Magical Mystery Chambers
I stumbled on an incredible new album recently, called Magical Mystery Chambers, produced by Tom Caruana.
Like The Grey Album, it's a cross-genre mix of remixed Beatles songs laced with Wu-Tang acapellas.
In an age of what sometimes feels like such musical mediocrity, something like this comes out. I've remained listening to a lot of new hip hop every month, and this is a refreshing album that demonstrates the universal nature of music. It introduces people born in the 1940's to Wu-Tang, and young kids to the biggest rock band of all time. My roommate is a 23 year old Chinese musician and he's familiar with The Beatles but can't name one song off the top of his head. Despite the release of 2009's The Beatles Rock Band game, a lot of young people are sleeping on The Beatles.
Unfortunately, the download site for this album has been removed. You can still find the whole album on Youtube, though.
Warp Speed, Mr. Sulu
Everything in 2010 is going fabulously, so far.
Things are looking great for this months Disco Death and Yao (the headliner) is scheduled to arrive in just over a week from Hong Kong. We'll see how the turn out is but I have high expectations. I don't want to drop names but big things are cooking for this spring and summer. I'm looking forward to it! Here's this months flyer, designed in part by the wonderful Miao Jing in Beijing:
And, after a five year hiatus, I'm pursuing design gigs once again. This evening I met with one client and tomorrow I meet another. It feels great to get back into it on my own terms. Many of my memories of doing design full time include being brain washed by repetition, mired in meaningless office toil, and ruining promising projects at the behest of clients who refuse to accept the benefit of my knowledge and experience when I offer it to them. That's all I have to say about that. It feels good.
Chengdu Living is also moving along at a brisk pace, considering it's been online for less than three weeks. Yesterday we achieved 100 Facebook fans, which is a modest goal, but at least now we have a custom URL. Join the fan page if you haven't already! The content on the site is looking good, Sascha has contributed some great stuff (especially this post!), and we're both excited about having a solid outlet for our thoughts, ideas, and lessons we've learned in our time here. We have ambitious plans for 2010.
I've also learned a lot about transitioning into online content production in China. I knew that it was a small community, but it hasn't been exactly how I imagined it.
I've been introduced to some very smart people who are as generous as they are wise, while demonstrating superb business acumen. Like the folks who run Freedur, the finest VPN in the land. Of the several conversations I've had with them they have, through the way they handle their business and my inquiries, led me to the conclusion that doing everything in my ability to help their cause will serve us both, and the larger community, very well indeed. There are specific developments that I'm excited about but I'm not at liberty to divulge the details currently. All in good time.
The pleasant experience of interacting with these types, however, has been tempered with unfortunate realizations that I'll also be dealing with short-sighted, self-serving people like the administrator of chinese-forums.com. I've been a member on this site for five years and since I start posting links to content on my own site (when it's relevant to the discussion of course!), he gets threatened and demands I stop spamming his forum with links. I respond to another users post in a thread about bypassing the Great Firewall and in closing link to my post on using VPN's, and next thing I know I'm banned for a week. According to his profile he's an English guy in Beijing, but he convincingly plays the part of a capital city fascist administrator.
I'm grateful to have both of these experiences to draw upon in the future as I continue to learn more about the China blogging and forum landscape.
61-Key Midi Controller Finds New Home
Lo and behold, another midi controller shows up for sale locally. And, like the rabid equipment fiend that I am, I snap it up. Even though I don't really need this, I got it at a heavily discounted price from someone who was leaving the country in two days.
The keyboard is CME UF-6, evidently made in Beijing in the early 2000's. It's a straight midi controller and there are no internal sounds, despite the appearance - it looks much more like a hardware synth than any midi controller I've ever seen. The design of the device looks very much inspired by the Virus C, but the good news is that this is a heavy and super solid piece of gear, which means it has a long life ahead of it. It has a few scuffs but included a stand - and although no power adapter was included, it's USB bus-powered. Unfortunately I don't really have a place to set it up at the moment, so it's sitting on top of one turntable and my MPC 2000XL. I'm thinking about selling the Yamaha digital piano (which I've been using as a midi controller) that's served me well for three years now, but I haven't acted on that impulse yet.
Here's a photo of the CME, isn't it sexy?
the CME UF-6, with an abundance of knobs and sliders
New Sites Online, Happy New Year!
I haven't posted on 19thstep.com in a long time because I've been busy building two new sites. They're both online new, check them out:
www.chengduliving.com - a site about life in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, chronicling the adventures of being a foreigner in the worlds fastest changing country
www.discodeath.net - a musical collective of myself and local producer Jovian. We'll throw up our DJ mixes, remixes, and original songs on this site and it's also the homepage of our monthly event at Xiong Mao.
