Mobile Video Breakbeat

"Yahh-hoooo!" screams the ecstatic Thai guy as the beat kicks back in. Its 9am on the island of Koh Pha Ngan, and the temperature on the dancefloor is 85 degrees and climbing. The party's been going over 10 hours non-stop, with the crowd turning over in shifts... running back to their bungalows to take a break, or to wake up friends and drag them back out. This is NOT the Full Moon Party, rather, an undisclosed cove where i've been coming for years now... and a Friday night ritual that usually lingers well into Saturday... spilling out onto the beach... brunch... with nomad friends from far and wide :) Solar Sonic means MUSIC out-of-doors... under the SUN and stars

"And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile"....The Talking Heads prophesized, and i complied, with a giant leap into tech-nomadic living: breaking up the band, getting a warehouse, cramming on computer music, then stuffing the studio in the back of a motorhome and finally hitting the road!10 Years of Eklektro is the slideshow that says it all, set to the original Eklektro track Time Release (circa 1999). Follow the bumpy path of one modern day nomad, and trace the evolution of "solar-sonic" living...Special thanks to the long list of amazing souls encountered on the winding road: from the gigs, the blogs, the crazy road-trips... the pics, clips, computer tricks, graphics and brainstorms. We're just getting warmed up.... solar-sonic / cyber-delic... So here's to the next 10 years!Join the Eklektro group on Facebook

Off the Road: Reflections of a Tech-Nomad (and $4/gasoline)It was love at first flight. After packing all my belongings and moving my music studio into a re-designed retro RV, it only took the first hundred miles of highway to have me hooked. As I crossed the Massachusetts state line in the snow, leaving behind all semblance of "home", all i could do was laugh to myself about what i had just done, having taken the plunge; i was welcoming an unknown number of months of mysteries that surely lay ahead. The year was 1999, and with the help of a revolutionary new laptop, I was an electronic musician whose bedroom studio had suddenly gone mobile! I was heading west. I was going to make music and maybe start a new band; and at first, that was about the extent of my agenda.And soon, with the addition of solar panels and the advent of wireless internet, my new mobile lifestyle had become super-charged (year 2000), with exciting new prospects. Now that the RV's power supply and communications link were all self-contained, it seemed less like a motor-home, and more like a space ship (yet still super-low budget, thanks to no rent payments)! So wow i thought, considering how electronic artists could specifically benefit from such a liberating experience (oftentimes tied to their bedroom studios), why don't i try to inspire more arts-oriented people do this? And that's when the never-ending flood of brainstorms first began. It almost seemed my "duty" that I should utilize these new technologies to their fullest, in a quest to do something new, vital, different... solar-sonic... but exactly what? I decided that the ultimate goal would be to launch some sort of mobile broadcasting initiative for artists and musicians (2001)... a little ahead of its time??... regardless, I was getting ready to take the jump. 9-11 was all the prodding i needed. Now it was surely time to change gears, put aside personal musical aspirations, and start concentrating on mobile media!I needed collaborators, band members, a crew of techie friends perhaps; and so i bought a 2nd identical RV to serve as a complimentary jam station, the staging ground, in conjunction with my own mobile domicile, the main RV "studio". TechTV caught wind of my project, and so i assembled a small crew to do a cross-country caravan, doing street jams and working towards starting a "broadcasting band" of tech-nomadic artists. Tech-nomadic artists? Talk about a couple far-reaching terms, even on their own, let alone juxtaposed! I knew that demonstration would be the best way to promote such concepts which had become second-nature to me, and was looking to expand through collaboration. So I started blogging web-video (2002)... long before there was such a thing as YouTube... and we kicked off Project Eklektro, and I launched Eklektro.net.And so to find that particular combination of artist, adventurer and entrepreneur, I approached "recruitment" as a long-term project (resolved to keep this project free of any entanglements to corporate sponsorships). I built a mailing list, organized road trips and continued blogging inspirational video tracks of the process. I met some amazing artists (2003, 2004, 2005), with whom there were countless upstarts, adventures, and collaborations that seemed to be made in heaven; yet ultimately none which could actually follow through, none firing on all cylinders together long enough to actually be starting a band, damn! On top of the usual set of variables: time, place, money, artistic intent... there were the rigors of RV living to circumvent. And so after 7 years of living mobile, gas topped $2.50, then $3 a gallon... and without any other artist willing or able to take on the quest, I started to wonder if my ideal Eklektro Karavan-tech visions would ever be fully realized. And just how long could i remain dedicated to the task, without the contributions of at least one other full-time kick-ass accomplice? This was to be a "band" after all, set up to travel and broadcast; but in addition to the obvious need for music/media talent, i realized that mobile self-sufficiency was a tall order to ask.Still, I was fascinated with the challenge, the cyber-punk aspects, and the love/hate relationship i came to feel for my favorite city in the world: Los Angeles (2006). And so spring/summer/fall, beach/desert/mountains, I'd mostly orbit the metropolis; and when the weather turned grim, i'd treat myself to months-long winter trips (still spoiled by no rent payments). I'd video-blog the tech-nomadic bliss i'd encounter with each tropical exodus. I suppose I was seeking to inspire simple thrill-seekers to something more specific... and demonstrate each technological update which made life more magic.... laptops, solar, wireless, and electronic music... not only would "we" start a band; but we'd be ready to broadcast! I now had 8 years of hands-on research put into this project, 8 big solar panels on top of 2 RVs, mobile streaming capability and a sound system, waiting for the moment (2007). Of course machines required maintenance. Mechanical breakdowns were to be expected, and i'd always find ways to circumvent them. But physical well-being was another thing (maybe i was "in orbit" too long?), and when i rushed back from Central America in sudden need of a hospital, summer 2008 found me unpredictably Off The Road, and reflecting... (and waiting out the $4.50/gallon gas!!)Tech-nomads (still) wanted! Stay tuned!http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6992229961

