My first tape is available for download via Combat records website. Click on the picture to get it.

Dub Blast is a short mix of 7 tracks of mine, crushed, broken, effected and dubbed live at home. it features :

00:00>04:20 : opti - set the new rules
04:20>07:36 : opti - hammering on your door
07:36>12:58 : opti - a chewing-gum in your throat
12:58>21:00 : opti - darkness is taking over
21:00>26:55 : opti - acting wild and feeling good
26:55>30:00 : opti - I knew I shouldn’t have followed her
30:00>32:48 : opti - Bounty Killer voice sounds cool with bass

The main goal of this tape is to make people see a bit of my musical universe. These are really ruff versions and since everything is made at home, and hasn’t been mixed correctly, there might be horrible things in it. But I don’t care about finishing it, for this release, energy, tension and emotions are the point.

Hope you’ll like it !

1. get a decent music player (iPod is the average quality, almost below average…). The IPod mania really has nothing to do with clear audio reproduction. I really love iPod’s look and feel, as well as its nice integration within the OSX environment, BUT since MP3 is already a destructive codec, you should try many other audio players. You may have great surprises with cheaper devices.

2. get a decent pair of headphones. forget about the trendy in ear things. They’ll destroy your ears and won’t reproduce sound naturally. Try instead to get closed or semi-closed REAL headphones like Beyerdynamic dt770 - my choice for studio and listening purposes - or Sennheiser HD, Audiotechnica, AKG, etc… The main advantage of these headphones is their ability to get you isolated from the rest of the world without having to crank up the volume. They also are really comfortable and often reproduce extreme frequencies (bass and treble) really well. Make your ears a favor, they deserve it.

3. even if you feel in the mood for it, DON’T PUSH THE VOLUME TOO FAR ! Damage to your ears are (often) permanent and un-recoverable.

4. Give other audio codecs a try. You may REALLY be stunned by OGG or FLAC’s ability to reproduce music a clear, sharp and natural way.

OK, now you have the gear, let’s talk about music. These are albums that really should be listenned to outside of your home or desk. I mean, try them in the subway or while you walk in the streets :

1 - Jonny Greenwood - Bodysong - 2003

Radiohead’s guitarist, composer and multi-instrumentist has a really interesting way to approach music. He’s often responsible of gear’s tweaking and melodic deviations that give Radiohead a legitimity as an experimental band, when lots of their tracks structures are really pop/rock formatted. When Jonny was asked by the BBC to write a soundtrack for the documentary “Bodysong”, he delivered a sparkling and free music that enlightens Simon Pummell smart and original direction. Listening to the soundtrack alone is an experience by itself. If you like experiments and sound design, don’t miss this one.

2 - Scientist - Scientific Dub - 1981

Scientist The Dub Chemist has delivered a true Dub manifesto in 1981. Each and every track on this record is pure dub madness. Listening to this albums makes you understand the process as well as the roots and meaning of Dub. While this record is really reggae sounding, it encloses a lot of Dub tricks and crazyness. Special A+ for “Taxi to Baltimore” with its real earth-warming melodies and short tape echoed lyrics. This albm strangely reminds me how both happy and sad life can be. You have to listen to this gem, as the influence of dub on modern electronic or underground music grows bigger everyday.

3 - Miles Davis - Kind of Blue - 1959

extract from a brilliant article by Lou Friedman on popmatters.com
“If there’s one album for jazz to hang its figurative legacy hat upon, it’s this one (with apologies to Trane’s A Love Supreme). There likely will never be a more talented, patient, and willing ensemble cast put together to make such vibrant music again, especially under their given circumstances. Yes, it’s trite and cliché, but it still rings true, after 46 years of shelf life: if you’re interested in starting up a jazz collection, or if you want to have just one jazz album that encapsulates “cool”, then Kind of Blue is your weapon of choice.”
Nothing more to add…

4 - Leila Arab - Blood, Looms and Blooms - 2008

after 8 years of silence, Leila comes back and delivers an amazing record. With her friends Tony Hall (ex The Specials), Martina Topley-Bird (Tricky’s female voice), Luca Santucci (who already appeared on Leila’s debut album “Like Weather”) and her sister Roya singing now and then, “Blood, Looms and Blooms” represents what England has the best to offer in hybrid electronic music.

I’ll write some more about other albums as soon as I get a little more free time.

have fun !

