A great week for music keeps on getting better. I got started on doing a remix for Melbourne’s Fromage Disco, which came at a great time as I have pulled out the bass guitar and am using it as a great vehicle to record some riffs with. I posted a quick and early snippet of this in progress over the weekend on the Segue Twitter account, which you can still listen to here. It has been an enjoyable track to work on, and play on, and as it would happen the Fromage Disco lads are coming up to play at Bar Soma in Brisbane this week. Check them out if you’re in the neighbourhood. I’ll be popping in, though it’s a big week with both Sasha and Jaytech hitting Brisbane in quick succession. If you’re wondering what the photo above of the sock puppet has to do with me remixing Fromage Disco, you can check out the film clip for their single, entitled “Vicious”, on YouTube.

A few packages hit the desk today, including the Mackie 1202 VLZ3 which replaces the rather heavier and larger console mixer which has been the staple for Segue and the odd Silent Shadow gig over the last year or so. Most excitedly, the Monome 40h kit has arrived. Unfortunately I don’t have time to assemble it this weekend, as I fly out to Hong Kong on Saturday and will be busy eating noodles, buying robots and getting custom Kung-Fu suits made simply because, well, that’s what you do in Hong Kong. I think. But I’m very excited about coming back to put this together for the gig at Bar Soma. Check more photos of the new Monome kit out on the Segue FlickR page.

I’m quite excited to explore the world of Monome for the contradictory reason that there isn’t anything entirely special about it. Which is rather what the makers think as well. The magic happens simply by enabling a certain set of possible interactions with music. I’m a programming geek, so I have a lot of ideas for the Monome and I can’t wait to explore the fantastic patches that the user community has developed. Most people reading this, if you made it past the subtle More tag above, probably still have no idea what it does.

In short, the Monome is simply a box with buttons. It is driven by software on a computer and enjoys a similar sense of programmability as the Jazz Mutant Lemur, which I gave back in recent months. Yes, gave it back, and yes, I wasn’t pleased with it in the end. The concept is sound, but the programming interface wasn’t as fluid as it could have been, with the absolute deal-breaker of an unresolved issue that saw the Lemur simply dropping out a few times an hour. Which means a few times a set my primary control interface would stop working. Unacceptable to say the least, and that’s without considering the sticker price of this thing in Australia. Having said that, it was a joy to use it to write the Segue remix of Guise (which I’ve rambled on about previously), and I’m grateful to Ellaways Music for sending it to me for so long.

As for the Monome, the common uses are with software like Max/MSP and Ableton, where it can serve as a simple drum machine interface, as a clip and sample trigger, as a performance interface or simply as a means to sit in the dark and stare at flashing lights.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For me, I anticipate this operating as an interface to trigger clips and music events, as a sequencer (such as the drum machine example able, so I can construct sequences live on the spot) and as a nice tool for some warped sample mangling. Or, to be honest, as something to stare at flashing away in the dark if I get bored during soundcheck…

Over the past week I have mixed down both a remix and an original single of sorts. I say of sorts as that is a collaborative single by myself and Amsterdam-based colleague Chris “Vitreous” Buckridge. We have mixed a Pacific Mix and an Atlantic Mix of our track “Pine”, which will be out on Smash Bang Records shortly. Also I’ve knocked out a very quick and short-deadlined remix for Alex Ward and his Dektek label. This is for his track “Showcase”, which should be out on or around the day of the Dektek showcase gig that I’m playing live at.

Here’s a snippet of unmastered versions of Pine and Showcase.

The track snippet in this video is a rough mix for a remix I did for Vitreous. The track is called “Pine”, and will be revisited for a fresh mixdown before being signed off and released shortly. More on that soon. Not in the “will tell you when we can” mysterious sense, but in the “we don’t actually know” realistic sense.

One of the things a blog should be about, and certainly for a band, is sharing some raw ideas. As I write a few different things for a few different publications week in and week out, I think I’ve let the original fun idea of a frequently used Segue blog fall into routine and a form of uniformity. Thankfully, I had a nice dose of inspiration on Friday night, heading out to catch the dual joys of Berlin Sessions at Bar Soma and Jody Wisternoff at Moon Bar. At the latter, Kris had a DJ set after Jody and ambitions to be entirely sober for it, and at the former it was great to catch up with the Logic lads and appreciate how far Nick and the crew have taken Bar Soma. So it was an interesting night. Kris dropped some originals, I lost my voice, various friends were escorted out of various venues and the usual collection of unprintable antics. I came home and threw together this little idea, before sleep overtook me and I eventually woke up wondering why I couldn’t speak anymore. I’m thinking it’s a voodoo curse. Or just talking loudly over loud music. In any case, here’s what I woke up to. It’s not a track. It’s an idea. And it’s about time to start sharing them more:

The name is literally the first thing I saw. Not being in much of a state to ponder deep and meaningful names at the time, and indeed, as per the picture above, being entertained at the time by a dancing Isobot robot in front of a rather moody lamp. Which is about all I really have to say on the matter.