Last two weeks, very many things have happened. Some for good, some for bad, some I can speak of, some I can't. There has been a lot of unexpectedness, amounts of drama, but also good things coming up. Hopefully the next few weeks will ease down so I can focus on writing new stuff, which is what I long for.

Productionwise I've been working on new material for both Ugress and Shadow Of The Beat. In all of my projects there will always be a certain amount of overlap. Right now I'm working on 5-6 tracks and I'm not sure where any of them will end up. I observe, even if I sit down to write Shadow tracks, I'm really in a Nebular Spool kind of mood so maybe the next Spool isn't too far off. I am nevertheless looking forward to revisit and upgrade older Shadow tracks, preparing them for the upcoming liveshow.

Got myself a new hardware controller, Edirol PCR-300, not sure how satisfied I am with that, wrote a separate journal on it.

I do manage to get some fresh air. After rediscovering skiing, I've got myself a pair, and I try to ski as much as possible before the snow disappears.

A friend of mine brought us up to the Vidden, a mountain plateau available from local Mount Ulriken, a quick trip by cable car from the city. I had no idea there were so vast opportunities for proper skiing right outside my door. We skied down the mountain afterwards and I probably faceplanted twenty times. It was awesome.

Thursday I went to see Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra perform Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. Bartok is one of my favorite 20th century composers, and the Concerto did not disappoint. There's a couple of delicious parts where the whole string sections are going off like crazy with staccatos, it tears in your ears and hairs are spiking in your neck, I don't know why but it just feels incredibly satisfying. The whole piece is kind of built for each group of the orchestra to show off and they certainly did.

There was also a violin concert as part of the program, I'm usually not too fond of those but this one had a good performer in Nikolaj Znaider who drew me in and I very much enjoyed that part too.

Bookwise, I've finished Foundation, my first experience with Asimov (in direct literature), and it wasn't bad. Not sure if I will be continuing the series though, it didn't capture me that much. I suppose that's because political systems and civilization development are the main protagonists, not people. I think I'll check out his robot novels before extending on Foundation.

OK thats it for journal update... Right now it is weekend, I'm off to a pub catching up with an old friend, the snow outside is slowly disappearing in the frontline of spring rain. I wish it would keep for some time so I could play more with my skis but what happens, happens.

There will always be another winther, that's for sure.

I got myself an Edirol PCR-300.

Why

Why not?

Well actually I do have a reason for getting this - at my last live show, the Lemur controller broke down, and I lost a lot of realtime control. I want to have a portable hardware backup with lots of physical options, so if the Lemur breaks down again (it will), I have something to fall back on.

Also even if I never use all the controls in the studio, I like to look at lots of controls. I like having access to potential in front of me, even if I never use it.

The good

The build is good, the size is GREAT!

Tactile wise, the feel of keys, buttons, knobs and faders are good for this price level.

The unit fits perfectly between my keyboard and monitor, it also fits perfectly in my gear flight. Looking forward to give this a spin on the next live show.

The notes on the keyboard are slightly smaller than regular, but I am a tiny person with nimble fingers, so I actually prefer the subsize keyboard, it means comfortable playing and greater reach.

It looks neither too much nor too little, visually and mentally it fits my world just where it should.

Crossfader feels good but not slap-able.

USB powered.

MIDI in and out, can hook up to my Faderfoxes if need be.

The bad

I was surprised that the keyboard starts at F, not at C, there is only 2.5 octaves, not 3 like I thought. My bad for not noticing this in the photos or promotional material, slapped myself when unboxing. I've had something like this before, can't remember what it was, but I'm not a stranger to lower F, and I'm not too fond of it.

Normally this wouldn't be as overly dramatic, but I've kind of got a weird way of doing things in realtime, during production, the lowest octave of a keyboard are set up to be control commands (a dimension of 12 commands with potentially 127 steps each) instead of regular notes. Not a life or death situation loosing parts of this, but not paradise either, could mean a lot of button presses.

Crossfader feels good but not slap-able.

