I kind of wished I posted this silly / fun little live jam in chronological order on this account as it's old. When I got back to the SF Bay Area there were not that many folks producing industrial-techno (uh, like really none) and I met Nadon through the techno.ca email list. We hung out several times though really should have hung out a lot more over the years. I brought over my computer, Vermona DRM1, Distressor, tube distortion, and Sherman filterbank then hooked it all up with his gear (909, SH-101, and other assorted goodies). We slaved my computer which was recording and also providing some synth lines to an external midi sequencer. I was playing the Sherman filterbank manually and controlling the initial / ever present synth pattern while Nadon commandeered all the other external gear. 

In '03 we tried to release a record together EGR-01 and Nadon did the leading track on the B side which can be heard on the top most track on this account (54:23 - 1:00:10). @the-nebulaic-experience left a comment on Nadon's track saying they really liked it, so here is more! As things go Nadon didn't release much output, so since I have this in my files I figured I'd post it. He also mentioned that he lost hard drives with most / all of his early efforts, so here is another Nadon stormer.. :D It's nothing more than a free form jam, but one I remember well! I remember him not wanting to put it online, awww... screw that... The salad of the past is fun to toss around once in a while... 

Acid Incarnation 2002 (Catharsis + Nadon) free form jam

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 17

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

So this is a big departure from the rest of the audio on my account as this is my only live performance. It is not electronic dance music; duh! This is also a very early use of TyphonRT (www.typhonrt.org) to control SuperCollider3. This was a night of performances with SuperCollider and other nights featured other experimental software synthesis systems like Max / Pd, etc. It was neat that James McCartney also was there for a talk and some audio demos / performance along with a couple other performances using SuperCollider. Wished I had some pictures of the rig I brought as all of this can be accomplished on a single reasonably powered laptop these days sans decent screen space.

The setup was fairly elaborate. I had a Mac and PC tower with digital audio interfaces between them (ADAT). Both audio interfaces also had analog in / out. SuperCollider was running on the Mac and I was running Nuendo and my software / GUI created with TyphonRT on the PC. There were a ton of effects / sub sends in Nuendo to various plugins which were all controlled by a Doepfer Drehbank along with switching program banks in addition to a Peavey PC-1600 to my software. The MIDI could be captured by Nuendo and my software at the same time and MIDI forwarded on from Nuendo to my software. My software provided a GUI as well which controlled 16 loops playing in SuperCollider. One could change the start position, duration, direction / speed - (Drehbank); volume of 16 sample loops plus triggering with the buttons on the PC-1600 and could create granular synthesis like effects. MIDI data and direct GUI use was converted to OSC and sent to the Mac / SuperCollider which was networked. The amplified violin was put through an Avalon U5, an Empirical Labs Distressor, and the Sherman Filterbank all turned to 11.. ;) I had an analog channel coming from the Mac and SuperCollider that would send audio triggers (impulses) to the cutoff / Sherman filterbank in a stochastic pattern with density controlled by a knob on the Drehbank. This is how the analog glitching of the violin is controlled. All of the audio from the analog violin source and sample output of SuperCollider was routed through Nuendo and a chain of effects including limiting; essentially this recording was cut & dry and finished all in one take.

Of all things back then Nuendo couldn't save settings properly; hah, this still seems to be a problem with some software that pops up occasionally these days. I had to map all the MIDI controller settings by hand when I arrived and it took ~45 minutes. I was supposed to perform first, but after James McCartney (creator of SuperCollider) finished a presentation he accidentally unplugged a powerbar that apparently was feeding my rig too. Bam! I had to go have a cig and grab a coffee next door and come back and reprogram Nuendo while others were performing. I'm actually glad I got to go last. 

--

I was lucky to attend the summer '01 session at CCMIX (www.ccmix.com). Sadly, Iannis Xenakis passed away months prior...  I got some great insight into the computer music world per se and studied however briefly with Julio Estrada, Gerard Pape, and Curtis Roads, among others. I'll write more about it when I post the composition I made while in Paris. However I had a MiniDisc and met many different people in my travels from Paris to Madrid and London. I recorded ~18 or so people saying "welcome to the fucking rave" in their own language and this is what comprises the vocal samples. 

