Home Based House Music/Band Resurrection

We all have our New Year resolutions to hold onto, I’m sure, but what I’d really like to do this year is spend more time on my electronic music project called Floordestroyer. I originally planned it to be a live electronic act complete with a real singer and all that tech stuff and wires running around with high chances of people tripping over them, and that really is still quite a realistic endeavor if only I could get myself to sit down and write more songs in my bedroom “studio.” Consisting mainly of a 49key Oxygen midi controller, Ableton Live and a DX7-S, I find it a good combination to put musical ideas down to tape. Ableton Live’s stretch and loop features make creating dance music not necessarily easier, but definitely more creative.

Also, I’ve been meaning to spend some time working on another project as well called Themarycuries. It’s difficult pulling the band together for regular practice because of everyone’s working schedule, so I’m thinking that for 2009, TMC can work as a studio band with live musicians only during those rare occasions where we’d actually perform. As such, the band is now a solo project. The concept, music and songs remain the same, it’s just that I have to finish everything from top to bottom to get them released!

Hope 2009 becomes as fruitful as we all want it to be!

21st Century Old Tyme in Solvang

Solvang is a small town in sunny California where Danish missionaries and educators settled. As such, you can expect a ton of stuff from Denmark in the middle of Cali, and it doesn’t disappoint. We got a chance to drop in for an overnight stay in Solvang en route to San Diego during our trip earlier this year, and aside from the usual sightseeing and vintage bargain hunting, we got to sample some excellent Danish from Oleg’s Danish Village Bakery which had the best Danish EVER.

Laptop DJing

If you mentioned the words Laptop and Djing as a compound noun just a few years ago, you’d probably elicit a ton of very negative reactions from both DJ’s and electronic music fans. The crowd complains that mixing from a laptop looks like some guy checking his mail in front of the floor, and traditional DJ’s continue to bash CD players even to this day! However, change is inevitable especially in a technologically reliant scene such as electronic dance music, and today we have laptop + cdj + turntable hybrids that run all the best clubs in Manila.

Embassy runs a comprehensive DJing system that uses the aforementioned combination of top shelf CDJ’s, analogue mixer and laptop running DJing software. I’ve seen their Wednesday Night mash-up set (i think John personally spins on these nights) get a huge response from clubgoers whenever a precisely drawn track gets dropped on another one to form the perfect mash. It’s impressive, to say the least!

Whenever a laptop is present at the DJ booth, chances are a track or two  (or even the entire set!) gets played from it. DJ’s have the option of controlling the DJ software directly with a hardware controller such as those offered by M-Audio (the Xponent and X-Session) and Vestax. Some DJ’s may not like this because it takes away the feel of using a real turntable or CDJ which they’re used to, which is why analogue/digital hybrid solutions such as Serato Scratch are more popular in big clubs.

I’d love to have a setup as detailed as a Serato system complete with a pair of turntables, cdj’s and a macbookpro, but since I don’t mix at gigs anymore it’s really quite steep. I was able to digout an old X-Session controller from our old electronic outfit Cactus Team and, coupled with NI Traktor, was able to mix some tracks albeit awkwardly:

Hope to get back to mixing in 2009 when I’ve got more free time (without having to wake up super early everyday). For the meantime, I’m loving Beatport and all the great tracks you can get from it.

A time capsule for the 21st Century

After reading a few too many Archie comics, my cousins Anton and Alec and myself decided to create a time capsule when we were kids back in 1994. It would be the ultimate digest of the late 20th century and would be the year in review for what we thought was a fantastic year for just about anything. Although we truly enjoyed playing videogames and such (Ice Climber, Mario 3 and Street Fighter II Turbo remain favorites), we also spent quite a bit of time outdoors. If we weren’t roasting food that tasted better if they were fried and setting things on fire, we’d play roller hockey all afternoon long even though our hockey sticks were for lefties. We also enjoyed setting off an entire box of watusi in one go because it was dangerous and watusi has a tendency to stick to your fingers just before you throw it. We’d also try to go camping in the backyard to no avail because it was really warm during Summer.

The idea for a time capsule came one afternoon when we had nothing left to do. We got a mayonnaise jar from mom’s kitchen and filled it up with stuff that we thought was important for people of the future (such as ourselves 14 years later) to find. Said important items that were included were: a clipping of the year’s Ms Universe pageant (proudly held in Manila), a dead ant and a piece of dying fern. We also enjoy digging holes in the ground, and so we made the best and super-most-ultimate-infinity-god hole that we could and put the jar in. In hindsight, we should’ve really been more thoughtful about what to put instead of whatever was just lying around, but the idea of a place to store such fond memories rests not only on the items inside the time capsule, but in the memory of keeping memories inside the time capsule as well. It would’ve been fun to dig up that time capsule now and take a look and breathe in what 1994 was like, but sadly it got cemented over by the backyard bbq grille. So much for that!

