Video link: Mind! Reggae Dubstep | 22 Oct 08 by spxl

I created this video from clips and photos I took at Mind! Reggae Dubstep on Wednesday night (22/Oct/2008) at The Dogstar in Brixton.

I wasn’t counting on the mindlondon.com branding across the top being made so blurry in the YouTube version, and the titles could certainly do with some improvement. I might try making a nicer overlay next time. I figured I’d already spent enough time pfaffing about, and it was time to release something!.. The render, re-encode, upload cycle takes quite a bit of patience.

-G.

And yes, I shall continue with the mind puns. I hope you don’t, er, get bothered so much by it. ;o)

I went to Denmark last week to celebrate the double birthday I share with one of my best mates. It’s a somewhat disheartening thought that I’d not seen him for a year, but while I was there I managed to forget about all the time (and troubles) in between and it felt like I’d never left, and the previous birthday was only a week or so ago. Time is a funny thing, or at least our perception of if can be. It’s all in the mind! More tangible, and certainly tastier, were the nice dinners I had – Chinese in a restaurant on Thursday, fried pork (a Danish specialty) at a friend’s house on Friday, turkey at another friend’s on Saturday – not only because of the food, but because they were occasions with friends.

-G.

-G.

MIND visuals by subpixel

MIND! :: Roots :: Reggae :: Dancehall :: Drum & Bass :: Dubstep :: Breakbeat

Music by:

• Earl Gateshead (Trojan Sound System)
• Unity Selekta

Visuals by subpixel

Wed 01 October, 10 til 2

The Dogstar. 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton SW9 8LQ

Directions: Exiting Brixton tube station, turn left. Turn left at Coldharbour Lane (KFC is on the corner). The Dogstar is a couple of minutes walk away on the right hand side of the road. Easy! :o)

First instance – Brick Lane, Saturday night: a guy handing out flyers spotted one of the Don’t Panic flyer packs nearby and picked it up (so it seems flyering is a two-way street after all!). I mentioned to him that they can usually be found in the record shop down the road (though when I went to said record shop on Monday evening I didn’t see any).

Second instance – in “The Shadows in the Cave” (part 3 of the documentary The Power of Nightmares), Lewis Z Koch from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says on dirty bombs:

The danger from radioactivity is basically next-to-nothing. The danger from panic, however, is horrendous. That’s where the irony comes. … (Is) Instead of the government saying, ‘look, this is not a serious weapon; the serious danger of this is the panic that would ensue, and there is no reason for panic. Don’t panic.’

I did a search for the phrase and found an interesting reference. George Zebrowski asked Arthur C Clarke in an interview, “If you were addressing humankind, and all its groups were listening, what advice would you give?” Clarke’s answer:

The best advice I think was given by Douglas Adams: “Don’t panic.”

There you go. Enough said, really.

In other news… the last Mind! gig at The Dogstar (Wed 17 September, as advertised in my previous post) didn’t go so well. I’d arrived early to set up only to find a football match onscreen, so no access until that had finished, then being told by the bar manager to stop what I was doing when trying to set up later, citing liability concerns. I’d made sure I was back in London from my trip especially for the gig, so felt a bit miffed that I’d left Berlin that morning for nothing. I’d even booked a hostel in Brixton that night and the following day to be close by. Hindsight is, or can be, painful.

The Sunday of that weekend saw the inaugural Sound on Vision event at Vibe Lounge on Brick Lane. I arrived around 2pm to set up and was on from about 5pm. I decided to start with a minimal setup and build up the content from there. I had some heat from Mowgli as he didn’t think it was eye-catching enough, but had someone ask me about one of the clips I used while I was playing and later had some positive feedback from someone else who had been watching. Mowgli noted some lack of contrast, suggesting that images usually need to be blown out to “too much” on your screen to look okay as a projection. Criticism noted. I’m going to have to work out a way to increase the contrast whilst still allowing for a dreamlike mixture of multiple layers, which might in itself be spoiled by too much contrast! Experimentation required.

This past Friday night I went to the British Film Institute (the BFI) at Southbank in London for the AV Social, something I’ve been looking forward to for a while now. It is an interesting venue, and I had some idea to go back on Saturday, but I left it a little too late to head down there in the evening, so had a look around Brick Lane instead.

I’ve also recently been reading about OpenFrameworks, the D programming language, and Ruby (as a language and as Ruby on Rails). Nothing exciting to talk about just yet. I installed Aptana Studio to try out Ruby on Rails, and was following some tutorial only to have something fail that probably shouldn’t be failing (setting up or starting some kind of server) before getting to any code. I did drop a simple “Hello World” script on the webserver to see if it will run, and at least that worked. As with the visuals mentioned above, experimentation required (and study!).

Latest news is that I’ve finally booked a flight to Denmark in October for some birthdays. It will be nice to see one of my best mates and some other friendly faces there, and no doubt become reacquainted with the legendary “Fisk” (Fisherman’s Friend and vodka).

-G.

-G.

MIND! :: Roots :: Reggae :: Dancehall :: Drum & Bass :: Dubstep :: Breakbeat

Music by:

• Earl Gateshead (Trojan Sound System)
• Unity Selekta

Visuals by subpixel

Second gig: Wed 17 September, 10 til 2

The Dogstar. 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton SW9 8LQ
£3 on the door, £2 with flier

Directions: Exiting Brixton tube station, turn left. Turn left at Coldharbour Lane (KFC is on the corner). The Dogstar is a couple of minutes walk away on the right hand side of the road. Easy! :o)

MIND! :: Roots :: Reggae :: Dancehall :: Drum & Bass :: Dubstep :: Breakbeat

Music by:

• Earl Gateshead (Trojan Sound System)
• Unity Selekta

Visuals by subpixel

*Opening Night!* Wed 3 September, 10 til 2

The Dogstar. 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton SW9 8LQ
£3 on the door, £2 with flier

Directions: Exiting Brixton tube station, turn left. Turn left at Coldharbour Lane (KFC is on the corner). The Dogstar is a couple of minutes walk away on the right hand side of the road. Easy! :o)