--

So, maybe it's just me having grown up playing guitar since an early age (6), mostly instrumental wackery before first getting an ear for electronic music around 16, but I take the notion of a _live_ performance seriously. While a large majority of my time has gone into TyphonRT from a music-tech / software creation aspect in the last 10 years (15k hours) and I haven't had too much time to produce music or perform I've always had issues on the direction "live" EDM has turned. I'd rather see the best DJs who work the decks and mixer like musical instruments, hah, who really does that anymore... :( Sadly, most "DJ live mixes" are as sterile as they come via Ableton "Live" or what have you and extremely safe "live" performances / live PAs where nothing literally can go wrong. 

Without the chance of failure as a performer whether as a DJ, live PA, or something more bespoke I really have a hard time appreciating something as "live"... As part of the aesthetic I've adopted over the years the chance of failure plays a central role. 

Catharsis (Live@Felix Kulpa Gallery / Santa Cruz) 06 2003

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 18

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

This was a fun set and a great event to perform at in Las Vegas. I sent the Black & White event organizers the Timeless Beginnings mix set figuring maybe they'd go for that and they did. I just played whatever I wanted to and this set resulted. The recording unfortunately was distorted, so I recorded the set when I got back to the studio.

This was just a really fun event as it was a real road trip. I met some new friends at a underground campout in June and it turns out they were headed to Defcon. I had no idea how I was going to get out there or where I was going to stay at the time. Despite doing software development forever networking & security have just be distant curiosities from the work I normally deal with 2D/3D graphic engine and audio coding. So, basically I didn't think I knew many people going. Anyway.. We rented a very large van and group of 9 of us and a nice little 3k or 5k sound system packed in the back set out on the road. We setup the system by the pool and were playing records for quite a while some nights and also did an event in the largish room we had as a group. I also headlined the "white" / Saturday night of the B&W. I really liked the event at the time because it was just a decent sized audience and I could play whatever I wanted and not worry too much on reception per se at least compared to dropping a set like this in the SF Bay Area at the time. Vegas was just a bunch of fun and it was a good long weekend. I also ran into folks from college and around too that happened to go as well.

I just was about to press my first record EGR - 01 - Xenos EP for a label I hoped to start; EGR Records... I had 50 test pressings shipped to the event hotel and they arrived on time. I did all the recording and mastering for it and it was awesome because when the package came in we had our sound system set up, so it went right on for a listen. I dropped all three tracks from it in the set toward the end.

Catharsis  - Xenos / Defcon XI - 08 02 2003

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 23

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

This is a collection of early work and various salad or test tracks that I didn't make into a fully finished effort. The tracks are arranged in chronological order. None of these were officially released and a few never put online. I don't claim any of this stuff to be mind blowing, but indeed it's the initial efforts I made to produce music.

I tried hard to start a label and pressed a record (EGR-01 / tracks 14-16 / 48:25 - 01:06:12), but no US distributors, I tried 9 of them in '03, would take them and I was stuck with eating my first release in full. That set me back financially as this was before Beatport and other digital stores took over. It also was highly discouraging in regard to continuing to work on music at the time. I wanted to start a West Coast techno label focusing on industrial-techno, but the time was not right (2003). Techno in general was on a downward trend in the US it seemed. I remember giving Sonic Groove a call and even speaking with Adam X about distribution back then and he said something to the effect that it was a shit show at the time. 

Now I could have made my first release be more likely to be picked up if I had a known producer do a remix. I had good contact at the time with several London acid techno producers, but wanted my first record to be my own and establish a West Coast even San Francisco sound on the hard / industrial-techno side of things.

I hate to say that I became inactive on the production side in '05. By that point in time I thoroughly realized that despite trying to keep in touch with peers and what not I was going to fall on the outsider side of things and not have much success with producing music as an adjunct to income. I just had no interest in sending my music abroad at the time to be released on labels in Germany and beyond. Without any reasonable local base in SF let alone the rest of the US I turned my attention to innovating in audio software and hardware full time. I started a major framework / platform project in '03 called TyphonRT (www.typhonrt.org). I've put in 15k hours on it's development in the last 10 years and invested all my earnings into it and the company I formed. 

