1 _ Alternative and electronic music watchers Release gave Aeriae the nod today. To them I say, 'Cheers!'

2 _ I have begun to work on a live performance. The nature of it is decided principally by the fact that I don't find it interesting to watch a person behind a laptop, especially when 100% of the gestures making the music are not discernible. Second, this music is way complicated. Compositionally speaking, this is part of the genre's great appeal to me - that the compositions aren't defined or limited by what a human can do in real time. For these reasons I wondered for a long time if there was any way to perform this music that would satisfy me. This year I saw Moldover's video on Controllerism. His methods are informed significantly by DJ practice, which is something I've never had any interest in, but the whole thing was striking, practical, visual and creatively legitimate. I'm taking what he's generously offered as a starting point and am working on integrating it into my own work. It's been very hard so far, but I've got the hardware, I'm building stuff with the software, and it is coming together. I've got a live version of AMay which I muck up 60% of the time, and I'm working on Skirr. What lies ahead is months of practice, refinement, track translation and building. So it's quite a ways off, but I believe I'll get there, and be able to offer a live version of Aeriae.

I like Delta Goodrem plenty. This seems to surprise most folk and causes them to deduct coolness points from me. Today I recommend you stow away any preconceptions and listen to my (COMPLETELY UNOFFICIAL) Aeriae take on 'Believe Again'. Somehow it's my favourite thing I've released this year, actually (note - released, not composed). You can pick it up from the B-Sides + Remixes page.

Background info on this remix: Delta's 'You Will Only Break My Heart' single (got it for the princely sum of $4.99 at JB Hi-Fi as I recall) came with a U-Myx version of 'Believe Again' on the B-side. U-Myx is kind of the Fisher Price of the remix world, allowing folks to produce very simple remixes of a given track using colourful onscreen blocks. Now I didn't use U-Myx to remix the track (it would be physically impossible to achieve anything like this with U-Myx) but what U-Myx offered me was access to a lot of isolated audio tracks from Believe Again. Just Delta's lead vocals, just her backup choir, just the guitar, etc. This provided great flexibility re: the source material.

I heard Catcall's 'August' on FBi over summer and was immediately a big fan. I did a remix of the track in January; Catcall was well chuffed. The remix is now doing the rounds on FBi FM. Head over to my B-Sides + Remixes page to download the remix.

I've been on garageband.com for a few years now, and while I've scored 'Track Of The Day' many times, I never managed to crack their elusive-seeming Top 20 in the Experimental Electronica genre until now. My (relatively weird) second B-side from Hold R1, Hermiones, has done the trick and got the Track Of The Week slot in the process. The moral of this story is that you just can't pick how any particular track will be received.

Link: The Hermiones page on garageband.com

The track is free to download from garageband or my own B-sides page.

New review of the album:

http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/blog/?p=1789

In January I participated in The Twentieth Project, in which an assortment of artists record a track in the space of a day. The results are gathered on a compilation CD. My track Lenticular Cup appears on the January 20th, 2008 CD. The CD isn't publicly available but the Aeriae track is. You can download it from this LastFM page.

Radio stations recently playing Aeriae:

FBi
JJJ
3RRR
2GLF
LastFM

(This is a dynamic, periodically updated post.)