples.com/

I forgot to mention that I’m doing visuals with Lance Blisters tonight at the after-party for the 1st annual Anarchist Book Fair.

LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.

This Saturday, 14 April 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at the Anarchist Bookfair Afterparty with bands VIC THRILL and SATURN MISSILE, MOURNING GLORIES, ZEMI 17, and DJ’s CX KIDTRONIK, PETER GUNN, SHAKEY, AMOK, EMMIT BROWN, JASON BK playing a mixed bag of breaks, hip hop, d and b, techno, rare grooves, dubstep, breakcore, and…

Expect LANCE to play at 10:30pm

9pm-4am, Saturday, 14 Apr 2007
The Creek in The Cave, 10-93 Jackson Ave. (Long Island City, QueenS)
7 to Vernon/Jackson -or- G to 21 St/Van Alst.
$3-6 w/ ID
Google subway map from onnyturf.com

Last couple thoughts for the night:

• i’ve finally got time to play around with a media-textured avatar (think video skin)
• i want to make an avatar (in SL) that moves like Duchamp’s Nu qui descend un escalier #2 (nude descending a staircase #2)
• I learned a lot about texturing from the SL fora today. Check the end of the GIMPshop texturing tutorial I wrote last week for some illuminating reading on the subject.
• i made a couple ringtones last week — one of the tiny projects I squeezed in to entertain myself after long hours of teaching — in GarageBand and easybeat was very handy in the mastering stage*. Recommended.

* that is, playing it on my phone and transposing it in nudges until it sounded good.

2006-06-27 01:08 am.

this is something i’ve been meaning to do for a while: stream audio from my home while I play piano. Right now, I’m sitting at my piano practicing, playing pieces and improvising. Listen to me play if you like. Requires Quicktime (free download, iTunes install not required — look for a ‘standalone’ link)

1:45 am

That’s it for now. Here’s what I played (times approximate):

• 1:08 – 1:19 am: improv
• 1:19 – 1:27: Schumann’s little study
• 1:27 – 1:29: Mendelssohn’s song without words
• 1:29 – 1:31: Chopin’s prelude (Op. 28, No. 4)
• improv
• Enrique Granados’s valses poeticos
• improv
• Schumann, about strange lands and peoples

Let me know if you listened, please, and if you had any technical problems.