I built a really awesome R&D music studio in SOMA / SF that features a 32 speaker 3D hemisphere. An 8.8.8.8 array. 8 subs with 3 tiers of 8 speakers. However, I finished building it over a 3 year process in August '08 and this was just months before Android came out. When I did get my hands on an Android device in October '08 I realized I could port TyphonRT over from the desktop and make it general purpose middleware I can sell to any company rather than continuing to focus on just the very small spatial audio niche. Over the last 5 years I have furiously worked to finish a future looking platform / software architecture that supports diverse app development and custom hardware development. Of course all of this including maintenance / rent is killing me financially and it's taking much longer to bootstrap my efforts toward release. I suppose read more here: 
http://www.egrsoftware.com 

I'm most definitely going to be getting back to production and purely creative aspects of audio production once I get my music-tech business fully operational. I figure music-tech is a lifelong sustainable path whereas just purely chasing trends to make a buck as an artist is not appealing to me at all as I'd rather create the future than entertain the whims of the present. 

Be sure to check out my only live performance (experimental / not dance music!) as well here:
https://soundcloud.com/catharsisegr/catharsis-live-felix-kulpa-gallery-2003


1. Tones
0:00 to 7:46
----
Made in 2000, Tones was my first track I ever made and first hands on experience with things on the production side of things. I was lucky enough to borrow a Fatman analog synth and a Novation Supernova. I also picked up an Akai S6000 sampler via doing some software contracting. Ultimately I patched things together with some outboard effects and even my DJ mixer for a last little bit of reverb, mixed everything through a Mackie 1642 mixer and back into the box. Various VST plugins were ultimately used for time varying effects too. The main synth line is from a Bochum Welt track and I must have been listening to a lot of this artists music, because it was the first thing I put together in a MIDI sequencer, so that line was a bit of an ear worm for me at the time. 


2. Metal Ashes
7:50 to 8:36
----
Made in 2000. I had a couple of metal ashtrays and they could make a sustained tone when smashed together and I recorded this then mapped it to my sampler and messed around with some severely pitched down sounds. 


3. Crazy
8:38 to 9:20
----
Made in 2000. This is the Fatman going into Audiomulch and the spatializer / binaural plugin. You can hear the glitching from the sound card and at the time I was stuck with a Soundblaster of some sort; nothing fancy. 


4. Song2
9:23 to 12:21
----
Made in 2000. This wasn't even meant to be a song per se. I just loaded up some bass kicks into my sampler and all of a sudden the sound degraded. So, all the effects that sound like bit reduction and such on the bass kick is the hardware sampler going a bit on the wild side. It sounded cool and if I turned off the sampler it would reset, so I just recorded the first thing I came up with to accompany the kick and it's the Fatman and Supernova with some basic arpeggiation which I would guess is software based / controlled. 


5. Thing
9:25 to 13:20
----
Made in 2000. This thing is just a little throwaway test snippet of getting some guitar samples into Audiomulch. I guess I was also playing around with a vocoder.  


6. Core
13:23 to 20:44
----
Made in 2000. This track was weird. It was for a Ritchie Hawtin remix contest put on by whoever made Cool Edit Pro at the time. You had to take some raw samples and such and I cut them up and painfully sequenced / mixed everything with CEP. I did mix down certain full tracks and process them in Audiomulch for some time varying effects as I don't believe CEP had this capability. I then recombined the stems in CEP and made the final mix. That is kind of why the sound is a bit awkward in this one too as well I cut out small bits from the sample loops and recombined them. 


7. Cafe Orbital
20:48 to 23:56
----
Made in 2001. I made this piece in Paris during the CCMIX summer session. This was a mind opening month as I never got to formally study electronic / computer music, outside of this one month of various pedagogy aspects. I'm going to definitely expand on this description! I actually made this recording in an internet cafe hence the title because I found one private enough where I could install software and that had faster computers than what the CCMIX studio had at the time. I took some samples I recorded from a piece of software Curtis Roads was involved in making that was doing "pulsar synthesis". I then loaded these samples up into AudioMulch and twisted things up a bit more. 

A highlight for me being 23 and someone approaching computer music from a self-taught direction was when I approached Roads and asked if he would like to go have a coffee and a chat. It was a 20-30 minute chat about contemporary electronic music that certainly was informative on my path outside the academy. 

I really enjoyed my time in Paris and that month and learned that all I need to do is keep my head down and I'll succeed. 