Pitch bend and mod wheel does not display transmit value, but everything else does. Why not PB and MW?

Not universal USB support, needs an installed driver.

The driver install needed to reboot the computer. WTF kind of 1990ies setup is that? What's next Roland, I have to edit config.bat to adjust realtime parameters?

Conclusion

Really like the unit as a physical thing. Fits my fingers and workspace perfectly.

Surprised at lower key is F not C. Would actually prefer 2.00, or 4.00, octaves instead of half-assed 2.60.

I'm going to try it for a couple of weeks, see if this works out. If not I'm getting the 500, even if I think it is too big. That could actually be a win-win, having the 500 for studio work and the 300 for live work. I do dislike all the rigging up and rigging down so this is a viable option.

 

Portuguese music blog Opus Sound did a review of latest album Reminiscience, and to follow up I also did a long and friendly interview with Miguel, talking about lots of stuff, including Fado, one of my favorite nostalgic music genres.

Portugal has a good place in my heart, I spent some special time there a few years ago. I'm very happy to have my music presented to Portugal, and flattered to be featured on the excellent Opus Sound.

Reminiscience review in Portuguese, and English version (Google Translate).

GMM interview, English.

Today I wen't skiing for the first time in decades.

I haven't been skiing since some school trip way back when, even before snowboards. I used to love skiing, both cross-country and downhill. I was intrigued with snowboarding when it hit, and really wanted to get into it, but I prioritized music. When friends travelled to the mountains, I fired up Protracker. When friends got their drivers license, I got a synth. When friends got sensible degrees I got a tiny record deal. When friends bought apartments I started a record label. While friends have been building homes, families, safety, I've been reducing my world to a laptop, a portable studio.

There isn't any right or wrong in this. But I have realized, this choice, sometimes it is the right one, but sometimes it is not. More importantly, maybe it doesn't always have to be a choice. I suppose this is obvious to most balanced people, but not to me. When it comes to many important things, I'm a clueless amoeba, not aware I am riding a one-way missile, jumping excitedly up and down on the guidance controls, messing it all up. I am just amazed at the speed and all the shiny things zipping by. Wohaa, look at THAT! Isn't this WONDERFUL? Then; impact, pain, hard lessons.

Well that's me blabbering, from skis to missiles in a paragraph. I need to get back on the ground. Skiing?

I'm in Oslo, I borrowed a ski set. My good friend and manager Roar knows Marka very well, and took us deep into wonderful terrain, away from the busy tracks, crossing frozen small lakes and through magic, soft and silent woods. We had an excellent trip, a great talk, I got lots of perspective and inspiration.

Here are my observations.

• I still know skiing! I am The Unconquestable Ice Master Of Ski.
• Ski technology has certainly improved, bindings are easy, shoes are comfy, skis are lightweight, not at all the hassle I remembered.
• Underwear does not itch anymore but I still don't like it.
• Skiing must be awesome for listening to music, but:
• My iPhone does not work very well in -15C / 5F, crashed like crazy
• However my Canon G11 works as usual.
• Downhill is awesome, and even more so when I have no idea what's around the next corner, bring it on.
• The slower someone moves, the more friendly they are.
• It was way more fun than I remember.
• I got blisters and complained like a child the last kilometers, and got a waffle.

Pics or stfu.

I'm sending Roar off first to check the, umm, sound of the skis on the ice.

I hope it's thick enough.

No moose for my sunset shot.

Sudden secret magic lake.

Kometkameratene Behind-The-Music: You can watch episodes directly from NRK or download official torrents. There is also a list of each behind-the-music entry. NEW: You can watch the whole video over at NRK Super.

My debut as lead vocals!

The episode subject is "Home", where you live, or in Norwegian, "Bo". First, I wrote a really bad first draft, that didn't work at all. Then Synne the director came up with the idea to do something different for this episode - there is a nest with some quirky birds, and what about having those birds performing the song, singing about how much they enjoy living in a nest? 

