pocketsnacks

Not that anyone even glances at this blog, but what the hell. I’ll post it anyways.
I’m VJing tonight (as Lux Lucidus) at Space Gallery in San Francisco.

Come check it out!

Saturday March 28, 2009
8:00pm - 1:00am

Space Gallery
1141 Polk St.
San Francisco, California 94109

Last night I snuck outside the warehouse and hit Mezzanine to catch Jon Hopkins & Four Tet.
Man oh man it was gooood! First off, let me say the Four Tet was fine… Enjoyable. Yes he was headlining and all the hipster kids were there to see him (probably because Pitchfork told them to go), but he was no where near as impressive as Mr. Hopkins.

I was grinning from ear to ear most of his set. It started off with the long every building wave of pretty vibrating electronic goodness that just washed over you. As the set progressed it just keep swapping layers for layers and building into deep bone massaging techno with this super nice glitched out IDM twitch.

It was great how it went from this warm, slowly moving ear soup, over into piano-tinged melodies, into finally just heavy, gotta move your feet, where the hell did this come from, electronic madness!

I loved it… it was way more than I had hoped it would be. Oh and it was gear! Ot at least gear manipulated. He had a laptop running, but was twiddling knobs and slammin pads the whole time. Twas brilliant! My only two regrets were that A) they had no merch table for which to buy more of his stuff (I already purchased his 1st two albums in a heartbeat, online) and B) absolutely NO ONE I knew went. I was all by myself… which is fine. I’ll go to shows by myself if I wanna see someone and no one I know is interested.
But this was one of those shows where you kinda wish you had someone there to share the experience.
Oh well…

After that I was feeling pretty damn good, just because it was such an uplifting thing… So I walked thru the rain over to 103 Harriet (aka part of 1015) to hit the Space Cowboys Finger Lickin Anniversary party. There, I actually knew some people, which was not exactly a surprise. That was also a damn fine show in it’s own right. REALLY good breaks. Like, really good. Wasn’t some dub steppy bullshit or whatever the newest trend is, it was really hard clean super fun breaks.  I had actually forgot what good breaks sound like… now I remember.

Good music on a solo Saturday night adventure!

It is March, slightly past the half-way point till the playa, and we have started the ball rolling on Burning Man prep.
This past weekend, former roomie and co-burner, Agent37 and I busted into our storage space, and dug out two solar panels, three gigantic heavy-ass deep cycle batteries, various wire n electronic bits and my sorry looking, dusty rusty squeeky floppy tire playa bike, and got them back to my warehouse.

The batteries need to be reconditioned, which means charging them and draining them, over and over for a long period of time, until the all drain and charge together like one big happy battery… or something like that. So we are going to have to mount a panel here at Cyclone and get em going soon.

In addition, tonight I got to go over to see the cool new-ish apartment that Agent37 and his second in command, Comptroller Jugz, live in (in Noe Valley at the top and opposite end of the exact same block we first lived in SF!) and talk and plan for all things Burning Man.
As usual we have much to do, but it is not too daunting and we are not taking on any major new projects. Mainly just repairs and a few minor upgrades. I think we have it fairly under control… if anything the main part we are lacking this year is people. I think are camp may be the smallest it has ever been. Right now it is the 3 of us, plus Mr. Jason… we may have a few stragglers breaking off from Fandango, but that is not a for sure.

After taking a year off, I am looking forward to it for sure. I am excited to do the radio station again…
If you want you can check some of our on-air antics that we recorded in 2007 and 2006. 99.1 FM The BRBC

Recently I have found myself in that awesome position of really digging into some new (at least for my ears) music. I think it sort of started with my over listening to Tripswitch’s Circuit Breaker album, which I still think is just the friggin’ bomb. Anyhow, that kind set my mood for more down tempo leaning stuff than I had been listening too.

That I think led me back to Ulrich Schnauss , who I have been a fan of for a few years now, but never really got sucked into.

