With Strange Fluid we also produced a second live video from our show at Spartakus, Potsdam. The song is “Gabba”, taken of course from our new studio album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.
Thomas Leisner
About Beauty and Bright IdeasArchive for the ‘Music’ Category
With Strange Fluid we released a live video of our new album’s first track “No Pope”, taken from our last show at Spartakus, Potsdam.
I just finished two tracks I composed and produced for my girlfriend’s puppet theatre “Katinchen” and of course I don’t want to keep them secret from you! Would love to hear how you like them.
Enjoy listening, and in case you want to find out more about the puppet theatre, have a look at the website of Katinchen, featuring a friendly educative style of puppet theatre for children.
This first song I composed in a way that should resemble to the music from the soundtrack of “Amelie” by Yann Thiersen.
The second piece is based on a traditional children’s song about elephants in a forest, which is already in use in one of the theatre pieces.
I am proud to announce a concert with Strange Fluid at the renowned and renewed Potsdam club Spartakus at February 24th, 2012. Besides Strange Fluid DJ’s Wou_Masta, Petroschi, ICEA, and Heinz von Mecklenburg are going to present some of the finest Dubstep and Drum’n’Bass.
What a night! Music was flowing continuously from dark dubstep to straight drum’n’bass into the early morning. If you want to peek into it, have a quick look at this bootleg video taken from our show with Strange Fluid at the Supamolly.
We produced a “Making Of”-Video of our new album’s first song “No Pope”, which shows a little of our studio work at Lauter Leben, where we retreated for a week to get the recordings done.
With Strange Fluid we released our brand new studio album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.
Strange Fluid is going to have a show at Supamolly, Berlin on February 20th, 2012.
Random Rhythm Reading is a series of downloadable text documents containing rhythmical phrases that can be rearranged for creating infinite variations of the reading text. This is very handy for practising purposes.
The musical text consists of pictures which represent one bar each. Using a simple text editor like TextEdit on Mac or WordPad on Windows you can copy and paste, drag and drop, duplicate or delete bars to rearrange them. As one bar is the smallest unit in this system, I offer reading texts in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 metres, each in 8th and 16th notes. As each package for one metre and subdivision is presented in a new post as I gradually expand the system, please use the Random Rhythm Reading category to get all of them.
As Mac and Windows systems use different techniques to incorporate pictures into a text file, I had to create different versions for Mac and Windows. The one for Mac is a .rtfd file that opens in TextEdit. TextEdit offers very cool drag and drop support for the pictures, which is really fun. The one for Windows is a .doc file that should open in WordPad, and as far as I know you can’t drag and drop pictures there. But this file format offers wider compatibility, also suitable for mobile devices.
Download Random Rhythm Reading 3/4 in 8th Notes, Part A for Mac
Download Random Rhythm Reading 3/4 in 8th Notes, Part A for Win
I will add packages to the system from time to time, so stay tuned – don‘t forget to subscribe to the RSS-Feed at the bottom of this page so you will always get notified when something new is out – and don‘t forget to „dice“ your reading text from time to time: Remember that you can reorder the text by simply dragging bars around.
Random Rhythm Reading is a series of downloadable text documents containing rhythmical phrases that can be rearranged for creating infinite variations of the reading text. This is very handy for practising purposes.
The musical text consists of pictures which represent one bar each. Using a simple text editor like TextEdit on Mac or WordPad on Windows you can copy and paste, drag and drop, duplicate or delete bars to rearrange them. As one bar is the smallest unit in this system, I offer reading texts in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 metres, each in 8th and 16th notes. As each package for one metre and subdivision is presented in a new post as I gradually expand the system, please use the Random Rhythm Reading category to get all of them.
As Mac and Windows systems use different techniques to incorporate pictures into a text file, I had to create different versions for Mac and Windows. The one for Mac is a .rtfd file that opens in TextEdit. TextEdit offers very cool drag and drop support for the pictures, which is really fun. The one for Windows is a .doc file that should open in WordPad, and as far as I know you can’t drag and drop pictures there. But this file format offers wider compatibility, also suitable for mobile devices.
Download Random Rhythm Reading 4/4 in 8th Notes, Part A for Mac
Download Random Rhythm Reading 4/4 in 8th Notes, Part A for Win
I will add packages to the system from time to time, so stay tuned – don‘t forget to subscribe to the RSS-Feed at the bottom of this page so you will always get notified when something new is out – and don‘t forget to „dice“ your reading text from time to time: Remember that you can reorder the text by simply dragging bars around.
