soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

So I am the last one in writing this, after all the announcements in different places such as vjforums, dmstk, xplsv.com, xplsv.tv, pouet.net, escena.org, trace's blog and only-God-knows-where-else, encouraged by all the people which has arrived to my blog looking for "neon v2 download", "neon xplsv" and so on. No need to worries, people, you can now download it for free and use it in your own VJ sessions.

All the information in neon v2 official website. I'm looking forward to see what people can do with it!

It's been a very loooong time since we released first version of xplsv.tv. At that moment, it lacked lots of features, and other were not very well defined - we learnt by seeing what the users did and asked for.

In a given moment, trace (or mr.doob) decided to change from the winamp tv stream that we had to a flash based solution. This one was better and easier for the system maintenance as we didn't had to ask anyone at cdmon (our kind sponsors, after our other kind sponsor scenesp) to run a dedicated process for streaming the motions. Now it's just the client computer the one which requests flash video movies (FLV's) to the server. And those are simple http requests.

Also, the support for flash is much better than the winamp video plug in - which was just available on windows platform, at least on that moment. That way (by using flash) we had a legion of mac users being able to enjoy the TV too! no more complaints from jealous apple users… which are a big mass in the motion graphics creators population, by the way.

So there he went coding and improving the tv flash player. And finally yesterday he finished it, and I am very proud to announce it here too: motiongraphics tv is not beta anymore! - specially in this forever beta trend which is disperse all around the world wide web :)

I am very happy and would like to thank everyone which has been using xplsv.tv and has not sent me a threatening e-mail each time they found any bug or error in the php code, as it's been mostly my fault by ignorance. Work in the existing (and upcoming) features is in progress and I hope to provide some nice (whether it is new or improved) functionality in the following months. Thanks to all!!!!

There was a time in which trace was known as trace the ripper…

On those days r08028 was told to be a copy of a deepness in the sky, mdma a copy of 604, and pilgrimage invitation was the deffinitive rip: more than three rips in just one demo.

But seems like time passes, and suddenly one day you discover nice similarities between one of your demos and a newly released one. That is, I saw the Black Birdie invitation screenshot and thought how nice! this is so similar to my Blue Tuesday! What a coincidence! But as I didn't feel motivated enough to turn on the PC and run the demo, I let it go. Then the (in)famous Shanethewolf told in pouet:

Wait a minute…I've seen this demo before. Oh no, it's just that it's a complete copy of Blue Tuesday but nowhere near as good.

Sure, they credit the ripped music, but why aren't there any credits for the original demo they copied/remixed?

And the demo author replied:

actually, i didnt have blue tuesday in mind while i was doing this. it was rather the asm04 invitro by moppi and fresh! that gave me insperation to do some mix of them both since i had a ribboneffect.

I didn't come to think of blue tuesday till now that you mention it, but sure, they are alike.

Ok, so I was certain then, it was pure coincidence. Then you go one day, and find the releases for that party (Black Birdie). Ok let's see what are they like… Ohmm not again!… more coincidences on green destruction by Digital Devotion … Several rotating objects, the layout, are very similar to the style of some xplsv vj gigs, and maybe even to vslpx. How funny! But we thought, that must have been a simple coincidence, so we didn't start any kind of troll-powered discussion in the demo comments.

The day after, Gargaj says what all of us were thinking but no one dared to say:

i lack a greet for TPB and/or XPLSV :)

and the author makes the long awaited confession:

oh yeah, i knew i missed something. BIG greetings to XPLSV for their stuff that inspired me in the first place!

So seems like this is a happy end… finally all the truth is discovered. Maybe it would have been better to simply send a greet or a ownage or something at first instead of letting the others think maliciously about your behaviour. In any case I feel very pleased of seeing that one of my demos has been imitated.

In fact, I had the same sensation past year when the bcnparty100 invitation was released. That one looked terribly similar to broken minds, the demo that we released at bcnparty11, but sucked terribly.