Well… I inhaled deeply.

And, man it is some good shit. I even went so far as to BUY some of his CD’s online. I do realize I am some sort of freak for actually doing that, but good music made by good people on small labels deserve our money. (Oh and I was also able to find Circuit Breaker as well. Got it too)

Sticking Ulrich Schnauss into the last.fm player also got me to discover Abfahrt Hinwil and their album Links Berge Rechts Seen.

They are on the Toytronic label, which my friend mr. projectile used to be on as well.

Their music is much more idm/minimal than the other stuff I have been listening too, but still pretty nice.

And then lastly, mr. projectile shared with me a link to a song on Jon Hopkins website, and I was immediately hooked and proceeded to buy his two albums fro his labels (Just Music) site the next day.

And wow… They are great. Simply brilliant stuff. Just tasty as hell. It’s one of those discoveries where you are almost happy you never heard it before, because here it is all new for you to take in.
Contact Note and Opalescent are just amazing. Go buy them now! I will wait…

Oh and if that weren’t enough, Jon Hopkins is going to be performing live in San Francisco on March 21st @ Mezzanine with Four Tet!

I gotta say, last.fm is the shit. It continues to turn me on to new music and keep me mindful of artists I like who are performing near me.

And finally, two of those CD’s I got came from Juno Records.
They are a great online CD store for electronic music and they are FAST. I order two discs on monday night, from England, and they showed up here, in San Francisco CA, USA, on thursday the same week. WTF!? Yes i paid for the FedEx shipping, but it was only like 3 bucks more… but DAMN that is fast.

I have waited for seemingly years for some one to write a decent note taking application. I used to email myself notes, web links, task lists, pictures, whatever… from one computer to another, just so I had a digital copy of some scrap of info for later retrieval. It was a pretty crap system at best.

I tried things like 37signals Backpack and Remember The Milk, but neither really did what I wanted and just seemed a bit too confusing for a note taking, task list system. So I never stuck with them.

The along came google notebook. While not the most sleek interface, it certainly did the trick. It was just a nice simple typical google web interface to plop information and link. It also had a  browser extension to make things easier. I used it quite a bit, but then along came Evernote.

Evernote is pretty much perfect. You can have unlimited different “notebooks” and within those, as many notes as you want. A note can be a link, or something written, or a snippet from a web page (text, images, or a whole chunk of a page). You can get stuff in there via email, or a txt message, or iPhone (or other mobile thingies). There is an awesome iPhoine app, a standalone app, and a browser interface. All pretty great. Oh and it does text recignition in images! Damn! When google announced they were stopping development on notebook, a flood of people when to Evernote, and within weeks, Evernote made a tool to import your stuff from google notebook.

Now although I love Evernote, it is a bit overkill for somethings, like just a simple link and possibly a map link you want to have access to mobily. This is where Shifd comes in!
Shifd is a super simple, minimal and clean system for basic notes, links and places. You cannot upload images or anything like that, but that’s not what it is for.
I have found it very handy for just getting a link to something I see at work, to me at home later.
I have also used it to for googlemap links and addresses for when I am heading out somewhere new.
Honestly there is nothig shitd.com does that Evernote doesn’t, but it’s simplicity lends its to be very useful in it’s own way.

This long rambling post really just reveals that I am still a pack-rat, even in the digital sense. I seem to like to keep little bits of things orbiting thru my universe, at arms reach.

I have a new idea on how to use this blog better and here it is.

This will be the dumping ground, if you will. The spot to post things posted elsewhere, be they tribe.net, last.fm, livejournal and even possibly stuff posted to luxlucidus.com. Not that there is anyone reading any of that stuff when it is posted to those various places, but I figure maybe one common place is that way to go.

Now if I could only figure how to automate that process better, so things cross-post on their own. I’m not the type of mind that can make that stuff happen, but I certainly can flesh out the idea.

Anyhow… It is yet another idea to attempt. Here goes!