Segue

A couple of interviews hit the news-stands and interwebs. Segue was on the cover of Zebra magazine this week, the dance publication as part of Australia’s Time Off. They ran a fun “In The Studio With Segue” style piece (check this photo and that photo) that touches on the collaboration with Vitreous. Moving further into that topic, an interview on Inthemix.com.au gets down into the gig I just played with Chris “Vitreous” Buckridge at the wonderful Bar Soma on Friday night. There is one factual error that I have to correct there, in that Leo is no longer a member of Segue and has left to pursue his DJ’ing. I made a dumb joke about that, saying that he has gone “Underwater“, but it’s a bit of an extreme Underworld fan pun that only the guy from Time Off got. Dance music is serious business. I’ll save the jokes for the next time someone asks me how stable Ableton Live 8.1 is. Thanks ITM & Zebra!

Segue and Vitreous are playing a special live set together at Bar Soma in Brisbane on the 4th of December. Vitreous will be flying in from Amsterdam for an incredible night in support of Jamie Jones. Jamie is a very cool cat from London, on the Deep House and Detroit tip and amid a mighty world tour. You can feast on his Essential Mix or check out some Youtube here and here. This is going to be a great gig and Vitreous and I are excited to be able to bust out some of the deeper and jacking sounds that we have been bouncing back and forth. There will be some fresh takes on some of our released collabs as well, including Guise and Pine. If you are in the neighbourhood, come on down. More info on the event here. Also, if you want to hear something more down the line of the Deep House angle we have been writing together, join the Segue Mailing List as I will post a fresh download to it in the next week.

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.

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I finally got around to doing a proof of concept test of a timelapse animation over the weekend. Hooking a Canon 450D DSLR digital still camera up to a Macbook, and setting the remote capture software to grab a frame every 10 seconds, I had the intention of roughly capturing a recording session. Instead I just quickly tidied up the studio, watched some Underworld videos on Youtube, posted on Twitter, and for the breifest of moments actually worked on a track in Ableton. Dumping the photos into Vegas, I knocked up this rough timelapse video. This is my first time testing this out, though our VJ collaborator Jaymis has done quite a few interesting timelapses over the years. I can’t wait to try this out in Hong Kong in a couple of weeks.

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.

Without taking it all too seriously, we were pleased to see Segue and Vitreous riding up into the Best Seller charts on Juno Records this week just gone. One of the great things about charting so strongly is that the release has been pushed purely by word of mouth and has escaped the “local” orbit that we happily released it into. Following that, it was with a bit of luck that Juno charted my Segue remix of Guise in their Disco Recommends chart. Put in front of people like that, the remix had a run up the charts and the EP moved with it. I daresay by this time next week we won’t be found anywhere near the charts, but for now, here’s the highlights over the week as we have seen them:

#13 Guise – Segue Remix – Juno Records Disco Chart
#56 Guise – Segue Remix – Juno Records Best Selling (Tracks)
#20 Guise EP – Juno Records Disco Chart (Releases)
#63 Guise EP – Juno Records Best Selling (Singles)
#63 Guise EP – Juno Records Best Selling (Releases)

A big thank you to everyone buying this tune, and of course for all the support of those playing it out. We would love to hear any feedback, so drop us a line. If you haven’t grabbed the tune yet, grab it now on Juno Records.

I was just surprised by a message from Nate B, of Fromage Disco fame, that Juno Records has listed the Segue remix of Guise at #11 in the Disco category of the Juno Recommends list for August 2009. Needless to say I was surprised, and not in the least because some of our friends are still amused to see the name “Segue” anywhere near the word “Disco”. It puts a smile on my face tonight, as I was already happy about the new setlist falling together and was going to post about how well the gear, concepts and tracks are coming together for the new live set. That and I’m sitting here running Moog riffs through an SSL Alpha Channel. It’s a good night all round. Thank you Nate for letting me know, and thanks to everyone for the various real-world and digital comments since! I’ve just been listening to the other tunes in that list while typing and adding a few gems to my download crate. A great way to start the week!

Check it out: Juno Disco Recommendations August 2009

This is not, really, an update. I’ve been getting into the routine of at least a weekly update of something tangible, but this week falls a bit short. All but one of the remixes for “Coming Around” have come in, the original mix is nicely acidic and tribal, and there is just a final mixdown left. The new studio is totally set up and I’ve got just a few tweaks left on some articles for Create Digital Music on the topic of Arturia Origin multi-samples and sound banks, plus a final check on my Ableton template for the JazzMutant Lemur. Add to that a pile of music technology to review for Time Off, thanks to Rockinghorse (a Stanton SCS.3d), Lightsounds (an American Audio Radius), and as ever the formidable Musiclab (Korg Microkorg XL, Akai XR20, TC Electronics Konnekt 6). Now I’ve just got to get “Coming Around” out the door, before getting through a number of great collaborations with Vitreous, another Segue single to be announced, and a couple of fun remixes. So, there’s nothing really cool or interesting coming out of Segue land at the moment, but hopefully you can appreciate how great it feels to be doing interesting things inside of Segue world. A world of, finally, neat and tidy cables, and well sorted files. For now.

Other people were out frolicking. A somewhat old term that, but more than appropriate no doubt. Roller coasters, taming lions, computer games and possibly even disco dancing. Crazy kids. Me, I was moving the studio once again. Some readers of Create Digital Music might remember that it was just over a year ago that I wrote an article called “Moving Music: 10 Ways For A Geek To Move House”. I loved the space I had moved into when I wrote that article, with the studio gear dominating the lounge room in close proximity to the kitchen. The fun I had throwing fresh vegetables and spices around in a wok only metres away from Kris hard at work on Begin Again. On the flipside, picking up the refrigerator when trying to record acoustic guitars while reviewing microphones for Time Off. Mostly a great space, but a chance came up on a unique property only a short walk from the current one, and a few months ago it was all about cardboard boxes, carrying things up flights of stairs and trying not to drop things on my feet. With a modicum of success at best.

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After a few weeks as a Beatport exclusive release, the Guise EP has gone worldwide. You can now grab it from your favourite flavour of online music store, such as Juno, 7Digital, Beatsdigital, and even iTunes. It is, of course, still up on Beatport and getting some great responses, so check out it and let us know what you think!

The video should say it all. Maybe not very well. And certainly in a rather pointless way. But there you have it. Segue. New track coming out. Remixers. Dektek Records. Drums and such. Awesome.