Brief updates are in order… last Thursday I was lucky enough to get a two years extension to my German residence permit with relatively little hassle. I’m sure the Marfa Texas Country Club will be disappointed that they won’t be having me as their golf caddy next season, but them’s the breaks.

As you can see above, my old buddy Tore “Origami” Boe is visiting Berlin again from the Canary Islands, and we’ll be playing with electricity together as BOE DEREK at the next Salon Bruit. Not sure if I’ll bring the TONEWHEELS setup, or construct something suitably primitive to match his fantastic “acoustic laptops”, but it should be a fun night all the same.

The TONEWHEELS workshop and performance in Belfast went very well. I didn’t shoot any workshops videos myself, but hopefully the Oscillations Festival will edit together some nice cuts of the gig some day.

For the workshop, I tried a new light-to-sound converter circuit from www.5volt.eu, and it worked so well I designed a board for it. Cute little thing, ain’t it?

Eric Archer (ericarcher.net) also just sent me one of his
fantastic light-to-sound converters, although I haven’t been able to
pick it up from the office where it was shipped to yet!!!

There were several updates to the TONEWHEELS website (umatic.nl/tonewheels.html), including some further historical info as well as the Vimeo videos finally added to the front page. Next step is to update the Technical section with better workshop info.

In the update, I included some photos of Daphne Oram’s Oramics machine, an amazing optophonic synthesizer from 1959, which Rob Mullender in London was kind enough to let me have a peek at. Some of the photos are posted below.

And Rob sent me a great scan of a 1970’s Optigan disc that I couldn’t resist putting up as well!

I’ll be taking the TONEWHEELS project to the following places very soon:

?? Nov – MS Stubnitz, Amsterdam, NL (date to be confirmed!)
31 Oct – Whatnight #3, Tilburg, NL
25-27 Oct – DA Festival, Sofia, BG
15-18 Oct – Tiny Noise/Kunstwerk, Cologne, DE

Final news item is that Polish noise-god Zbigniew Karkowski will give a two day composition workshop at NK here in Berlin 9-10 November, and yes my ass will be sitting in that workshop.

colin wilson–the outsider book (1956)

ryokuchi–shinsho[2006 smd]

various artists–psychedelic phinland_finnish hippie & underground music 1967-1974[2006 love records]

ben frost–by the throat[2009 bedroom community]

orthodox–sentencia[2009 alone]

om–god is good[2009 southern lord]

sleep–live at ATP 9 may 09[bootleg]

yoga–megafauna[2009 holy mountain]

pietro grossi–musicautomatica[2003 die schactel]

antoine chessex & arnaud riviere–split 7″ [2009 le petit mignon](amazing printed cover by mounir jatoum!!!!)