8. D-1
24:01 to 27:31
----
Made in 2002. I borrowed a harp from a most excellent musician friend at the time and decided to give it a go. I suppose the only problem is that I don't play the harp, but it was more of an exercise on getting a solid recording and follow up manipulation. I just had got one channel of solid compression with an Empirical Labs Distressor and this made getting a thick recording of the harp possible. I then selectively reversed sections of the recording to make a more pleasant flow / sound while adding various busses of effects on particular sections of the recording. 


9. Drone-I
27:35 to 32:26
----
Made in 2002. I really like this one because it is definitely a concept piece. It is a no-input piece, so there were technically no sound generating plugins or sources. I found a way to make an effect based plugin misbehave and create sound from no input and heavily processed it in AudioMulch to create a variety of "tone clouds". I then spectrally split up the recording and processed it with outboard gear including the Distressor and Sherman filterbank. I made a 5.1 mix of it and premiered it at the concert after the SuperCollider week long event at UCSB in the summer of '02. 


10. Just Trance
32:30 to 39:31
----
Made in 2002. This was kind of my send off to San Luis Obispo and the rave scene we kick started around that time there and I decided to create an "experimental trance" track. Again using the no-input trick provides some of the backing grit. I also collected some samples of my musician friend playing a flute and had to pitch shift things quite a bit to get things to sit well, but it doesn't completely resolve per se and adds a bit of tension which is fine with me. I never really released this and well.. I don't make trance, so it's a one time thing.


11. Phat Uber Test
39:33 to 45:35
----
Made in 2002. This is a scratch / unfinished track. Just playing with the Sherman filterbank and such. I was just having fun with some sample splitting / beat detection software and such. I use the no-input trick again to create some backing grit. 


12. Distort
45:38 to 46:36
----
Made in 2002. I grew up playing guitar and finally bought the guitar of my childhood dreams; a Parker Fly. It's a neat guitar and has multiple pickups including a piezo. With the Avalon U5, tube distortion, and Empirical Labs Distressor plus some amp simulation plugins I was able to get my guitar to infinitely feedback. This little sample was created by playing harmonics and tapping the guitar body. There is also a bit reduction plugin doing its thing. 


13. Brushed
46:39 to 48:22
----
Made in 2002. A graphics designer friend at the time helped me with a few things including making a cover for the Particle Garden mix. I returned the favor by making a short audio clip for his demo reel. I initially played him clips like the "Phat Uber Test" above and he wanted a more minimal / subdued sound, but still up beat and fast. I refined what I did with Phat Uber Test and came up with this clip. 


14. EGR-01 - Catharsis - Xenos
48:25 to 54:19
----
Made in 2003. Indeed EGR-01... I spent a good deal of time making and tweaking this track. It came out OK for a first effort getting it to vinyl as I mixed, mastered, and did all the legwork to find a record press and fund it and such. Perhaps I let my microtonal influence let me veer down a strange path. I recall picking out a scale that Xenakis created and recorded the tones of the scale as closely as I could on my Vermona DRM1 then made some contorted loops. Apparently people don't like it and think it's strange.. Heh.. Indeed... Xenos... 

15. EGR-01 - Nadon - Weiss_Guy
54:23 to 01:00:10
----
Made in 2003. Nadon was a friend in the SF Bay Area also into industrial-techno. We hung out several times and he contributed a track to the B side of EGR-01. I figure I'd include it in my early work to have the whole record present plus I helped in mixing / recording and mastered this track and got it on a record.

16. EGR-01 - HedMess - Howzitgoing2B
01:00:14 to 01:06:12
----
Made in 2003. HedMess was the roommate of Nadon. I figure I'd include it in my early work to have the whole record present plus I helped in mixing / recording and mastered this track and got it on a record.

