GAS at the Transmediale09 festival Berlin.

GAS aka Wolfgang Voigt has just opened the Transmediale festival in Berlin at the Volksbühne Am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
More importantly someone took a video camera.

Schengen Ce Gil album, a handful of copies left

There are just a handful of Schengen's album Ce Gil left at Distant Noise. If you fancy grabbing one of the last ltd edition numbered copies, head over to Distant Noise and get yourself one. Cheers for your support!

http://www.luga.haveajoint.com/shop_new.html

As a taster here's the opening track to the album.

Duc by Schengen

UPDATE: All copies of 'Ce Gil' have now sold out. Thanks for your support.

By the way the Distant Noise remix album blogged about earlier has completely sold out in under a week!!

Stunning new Portal EP

Simply had to blog about this one. Portal is releasing a new EP 'Options' in March on Make Mine Music. I've been lucky enough to hear some of the tracks and they're blinding. Scott has kindly upped to Soundcloud an alternative mix of one of the tracks recorded with Ben Holton from Epic45 for everyone to hear. It's frankly superb. The track is entitled You're Building Over My Childhood and it's a lush slab of guitar pop with a tendency to stay in your brain long after hearing.

You're Building Over My Childhood (Ultra Mix) by Portal

The new Portal EP "Options" will be released in March 2009 on Make Mine Music (MMM048). The 20-minute CD features four new tracks:

1. Options (with vocals by Glen Johnson, courtesy of Future Conditional)
2. You're Building Over My Childhood (with vocals and additional guitars by Ben Holton, courtesy of Epic45 & My Autumn Empire)
3. Slow Burner (with vocals by Lorraine Lelis, who has previously sung with Mahogany and Auburn Lull)
4. Options (Future Conditional remix) (with vocals by Glen Johnson and Angèle David-Guillou, courtesy of Klima)

AKA APC40 Ableton controller

This new controller from Akai has just been announced at NAMM09. It's already lighting up the forums and creating a bit of stir. At first glance it looks so intuitive. Clip and scene triggers by cool looking LEDs (as readers of my blog you can never have enough LEDs), track faders, potentially motorised, who knows, plenty of track assignable and plugin-assignable pots as well. And that's just the top level functionality described I'm sure.

And we haven't even heard what Ableton are announcing later on today. Expected to be something along the lines of super MAX integration following months of collaborative work with Cycling74.

Details of the Akai here.

2009 and busy

Well happy 2009 to YOU. I've been enjoying myself over the Christmas break, lots of parties, seen a good amount of friends, spending new years with 3 of them and a bottle of Disarono (check out the Wild Hibiscus cocktails coming soon) and generally having a good time. And it was my son's 6th birthday today so as with every year the party vibe lasts a good week longer into Jan.

The first proper week of the year has been really busy for me on the music front with 4 tracks laid down for a *possible* ep. I'm going to wait until the tracks have bedded in, and I've digested them enough times before deciding whether I like them enough to do something with them. But I'm pleased put it that way.

Looking out for a new kit on the cheap for the studio to progress is the next thing for me. My thoughts have turned to playing live at some point this year so I need to get some outboard rig together if I'm going to do it. We'll see....