If you've known me for awhile you know I'm really into all kinds of electronic music. For awhile I was totally infatuated with Max/MSP and all-digital laptop music. I'm still interested in that, but for my own music-making I've gravitated more towards physical instruments like keyboards and bass. I've also become more interested in instruments with hardware sequencers, like drum machines and the 303.

You can read elsewhere about how influential and cool the TB-303 is, or you can listen to pretty much any electronic album made from the late 1980s to the present. The 303 is not the easiest instrument to work with, but it's played a huge part in creating loop-based music.

Aside from the musical aspects, though, the x0xb0x is cool because it's open-source, or rather open hardware, which means that every aspect of its construction - the instructions, the parts list, and the PCB design, schematics, and firmware - is available for free downloading and sharing. LadyAda, the originator of the project, runs a forum for people who are building and hacking the kit, and even posts links on the x0xb0x site to people who are sourcing their own PCBs and parts, and building and selling x0xb0xes totally independent of her.

In the end, building an x0xb0x is going to be a lot more trouble than driving over to Guitar Center and forking over some cash, but in the end I'll end up with a unique intrument that I made myself. It's the musician equivalent of a Jedi making his own lightsaber or something.

Update 2009-1-12: I should clarify that the x0xb0x in the picture above is not mine, which I'm still in the process of building. This would go faster if I had an actual electronics setup at home, instead of running out to get parts or tools as I need them.

On the down side, there was a lot of drama at work this year, and my Mom has been sick since November, which has been hard on everyone. The doctors have said all along that it's treatable, and we've seen some improvements, but we've also had some setbacks that make the process really hard, especially for my folks. We'd really appreciate your prayers, good vibes, well wishes, etc.

On the up side again, Una and I have really enjoyed settling in at Pasadena Mennonite Church. Everyone there is really cool, and it feels like home. First Baptist is a great place - it was really the perfect place for me to be when I came back from Japan, and it's where I met Una. But folks at PMC are concerned for more of the same things we are and I feel like we can learn a lot and contribute a lot there. That's not to say it's perfect - having 50% Fuller seminary students and profs is neat but has also lead to us getting the middle of some "intense fellowship" over obscure theological stuff. But in the end we've grown through the experience and learned a lot.

Una and I are helping to lead worship at PMC too, and we've enjoyed it. It's challenging to work with a new format - PMC is more liturgical and less praise-chorus-y than First Baptist, so it forces us to try some new things, and many of our old tricks don't work. But we feel like there's a lot of depth to the worship at PMC, and we're grateful for the chance to serve there.

We're tying up a few loose ends tonight, and plan to try to see at least a little of the Rose Parade tomorrow morning. Una will also be sending out the New Years email that she's been working hard on. Those of you on The List know who you are. :)

Happy New Year!

The show was at the Nokia Live (used to be the Staples Center?) in downtown LA. That night there was some kind of protest going on in front of city hall, so it took me longer to get across downtown from Little Tokyo than it took Una to drive from Pasadena. Sometimes the grid just shuts down...

Since Little Tokyo was so locked up, we ended up meeting at Mr. Sippee, a weird little broasted-chicken joint in a gas station that made a brief cameo in William Gibson's latest novel. It's funny how Gibson's otherworldly spot in a bad part of town turned out to be a place that Una often stopped at for dinner when she was going to law school downtown.

At the Nokia, the crowd was great - very multiethnic, with lots of interracial couples so we felt like we were right at home in some alternate universe. We even ran into some friends from the Westside there. Lots of unusual clothing ranging from punk to hip-hop to a guy wearing an orange tiger suit from some costume store. Björk seems to give people license to just do whatever they want - in a good way, mostly.

The concert was great, everything we'd hoped for. Björk had on one of her trademark difficult-to-describe outfits (yellow, lots of floppy cloth...?) and danced around on the stage like a mad pixie.

Her band consisted of two electronics guys, a drummer, a classically-trained keyboard guy who played on a huge keyboard and what looked like an electronic harpsichord, and a brass group wearing outfits that were like day-glo-colored marching-band uniforms with Japanese soldier flags sticking up from their backs. The stage was covered with flags that lit up in different colors depending on the lights, and the stage got progressively messier as confetti and other stuff was scattered everywhere during the songs.

Being a music tech and general gadget freak, I spent a lot of the concert looking at the odd collection of musicians in her band. I won't try to go into too much detail - you can find lots of that (and pictures) elsewhere. What I kept thinking was that the laptops, samplers, synthesizers on one side, and the brass, piano, and harpsichord on the other seemed to embody a lot of dichotomies or contradictions:

• machines vs humans
• modern vs traditional/premodern
• scripted/sequenced vs spontaneous
• hip (grungy laptop guys) vs outlandish and theatrical (the brass choir and the tuxedo-ed pianist)

There were some moments where Björk sang surrounded by a soft brass chorale (french horns and tuba, with flugelhorns or cornets instead of trumpets), others where she danced to a solo piano, others where she grooved to the otherworldly reactable, and several awesome moments where the electronics went off full-tilt and the house was more like a slammin' dance club. There was an incredible range of emotion and timbre.

The only regret I had about the concert, other than the railing that blocked my view of the electronics unless I craned my neck, was that we didn't leap to our feet and scream when Björk closed the concert with "Declare Independence" (!!!), probably the most intense song she's ever done, one that (if I really listen to it) causes my blood to boil and makes me want to run out into the street and yell for the impeachment of the goons that currently rule us, or at least to write an angry screed to my congressman. Which is probably how Björk's homeland got its independence.

When the concert was done, we lingered for awhile watching the confetti settle to the stage under the simulated moonlight, then filed out and walked past the after-concert streetside taco vendors to our car.