I was talking with a friend the other day about that time capsule, and just now I realized how important keeping even the most ridiculous items of your life handy and within reach. Coincidentally, I took the dive and bought an external hard drive for some studio backups at loveoneanother a few weeks ago (A Western Digital MyBook Home 500gb) , and was thinking that this would be the best place to create a repository for all the photos, videos, interesting articles and music that have been sitting around in my hard drive.

We used to have all those photos from college - 2006 in an old hard drive which, unfortunately, crashed because it was quite old. I’ve read some pretty good reviews about the reliability of the WD MyBooks, and so I transferred all the media I had on my mac for the time being. I, however, am not exactly the most avid photographer in the bunch (I rarely take my cam out for a few shots), and so I’d have to pass the MyBook to other people in the gang for them to fill in with shots from as far back as our group existed. Let’s call it the Time Capsule Crowdsourcing Project (TCCP). It’s a lot more fun that way, too, since the photos all come from different perspectives depending on whose camera the photos came from.

As you can imagine, I like hoarding old stuff. My mom tells me I’ll grow up to be a crazy old person with a lot of junk in his bodega, but I don’t care because nostalgia really gets me every single time. It’s probably the same reason why people stick to listening to music of “their time” and also the reason why people say “they don’t make them like they used to anymore.” Sometimes, it’s not about the quality of a thing, or an experience, or some individual/idea, it’s more about the emotion attached to it that really brings you back.

I’m thinking of making this Time Capsule Crowdsourcing Project an ongoing process spanning 2008-2012, just so that if ever we do get extinct come the end of the Mayan Calendar, I’ll bury the MyBook in a 10″ thick lead container 12 feet below the ground for some future primitive to discover what life was like in the past (as long as he’s got a FireWire port).

Here’s a taste (thanks ric):

Sidewalk

A Party of Yore

A Debut

The Tagaytay adventure

hopscotch

If you’re one of the people who have the photos/music/videos/etc that I’m talking about, do drop me a line and let’s get them on the T.C.C.P. NOW!!!

xoxo

joey

Red Alert 3 might just be “an RTS to play while waiting for this” type of game

Thinking Back Sunday: Cheng Du in retrospect

It will have been more than 6 months come the 12th of December since we were over at Cheng Du, China for that crazy quake. I just realized how much of a big deal being stuck in a catastrophe really is, whether natural or man-made, after a few rounds of drinks last night after the Rick Astley tribute night over at Route 196. Gang was chatting about the huge Baguio quake in the early 90’s as well as the one that hit Metro Manila hard (we were in 2nd or 3rd grade I think), and when I woke up this morning it suddenly hit me after waiting half a year: earthquakes in a another country you’re visiting have the potential to become the craziest things you’ll experience your whole life, so you’d better bring a camera wherever, whenever.

I’m hardly a photographer, and when I take my camera out to photograph people I don’t know I always get this weird feeling that they might get offended because I’m the most paranoid person on earth, but I really couldn’t let the opportunity to photograph people in a state of shock pass by. I figured that a person annoying them with photography could very well be the furthest thing from their minds at that point in time, and so I got to use my digital camera without shame.

Japaning around

I was in Nagoya during All Souls Day, and we got a good look around the more laid back part of Japan. If Tokyo’s a bit too much for you with all the people walking fast and Osaka’s too much of a sleepy-town, Nagoya’s your best bet. It’s got the best of both cities, and there’s tons to do and lots of cultural things to see and learn. Japan #1!!!

A bold new blog?

Okay, so I finally got around to revamping this portion of theunjob which, as you can see, has nothing to do with it! Instead of getting a new domain for my blog/lifestream, I just decided to add a subdomain, thus allowing you to access it via joey.theunjob.com.
What else can you find here aside from my Lifestream? I never liked posting blogs on friendster, myspace or facebook, so I’ll probably just do all my blogging here. It’s nice to write about things that you don’t have to formally think about once in a while, and that should be the purpose of this blog.

I also never liked taking photos much, but I realized this morning when I woke up that I really should, and so I decided to upload my photos here as well for your viewing and scrutiny. They’re not the best/mass photography type that you find on social networking sites, but they’re the ones that I like to pick out and display on photo containers so I do hope you like/hate them because any reaction is better than no reaction.

I’m also putting some music stuff and tech stuff in here when I have the time, but basically it’ll just be about anything I want to write about to get me in the habit of writing on a daily basis. It could be the most important event in the world (e.g. scientific discoveries, proof of 2012, people rising from their graves, etc) or the most mundane (e.g. why I don’t like sandwiches with pastey bread).

So sit back relax and enjoy the birth of another blog that you could probably live without!