I didn't say anything on the pouet comments to not to give an image of being overcritical and intransigent with bcnparty, but that one unpleased me absolutely. Music was horrible, code was extremely slow and it didn't work as an invitation at all. Not to mention the terrible non-sense it was, even if they tried to justify it with the party slogan ("Scene makes dementia")

I know our demo was also very complicated to follow (our initial script wasn't developed enough, so the idea of the demo is not very clear I think). But it didn't got frozen in the middle when some metaballs appeared with no reason!

Gosh! to ask for more than a radeon9000 and a pentium 4 for seeing a metaballs scene is destroying the demoscene spirit!!

Next Great Event is almost here, and I still haven't finished preparing all the materials for the stunning live performance that xplsv is going to offer there.

Yay!! why do I always have the best ideas at the last moment? :'(

anyway, time to sleep!

Seems like trace is turning to be a bit shy (or busy). He has just released an ep, freon150, in roterfleck netlabel. It contains four songs and nice artwork (including even a wallpaper!). Everything has been made by him - and you'll note that easily. I'll start my analysis with the artwork as it's what one can see meanwhile the first song starts to shape.

The design is pretty stylish, and a word which could describe it is poison. You see those pills and can't really trust them, may be like the poison gas of The Rock, may be simply what appear to be sweet at the beginning but can have a bad surprise inside when you have eaten all the cover. You'll simply be careful!

And about the songs. It starts very progressively with Introducing. It's kind of scaring with that beeping sound, and those dark strings which seem like somebody is running after you and will catch you if you aren't faster than him. Then more elements are added giving it more pressure, until the percussion enters. It's not a typical 4×4 drum line, instead is like broken, so you are a bit disconcerted while another beeping synth line enters over and previous ones somehow dissapear. You feel completely nervous now. If somebody touched your shoulder now you'll probably scream! Now the rhythm continues and makes some strange, subtle changes, adding more and more dissonant sounds while removing others, like alternating layers. And finally they start dissapearing - just when you think you are scared of something - don't know what!

Dark Ship starts with more long dark bass lines, which somehow could remind you of a boat siren. But it won't last too much. Some acid bass lines appear and suddenly a light drum does too. You would expect something more powerful - it's trace's music isn't it? But he compensates adding some weird random sounds, like industrial or alien ones. In the middle there's like an hypnotic pad which gets compensated early by the same elements which appeared at the beginning. It has some space-alike sounding at all. So we have evolved from a dark boat to an alien spatial ship. Quite interesting atmosphere transition. Around 4:10 we get to what could define as trace's sound v.2: something 4×4 but with more worked arrangements. It's a pity it ends so quickly then!

Now it starts Velociraptor. This song was made a bit before the others, so you'll note the sound is a bit different. It has a loop which now I don't remember where I have listened to it before. Also there's an strange vocoded voice talking about a velociraptor. May it be a scientific trapped in his laboratory? It stops, some cut off filters are applied and then the rhythm starts again. It's interesting to see the pads responsing to the high compression of the song, and all the games with the synth textures.

Finally there's Autech02. One could wonder if he's been influenced by Autechre - I would say yes but in fact I think he's got lots of other influences. This features some slow ghostly pads at the beginning and builds a whole arrangement sequentially by adding more instruments slowly. This is paced down, somehow like if there was some presence in a studio triggering sequences and muting and unmuting channels with some strange intention in mind, while playing some evil pads in the keyboard. Everything seems quite mysterious, so there's again that dark atmosphere he manages to create. He also dares to add variations to his dark pad sequences, by introducing some major ones. Finally after that major chords extravaganza which is like the hill on the road, the song starts going down, some sounds appear and all other dissappear, except for a sad synth which remains there - reminding of something which was here for a while.

My conclussion? This is quite weird and original. Is it bad? No! But because it's different, you have to listen to it several times until you start to understand the concept. I like to explain this in another manner: when you listen to typical music, your ears aren't really listening but expecting to listen something. So they hope to find crashes, chorus, repeats, etc. For the case of this EP, you can't find a typical structure so it will make you find a bit uncomfortable - your ears will be wondering: hey what is this? I haven't listened to this before! And that is good… fresh sounds are always good: they keep your creative brain working!

C'mon trace… We want more strange weird music by trazzzzzzzza :-) !!!