circumjacence

I’ve had a fascination with John Conway’s “Game of Life” algorithm since I was a kid and read about it in Scientific American.  My first implementation was in Commodore 64 in Basic and shortly thereafter in 6502 assembly code.  Over the years I’ve written versions in C, Pascal, MIPS assembly, and Perl.

So I spent pretty much all day yesterday writing “ColorLife” - a version for my new Meggy Jr. RGB with the Arduino development environment.  [More after the jump.]

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I received a fantastic Meggy Jr. RGB kit for Christmas this year (thanks to my beautiful and talented wife Erin!!!), and Owen and I spent most of Tuesday afternoon building it.  Other than goofing up the polarity of all eight “auxiliary LEDs”, the build went smoothly.

Presented here is Owen’s time-lapse recording of the whole build along with my first program (a Christmas tree with blinking lights — since I got it for Christmas).  The music is “Paper Games (Sketch v2.1)” and “Theme for Two Psalteries”, sketches for tracks I’ve recorded, but never gone anywhere with.

I’ve also written a fun little implementation of Conway’s Game of Life for the MeggyJr, and will post more about it soon…

So yeah, the Circumjacence blog has officially been neglected for months.  There is currently a little too much work in my life for blogging lately.  Sorry folks.

But enough about that.  When you have a few minutes, you must head over to the Dutch Onesize web site and watch their video for “Anything You Synthesize” by The American Dollar.

Do not read the “info” or anything else about the video until you’ve watched it. It is a positively sublime combination of music and motion.

I cannot say enough about the sunny cut up electro-pop track “Homeless Hero” by Bufi (Mateo Gonzalez Bufi), from the Homeless Hero EP.

Thanks to the good folks at Phlow Magazine for this discovery!

[Download Track]

Complete release at Poni Republic.

I’ve spent a lot of time the past few weeks pointing the camera at the ever changing colors and textures over my head.  A number of the night-time long exposures were taken with a wonderful Tamron aspherical rectilinear lens (think wide-angle without the “fisheye” distortion).

The weather got pretty hairy here last night with hail, heavy rain, heavy wind, and a tornado sighting at 10:35 (we all sat huddled in one of our interior underground rooms and read stories out loud).

Anyhow, at some point I stood around outside and tried some long exposure photography. Most of it was a bust, but I liked these two pictures despite the grainy high ISO look of them (film grain can be beautiful, digital grain is just nasty).

A few updates to the blogroll today.

The first addition is the Russian netlabel: Fragment. Their releases seem to run from microhouse and minimal techno through glitch and ambient. Their most recent release “sur-dramatic nature” by Gorje Hewek has been in heavy rotation here for the past few weeks!

The second new netlabel in the list is Pueblo Nuevo, a Chilean label (and netlabel) whose releases span the electronic spectrum.   I’ve only recently started exploring their catalog, but it is quality material.

The last link is for Phlow Magazine.  I’m not sure how I neglected to add Phlow for so long, but it is a significant oversight.  The site is a great resource for exploring the electronic netlabel scene with multiple reviewers, a podcast, playlists / compilations, etc.

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I drove around taking photos. Nothing particularly spectacular or sublime, just a morning…

Here is a little sketch — a fun early morning session recorded live using a collection of SID samples and my Sidstation. I cannot really call it a chiptune since it was assembled primarily in Ableton Live, but chiptunes were certainly the inspiration, and the sounds originated in a 6581 of one form or another (my SX64, the Sidstation, etc.).

[Download Track]

Leo’s Song from impactist on Vimeo.
A beautiful animation set to beautiful music by Kelly Meador and Daniel Elwing.

It is fantastic!

You can download the music (and a number of other great tracks) from the Impactist Web site at:
http://www.impactist.com/mainpages/audiopgs/imp_audio.html