syphus

This is hardly news-worthy by anybody’s standards, but here’s me saying I’m taking an indefinite breather from doing live Syphus performances. Yes, I know it’s not like I’m kicking out the keytar jams 24/7 anyway, but my whole routine has sleepwalked into stagnation a bit, and I can’t find the time or head-space to evolve it. And besides, I’m something of a traditionalist and I don’t desperately want to contrive an evolution of my live chip-style outlet when it probably doesn’t need one. Why force it?

It started in my bedroom, on grey Sunday afternoons with ProTracker, then years later it coincidentally happened to become popular in the ‘real’ world and I had a great deal of fun playing it live; improvising; reinterpreting it for fresh audiences. So I guess now it’s going back into the Sunday-afternoon/bedroom domain, where it belongs and where I get the most enjoyment out of it.

I’ll still be making occasional Amiga tunes and working on demoscene productions, but I plan to focus on getting back to composing fully-sequenced music, expanding on the bits and pieces of games music writing I’ve been doing lately and generally driving myself forward rather than treading water. Maybe I’ll even get the swathes of unreleased tunes released, and unfinished tunes finished.

This isn’t some sort of tearful goodbye, and I’m not conceited enough to think that anybody should give a toss, but I do want to say that I’ve:

• met some cool people
• played some cool gigs with some cool people
• seen a few more crevices of the world than I might otherwise have done
• had my grumpy sourpuss old mind opened up to some things beyond the scope of the demoscene
• opened some other minds up to things within the scope of the demoscene
• had my Blip Festival visuals done by The C-Men
• got shitfaced with Firebrand Boy
• got lost in Manhattan with Trash80
• been attacked by a London gang, along with Minusbaby, Starscream and Nullsleep
• watched Nullsleep literally headbutt his way out of the situation
• driven a tour bus at 90mph whilst technically and medically asleep
• been part of some triumphant organisational successes (and some triumphant organisational failures)
• watched a hooker give a copper a blowjob in a Newport carpark whilst our audience were being arrested and loaded into a paddywagon across the road
• taught USK all conventional English swearwords, plus a few custom ones of my own devising

and much, much more. So, y’know, things could have been a lot worse ;)

The exhibition’s at FACT, but I’m playing the launch’s after-party at Chameleon Bar in Liverpool – L1 4NL – from around 9pm :)

Space Invaders: Art and the Computer Game Environment
Preview: Thursday 17 December 2009, 6.00pm – 8.00pm
FACT, Liverpool
Booking: rsvp@fact.co.uk

Syphus
Firebrand Boy
SoundMatrix
Jellica/Kittenrock DJ mix
DS Orchestra

FINALLY, I’ve got a release-worthy build of my MOD/XM/S3M replayer library for Processing! PortaMod is based on a very high-quality (but bare-bones) pure Java replayer engine by Martin Cameron called IBXM. IBXM had been around for a few years, but I wanted to implement it for Processing and make it available to that lovely little sketching language that’s been so helpful to me in my effort to learn OOP.

I’ve been working on this in a couple of different ’strands’, and if you’re following my sporadically-documented, mad-scientist crap to any degree, you’ll know that they include:

• Chipdisco (a dual-deck module DJ application with MIDI control, headphone cue-mix, module-loading from URL and dual playlists) – click here for a work-in-progress
• PortaMod Player (a single-deck player with scrolling tracker-style patterndata display and various other nice features – interface similar to Chipdisco)
• PortaMod Single (a very very compact single-tune player intended for embedding on websites, particularly websites that archive modules)
• PortaMod itself – the library which will make projects like these easy for others to make. Usage can be basic, e.g. doing a soundtrack for a sketch when you want to avoid bundling a massive mp3 file, or more complex, e.g. driving a series of visual effects triggered by note-events in the music.

Anyway, better follow the above link to get all the details.