17. UlvCM
01:06:15 to 01:09:53
----
Made in 2004. I guess a little rant first. So, I was working furiously on TyphonRT and actually spoke at 4 or 5 large tech conferences in '04 about where I was heading. This included the International Computer Music Conference which happened to be hosted at the university of Miami / Florida. I got a paper selected to present and I was super excited to show my work with TyphonRT and SuperCollider, but I was put in the hallway during lunchtime. I was so extremely pissed beyond belief that the paper presentation and demo I had worked so hard to complete was simply cast aside and I was treated without much respect. I was ensured that I'd have a multichannel 5.1 setup to do my demo and a grad student came out 10 minutes before the lunch break started with a cardboard box of crappy mismatched computer speakers without the RCA cords. I brought plenty of XLR & 1/4" cords. I broke my bank (at the time) buying an RME Fireface and paying airfare & travel costs. It wiped out my discretionary budget completely and pretty much is what I blew my budget on for '04; sorry no EGR-02 / record. Anyway.. I could only get 2 speakers up and working and while ~20-30 people stopped by it was like a car salesman pitch where I had to start over every 30 seconds to a minute. It was so humiliating and the organizers of the '05 ICMC event from Spain saw this and even apologized and encouraged me to submit future papers. Lets just say I developed a healthy skepticism of the academy and the favoritism shown to those who were presenting from the inside with a lot of connections. I suppose in true swat style I took over a 5.1 music area / station outside one of the conference halls and set my demos up which included various audio / music demos and a 3D game engine based on Quake 3 with full spatial ambisonic sound provided by SuperCollider. Various known names in the computer music scene got to check out my efforts and gave a thumbs up including Miller Puckette and such. I suppose that was neat. 

Another tongue in cheek occurrence was that I applied to the Dartmouth electro-acoustic graduate program for the past '03 / '04 years and was denied both times despite having some really great original software to show and such and having an excellent computer science background / ability. The students from the program were there and I chatted with all of them at the time (and one or two over the years in SF) and was just dumbfounded that I was denied getting into this program compared to what the students knew and such. I didn't have funds to pay for grad school and certainly wasn't going to go into debt, so I only applied to the Dartmouth program which gives free tuition / room & board, etc. Anyway, I was staying in the sponsored hotel and I happened to be riding up the elevator with Eric Lyon who was an associate professor at Dartmouth at the time and he leaned over to look at my name tag and mentioned that my name was familiar.. I shot back, "yeah, you denied me from your program for the last two years." He was a little taken back and mentioned something along the lines that a third time is a charm... I probably just grumbled something. At that point I found my path with spatial audio and didn't see the need to attend grad school and my experience at ICMC certainly sealed the deal in avoiding academia for computer music. 

OK, so that is most of the rant, but mid-week among all the official concerts and such a non-sponsored night of electronic (dance) music inspired performances was announced. I created UlvCM, "You Love Computer Music", in my spare time since I brought along a bunch of samples and such. One night during a concert I took over a sound station and made this track in the hallways of the university. 

It was pretty cool when I dropped it at the event which was held at a pub as a bunch of folks heard it and stood up and walked over to the stage to take a look who it was... 


18. Combichrist / This is My Rifle (Bang You're Dead Mix)
01:09:57 to end
----
Made in 2005. Sadly this is the last track I worked on before fully focusing on TyphonRT. It cracks me up because during the ICMC conference I had a discussion with Matt Wright, a co-creator of OSC, about producing music while pursuing the tech side of computer music. He said he just didn't have time to work on producing / composing which I still held out and thought it was something I'd pull off.. Well turns out when I got into the work world / software dev and then spent hours nights and weekends on TyphonRT I too have been starved for time to produce music. 

Anyway.. There is this silly industrial band called Combichrist. The dude tried to coin a new genre, TBM / techno body music, and I was like that's a load a crap. Just call it industrial-techno already! Actually, perhaps keep calling it TBM as not to sully the good name of industrial-techno.. ;P  Anyway there was a remix contest for This Is My Rifle which was a way overplayed track in the "industrial" oriented clubs at the time. When hearing the original it always made me visualize goth / industrial kids line dancing to a very non-syncopated beat. 

So, I made what I call a true industrial-techno remix of the track. It was nice to hear a few DJs play it in clubs and such, but alas this was my last track I worked on... I wanted to provide more variation with the bass kick, but ran out of time before the deadline. I don't recall a winner to the contest being announced and that doesn't surprise me because any remix is likely better than the original.. 

-----

I'll be back to produce more one day, but innovation and creating the future is more important to me right now; stay tuned... 

Catharsis - Collected Early Works - 2000 -- 2005

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 24

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

This was the biggest mix set that I did and it apparently was a very popular streaming session for KZSU as word got out. I hosted this set for quite some time too and had a little counter that redirected to the link silently and it was downloaded over 6k times, but eventually someone got wise and put the direct link out there and of course any P2P distribution. 

