I'm creating this blog to keep those interested in the know of future shows, commissions, strange movements and orchestrated catastrophes related to the great lumbering mechanical Ape. We've already scheduled a busy summer and fall, so much so that we have to consider prioritizing and declining opportunities to perform, which always hurts, but is necessary to keep up a certain level of quality. I'll flesh out the blog as we go along, and, of course, I encourage any and all to share this to whomever they think will be interested. So here we go...
Final preparations are under way at the Destroy compound for this years Electric Eclectics festival in Meaford Ontario. For those who are unfamiliar, EE is a weekend festival of true freaks displaying strange inventions, unconventional sound art and generally inexplicable behavior at a farm in rural Canada. A good time will be had by all.
Apetech will be appearing in a couple of different contexts at the festival. We will be doing a repeat performance from previous years with our mobile robots, maybe the traditional roachbot skulls or maybe an as of yet unannounced new prototype mobile weirdness platform with some novel characteristics. You'll have to go to find out. The second will be our first stage performance at the festival, which will be a collaboration between us, Lon C Diehl of Hunting Lodge fame, Nate Young of Wolf Eyes fame, and Andrew Coltrane of Andrew Coltrane fame. There was much preparation for the collaboration last night at the Destroy compound as Lon and Chip ran around supplementing Lon's collection of smashed glass and bent metal samples with a library of clips best titled 'Everything You Should Probably Not Do To A Gong,' Nate put a new Arturia mini Brute through its paces and Coltrane was doing something strange in a suitcase. I like to think he was just manipulating dials, but I couldn't get over the feeling that he was just amplifying an unanesthetized surgical experiment on a small mammal. I decided not to look. He might have been force feeding a cat a contact mic. I don't know. I don't wanna know. Anyway...
Preparations for a September Mocad installation move ahead as a fleet of junk cars are dropped off in the yard. Work will begin today on dropping the engines, transmissions and gas tanks. It will be a delicate operation involving a oversized forklift, a oxy-acetylne gas axe and some hopefully delicate intervention by the law of gravity. Luckily the drought around here lifted a little bit, so we're not as worried about catching the yard on fire. On the control side of that project we're making incremental steps on a MaxMSP based program to be triggered by either passive infrared or interrupted beam switches.
We're waiting on pins and needles for word from the Dlectricity show as to whether or not our grant has been approved. We're really looking forward to moving ahead on this project but as it involves a bunch of new tech, we have to wait for the funding. Keeping our fingers crossed on this one, it's going to be a top notch event and a real coup for Midtown.
Other things in the near and far future... two proposed one night performances, one with New Music Detroit and another with an as of yet unannounced headliner, experiments into the intense vibration of large pieces of metal with linear motors, corn starch and remote surveillance.
In other compound news, the sound and light control loft is finished in the Michigan Underground Group space is finished and being put through its paces. It has added a lot of sound functionality to the space as we can now leave our large mixer setup, use the twelve in four out mic/direct snake and leave a recording setup wired for immediate plug and play capture. Some dreams for the future include a new (or gently used) DA interface for multitrack recording. Eight channels would be nice. Christmas is coming up. Just sayin.