A great idea, and we decided to have me an Sjur perform the birds, with some additional pitch editing. We've already performed many supportive vocals, like the Boogles, socks, gloves, children and more, but never been the lead vocals.

I set to work and wrote the following Nobel price winning piece of literature:

The birds are performing this text in very broad Bergensk, my own dialect, which is excellently self-smug and self-centered when taken to extremes. It is a perfect voice to the happily clueless birds, enjoying life in their nest.

There is also a solo part, where the two birds yell about how incredible awesome it is to be a bird, how great everything is, and they are now going to perform an awesome chirping solo.... which of course absolutely totally suck.

I built a very 80ies pop setting for the song, I'm sure the references are easily spotted. The chorus are performed by everyone, and the wonderful lofi video as usual is produced on a legendary budget.

Kometkameratene - Bo / Home by GMM

So that's my debut as a lead vocalist for a music video shown on prime time television. (Me to the left, Sjur to the right).

When was the last time you enjoyed reading a pdf? Did you ever try reading comics on a computer? On a mobile? Yuck.

There has never been a great way to read and enjoy electronic text, comics and visual material on computers. Music, films, games and somewhat books, has moved into the digital realm with great success. Now is the time to combine all of this into something new, bringing along all the rest of media.

The iPad as a device may be a lackluster response to everyone's dream of the ultimate portable everything-all-the-time, but that's not what the device should seek to be at all.

There are two important pieces of information necessary to this puzzle, both written before launch, and then exciting conclusion onfirmed by the announced device.

First this excellent article from Gizmodo, from an interface perspective, on why the device will not, and should not, be a "handheld computer". It won't multitask, it won't run OSX.

Then this intriguing observation from Epicenter, that the iPad isn't about hardware, it's about content.

And these two point to what I think has been missing for digital content: A dedicated delivery platform for new futuristic digital content, it being music, film, text, graphics, games or more excitingly - all of this at once. Interactive, intelligent content, stories told and produced by small companies and single individuals like myself. 

This is the mp3 revolution, now happening for text, films, games, multimedia.

Now for the letdowns, I agree with most of them too. Yes it sucks massively that you can't play Spotify in the background while reading books, or have a chat going while surfing the web. No Flash is just sad. It doesn't look too superhot, with that fat bezel. 4:3, not 16:9. The closed Apple controlled application process is both a pain and a pleasure; both as a consumer and producer.

There will be other pads that does what the iPad doesn't. This is just the beginning of something really great, I'm super excited about this new platform.

Journal entry, January 26th, 2010.

The last week has been a busy bee composer work week. I delivered the final four songs for the Kometkameratene show, plus some pieces of incidental episode music. I also finished a large scoring job for a production company, which concluded a long, but fun and challenging, scoring gig.

I don't know when how this production will be public, so I can't reveal much yet, except an interesting fact: I composed and produced the music BEFORE editing. This isn't the usual old-skool method for film production, but it is not a technique I am strange to.

My album music is often used in films and TV stuff, where editors cut the film to this already existing music. As an extension of this, I am often asked to do subtle changes to tracks, helping them fit the cuts optimally. This has developed further into a working method where I am involved early in the production, and start writing music WITHOUT images. The editors then edit the images to the written music. I did this somewhat on the Perfect Moment series, and I've been doing it more and more on several productions later, finally now with this large production where I did all the music without actually seeing anything of the movie - they are cutting it now to the finished music.

Writing music to specific images you haven't seen is challenging but I think it is a great challenge and I love doing it this way.

Oh and I also went to the dentist this morning. They had this new digital roentgen thing, I forgot to ask if I could hae a copy of my teeth. Anyway, what I wanted to mention, as usual, no holes, for the fourth year in a row! I AM THE INDESTRUCTIBLE PERFECT TEETH ROBOT.

NRK Urørt, the radio show that originally broke Ugress in Norway, is celebrating their 10 year anniversary.

Happy birthday, dearest Untouchables. And eternal gratitude, not only for what you have done for me, but what you are doing for music in Norway. Urørt has been vital in the growth and development of new music in Norway over the last decade.

