keith’s new self

Been too busy to blog lately. Went to the Vancouver Folk Fest last weekend. Wonderful - always an amazing vibe. Highlights: Feist, Juana Molina, Buck 65, and the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band.

Buck 65 is really entertaining live. Highly recommended. His new stuff is an amazing fusion of folk, blues and hip hop. The lines blur to the point that it becomes a new thing - it doesn’t sound like hip hop plus something else. I like that.

The new Juana Molina album is sooooo tasty. Totally stripped down and minimal - I like it better than her last one which was beautiful and quirky but a bit too busy in places. Her live performances were great - I thought her music was a lot more “canned” then it really is - she’s a master of live layering and looping. She would sample her own voice or guitar live and have half-a-dozen layers all playing simultaneously, and then would tap out a melody on her synth and loop that live too. Truly a master of acoustic/electronic blending.

The new Four Tet record, “Everything Ecstatic”, is fucking brilliant! It lives up to the name - the songs really are imbued with a sense of bliss and ecstasy, as they skitter-skatter around with noisy beats, bleeps, and fills. It’s so great that someone can make an electronic album that is so experimental and psychedelic and rich and positive at the same time. Hooray!

Feels like I have about a trillion-and-one things all converging at once. Excerpts:

- Launched the new Lightwork website. Lightwork is my spiritual and meditation practice. It rocks. Now it has a website that does it justice. It took a lot of work to make a site that has tons of saturated photographic backgrounds and is still readable. Utilized a bunch of PNG-transparency hacking, and PHP embedded in CSS style sheets to deliver different CSS to different browsers (beats obscure CSS browser hacks, IMO). It makes for a very unique-looking site. All powered by Mambo. Nifty!

- Bought some Soundpax speakers - omnidirectional cardboard speakers with a 15W amp that you can run off AA batteries - perfect for the camping trip that needs a soundtrack.

- I am now a full-time employee of Sxip. I love it there. Know Perl? Come work for us.

- I’m leaving for a retreat at Hollyhock, on Cortes Island, in two days. Can’t wait for a week of serenity, meditation, great food, outdoor hot tubs overlooking the ocean, …

tags: code, folk, hiphop, indierock, lightwork, meditation, music, perl, sxip, vancouver, web

posted: 12:05 am