sheep music

new übercool project courtesy of sheep music’s archive of visuals equipment: grass valley controller to be turned into a midi/usb interface. so thats the buttons and lamps of high-end 80’s broadcast tech (not to mention the death star itself) but attached to the current state of the art in the form of a laptop with vdmx rather than its crate of obsolete analogue electronics. best of all, the connector isn’t some serial device we’d need to decode, its just an array of all the switches contacts etc, perfect for plugging straight into diy controller electronics like arduino or midibox.

…and, quite spectacularly, the weather reverts to the stunning form it was on when we arrived, a week or so earlier.

striking the site. packing up mud covered equipment: urgh. thought of separating them later: double urgh.

…this was the most tuned-in kid, quite something.

i love the juxtaposition here. moonbase alpha meets gypsy meets bavaria.

…bunch of virtuosos that they are. and always good to catch up with old friends, harking back to uni days.

the destroyers, despite turning back once already, arrive and truly storm it…

“the committee” declare we can continue. and so we do. strange when a festival almost gets cancelled.

things that are kinda cool, but only once you’ve done them and never again -

745 : approached the house with wifi in the garden, to find the road had turned into a half-foot deep river. nonetheless, cycle down it replete with laptop on back.

the latest visuals technology development to come off the *spark anvil is a mac-native titler application, made by wrapping a quartz composer patch with some fullscreen code and interface builder bindings. props to roger bolton of quartonian for the guts of the fullscreen xcode project, shared under gpl so expect to see the titler soon once it’s been tidied up.

truly came into its own during the ups and downs of the first day of the festival, where a huge rainfall threatened to wash away half the site. we could upload videos and images taken moments before, and pun the titles out till they got beyond baaaaaaaad. ‘shave yourself’ still my favourite.