Personally, the Urørt radio show is the most important kickstart that happened to my career as a musician/artist. Today, I am your average struggling artist, fighting to make ends meet, but doing this on a professional level: Since 2002, my income has been from my music. It's tough, it's a lot of work, but I'm there, and I'm there very much thanks to Urort. Climbing up to this platform, making it possible to I live from what I create, I can only give my deepest gratitude to NRK Urørt for.

Thanks.

Kometkameratene Behind-The-Music: You can watch episodes directly from NRK or download official torrents. There is also a list of each behind-the-music entry. NEW: You can watch the whole video over at NRK Super.

We are writing a song about senses, of course the first thing that pops into my head is 60ies psychedelia, and Doors in particular. For kids, this setup will fly above their heads but hopefully the grownups will appreciate the reference.

I wrote a beautiful piece of silly and simple psychedelic poetry, here's an excerpt:

It sounds better in Norwegian. After writing the lyrics, I dressed them in a very 60ies rock sound, with compulsory sitar. I suppose the influence of this track is rather obvious (harr harr).

The first version was much longer and better than this broadcast version, with more of my excellent poetry and more room for each instrument and vocals to build, creating a finer linear structure. However there isn't much time for the music videos in each episode so we reduced the track to the essentials.

Kometkameratene - Sanser / Senses by GMM

From this track the production team cooked up a hilarious video, spinning further on the 60ies theme.

Conclusion

I think this track is great, it nails the 60ies in a respectful parody. But retrospectively I'm a little bit concerned we're having more fun as adults than the kids do, it doesn't talk too well to kids. But thats OK, most tracks in the series prioritize the kids first, we're allowed to do some grown-up jokes too, this one was too good to let pass.
 
 

I'm writing and producing music for a Norwegian sci-fi TV series for kids, Kometkameratene.

The latest episodes of the show are now available in full HD quality, as torrents from NRK. This is pretty cool and I'm quite proud to be part of one of the most modern, forward-thinking series at NRK.

According to NRK the episodes can only be available for 30 days, due to certain rights issues. Rest assured this is not because of my contract.

I'm a little bit behind on the regular "making of" for each episode. They'll be coming here rather soon, working on them now.

For returning readers, you'll have to excuse this occasional explanation of Kometkameratene in the introduction. Web stats inform me there is a continuous growing number of new readers (hello, noobs), which is great, I'd just like to have everyone informed on whats going on and why I talk about it.

Wow, Rhizome is running a whole week of documentaries on electronic music!

As usual I haven't the faintest moment of time to dive into this right now, but these are seriously bookmarked.

So far it's only been two days into the series, but they have unearthed delights such as Magic Music From The Telharmonium, The Alchemists Of Sound from the BBC and a program on Max Mathews and Miller Puckette (Miller is the originator behind Max/MSP and Max is named after... guess who.)

Ah, excellent, my world domination plans are coming into action!

My own label Uncanny Planet has signed a sub-licensing deal with South-Korean company FeelMusic, one of the largest record companies in South Korea, with focus on importing up-and-coming international artists and placing music in films, TV and ads.

This means most of my music and projects will be promoted and available in South Korea, where iTunes and Spotify et.al. are not available yet.

I very much looking forward to this collaboration, I have always wanted to visit Korea. I am fascinated with how quickly the Koreans have embraced digital and mobile opportunities for music, and in general how wired they are. They're in the future.

I haven't had any albums for distribution there yet, but the Harakiri Martini music video went viral in South Korea first, before anywhere else. A tiny part of me starts to dream of playing live in Seoul. What is a Monday without deceptive illusions of grandeur?

Next live show, and my first show of the decennium, is a new gig in my concert series at Kafe Edvard, February 27th 2010. As usual, lots of Ugress classics and new tracks, and finally, I'm playing live with Shadow Of The Beat again!

I did a few gigs with SOTB  back in 2005 and 2006, around the release of the Nanokaravan debut album. Since then I have written a few tracks for the project over the years, and I've toyed with developing spooky visuals, but haven't played or released anything, except the Shadow Vault which was mostly a compilation of older tracks. Forcing a live show on myself is a good step towards a new release.

I'm not sure how to classify current SOTB, it has equal amounts of sordid organic darkness, frenetic drum and base, massive dubstep, and glitchy industrial horror-noise. The visuals are equally dirty and sordid. I know dubstep is en route to massive sellout these days, but coincidentally, it turns out my superhero skill is a fierce resistance to hypes and trends. So industrial, organic dubstep it is.

I'll be back with more specifics as the date approach.

So this week I was in Oslo for the final vocal session with the Kometkameratene show, and some top secret new business meetings... Right now I'm at the top of Oslo, in the super expensive SAS Radisson bar spending my last money on a celebrational beer before catching the night train. This was my last session and I'm kind of sad, celebrating alone in a hotel bar. Here's a journal of events.

Sunday evening, I took the overnight sleeper train from Bergen to Oslo. I never get to sleep on those trains but I am so fed up with flying. And even if I don't sleep, I really enjoy traveling by night trains, the whole atmosphere is quite the opposite of air travel. The night train is an eternally moving bar, zooming through the icy Norwegian wilderness with your bedroom a few paces away, how can you NOT love that.

So I prefer the night train. While lounging in the bar a good friend of mine turned up, so the first few hours of the journey we had lots of space, lots of time, some beers and talked music and technology and future and and in general travelled the way one should.

I arrived early Monday in Oslo, with some hours to kill before my first appointment. When touring or traveling for work I like to have some time off on my own, exploring the new planet, observing it's indigenous wildlife and perhaps take some expedition photographs for my journals. I took the metro up towards Frognerseteren, a popular recreation hill outside Oslo. From there I headed into dark dangerous forests, unravelled by a frosty January sunrise. Thanks to my GPS I eventually ended up at a Sognsvann, another metro line, some time later.

(I got myself a Canon Powershot G11, recommended by my usual photographer suspects Eivind and Siri (thanks guys), and I'm documenting my travels and taking stupid wilderness photos with it and I'm loving it silly.)

The rest of the day was spent in meetings and catching up with friends, broken up by a little network session at the Deichmanske, public library. There is a quiet working area at the top floor, with wifi, power outlets and comfortable desks.

Tuesday I had a long work session at the hotel, I worked on some new tracks, and I prepared the recordings to be done Wednesday.

I took lunch break at Nasjonalgalleriet, there's a really nice tea salon there, with crazy over the top decorated walls. Then, a few more top secret meetings and an early evening.

Regarding these secret meetings: I'm generally reluctant to mention "future maybe's"; I always have a certain amount of upcoming projects that are really exciting and I would love to do them and talk about them, but they might or might not happen; usually they don't. Like last year I was very close to scoring a computer game but the funding didn't come through. I'd rather not mention anything until contracts are signed.

Wednesday, recording at NRK, I was up early getting packed and moving out. The last sessions at NRK has been in the same studio, a wonderful surround mixing room, with excellent working conditions. I set up my stuff in a corner and hook into the wall screen, for the actors to watch the video and lyrics. My setup is very simple, just the laptop, an Apogee One, an AKG microphone and a cheap headphone amp providing monitoring for the actor, the director and myself.

There was only four tracks to record this time, with only a few lines for individual actors. The sessions went very smoothly, we had lots of time for each actor, a nice change from some of the earlier super-hectic recording sessions. I liked that this final session was relaxed, friendly and full of laughs. I think the whole production team, actors and external has become good friends during the production. Everyone is kind of sad this is the end, the production is finished. The episodes we are making now will be running until summer, after that nobody knows (or tells me) what plans the brilliant brains at NRK have. The show has become a success, everyone is hoping they will continue this in some way or other, but nobody knows if, how and when. So it is kind of goodbye.

We've written and recorded 32 songs, and I've scored a massive amounts of tiny scenes, cues and character music. The show, and the people doing it, has been a huge part of my life for almost two years now. I've had the most wonderful time, I've never been so busy and hectic ever, and I've had the time of my life. And then POOF it is over, we're all gone, moving on. NOT working on this TV show scares me.