After hosting my first event with Gunjack in SF around August '05 at a loft in the Mission he introduced me to DJ Amok and it turned out he had family in the North Bay and he came back for the holidays from Germany. I put together this event and setup an 8 point cube for a sound system inside a 4k square foot loft. I didn't get a chance to get any of the sets recorded from the night, but JC was there and he had to do his radio show in the morning and I asked if he had any guests lined up and no one was, so I turned to Amok and asked if he wanted to pull an all nighter and go record a versus set. He gave me a look, but he gave in and went with it. I think I got maybe 45 minutes of sleep after wrapping up the event; Amok might have gotten just over an hour before I woke him up and we brought down 2 CDJ-1000s and a mixer and I used the house turntables and mixer. Amok was on CDs and I was on vinyl. 

Amok wanted to have the last 20-30 minutes, so he launched off into it at the end. I'll add more comments soon, but just want to get this up for now!

DJ Amok vs Catharsis (Live Mix@KZSU Stanford Radio) 11 24 2005

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 25

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

This is a studio mix. 

I was going to make 2 studio mixes for the 8 year event I hosted early April 2006. I was going to label one "truth", IE the music I like, and the other "lies", for the music I play for a more mainstream audience, erm I mean everyone else in the SF Bay Area, you know darkish electro-tech and quirky / club techno w/ some harder stuff thrown in from time to time. I was way overwhelmed with hosting the event and I had to move out of the loft where I hosted it the day afterward, so needless to say only one mix got recorded and that is the truth of it.. :) As things go I messed up recording the mix properly as I was way stressed out and the sound quality isn't as great as I'd like, but it's still a fun set.

For this event I wanted to invite as many national names in the harder side of techno out and I had Mark Verbos (New York), Matt K (Atlanta / new to the scene), and Joseph Issac (Portland / Mafia Records label head) out and it was quite the event. It was a great couple of days hanging with Mark and Matt as they stayed at the loft. It was almost like I had friends... heh.. at least friends who I could speak about music with instead of the usual blank stares out here. After some initial success Joseph unfortunately shutdown Mafia Records by this point. I guess I don't feel too bad about not getting my label started since it just wasn't happening in the US at the time. 

----

An aside.. While I didn't get a recording at the '06 Defcon event in Las Vegas that summer my set was similar to the above. I always liked that event because I'd play whatever I wanted. Two German attendees came up to me afterward and remarked that they didn't know anyone from the US played music like this and that I sounded like the big names back home in Germany... I was like.. yeah.. I know; :: silent tears inside ::... The US was a wasteland for hard techno / industrial techno at the time. I wished I wasn't so tied to the SF Bay Area for tech work / and the startup investment scene that one day I might tap for my music-tech business otherwise I would have moved to Europe in a heartbeat. 

Catharsis - EGR 8Year Mix - Truth 04 2006

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 26

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

--

So, this live mix at KZSU was last minute and I just grabbed a bunch of records and had at it. The set starts out on the techno side of things then dips into the harder stuff and finally ending with electro-tech. I didn't release this mix because there was a couple of mistakes, but overall it's a fun one and easy listening at least for me... 

Hah, so another gripe / rant about the SF Bay Area.. So, if you have been reading my comments on the mixes I've posted you will pick up that I'm not particularly fond of the SF Bay Area or US in regard to it's acceptance of industrial-techno in general. What underground did exist at this time in the SF Bay Area was damaged goods and still for the most part it remains this way today. 

As things go I was invited to perform at a techno monthly on my birthday which was the day before on the 8th of March. I hung out with the promoters a couple of times. Their tastes were more on the minimal side of things, but they seemed like they were down and said as much in regard to holding a proper techno monthly and feature all aspects of techno. Well, so I planned a special dinner party nearby the venue with ~20 or so guests and we were all going to make it out to the techno monthly event afterward. Just two days before the event the promoters call me up and cancel and not just my set, but the whole event that evening because they heard I was going to drop industrial-techno. I shit you not I actually had a gig, however small, cancelled because of the music I was going to play. Granted if they asked nicely I'm sure I would have toned it down a little, but these idiots just up and cancelled the entire event and then rebranded themselves as a minimal techno only monthly. Their event did shitty over the coming months and they eventually closed it down and moved out of the SF Bay Area; good riddance!