Eklektro Retro: Footage from 1999 and misc pre-millenium festivities, set to the Eklektro track entitled "Time Machine" and mashed up with musings by the character Miller from the 1983 film, Repo Man (also set in LA). And the moral of this story: RVs = flying saucers = Time Machines. Time flies... when you live in a time machine!

astrologers have many things to say about the phase called "mercury in retrograde", during which they claim communications scramble and technologies falter. add to the mix the meteorological phenomena of hot dry santa ana winds in southern california and you've got a rare recipe for disaster; wildfires and fall-out from malibu to the mexican border. at very least the forecast seemed like an impending dose of indian summer, and at worse, apocalypse. we fled the city and stuck to the beach

(click on this pic for sample of video breakbeat)What is mobile video breakbeat? Using music software in unconventional ways, triggering VIDEO clips from a Korg PadKontrol MIDI drum-pad (demo forthcoming); i now PLAY visuals rather than pain-stakingly "edit" them; and so i've started to rhythmically re-assemble 7 years of nomadic RV dreams (fueled by solar power, shot on DV) into some semblance of meaning for the outside viewer (maybe?). "Playing" video without a safety net, its like trying to master a whole new form of multi-dimensional instrument... laptop "data" now mapped in little chunks (of semi-relevance) to drum-pads (the palette... one's experience)... fluctuating fully mastered grooves to all-out trainwreck and back... its lo-fidelity, yes. (but life's too short to get all hung up on hi-def) And so no better way to declare the Eklektro manifesto (over and over again): Mobile Video Breakbeat, as a form of specific artistic communication?: video samples, spoken words, phrases, atmospheres, sometimes with underlying background beats... all get re-constructed, recombined on-the-fly, semi-accidently at times (and i'm kinda likin that, semi-roulette... forecasting the direction of the karavan... musically... and as a game of chance?); and so over the coming weeks... weeks of uploaded "episodes"... weeks of trials and errors: discoveries, declarations and dares will be unveiled out of thin air; theme by theme, concept by concept (solar-sonic cyber-delic?), starting with the core belief, of which i've been convinced repeatedly is the key... and grown a chip on my shoulder to this effect: CHANGE the world, through (mass-)media, through flash-mob, through the world's best kept secret (audio-visual) (and in-person), soon surfacing: Cyber EZ Ryder

This is the part II clip from back in '05, the trip where my camera died. Finally edited and uploaded...For part one, scroll down to Feb 2006 and watch the Thai intro bit first... the train to the bus to the boat to the bus to the pick-up truck! All this with gigantic back-packs full of studio gear... techno-travel!

a sunny simple start to a New Year, shot with my cellphone!here's my friend Angelo hooping to some techno-tranceat the Green Sector party, in the mountains 25 miles north of LAHappy '007!

Something to groove to over your Monday morning coffee...While setting up the Silver Lake Studio, I uncovered some DAT tapes dating back about 10 years to the infancy of Eklektro: born of one particular warehouse party we threw in the frosty boston winter of '97, with the "eclectic-electronic" concept further developed via our renegade (and often car battery powered!) street jams that followed that next spring. There was never any set "band", rather just a fluctuating half dozen of us room mates and friends with synths and drums, all experimenting and seeing what we could cook up. Definitely a time of transition, as within the next year the whole crew would scatter in several directions when the warehouse was suddenly sold out from under us. That's when i weighed my options, bought the RV, minimized (and solarized) my studio... and hit the road to the west coast!This particular jam was a one-on-one real-time recording with my friend Ryan on synths and loops, and me on live drums. I picked this rather simple and unfinished track not so much for its musical content as much as HOW it was collaboratively jammed, "written" in real-time... following in the footsteps of jazz. Yes, the next 10 years would bring incredible leaps in computer music technology... and unprecedented techno-travelin' adventures for the RV and me. So as one of the last recordings i ever made in a non-mobile studio, well the rest is Eklektro history. Stay tuned for more retro releases over the coming weeks... and a return to the VIDEO side of this blog!

Continuing upon this pre-Eklektro AV archive trip-through-history,for Nov 1st... "All Saints Day"here's a heavy-duty death-defying track... befitting for the day after Halloween, when all spirits are redeemed...ahh ha ha!! (OK, maybe that's a stretch)...Electric Angel Fixion, 1995yes, in my pre-techno days, we were Nine Inch Nails wanna-be's...and that's EKG (me) on drums and lead screams!