As I spend more time developing these sites I won't be updating the 19thstep quite as much (since over the years, it's come to be similar to Chengdu Living, anyway) but the back catalog of years of posts are still available for browsing.
Happy new year, by the way!
Birthday
Today's my birthday!
Recently I've been working hard on a new website which will launch very soon. I'll post the details here when it's ready!
World Cyber Games 2009
Today is the first day of the World Cyber Games (WCG) 2009 World Finals. Oddly enough, the world finals land in Chengdu China this year! I'll go and take photos.
Restored
I've moved to a new host and I'm back up with all of my old posts. I decided to implement a new theme. Even though I've changed the design for this blog a lot in the last few years, I haven't been able to tweak it exactly the way that I want. I like the current muted look which focuses on the content and feels more like a journal which it truly has become.
60th C.C.P. Anniversary
Yesterday was the 60th anniversary (Oct 1 1949-2009) of the China Communist Party and they spared no expense to celebrate. The fireworks in Chengdu, I had heard, would outnumber those used last year in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 40 minutes of non-stop fireworks, shooting from the center of Chengdu, Tianfu Square. I spent the afternoon with a handful of friends on a mountain temple in Long Quan, on the outskirts of Chengdu, and then came into town in the evening.
For all its shortcoming, the ruling party in China seems to be right on track. Security during this week, the Mid-Autumn Festival, is extremely tight but as with the Olympics, everything is going smoothly. With that said, I certainly don't expect the C.C.P. to make it another 60 years!
Gettin’ Busy
Recently business has started to pick up - after months of working on music production and developing guitar skills at home finally I'm getting calls. Right now I'm in Wuxi, in Jiangsu province very near Shanghai, and the day after tomorrow I return to Chengdu to do two shows (including the Hemp House 4 Year Birthday party which I'm looking forward to) and then off to Qingdao to play a 3-day music festival. Qingdao is one of the places that I've been waiting for an opportunity to visit for four years. Once I complete that goal the only significant city I haven't been to in all of China will be Haerbin.
Here's to completing your goals, no matter how long it takes.
Proxies in China, Freedur’s Ship Sinks
The last few months I've been testing out a variety of proxy services to get access to websites which are blocked in China (youtube, facebook, twitter, etc) and just when I had found a great solution it stops working. Fortunately the company, Freedur, seems to be on top of it and hopefully the problem of their entire customer records being deleted will be remedied and they can continue to provide their service. Freedur, unlike Sneakme.net or my proxy, installs to a computer and has an on/off toggle switch which allows access to unblocked websites without routing through the proxy. This is a small but helpful addition.
If you check Freedur.com you'll see a lengthy explanation of the events that led to the demise of this service. Some excerpts:
Working as an accountant on Freedur project, Chris was in charge of buying/paying various small things for our company, (for example advertising, etc.) He purchased for us domain name as well (freedur.com). He abused his access to our registrar account a week ago as well as today by redirecting freedur.com to his private servers (hosted by smallvillages.com hosting provider).
Chris has stole our web scripts, database and money and afterward destroyed our site and backups in an attempt to, with a group of his friends, Vincent Shen, a Chinese programmer from Shnaghai, and Rick Olson, an American programmer, take over Freedur service and run it on his private servers.
We have got a few questions from our customers regarding stolen database and about their Credit Card records. Yes, unfortunately, Chris has now Credit Card records of our customers, but all records are encrypted and only our engineers working on payment system have the algorithm to decrypt them. Also we can advise Chris this time, that abusing customer records in any way is severe crime and we will advise him to delete all copies of stolen database immediately.
For all illegal actions Chris performed against StackFile Corp. and its customers, we will be filing a set of law suits as well as against any hosting company running our web scripts on their servers (for example SmallVillages and MediumCube etc.)
Because our money is stolen, and Chris holds the money, we will ask this time all customers whose record is lost due to Chris sabotage, to fill a dispute on PayPal for a full refund (You can select reason: “I’m not satisfied by the product as it doesn’t provide all features it advertises on its declaration “).
What a nightmare. Fortunately Freedur has decided to provide all of the details of what happened. This sort of espionage and domain theft actually isn't too uncommon, all it takes is one person with access to the domain registrar. Freedur will be offering a month of free service to those affected by this so I'll continue to use Freedur and hope that they can resume service as normal.
Obviously the best case scenario would be to not require a proxy at all!