Anyway.. This really made me unhappy because I just canceled my entire bday event including the dinner. It's stupid too because for monthly events that are usually small getting a bday event is usually a blessing of sorts since you know people actually show up and I was bringing roughly ~20 friends there. This doesn't sound like a lot, but usually techno monthly's in SF around this time were simply dead / not attended well. The venue was in the Dogpatch too, so not a popular / accessible area.

I happened to have an opportunity to drop a set at KZSU though, so I played there. It cracks me up because I can't recall precisely what I planned to drop at my bday event, but the beginning and end of this live mix is hardly too hard per se.. Sure I dip into the harder stuff in the middle.. Anyway.. My general distaste for SF and the "discrimination" against industrial-techno kind of grew quite a bit due to this incident. I use "discrimination" lightly here because we're just talking about music, but I never heard of any other DJ / performer getting their gig pulled just before the night was to go down, because the promoters had a change in heart. The SF Bay Area sucks for industrial-techno, but that was then.. I suppose I once again am having a glimmer of hope that the winds are changing, but I'm not holding my breath. I mean how much "minimal-techno" can be played here, because honestly when I go to a minimal-techno event it's more like minimal-house / house than techno and the DJs certainly mix in a very stale manner like house versus proper techno mixing; IE working it! Just face it SF people you all really want house music 24 / 7... Meh.... 

Catharsis (Live Mix@KZSU Stanford Radio) 03 09 2006

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 27

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

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This mix was free form and I grabbed a bunch of records and just went at it. I started off more on the industrial-techno side and ended on the techno side.

By this point in time I moved back into my current space in SF and started to build the 32 speaker spatial studio room. I had yet to get the speakers, but started with white walls and pressed wood on the floor, so there was a lot of prep work to do. I just finished painting, carpet, lining the walls with theatrical drapes and bass traps, so it was looking more like a proper studio at this point. You can see some pictures of the finished effort and more info about what I'm up to today here: http://www.egrsoftware.com/

I did a free 9 year event in April '07 at the studio of all locals. Things were good, but my rent sky rocketed by living alone and having the studio facility in SF / SOMA in a hip part of town. I lucked out with the location because it is walking distance to most of the nightlife (a block from 1015) and near a bunch of restaurants and such and I can be loud 24 / 7 which is rare to find a place in a livable area in SF. It is also 3 block walking distance from Moscone Center and I picked this spot, so I could do open studio events and have conference attendees whether it's JavaOne, GDC, AES, or otherwise stop by and check out what I'm working on regarding spatial audio. While I was promoting about ~2 undergrounds a year at this point the seams were starting to show because the only way I could get people to come out despite having international and national headliners to the events from techno and industrial side of things was to host free parties and eat the entire cost, so I was losing ~$2k minimum per larger event and not getting any local cred, followers, or anything to show for it. Local event bookings always were really really low; err, no one was really throwing any remotely non-minimal proper techno events at the time. I could get ~200 to come out for free events, but later in '07 I switched to $10 and practically no one came out. Basically promoting industrial-techno as underground events in the SF Bay Area just wasn't sustainable at the time. Doing undergrounds further complicated things since I couldn't openly / very publicly promote and find fresh blood necessary to really kick start things. 

Catharsis (Live Mix@KZSU Stanford Radio) 03 08 2007

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 28

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

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It's not often that I get asked to play classic tracks from the industrial side of things. In fact this is the only time I've been asked per se and the set came out OK, but there were no monitors at all and I didn't get much time with the mixer before starting the set and it was a Vestax mixer. The fader curves were set for extreme cutting and this threw off my mixing since they were set to very sensitive. I just didn't think to look for the curve adjust knob as I immediately got stuck grasping to find the mix given no monitors and these old records aren't exactly the most well defined as far as sound quality goes, so that made it challenging. 

Over all the set went well. I always wanted to drop Kraftwerk, Jean Michel Jarre, Killing Joke, Borghesia, Chris & Cosey, and much more into a vinyl mix set somehow and I got to check that one off the list this time. As typical at times for my sets in SF though not a single person was on the dance floor and well I basically played this set for some folks drinking at the bar around the corner... :: sigh ::  I hope you guys enjoy it though!

Catharsis (Live Mix@Epidemic SF) 08 09 2007

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 29

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

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Fractured was the last event I promoted before giving it up. I had a good run of 10 years of promoting techno (industrial-techno after SLO) and such on the West Coast of the US and hosted ~100 events with the majority in San Luis Obispo and 6 in San Francisco. It so happened Robert Natus and Arkus P. got a random booking in LA and they were able to make it work to make it by SF. 

