Above is some (poorly shot on a phone, sorry) test footage from the new visuals set for the Tycho live show (next one is this Thursday, 4/7 in SF). The song is from the forthcoming album. It’s not all completely tightened up yet but you get the idea. I recently stripped down the entire live set — audio and video — and started from scratch. With the new album pretty much wrapped up I decided to rework the visuals to go with all the new material and to have everything work better with the new live band. What you’re seeing is VDMX effecting / compositing video in real-time on a Macbook Pro. Everything is being triggered / synced by another machine via MIDI over IP running Reaper which is handling all the audio duties.
I’ve been using VDMX for years now but just recently switched to Reaper as my DAW for recording and decided to use it for the live shows as well (Was never happy with Ableton. It’s a great app but it just didn’t fit my specific needs / workflow). It’s been a very freeing experience to say the least. Being able to use the same software in the studio and on stage has helped immeasurably and opened up some possibilities that didn’t exist before. Here’s hoping it all works as smoothly on Thursday (the first Tycho show to feature the new album and visuals) as it has been during rehearsals.
I also wanted to take this time to give a bit of a progress report on the new Tycho album. It feels like forever since I started, but everything has finally come together. Things took a lot of twists and turns; a lot has changed and some songs have been shelved while new ones have taken their place. But I think the album is now — finally — what I envisioned it to be when I started this process some two years ago. All that is left to do now is tie up some loose ends and complete the mixing / mastering phase and things should be ready to go. With label schedules and all that I’d imagine a release date sometime after this summer.
Thanks to everyone for your patience and support over this past couple years. You have afforded me the ability to focus on my work in a way I was never able to before, and for that I am extremely grateful.
I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be doing a few Tycho shows later this month in Seattle, NYC, and Toronto. All the sets will include the full live band (and unless otherwise noted, all future sets will as well). Details follow, hope to see you out!
Tycho Live Dates, Sep/Oct 2010: 9/26 – Tycho w/ Tim Hecker+Sanso-Xtro – Triple Door, Seattle Tickets 9/29 – Tycho w/ Com Truise – Le Poisson Rouge, NYC Tickets 10/2 – Tycho w/ TBA – The Drake Hotel, Toronto Details
Launch 2010 is going down this Saturday, July 31st and I’ll be displaying some design work as part of the event. I should have a good number of the giclees from the Studio Editions series up along with some unreleased stuff.
In case you missed it last year, Launch is Sacramento’s indie design and music festival. They sort of cover all the bases, showcasing the best of Sacramento music, design, and fashion. Being from Sacramento myself — a town I feel is often very much misunderstood — it’s great to see events like this that bring all the incredible talent this place has to offer together in one place.
The event goes from 6pm to 1:30am at the Artisan Gallery (1901 Del Paso Blvd, Sacramento). Admission is $10, a total steal considering the lineup. If you’re in the Sacramento area, you have no excuse not to go to this — besides all the art and music, it’s just a really good time. If you’re from the Bay Area or beyond, I urge you to make the drive out and get better acquainted with the art scene in Sacto, you won’t be disappointed. Hope to see you out there!
Thanks to everyone for entering to win the Ghostly Box and tickets for the SF/LA shows. We had over 550 entries but through the magic of random number generation we’ve narrowed it down to the lucky winners. Congratulations to Nora from Culver City who won the Ghostly Manzoku Bento Box and all the others who won tickets to the shows. You should have received an email if you won the tickets.
Dusty Brown will be playing live this Friday (May 28th, 2010) at Harlow’s in Sacramento. Their shows are always worth checking out — few can match the intensity and raw emotion they exude on stage — but this one promises to take things a step further. They’ve put together a full band and reworked all the songs with fully live arrangements for this set. It’s always interesting to hear how predominantly electronic music works in a live context, particularly with a drummer. I saw Caribou and Toro Y Moi last night here in San Francisco and that was certainly a treat to hear how the songs had changed between the studio and the stage (more so with Toro Y Moi as Caribou’s records are essentially rock at this point anyways). I’m looking forward to the same from Dusty and co. on Friday. Hope to see you out there.
I made it in to Toronto tonight, pretty easy day of travel. Unfortunately there’s a little bit of rain but I hear it will let up by tomorrow evening. I went over to Function 13 Gallery tonight to get started setting things up, I’ll be hanging all the artwork for the ISO50 show tomorrow.
The gallery show will feature a lot of new work along with some old stuff. I ended up going back and reworking everything, pulling out the text and just leaving the artwork. It was a pretty fun process stripping things down to their core elements, it’s always a nice test to see which images stand on their own without the accompanying type. A couple posters — such as 1971 and Madrone — couldn’t do without the type so I just tried stripping out some other extraneous elements. Going back through some of the older files was pretty surprising, it was interesting to see how much my technique has changed over the years. Some were just a mess, it felt like restoring an old house removing all the heavy handed distressing and randomly placed elements. It was great to see the results, I feel like the core concepts of a lot of the pieces can breathe a lot better now.
I’ve also got some new stuff in store for the live Tycho set; a few new songs, some remixes, and reworked live visuals. It’s been pretty stressful over the past week getting ready for this but it all came together over the past few days so now I’m just excited to get it all out there. Hope to see you out tonight. Click the links below for more info.
Also, if you enjoy all the music posted on this blog (which is pretty much all Jakub), then you will enjoy Jakub’s DJ set tonight. He’ll be playing as his DJ alter-ego Aarnio tonight at the show.
I’m doing a solo exhibition at Function 13 Gallery in Toronto next Friday where I’ll be showing some new work and large format stuff. I’m still working on the main poster for the event so I’ll be posting that on Monday probably. For now, here’s all the details:
