The Usual Monday Bullshit...

This made the rounds a couple months ago, courtesy of a @GreatDismal tweet, if memory serves me. For some reason I keep coming back to it. This agency, MK12, owns After Effects in a manner far beyond that of mere mortals, and their Vimeo channel is absolutely littered with ludicrous examples of their skill. This particular video, which combines completely off-the-hook sound design with AE trickery the likes of which you rarely see, is the best of the bunch, though.

I’m working on a group of generative artworks that kind of have the same feel to them; being done in real time and purely procedurally, they won’t be at this level of sophistication, but visually they’re in the same ballpark. I’m using the covers of several 50s era electronic music records as touchstones/starting points. Each work will consist of a 19” LCD monitor (4:3, not 16:9) with a Beagleboard strapped to the back, running Processing, in an aluminum frame. It will have the ability to generate, on the fly and with motion, four different pieces. I have the code running on my Mac right now; the first Beagleboard arrives this week, and I’ll put up a video when I’ve got the whole mess running. I anticipate many, many headaches getting the proper combination of Linux and Processing to work, and I also assume I’m going to have to dumb the works down a bit, as a Beagleboard doesn’t have a lot of horsepower.

In other news, the RT60 record is completed, song-wise. I have to go back and mix a couple tracks again, but for the most part it is done. I’ll have some more info about that in the immediate future; Jeremy and I have to decide how we’re gonna roll things out, but Bandcamp will no doubt be involved.

In AD news, we ran in to a weird issue with the Axon update; when we moved the OS X version to VSTGUI4, it got really laggy, visually. Adam is (as I write this) trying to figure out what’s causing the slowdown. As soon as that’s out of the way, we should have the update out pretty quickly. While he’s working on that, I am, of course, working on the UI update to Replicant.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. You know what we haven’t done in a while? Had a Hawt New Music thread. I could seriously use some new tracks to listen to while I’m pushing pixels. What’s caught your ear lately? And, as always, try to put at least a little editorial in your post rather than a big fat list of names. I don’t want to have to google some band that turns out to be some Norwegian death metal bullshit, and I assume nobody else does either.