It’s been a busy past few weeks and I haven’t had much time to think about blogging. Here’s a short summary. We all went to Earthcore 25-27th of November. It was a really good weekend; fantastic music and a great retreat from city life. The standout music acts were Shpongle, Hallucinogen, Lab 4 and Juno Reactor. Unfortunately there were some major issues with the showing of my DVD. However, I did pass it onto one of the main VJs at the event, so hopefully it showed up in one of his sets. Check out Mike’s blog for a full run down of the event, including plenty of photos.

As we are heading to New Zealand in a week, I have also been very busy finishing up some work for Smartpath. I have been working with Macromedia Flash and SOAP Web Services. It’s been a great learning experience – I’m really enjoying getting away from HTML and CSS for a while and working in a more visual authoring environment.

Shari, Mike and I enjoyed the Juno Reactor set at Earthcore so much we decided to go and check them out last Friday night as well. They are a goa trance group, but labeling them in one genre is near impossible. They have a wide variety of musical influences and their live sets include various live instruments such as tribal drums, modern drum kits, electric guitars, singing and even blowing through animal horns. The other sets on the night were Tsuyoshi Suzuki and Ott. The Tsuyoshi set was powerful and pumping as usual; a fantastic set to dance to. I was really excited to hear Ott live. He has worked with Simon Posford on a number of works, including Shpongle and remixes of Hallucinogen. His musical style is psychedelic ambient or chillout. He incorporates dub, a progression of reggae in his music, which gives it a fantastic unique feel. His music is incredibly multi-layered and he mixes in a wide variety of other musical styles, from classical and jazz, to distorted voice.

I was so inspired by hearing Ott’s music I went and bought his album Blumenkraft from audiolunchbox.com. Audiolunchbox is a great site I found recently that allows legal buying and downloading of MP3s from independent artists that aren’t in the Apple iTunes Music Store (especially in Australia).

Finally, Mike decided to move into 109 Kay St, Carlton with Shari. That means there is exactly one house separating us! We can even share our wireless network. It will be great fun having him nearby to hang out with.