All right, I have to go catch the night train back home, which means NOT getting any sleep, get up gruesomely early, I have to mix down these recordings and I've got some other production work work to wrap up. And I have to start preparing for the next Ugress live show, we've set the date for February 27th, I think I'll be doing a lot of new Shadow stuff, must get to it.

The era of physical media, and perhaps even digital copies, is coming to an end.

Voddler is to film what Spotify is for music - a thin client on your computer, accessing full featured films in a torrented cloud library, through the Voddler network.

I got my Voddler credentials and gave it for a spin. Install is quick, then it tests your network connection, and you're ready to go. First it crashed, but after a restart of the client service (yes it installs and runs an ever-running client) I got it up and running. Stable from there. 

Very simple and effective user interface, which is navigated with arrow keys and enter/escape. A+ on the UIX. The interface is clearly setup for being used at a distance, with the Apple remote (or any remote probably). The interface, a matrix of posters with a genre menu on top, works fine for browsing and selecting, but I fear it to meet some challenges when you need to search, or know exactly which movie you want. There isn't a mouse/keyboard approach at all. At the moment this isn't a problem, because:

I didn't count, but the movie selection is very meager for now. This isn't a big deal, this is very new service in a closed beta, and they are working out agreements. There is a handful of films in each genre and a selection of recent blockbusters. There's also TV series, and I was happy to see the documentary genre well represented. I was a bit let down there weren't more Scandinavian material - this is the one area where Voddler can raise up and challenge iTunes immediately.

However, as content collections grows, there has to be ways navigating and discovering "what you want", not just matrix overviews. Look at how Amazon "helps" you select or browse products - there is no way you could browse products on Amazon from a up/down/left/right method... iTunes is much better at presenting content, especially through the Genius feature.

Who watches the Watchmen? You watches, for 1 USD.

Rental prices was competitive with iTunes, everything from 1 USD up to 4 USD. Many movies are free to watch. I tried starting one, and had two watch two Swedish commercials (2 x 30 sec) and one trailer (2 minute) before the feature started. It runs very smooth, controls are simple and you can search up to 8x.  No chapter navigating though (on the titles I tried). Subtitles are in Swedish. Picture is good. No lag.

Will this challenge my iTunes use?

I don't think that is the right question to ask, because we are entering the era of ubiquity and overlappingness. What content do you what, and how do you want it? This will decide what you use at that moment.

For music, I'm using iTunes, I'm using Spotify, I'm using Last.FM, I'm using Youtube, I'm playing SIDs, I'm streaming webradio - what I'm using when how where for what is in constant flux. One moment I could be playing a track in iTunes, an hour later I might play it on Spotify Mobile with some friends, the next day on Wimp... I expect this to be the same for movies; I'll be using iTunes to get at the things iTunes does well, and I'll be using Voddler for the things Voddler does well. I'm sure there will be a third and fourth and n'th option very soon. And I'll be using unspeakable options for the things that i MUST have, but which is not available to me through the proper channels. But this, I am happy to observe, is rapidly declining.  

To answer my question, I will be using both. But at the moment, clearly iTunes wins. I have an American account and buying films/shows/music through iTunes is a breeze. I can buy, or rent, movies and start watching them at once, with no ads or trailers. iTunes as a massive lead when it comes to content and presentation, in particular TV shows. This is to be expected, iTunes is more mature.

If Voddler builds up a respectful library, I do not see why this can't be an excellent choice. And it certainly falls under my own philosophy - if you provide good services for content with reasonable prices, people ARE going to use it. Most movies I just want to see, right then and right there, and I do not want to hassle with ANYTHING, not even keeping any gigabytes around afterwards. If I want to watch it again, I'll just rent it again. At some point this rental/purchase model is going to move over to a subscription model.

The era of physical media is over. Content is moving into the cloud. Voddler is a good nail in the coffin and a nice winglet.