This design modification gives Mainstage the same „desaturated“ look that comes with the Logic design mod. Buttons, icons, meters and much more have been reworked to get to a neutral appearance of the whole interface, so you can concentrate on the colours you‘re actually working on in your layout.
Mainstage is the live performance application that comes with Apple‘s Logic Studio software bundle. It allows you to use all the powerful software instruments and effects you have within Logic live on stage or in a studio or rehearsal situation, providing an interface that is optimised for exactly that purpose.
Download Neutrum Design Mainstage Mod
The innovative concept of recreating your hardware midi setup as an individually designable graphical representation on screen before adding your sounds to those elements gives you extreme flexibility in creating exactly the interface you need for your performance. The other great innovation is that you can have all the songs for a performance in one big „concert“ file, allowing you to switch between songs on the fly.
As with Logic the general design as well as the concept is great, but some individual parts and components drop out of that overall scheme and have a disturbing influence, at least in my humble opinion. I reworked those elements, as far as that was possible by the applications design concept, using some tricks, so to my eyes they now integrate well into the whole interface design and give it that „Neutrum Design“ look, providing optical understatement and clarity and focusing on what‘s important.
Some weeks ago, when I went to my cellar, I found a CD that I had forgotten about for many years: A demo of my former smooth-jazz trio „Qualita Rossa“, and I was surprised how much I liked the sound – much better than I had it in mind.
With this very entry I‘m happy to present the first part of a new series called „Neutrum Design“. It is my approach to desaturate the interface of the applications I‘m working with, in order to set back what belongs to the background and thus to focus on the work itself.
I‘ve always been very sensitive to the design of the applications I use, for they are more or less my „home“ for the time I‘m working with them – a surrounding, I kind of „live“ in for quite a lot of my time, and which certainly has an influence on my work.
This first entry of the Neutrum Design Series deals with Logic Pro, Apple‘s flagship audio application. Logic had become a new face with the introduction of version 7 some years ago, presenting the new single-window concept and a very elegant neutral design – except for the colours of many knobs, faders, buttons and icons, which I guess haven‘t been reworked by the designers who created the new design.
Those interface elements remained the old way, which was, and still is until today, – well, let‘s say very „joyful“. Most colours are very bright and saturated in order to catch your eye for one important function. But without a good general concept, for the next function a colour will be needed that is even more catchy, which leads to an application interface that‘s not clear, but confusing and even hurting to the eye in some cases.
I find that in most cases there even is no need for colour, highlighting in greyscale just would do. So, that‘s exactly what I went for: Desaturating the interface, so it becomes more or less grey, just like the new design framework introduced in version 7. Since I saw Logic 7 for the first time I wanted to do this, and now I‘m very happy to present to you my result: Neutrum Design Mod for Logic!
Above: Neutrum Design Mod applied to Logic 9
The download link below gives you all you need to install the design mod for Logic 8 or 9. A read me file will show you how to install the data into your Logic application package. It is the same content for both versions, only the folders are name differently for Logic 8 and 9. The locations are clearly indicated in the installation folder hierarchy.
Above: Neutrum Design Mod applied to Logic 8
I have also added a Logic song file with some tweaks to avoid some disturbing colours that couldn‘t be changed for technical reasons. You may adjust this to your liking and use it as a template to keep your interface clean. It also contains the notation colours you may have noticed on the pictures to the right. The custom colours for the Logic colour picker can be installed using the colour palette file.
Download Neutrum Design Logic ModSo go ahead and give it a try, and feel free to tell me your opinion about it. This is just the first part of a series of design mods. I already prepared mods for Mainstage and Soundtrack from the Logic Studio package. But there is also a very large and comprehensive set of icons for all of these applications to come, which is nearly finished just yet. So watch out for this!
“White Sculpture” is a demo video of my girlfriend’s performance we made for the World Sculpture Festival in the Netherlands later this year.
We spent some time at my friend’s place outside Berlin and filmed this video one sunny afternoon. The next day I cut the pictures first and improvised some music on them afterwards. To me Katharina in this performance looks like an alien who just landed on planet earth and wonders what’s going on here.
So it came to my mind to use a set of sounds called “Sonic Fiction” by Jeremiah Savage. Jeremiah designed these sounds for Native Instruments Kore, so while looking at the video I played on the keyboard with one hand and turned some knobs on my Kore controller with the other to get the smooth transformations in sound you hear on the video.
In order to watch the video in fullscreen mode, click the small button in the lower right corner. Click here to visit the website of Katharina Kröner.