Save the forests – buy a t-shirt! Will post more here when all the details are worked out. E-mail my temporary secretary if you want to be sure to get one: info % goto80 % com.
Design: Raquel Meyers
Production: Serie B / Plan9
RAMBLINGS
G0TO¨^spam
GOTO/SPAM
wheredid lance armstrong goto colage
goto kills sustain
goto another url
on error goto tutorials
goto light
how to grow goto kola
goto meeting replacement
photorealism
Chicken Sound
I think I am making chicken sound, because this is here. Additionally, this is here.
SID CHAOS PARANOIA
I have destroyed way too many SID-chips (the soundchips of the C64) over the years. I developed a severe paranoia where I thought that my body had been intoxicated by electro chaos at a club in Göteborg, when the sound technician killed my C64 by plugging it into a dimmer plug. But then I tried a stun gun (the illegal kind) and the rate of destroyed SID-chips decreased, and about a year ago I started to beta-test this SID-chip protection that Mogwai is building. You put it inbetween the SID and the C64 motherboard, and it stabilizes currents and does other magic. I’ve put it through datahell, and it has worked great so far.
But when I returned home from a few gigs in the UK a couple of months ago, the SID was suddenly very quiet. This is a typical near-death experience. During that tour I also destroyed my disk drive. I thought that my trash-skills had once again won the fight against engineering. At the Nödik Impakt festival last weekend, I brought another C64, which also had a broken SID-chip when I came home. Paranoia. Electro chaos. Datahell.
Enter the troubleshoot. I took the old C64 and removed the SID protection, and connected the SID straight to the motherboard. No sound at all. I opened the other C64 and gave the SID-chip some sweetness. Still no sound. Doctor Matsumoto suggested to change the power supply because there are rumours about bad behaviour of on the right. Doctors never lie, and neither did this one. Indeedio, it worked. Both SIDs were now back to life, back to reality.
SID says: Bad power supplies can make you think that we are dead, but Mogwai SID protection can make you think we are alive anyway.
Little Computer People 2009
I was at Little Computer People 2009 – the largest 8-bit demoparty in Scandinavia for 15 years, with about 150 people.
I was happy to win first prize with Automatas in the C64-music competition. I spent the week before at the countryside, composing a song specifically to win the compo according to my algorithm. But after a while I gave up to make a good song instead. So obviously my algorithm was wrong. It is an 8x-speed song made in Defmon, meaning that it accesses the SID-chip 8 times faster than usual. This gives you a higher resolution of all the tables, faster slides and LFOs, etc.
In the Amiga music compo, I came second last with my song Konkurs Data. The sounds used are mostly textfiles, pictures, executables, etc – sweet data that Protracker eats perfectly. It is not the recipe for winning demoscene competitions.
Some of the releases I enjoyed especially was the Amiga songs by Yonx and Qwan (mp3s), Zabutom’s Space Fish, Mortimer Twang’s Seved Skweeeeeeeee, Jucke’s Where is Dino?, LFT’s Power Ninja Action Challenge (custom hardware, mp3 here), and many more! Get all the releases and photos
WORM-residence: SID-beats and ARP-heat
Since 2007, the allround venue Worm in Rotterdam has housed CEM – a studio that dates back to 1956. Last week, I had the opportunity to spend 4 days there, amounting in around 20 (sketches for) new songs. These will be released over time, but for now you can listen to three tiny teasers at wormstudio.
I used the Arp 2500 and a Commodore 64. I sequenced, played the keyboards and tried different ways of synchronizing them. Eventhough the studio has so many machines to use, I deliberately focused on one in order to gradually improve my trial and error methods (being somewhat inexperienced with modular monsters).
The C64 has analogue filters and is not as deterministic as other computers – something I always appreciated. I saw this residency as an opportunity to amplify and recontextualize these characteristics, in order to take the C64 into a new ultra dimension.
Neither of these machines are optimum for setting exact tempos. Unlike today’s standards they are influenced or even determined by electric currents. On the 10-step sequencer of the Arp, you have a knob to set the tempo, and every millimeter counts. To me it also seemed to fluctuate a bit in the tempo, possibly caused by other signals leaking into the clock signal. (This can be solved, but I like to encourage these things)
On the C64, you normally have predetermined tempo-settings to choose from. If you hear a C64-song, it will likely be in either 125.31 or 150.37 BPM. In European PAL-country that is, because the tempos are derived from the electric current.
However, with my dear Defmon software I can set the tempo with maximum precision – down to a tick of the processor. Going out of the inherent tempos however, has consequences for the sound. You can no longer be sure that envelopes and loops sound the same. To avoid this, I usually have the C64 as master, but this time I adjusted the tempo after the Arp.
The process was this: output the clock signal of the Arp as audio, sample 2 minutes of it, analyze the BPM, convert the BPM into hex-values according to the other speed settings of Defmon, and you got it synchronized. Sort of.
I can hear all you tech-geeks sighing over this lamer solution. But it was wonderful to leave the machines running, hearing them mutate by themselves since they were slightly out of sync, or due to electrical leakages in the Arp and uncontrolled bugs in the C64. From a technical point of view, this might be possible to do with a laptop, but this was sometihng profoundly different from working with über-data-control.
All this amounted to several hours of recordings. Some of these 30 minute improvisations can be cut up in parts, and overdubbed with more C64, to create songs that also relate to eachother quite specifically. But we will see what happens. I already miss that studio with tropical heat and sparkling beats!
Russia Tour Cancelled
Just to confirm: the tour to Russia and neighbouring countries has been cancelled. Eventhough I had an invitation sent over telex (!) for the visa, it did not work out this time. And this is not an april’s fools joke, this is not a drill. Rave on, until next time.
Live @ Pirate Bay Spectrial Party
On Friday next week in Stockholm, I will play at the opening party for the trial against Pirate Bay. In true pirate style the trial is announced as a theater spectacle – spectrial – and it is definitely something worth following. It is of course not a spectacle for the entertainment industry, European Parliament, and other copyright mongers that are pushing for the death sentence of the Pirate Bay. But for me, it is more like a money-induced theater than something about artist’s rights or computer literate laws. Why, you may ask?
The investigations leading up to the trial are the longest ever in Sweden, according to some. It is probably because linking to copyrighted material is not illegal in Sweden, which has been explained to “the industry” repeatedly, hehe. But to try to prove that it is still wrong anyway, a number of officials from the media industry has been invited to court. And the police man who investigated Pirate Bay. But well, he was also working for Universal and Warner so we’d might aswell call him a part of the entertainment industry. I am guessing there are reasons to why there are no people that actually know something about computers and law?
Eh, yeah well anyway, see you at the party!
Summary of Shit
As we all know, 2008 was a shit year. The only good thing that happened was me dressing up as a salad-man and being called the shadow. Oh, and the financial crisis of course. Anyway. Me and my partner in crime didn’t manage to fill up all 365 days at internet2008.se but of course we blame someone else for that. I did however put 182 songs there, although most of it under other names than Goto80. As you might have noted the quality control was not exactly cosmic all the time, but it was good enough for a shit year! Counting other releases (mp3-albums, collaborations, videos, games, compilations, demos) I got about 225 songs out in 2008. Yip yip yip. Years are numbers, and should be summarized in numbers. Here is another number: 59
As for 2009 I will stop aiming for high numbers. This is the dawn of the new beginning, booya. Expect some good ol’ quality releases again. I will also try to do more live shows than last year, so e-mail me when the cables are plugged in and you’re ready to rumble. My name is Goto Eightola. Nice to meet you. I Hope you like it.
