Goodness gracious! Much going on! This blog and the old version of the mmd website has come to an end! Moving onto a much more manageable approach with Wordpress, behold my new home:

http://m.thequietrevolution.net/mmd/

This b2evo blog will remain here and stop as of now. Please make sure to bookmark the new website and update your RSS feeds!

My hack web skills always lead me to making mess, so every now and then I clean things up with this website. The mp3 page has had a facelift. The podcast is fixed and shall be up to date from now on.

I've also decided to put a new navigation graphic up on the top of this website - about time for a fresh look from my latest album artwork 3 Smargaid Maerd.

In the mad rush of things going on at the moment Iain reminds me that we've a gig on that I've forgotten about! This was last Wednesday the 24th, leaving only two days to get ready for the Armidale Club's open mic night on the Friday the 26th! Holy smoke, I though it was going to be a month later! Nevermind I thought, been practising for a while now with Iain, so we won't do too bad.

The evening was opened by Ed Campbell's 299's project throwing some laptop driven pop to ears that may not have experienced such a thing before. He had some fine moments during quiet sections and the electronic vibe paved the way nicely for Iain and I to go on second. Our project name has moved onto 'Solsonic' and operating as a prog-dance duo. Here are some in-the-heat-of-the-moment-photos thanks to R:

I think we played for around 40 minutes but it was hard to tell due to being caught up in the whirlwind of the sound and performance. Overall we achieve our goal very well, to play progressive improvised loop-based music with a sense of fun, groove, melodic engagement and characterised entertainment. Of course, many minor slips occurred, and things can ALWAYS be improved upon, but the overall energy was right on for the aim. And it was fun to do! That seldom could be said of playing live, as there are so many ways it all can go wrong. I left the gig feeling that something small but important was achieved, and that Iain and I can now build upon the live idea with confidence.

The 50 odd people were generous with attention and applause - no heckling or looks of utter confusion could be detected. Assorted audients came up and gave thanks after the show, which is nice to hear from people you do not know, or from people who are not directly 'there to support the project'. One particularly satisfying encounter was with a Zia from Wytaliba who invited us to play live for a fund raising gig for the Stockwood Festival during late November. To be asked to do this is a big honour, and I've long wished to play live there one day. Looks like there is much rehearsing and refinement to go!

This site has been loading very strangely in Firefox 3, and through Mick Rippon's help I've found that the Gallery plugin for this blog is causing the issue. I've temporarily disabled the plugin for now to see what I can do about it. If you're browsing older posts some will not appear right due to usage of the Gallery plugin with those posts. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon...

Alex Strain paid a visit to Galloway Street to meet me in person for the first time and set to the task of sorting production issues and having a little sonic fun. Much delight was had with his new toy: the Yamaha CS-30 synth. For someone who works probably too much in the digital audio world to hear this heavy bit of kit producing sounds of of this world via strictly analogue processing was fresh to the ears. Recent fascination with FM matrix routing meant we conducted an experiment in Frequency Modulated routing and noise modelling. We recorded a bit of it which you can hear here:

The Amazing Analogue FM Journey

Alex and I are hard at work with a few more tunes which upon completion will herald the release of a new 'collaboration website' to showcase our work. We have quite a few tasty treats on the boil! As always stay tuned...