Dear journal, mad times.
No chance to survive make my time, quick recap of last week.
Ninja 9000.
The recent Ninja 9000 gig and EP release took quite some effort, but I'm glad to have done it. It is available for download on a minisite and I wrote an entry on the gig. As usual, never as expected but always exceptionally fun.
New Lab.
I moved to and furnished a new lab location. My previous laboratory was a cozy but cramped office of approx 12 square meters. I worked there for 3 years, day and night. and I loved it. However I'm getting madder and madder, the madness knows no boundary. So I needed more space. Also, I work almost around the clock, and at the previous location there were a few other bands and producers. They didn't annoy me much, but they made noise, and it just teared me down over time. I prefer NOT to hear someone else's beat when working on my own.
My new space is wonderful. I have a huge, airy room with a lots of light. There is a proper kitchen right outside the door, and a fantastic, huge balcony overlooking the busy container port of Bergen. The room is located at the end of a huge empty abandoned space, in fact so huge I actually ride my bike or rollerblades from the studio to the toilets because it takes too long to walk. Seriously, yes, it is that big.
Did I mention the silence? I'm really glad I took the week to move over.
Ugress album release date and concept.
The next Ugress album is looming like a snoozing monsoon. I spent some time finalizing and deciding for myself what, how, where, why and when to do the next Ugress album. There is an enormous amount of material ready. The concept is ready. The date has been set for quite some time, actually since April, but now it is irrevocably agreed upon. Within a week or so you know it too, good things comes very soon.
My Life In Bits.
Any waking moment at home I spent feeding my laptop with CDs, my scanner with photos and the waste bin with everything else.
I digitized all of my CDs, removed the discs from their redundant cases and jammed them all into a huge disc storage folder. I reduced enormous amount of shelf space, where CDs had been collecting dust for ages. I haven't bought a physical CD in years, except from friends or live gigs. Most of my purchases are digital, and whenever I buy a physical CD I digitize it at once. The physical product is useless to me and it was fantastic to get rid of all that plastic.
I encoded them in 320 kbps mp3, I thought about doing it losslessly but instant accessibility is more important to me than the potential quality. The discs are still available in any case. Much to my surprise I have now almost 1300 albums in my iTunes library. I had no idea it was that much, and I'm sure there must be a lot of duplicates, non-album albums and trash. Haven't had time to sort it out yet.
I also scanned all of my analog photos, reducing even more of my embarrassing past and ghosts from shelf space to disk space. I'm trying to move all of my knowledge, history, property and repository from physical to digital, as you might recall I mentioned my struggle to find a proper information manager. I am very comfortable with having all of my stuff available on my powerbook. With Spotlight I can reach anything within a few seconds, I don't even need to know where it is. Everything I do - music, visuals, ideas, concepts, texts, webs, communication, whatever - is either digitally confined or at least spends one step in it's process in the digital realm.
The concept and theory around digitizing of ones life is super intriguing and MUST be properly explored in a future entry.
Today I killed.
I wacked an irritating fly, by throwing a pad of post-it notes at it. I was delighfully surprised at my hit. Bad karma but good marksmanship.
