I remember when the wall in Berlin came down, for a short while it was not clear whether Germany will be reunited or a new country was born. In the east they created an interims government and it could have been sort of best of both worlds, I watched it carefully and even considered moving there.

But soon it became clear that Kohl wanted to write history as the man who caused the reunited Germany so they pushed it without really thinking about the consequences.

The celebration night in Berlin I perceived with some horror, it was odd with the reoccuring patriotism. I think it was videoartist Björn Melhus who did once a videowork with these pictures, mirroring my feelings of it. With the samples from that broadcast I did at least 2 songs as Notstandskomitee.

http://soundcloud.com/notstandskomitee/vulkanisier...

Vulkanisierung  by  Notstandskomitee

A new track I produced today. I used the unique commenting feature of soundcloud to describe the sounds which might be of interest for synthesizer enthusiasts.

I like sampling drumboxes so I follow the story of the upcomming hardware drumbox Beat Thang. Recently I learned that it runs an embedded Linux inside which is pretty cool, hopefully it could be hacked and extended.

Manufacturer Beat Kangz had some trouble violating the GPL recently by distributing LADSPA Plugins with their software plugin without giving credit and sharing that source but hopefully its sorted out. Companies seems to have difficulties to understand open source licenses and how to do a proper business with it, the Kangz are not the first.

Here are some very minimal drummachines by Eric Archer with photocell modulation and sync over IR:



http://ericarcher.net/2009/08/23/minimal-drum-machines-preliminary/

Hamburg has a long tradition of closing down music clubs but now its 3 in a row. Its Astrastube, Waagenbau and Fundbureau that are about to close shorttermed. All three are in one area and rented from the Deutsche Bahn railway company who are now about to renovate the bridge Sternbrücke which is running over that area. Its a sad loss for the shrinking music scene in Hamburg. I performed several times in Astrastube and Fundbureau.

The Mackie C4, featureing 32 knobs with LED rings and 4 displays, is at the moment with 400.- euros rather cheap. Unfortunally not much software supports it so I decided to create contrOSC which will make it easy to integrate it for instance in Pure Date or Csound patches via OSC commands which are going to be well documented.
Not so well is the developer documentation for that device, nothing is available appart from Apple Logic docs about the Universal Control but it was easy to midisniff the communication. Expect a release soon...

While last weekend a massive police commando in Hamburg violently broke up a streetfestival in the neighbourhood Schanzenviertel and raided also a bar of StPauli supporters without apparent reason, the conservatives in the townhall suggested a police museum. CDUs Elke Thomas adds " Zudem ist es ein wertvoller Teil der Hamburger Kulturszene.“ roughly translated 'its a precious part of the Hamburg cultural scene'. 350.000 Euro should be provided this year alone for preparing the exhibition. That in a big wealthy city which decidedly not supporting the socalled Off- or media arts.