Some great shots of me up on stage bustin cuts from Blair Francey @ BFdesign / That Night in Toronto

(Taken @ a fundraiser-party I was spinning @ in Toronto called SpinTO)

(You can see the full set on flickr here)

Its become a habit to press record whilst randomly going through tracks in prep for a gig (i.e. unrehearsed track selections and transitions) - this mix runs just over an hour and surveys a bunch of 4/4 rhythms - from all types of dance/house to rock, funk and more.

Please pass the word around about the gig the mix is being posted to get you excited for - that's our 'I Need Sugar' launch party on June 13th, 2009. 

You'll find all the necessary links about the party + to listen/download the mix @ peopledowntown.com :)

Since the #SpinTO fundraiser party I spun @ last Friday here in Toronto, there have been a ton of photos uploaded to the gig's flickr pool and videos keep popping up.

To recap on the event and highlight a few of these images and videos, I recommend checking out this excellent post on spinto.ca !

In prep for a great gig next week I'm playing at (DJing and doing live visuals), I thought I'd press record as I went through my record box and sorted tunes out.  The result is a 1hr 34min megamix of mainly 4/4 beats - a variety of house styles mixed in with breaks etc...

Note: this was totally unrehearsed and my decks totally need re-calibration (the pitch bend is waaaay off on both of em) :)

Click the link to download:

http://www.abdulsmooth.com/files/mixes/abdulsmooth_spinto.MP3

* If you haven't heard about #SpinTO you can clue in by following the hashtag on twitter and by watching the attached video + heading over to http://www.spinto.ca

TRACKLISTING:  read more »

I haven't recorded audio for my remote/phonecall Indian Electronica interviews in a long time - back in the days of landlines my preferred method involved plugging a phone's receiver through a $20 Radioshack wire-tap and the tap into the phone's base; simple and clean.

Since I did away with a landline years ago I suppose I just hadn't spent the time to figure out a more modern approach involving software, until today!  The new approach involves routing a Skype call's input and output to ableton live.  You see, by default Skype will send sound devices just 1 output channel with the voice of whomever is on the receiving end of the call so you have to grab another input from your skype-mic to combine with that output to then route into Ableton.

After reading mention of this on CDM, I jumped into making this work today and am bloody stoked with the results! Ultimately, the learning curve resulted from not knowing what I needed as in-between infrastructure; to utimately combine the IOs... But when you have it all in place the whole setup is pretty simple.

Software needed:  read more »

The dates and lineup are online for this year's Blip Festival in Brooklyn; Happening December 4 - 7 there are 40 performers busting out crazy AV madness.  The festival features game and home computer hardware as AV performance tools.

More info: http://blipfestival.org

Check videos from past years

Thanks to the Interaccess blog for this one... (more info here.)

An original audio visual remix by Abdul Smooth of the Avaaz & AnyoneButHarper.ca campaign song "You Have a Choice" from K-OS, Ed from Barenaked Ladies, Ben Kowalewicz of Billy Talent, Adam Gontier (Three Days Grace), Sarah Harmer, Hawksley Workman, Jason Collett (Broken Social Scene), Darren Dumas (The Salads) and the Arts Offstage Choir. Written and produced by Ian Lefeuvre (The Hundreds and Thousands) and K-OS.

* This remixed film is a live performance featuring cut-up clips from the original campaign video which have individually been effected & mashed up.

* The campaign audio track in this film was remixed to add emphasis to percussion; employing panjabi dhol and other drums...

* You can download the track from this post - its attached below, just right-click and save it to your computer!  Enjoy :)

Links:

anyonebutharper.ca

avaaz.ca

This live mix session by Abdul Smooth features original footage shot
throughout the night of wandering around Toronto for Nuit Blanche on
October 4th 2008.

Filmed mainly in the Distillery District, Cabbage Town and at the
Centre for Social Innovation, this short film also features Blair and
Katherine from That Night In Toronto (nightintoronto.com)

More info on the filming locations:
qasim.ca/blog/contextualization/nuit-blanche-2008-picks-and-route

I love this clip - it exemplifies a clean-cut aesthetic most VJs aspire to in a way thats way to calculated to achieve real-time with common VJ apps... of course, as a produced music video the clip probably took quite some time to put together yet reflects that inspiration to express the disfunctional harmony amongst video sources.