Episodes

Back from a fantastic Electronic Circus with great and diverse musical acts like Martin Stürtzer and Schwarz. A new location with much space and lots of nice people made the weekend an event to remember. And the next one is at the horizon with E-Live end of October. I hope to make it to Oirschot, but one never knows. After such an exciting time in Detmold, I am looking for some rest and relaxation.

So I am just preparing for a short trip to a small town. Not that small, actually, as it is the biggest in its region. Quite a nice region as well with nice places of interest around. Yeah, right, some of you will have guessed it, I am talking about Detmold. What's so interesting about Detmold? Well, it is the place hosting the excellend Electronic Circus festival for several years now. What better reason to visit a place than experiencing high quality musical acts? And there are more such festivals to come, in the Netherlands and in the UK. Don't hesitate to go, because, suddenly, such an event might get cancelled. Sad greetings over to Belgium where this just happened with B-Wave. Hence, no time to waste but run for the upcoming festivals.

I highly appreciate people committing themselves for a greater good. It does not have to be the big world wide good like a famous schoolgirl running for climate change, although her dedication is admirable and should receive all the support she can. But also doing small things are applaudable, like running a festival for non profit just because you love the music and love to support its fans. The guys from the Electronic Circus are such a lot. And I am very happy they decided to run the event even though it will be difficult to reach the required figures. You will get a tiny impression of their headliner on this show.

When I was younger, at the beginning of my electronic music journey, at one time I discovered the music by Suzanne Ciani. It was published by Private Music, where you could also find the music by Yanni. It was both labeled New Age and not electronic music, but their music was simply beautiful to listen to without being corny. Well, yes, I also relished the piano play of Johannes Schmoelling with Tangerine Dream, but this was different. And I still carry the love for the piano sound inside. Tonight will be much of a focus on beauty and melody, and most of the tracks with a piano at its core.

Are you a sweet tooth type? Or the spicy one? Or maybe more on the bitter side? Or, like me, oving the variety of tastes? Some buddies think that I lost my gustative nerves regarding spicyness. Well, I admit that I love hot food. But I definitely know that there are some dishes even I cannot eat. (I especially know about one such dish I had in an Indian restaurant in Ottawa.) But it's not only food, where I love it hot and sweet and bitter. The same holds for my taste in music. And tonight's selection kind of reflects this with tracks having a perfect mix in textures.

A rather quiet week passed by. And I am still into video production. Recently I used some graphic engine to create an animation video, where the camera moves a certain path over computer generated buildings. Actually, I did two of those. The first one took about 70 minutes to render for about 3 minutes video. And the second took more than 3 hours resulting in a 2.5 minutes video. Crazy! As a test, I uploaded the 3 minutes video to Youtube. Well, it took about 4 hours to have the video online. Four hours! Oh, boy. I can see now where all the time goes for producing and publishing some video. I much prefer serving my audio only podcast, which takes about 2 minutes to upload to my server with 30 minutes of fine electronic soundscapes.

Surfing on Youtube, Vimeo or similar video providers, I often stumble upon videos done for a music track. It reminds me somewhat of the early days and music TV. Actually, a good pal did a video teaser for my The Sound of Syndae CD, which is awesom (the video, and of course the CD). So I thought, I would try to do some video for tracks to publish. Turns out, there is quite some good software out there, for free even, to cut and edit videos. The most difficult part actually is to find a theme and, depending on the theme, fitting video fragments to combine to a full track length video. So there I am spending time on video creation, and I surely will let you know about its outcome later this year. Tonight's edition of syndae somewhat felt like combining fragments, as the tracks are rather short in duration.

We are living in a short-lived time. The world spins faster and faster, and events are rushing by like sport cars on a racing track. Well, I don't think that everything was better in the years behind. But I think it sometimes is a good idea to stand still and look back. Or rather listen back, if you talk in music. Back in the days when electronic music was young musicians tended to experiment with these new instruments making sound from current. They found new ways to express themselves, let the inspiration flow into the art they created. In an instant. Nowadays, while the instruments are no new wonder anymore there are still such people enjoying to let the flow surprise themselves.

Do you enjoy magic? I mean, the real world stuff where they do all sorts of tricks which seem to be impossible to happen. Magicians somehow took over several talent shows, it seems, but this may all be my bubble of experience. To me, it still is fascinating how they make cards vanish and reappear from thin air. I know it's a trick and I think about how it could be done. I also admit that I sometimes watch videos revealing tricks, just out of curiousity of how it is done. And my biggest respect to the magician's imagination on ways to fool spectators. Creating music that really gets to me to me also is kind of magic. Here, it is not about fooling but about injecting emotional hooks into the listener. Most commercial productions don't do it for me, as they do work with the equivalent of magic tricks, but not with passion in mind. The tracks on my show don't play tricks. They simply have the vibe to make me love them.