I love this video!

I found this a while ago, remebered it the other day and thought I'd put up a post about it. This is the video to a song called "late at night" by a band called Futureshock (Never heard of them? - no, me neither) The video was made by pair of directors calling themselves Ne-o (hmmm...wonder where they got that one from, eh?) I read about them in a Focal Press book on New Music Video Directors (Reinventing Music Video by Matt Hanson) Apparantly they shot the backgrounds with a digital camera in Tokyo and the greenscreened the actors in later - the faces are not those of the dancers though, obviously, you can see that by the way the face seems "dislocated" from the rest of the body, looks cool though, kind of trippy too. And the music has a great Numan/Tubeway Army-feel to it.

here's the link to the clip on their website - you should also check out their amazing short: Salaryman6

What is up with Arturia's stuff these days?

Reading this post, put up a few days ago on Failed Muso, about Arturia's demo of their new Jupiter 8V (a softsynth version of Roland's much loved Jupiter 8) I have to agree with what he says about abnormal CPU usage; but it's not just the Jupiter, all of Arturia's synth's now seem to be like this. I bought the ProphetV and it's the same and recently I tried some of their new demos of their older synths - Analog Factory etc, and they also have the same problem. I thought it was just my crappy old PC (only 2 years old but not very powerful) but judging by what was said on F.M., maybe that's not the case after all. What's going on? I remember trying out demos of Arturia's older stuff on my P.C. before and they worked fine; you couldn't have many instances running at once, but at least you could play more than two notes together without the CPU meter in Ableton going into overdrive!
Anybody else having the same problems? let me know.

Free ImpOSCar sounds

Appologies to those to whom this is (very) old news, but I came across this page on GMedia's website with free sound banks for the ImpOSCar synth - one of my favorite VSTi's (very minimal CPU usage, the same can be said for all of GMedia's synths - except perhaps "Minimonsta", though even there one can switch to "mono mode" which reduces it's load somewhat). I've tried a few of the banks already and there's some good stuff there - especially those by dogboy, excellent Boards Of Canada-style sounds- and thre's even a demo version of ImpOSCar itself so you can try the stuff out even if you don't own the synth yourself.

here's the link:

http://www.gmediamusic.com/gforce/imposcar/impOSCarSounds.html

Enjoy....

Keyboard stand madness!

With the impending birth of my first child, one of the the most obvious changes that has happened so far is the move of my studio from our spare room on the landing. This is just fine with me, but needless to say it throws up the old issue of re-arranging where every thing goes in the studio.
I decided that to save to space I would have the Micro Korg synth on the same stand as my Nord Electro - thinking that it would easy and relatively inexpensive to by a second tier for my Keyboard that i could just clamp on to my existing one....but nooooo! (as John Belushi would say) I can't do that. Not one manufacturer seems to offer additional tiers that would just clamp on to any stand! There are stands that have 2 tiers (or more) but these seem to be custom designed multi-tier stands - which are more than twice the price of a normal stand. If anyone knows of a firm making generic clamp-on tiers for keyboard stands please let me know, in the meantime I shall have to be content with steering clear of the Nords last octave! (see photo)

Last of the cd's?

Having to prepare my new cd in the last few weeks as got me thinking as to whether I really want to do anymore after this one.
In most cases one nevers hears anything from the recipient of the cd, other than the usual polite "Oh, thanks for the cd" from the friends you send it to, collegues in the industry rarely reply and as for sending stuff out for promo purposes to labels, magazines, websites etc. - you might as well forget it.
It's telling that I've had more feedback and interest towards my music via the mp3s on my myspace page in the past 4 months than anything I've sent out as a Cd copy in my entire career! And since I don't play live - this feedback is all I have.
Obviously its still worth sending out hard copy cd's in some cases - a recent happy accident was Mr Trick from Resonance FM's Rhythm Incursions show (a London-based new music station) picking a copy of my last e.p. that was lying around Resonance's office and liking it enough to want to play one of the tracks on air, props to him - but by and large, most of the cds I've sent out have ended lining the inside of somebody's wastepaper bin.
My current thinking is that perhaps, in future, I'll simply post new tracks (or collections of new tracks) as free downloads on my myspace page (with an archive on the Noisy Image website) - I don't care about the money, it's simply nice to get some sort of feedback - even if it is limited to "Nice tunes, mate!"

New Cd / New Blog

Hi,
new blog, taking over from the frankly useless one on my myspace page - does anyone actually read those? I doubt it, personally - but ho-hum.
I've got a new cd, called "Feral" coming out on June 1st, like my previous cds it'll be available though my website:

www.noisyimage.net

you can hear one of the tracks from the new cd, plus some tracks from my previous e.p. here:

http://www.myspace.com/rupertlally