BuzzMoo.com

Nuts to garageband recordings on a dictaphone. Rent a studio and blast pop rock from Melbourne, Australia. Kristian has got a bunch of new recordings out, published on his MySpace page. You’d better go and check it out!

A great upbeat remake of one of Aphex Twin’s best. Almost one of the saddest songs of all times – but that might just be the Salad Fingers connection.

The first experimental track I’ve ever really been happy with. Home made textures crossed with a late night recording from a HF radio in Colorado. Included should be depth, texture and development. 4.3mb MP3 @ 128kbps.

I’ve been meaning to mention a top quality ambient release from the artist formerly known as Audio Gourmet. If you like organic ambient then you need to get this disk. Since it’s free for download you don’t have an excuse! Harry Towell sets the bar high with the first track Six Years Dreaming and takes it from there,

Eyes Flutter Beneath – Inside The Dream Laboratory (PHCH007)

It’s amazing what gets you hits these days. Take Better Homes and Garden’s (US) tutorial on how to make a Halloween wreath. It’s a full page article that can be summed up in a single sentence. To make a pumpkin wreath, glue pumpkins to a wreath! Good advice. But not enough for poor She256:

Trance as Armin Van Buuren has it has raised it’s game recently. I forgot how much I’d missed the old four four and the golden hooks. The Dutch superstar DJ has an electric series of sets that run on Digitally Imported, but if you’ve missed the stream you can grab some episodes in torrent format here. The latest, “380″ is fantastic.

When I downloaded copy of Audio Gourmet’s Earth’s Exit Door, it immediately rose to one of my all-time favourite ambient releases. There’s something about all AG stuff that seems so connected to nature, despite its electronic nature (one of my favourite paradoxes of the genre). Now, with Subconscious Substance, Audio Gourmet brings us closer to home.

This is an album to play when you are sitting along, reminiscing about bygone times. Subtle, restful melodies and sounds of nature guide the mind to positive, yet nostalgic reveries.

Webbed Hand Records has this release for free, through archive.org. Head to the official release page to get a copy for yourself. Top quality.

Just back from CASE’s One Laptop per Child Open Day, held this afternoon in Belconnen. We had a good time with a dozen or so people showing up. Visitors were introduced to the laptop and then had the opportunity to play with them and experience the feel of one. This stimulated a good amount of discussion – as Darrel said, you could spend a whole day just talking about the ideas behind the project. Pia made it with time to spare and gave her talk which we all appreciated very much. Revealed were some details regarding Australia’s First OLPC XO Pilot, which is now in full swing. Tom Worthington blogged away during the event, and he draws a good picture of the day (live blogging takes some practice…Tom has had practice..).

As for me, I’m tired but glad things went well. There are plenty of things I learned, one important one is that you need practice to demo a large number of these things effectively. Being intimately familiar with the devices will make the difference when trying to pitch their case, and that takes time.

So what’s next? Basically wait and see what the powers-that-be decide what they’ll do next (In Australia, specifically) we’ll see something solid on the OLPC wiki (wiki.laptop.org) shortly, I believe. More to follow…

So due to some mixups and complications here in the bedroom studio I’ve ended up with two incomplete tracks, but I like enough to want to release them. Somehow I’ve lost the master file for the first track, and the settings for the second are entirely screwed up for no good reason. Both contain what is essentially my first “live jam” that’s been good enough to include in a song. Hence the jam jars! Enjoy their incompleteness and the boppy beats.