In SF all my other events were undergrounds, but this final event I did at DNA Lounge. Monitoring was a bit challenging again, so my set isn't as tight as I'd like; fun set though. I also opened the night and kept things on the techno side since the room was empty and well Natus and Arkus P were going to be banging out proper soon enough. 

It was a very fun week and I'll write more about it soon. 

Catharsis (Live Mix@Fractured) 10 17 2007

EGR 15 year anniversary - Day 30

Everyday this month I'm releasing a new set to celebrate 15 years of DJing. April 1st '98 was the first music event I hosted and the first night I DJed.

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I dropped this set at a rave in the "progressive" room; we rarely have techno rooms out here on the West Coast as things go. In most cases it's usually an all techno event or nothing. Those all techno events are rather rare too these days. Anyway, I decided to try and slip some techno in with more "progressive" tracks. As things go the turntables weren't fully setup when I started my set and one channel was out from one of the tables, so I had to do a little mucking about with the needle and cables and kind of blew an early mix or so.. 

Michael Liu, puts on the Pisces event and I just happen to be one and actually this event fell on my bday.. I happened to get an invite to perform when one of the other previously booked DJs couldn't make it a week or so before the event. It was a lot of fun and I got to play and keep a full room of folks dancing. When the Alex Bau track dropped at the end the floor was jumping. 

This is kind of what I'd normally play to a mainstream, IE everyone else, at an SF event unless it was obvious that I could do whatever I wanted, but that usually is accompanied with and empty dance floor (when starting the set & during it)... ;P Usually I get a few darker tracks in, but overall this particular set is pretty fluffy for me. I also tried to stay under 130 BPM. 

Anyway.. I ended up DJing at the Pisces event every year through 2011. It was my "main / only" gig in SF those years as I more or less dropped out of the scene that I can't really say I was a part of in the first place after hosting my last event October '07. In 2009 at the Pisces event that was my final performance with vinyl sadly, but it was even better than '08.. I didn't get a recording of that set, but here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR4jB50sVr0  I ended up playing in the progressive room again right after the headliner and really worked a packed room. Unfortunately the stage was one part, so lots of skipping with the turntables; at least ~6 times. I was the only one at the whole event playing vinyl. A fellow who apparently came out from New York for the headliner who played before me commented that I should play festivals and my set was the hardest progressive set he ever heard.. Heh, well cause it wasn't just progressive! :P Good fun all around. 

As things go the last five years I've only DJed one event a year. It was the Pisces event '08 - '11 and a 5lowershop underground last year in '12. I'd like to DJ / perform more, but all my time and effort is going into my music-tech business and I double / tripled down after stopping promoting music event in '07. 

Catharsis (Live Mix@Pisces) 03 08 2008

Celebrating 15 years of DJing by releasing a set a day all of April 2013. All of the DJ sets are from vinyl and encompass all the recordings I made during that period. I lasted up to '10 before I switched to CDs extremely begrudgingly. In '10 the new releases for genres I like finally swapped to 10:1 new digital vs vinyl. Plus it just was way too expensive ordering records from Europe as most distributors shut down in the US. I have performed at an event or two a year since the last posted set in '08, but the sound I love is absolutely not popular here (or in the US) and there is no upside to trying to promote industrial-techno out here after losing enough $$$ on promoting undergrounds and such over the years despite hosting well recognized producers from abroad (Amok / Natus / etc). I received zero local cred and it just became a chore trying to open up deaf ears to the point that I disengaged from the local scene. To really give my music-tech business a chance I had to stop losing money from promoting events. Nonetheless, I'm definitely down to perform anywhere if you like the sound you hear from these sets.

I am also a promoter / producer in absentia currently while I focus intently on launching my music-tech business (www.egrsoftware.com). A large focus of mine is creating custom audio hardware / software and an open platform that makes it easier to create custom hardware; audio or otherwise. In particular I work with large scale 2D / 3D spatial audio and am working towards creating a low cost DSP box for venues / home theaters along with providing the tools for producers / composers to create advanced spatial audio for production and live performance. I'm definitely going to come back around and produce in full force, but am focusing on innovating on the music-tech angle first.

CatharsisEGR

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