7/19/23

Bit of a break in posts, but for good reason. I’ve been heads down in bag world, created an LLC, and will soft launch at a local record fair in August, so that’s exciting. Second, I just returned from a three week solo trip to Japan. I’m still decompressing, but it was magical, inspiring, and life changing in a lot of ways. At the moment, I’m organizing my field recordings and voice memos to create a sort of audio collage that I hope captures the essence of the country, but also my experience, because I suspect I did a lot of things that most first time visitors did not.

5/24/23

I was in Austin over the weekend for a DJ gig (and to see my parents) and wanted to make another record bag for the trip. I made a v2 with a few changes that I'm pretty happy with. Turns out a lot of other people are too! I posted it to instagram and I've now got a shortlist of a dozen or so folks interested in buying one, so I'm now planning to make and sell a small run of them.

Features:

• abrasion-resistant xpac and ripstop material
• fully padded main compartment
• gussets flap closure
• one-handed closures
• non-slip bottom

5/15/23

Live-drawing performance tool

While I was at Big Ears at the beginning of April (a music festival in Knoxville), I noticed there wasn't much of a visual aspect to any of the performances, but for a festival so centered around collaboration and improvisation, it seemed like a missing piece. There were a few key things that I think lead to the spark of inspiration:

• I've been sketching and drawing more lately; Trying to get better so I can animate some of my ideas.
• The first set I caught was Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes. They performed as a duet in a small, drab church. I must have been feeling restless or something and grabbed one of the envelopes for offerings and a pen from the back of the pew in front of me and started sketching the scene. (I put it on top of SG's laptop after the set, hopefully he got it)
• I was watching the Vijay Iyer Trio (Linda Oh, Tyshawn Sorey) Friday afternoon and was captivated by how physically dynamic the players all were. I had this image of tracers and trails left behind where their bodies and limbs had been, almost like live figure drawings or realtime rotoscoping.

From there I started thinking of tools to implement something like that. Drawing apps are a dime a dozen, but I want it to automatically remove or fade old strokes. Otherwise, it would just become a mess of lines.