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 ;)

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

It’s that time of year again: spreading myself wide across the UK (well, just England this year) with a BRAND NEW SET comprising 80% BRAND NEW MATERIAL for your rocking-it-up/jumping-around/spazzing-out pleasure.

First up is this summer’s hottest mini-fest, organised by gwEm and I and featuring some fucking blistering acts (including us :P) – BLEEP +LDN, on Saturday 11th of July: see the flyer here.

Next, it’s Newcastle at The End Bar with The Turing Test on Wednesday 22nd of July.

Then Blackpoool on the 1st of August for 8bitBall.

Get yourselves along to one of them; it’ll be fun!

Some phonecam footage of my set, kindly uploaded to youtube by someone who was in the Blip audience. This is almost all of the first song I played (after my intro) – a new one called Returns which will surely find its way to the outside world soon.

Another year, another hometown gig. Hoping it’ll be a nice and cosy affair before life kicks in again. My good friend Outgroup and I will be supported by some other good friends – the newly collaborating ABSORB (my old Soul Technique bandmate and a great vocalist) vs. Sequel (the new face of everyone’s favourite Oliver). Be nice to see you all down there :)

NEW SITE: by the way, I’ve done yet another overhaul of this thing. There’ll probably be a couple of bugs for the next little while, but I’m working on it. Music page is a mess, but all the files are still available!

The whole four days have been great (I can’t stress this enough), but my choice ‘discoveries’ have been Trash80 (who is fantastic live) and Cow’P (who’s just stupendous, but previously unknown to me). Check that shit out.

More post-mortem will undoubtedly come… Keep a look out for stream recordings (although I think the stream broke down for my set), youtube vids, whatever. Peace.