Sexy Men Of Synths!

I just found this blog all about sexy synth men and I almost fell off my herman miller aeron half way through. What an honour! Heres a selection in black and white:

Plaid Shirt

Heres an update to this post, in which I tried to become John Carpenter / Alan Howarth for the day again. It got reposted by those nice people at synthtopia, which is always cool. And it's nice too to get peoples comments - here are my favourite two:

Sheer Endless

I wonder what sort of music he is playing for her?

Via Matrixsynth / synthmuseum.de

Home Taping

These lovely scans caught my eye over on found0bjects. Do you remember the slogan 'HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC'? Well it seems to have worked because music is still with us but tapes have dropped off a bit recently. Having said that, I released my first cassette tape a few months ago

Voice Of Mal

Saw this over on ethe^ra's blog. Shame theres not more of this programme...

Creepy Keyboard

I always find things like this a bit creepy. The machines are getting more like us every day. Via Matrixsynth

Benge Interview

Hello. Tara Busch has put up an interview with me on her blog Analog Suicide where I talk about my new album Abstraxa and working with the Buchla modular synthesiser

Super City

Saw this over on found0bjects

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972) from Repazzo on Vimeo.

First Foundation

I am a huge fan of Roland's beautiful publication The Synthesizer. In fact I have both 1st and 2nd editions of it. What makes it so good for me it its use of the Roland System 100 series modules in most of its patching examples, as I also have those modules. Well the good news is that Analog Industries have gone and scanned this long-out-of-print tome and you can download it from their website. Here is the excellent A Foundation For Electronic Music
RTS Foundation

Hoodie and Moog

Heres another video that me and Sam made of us and Max playing the Moog Modular on one of Sam's new Diagrams songs

Sam's got a really nice blog here that you will enjoy looking at




Also, here are some pictures that Sam took of our session:

Moon Base Beta

I just found this great blog by the designer of the recent scifi film Moon. I love this movie, its one of my favourite 'ambient films' [I like putting it on in the background while i'm working]. All the design in this film amazing, especially the moon base where Sam lives. I might use it for inspiration when I build my next house...

Here is a 3d render that Gavin Rothery made, but I took the liberty of adding some music from Space 1999:

Prize Winning Photo

I won a prize! Its for a photo I took of my modular synths. These people are making a documentary film about modular synthesisers, which is a really good subject I think. So to help raise awareness they teamed up with the Matrixsynth synth blog and opened a photo competition. I won this weeks best picture award! I get some free stuff and also got to chat to Solvent via email. I love his music! Heres the pic:

Heres the trailer, enjoy:

Theres No One Driving

We were lucky enough to have Gazelle Twin supporting us at the first XOYO gig last week, and Elizabeth also did a beautiful remix for us which is on the new Maths album The Shape of Things. A very rubbish video I took is below



She has just done a really cool thing over on The Quietus, its a fascinating insight into her inspirations check it out here. One thing I liked was this rather spooky robot-bus, which actually exists. Its typical isn't it? You wait years for something to happen then two come along at once. I put a new soundtrack on it (from a cool 1980s library album called New Technology V3) which I just downloaded from Dusty Shelf

Buchla Mayhem Again

I was asking John Potter [ether^ra] what the difference is in tone between the new Buchla digital oscillators and the [new] vintage-designed analog oscillators currently being made by Mark Verbos. They are clones [approved by Don, natch] of the supremely rare and wonderful Buchla 258. He sent me this demo



Here are some pics of the 258. The last pic is the clone:

So Many Colours

I saw this post over on the patchpierre blog, which is all about Doepfer synths usually, but this post is about an album by Wendy Carlos called Secrets of Synthesis. I had never heard of it before which was a surprise because its an album of her talking about and demonstrating her take on synthesis. Wonk-tastic!

More Gig News

It has been announced that Tara Busch will be giving her support at some of our upcoming shows in october. This is really great news. Also Xeno & Oaklander will be doing some which makes me tremendously happy and excited. I love it when a plan comes together. Below are two more vids that Tara and Maf took when they came to the studio, go check out her blog!

Smashing

I saw this over on the rather brilliant Rockets&Rayguns blog. Its a copy of Smash Hits from 1980. Nuff said. Except that theres a mind-blowing archive of them here

How to put an animated video gif on your blog

1] Get your video clip and open it in quicktime pro. Edit it to the right length and export it as 'movie to image'. This will create lots of single frame images so put them in a new folder. You can decide the frame rate - say 5 or 10 per sec (UPDATE: in photoshop 6+ you can simply go to FILE/IMPORT/make selection from a mov file, and it will save the film frames to layers)

2] Open the first frame in photoshop (I use CS2 on a mac) and select the animation sub window. Open the second picture, select all, copy and paste onto the first picture. This creates a new layer on picture 1. Repeat this for all the frames - i.e. create new layers of all the frames as layers in picture one. In the animation window on the right there is a menu - select 'make frames from layers'. You can select the duration of the frames but usually leave at '0 sec'. 'Save for web' from the file menu creating a gif file. It actually makes 2 files - the gif is in a folder called 'images'

3] Open your postimage account and upload the gif file which is in the 'images' folder. Make sure it is less than 1MB

4] Open your blogger editor and paste the embed code from postimage

Found Object

Much as it pains me to put up a video featuring the other Ultravox, I couldn't resist showing you this awesome slice of vintage synth madness. I saw it over on Found0bjects, as part of a 30 minute compilation of groovy 80s clips. Check it out below too (the 2nd vid) and be amazed at a very young Danny Baker investigating the Essex Futurists

PS, I want a space invaders jumper...

Found Objects Television 2 from Found Objects on Vimeo.

Lynch Cassette

OK, so I am still in love with Dune the movie, it never fails to amaze me, especially as everyone else seems to hate it so much (including it now seems David Lynch, although he seemed pretty happy with it at the time). I found this audio cassette of an interview with Lynch and Herbert, made just before the release of the film in 1984. I got it from egg city radio, a very cool music blog. Anyway, they talk about the film and then Lynch slopes off and Herbie goes on about sociopolitical stuff, but its still very interesting. I would love to see a proper HD directors cut of Dune, is that possible David?
Dune Cassette Part1
Dune Cassette Part2
Dune Cassette Part3
Dune Cassette Part4
Dune Cassette Part5
Dune Cassette Part6