From Adobe Flex Exchange :

“The Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 allows you to create interactive, animated content in Flash, and use it in Flex as a Flex component. This is an Alpha version that was built for Flex 2.0.1. The final version will be included as part of the Flex 3 SDK. You can watch the presentation at http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p75214263/ to learn more about the component kit. It includes the steps required to prepare your Flash content for Flex, and examples of various interaction possibilities…”

This little .mxp thing should allow us to create an infinite stock of small flash-made flex components within minutes. Create you Flash module then export it to Flex… really interesting.

I’m currently trying it, GET IT HERE and stay tuned for more.

This is a really nice 180g vinyl, with something really special about it. One side of the disc is etched with a picture of a prisonners camp… not that happy as an illustration, but beautiful. I really care about vinyl, and as time passes by, I find myself listenning more and more to vinyl releases. So when a band I respect a lot cares about delivering us such a nice object, I applause and enjoy.

Buy it before it goes.

While Ben was still a young child, his father took the opportunity to escape the hardship of life in South Africa by relocated his family to Chicago, Illinois, where he took the post of Audiologist at Cook County Hospital before moving on to become a lecturer at the prestigious Michigan State University.

Growing up in an alien culture and intensely aware of the plight of his fellow countrymen back home in South Africa, Ben was inspired by the radical new voice that Hip Hop was giving to the disenfranchised and oppressed.

When Ben came back to South Africa in 1993 for the first free elections, he quickly set about establishing himself as a major force in the underground, forming cult crews GroundWorks and Audio Visual. Ben’s music addressed themes of social consciousness, politics, conspiracy theories and the hustle to survive.

In 2003, Ben Sharpa won a nation-wide freestyle battle competition sponsored by South African cellular network, MTN. This not only gave him notoriety and country-wide exposure, but also won him an opportunity to go to London and meet Eminem during the artist’s Anger Management tour.

Ben Sharpa has shared the stage with artists such as Immortal Technique (June 2005), Jonzi-D (June 2003), Black Thought (August 2001), Mr. Len and Jean Grae (May 2001). In June 2006, Sharpa headlined alongside Wordsworth and Jonzi-D as part of the Tri-Continental Hip Hop Festival that toured South Africa.

In 2007 Ben was discovered by accomplished BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary-Anne Hobbs who described him as “one of the most inspired and agile lyricists in the world today”. Soon after, Ben performed at the annual Glastonbury Festival (June 2007) on the BBC Introduces Stage.

In late 2007 Ben fell into a diabetic coma. A week later the prognosis was bleak. He had massive internal bleeding, kidney failure and was only able to breath with the help of a ventilator. Doctors had all but given up on Ben when he miraculously regained consciousness. Ben quipped, “I have seen the other side of the Matrix” as soon as he was able to talk. The veteran underground rapper made a full recovery, his new lease on life providing him with further energy to continue carving out his niche in Hip Hop history.

Jarring Effects is about to release a brilliant Ben Sharpa 12″. It will feature tracks by our beloved beatmaker Sibot & Milanese . I really can’t wait this release. It will also feature a wonderfull and proper artwork by the brilliant design bureau Apartment Studios . We have it all : Killer MC, killer beats, killer artwork and even more : faith, trust and shared conceptions of music as a passion AND business… we’re gonna rock you all !

This 4th JFX Party is going to be wild : playdoe, aku-fen, led piperz, dino, grosso gadgetto and our new friend ghilain poirier are going to burn the Batofar.

See ya there.

• Post Revisions: usefull for wp-as-a-cms use cases
• Press This! : post from wherever you are on the web
• Theme Preview for admin : thought it would never come !!! Happy to throw up my handcoded version of this tool and use wordpress one, since it’s way better ^_^
• Implementation of Gears

As well as other improvements : Image captions, new image control system - WYSIWYG integrated, JQuery upgrade, TinyMCE upgrade, and 194 bugs fixed !

get the update !

Then came Drupal, that I first used to build a collaborative-news-multi-user-blog/encyclopedia/knowledge management website wich isn’t online anymore (www.em-ma.org). I was so disgusted in this project to be abducted that I did not open Dupal’s interface until… I thought about it as a good backoffice for Flex Apps…

I know I’m not the first to think about it, and Google will tell you all you need to know about this subject. But as soon as you know the power of Drupal’s XML generators and play with Taxonomy and nodes, I’m sure you’ll have the same idea.

there’s a good article to start head first

and start dividing your dev times by 3 on Flex projects ^_^