So cool to see this here! Ceephax is quite good. In the same circle as Aphex, Squarepusher (his brother, don't you know), BoC, and the rest of the Warp/Rephlex adjacent stuff. But he's got his own style, and his own things to say.
Camelot Arcade is delightful, it's what it sounds like - electro if it were made by cool dudes in King Arthur's time.
His videos are a bit cheeky but fun. Someone else already posted a link to Eurozone, it's worth a watch.
This is the last thing i expected to see on HN. One of my favorite tracks by this dude is an acid version of Bach's Prelude no.1 in C major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2kcOCsALnw If anyone's ever programmed a TB-303 manually you can imagine how much patience it must've taken to score this.
I also really love his track Acid le Soken. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghgbqldDI2U It's some of the most beautiful symphonic 303 out there. The only other stuff I feel comes close is Kosmik Kommando's first album (Freaquenseize). It's just infused with such a delightful sense of shameless nostalgia, no need to get "intelligent" just for the sake of it.
> If anyone's ever programmed a TB-303 manually you can imagine how much patience it must've taken to score this.
Well, by his own words:
> It was made on a non midi TB-303, I copied the score from Bach's prelude no.1 in C which is all monophonic and quite simple to read and put in to the 303. Most patterns are 8 16ths long with accents on the 5th and 8th notes. The patterns are repeated twice per bar. I chained every pattern in each pattern group start to finish in song mode and manually changed the pattern group from I to II to III and back again throughout the song, used up about 36 patterns on the 303 + took about 3 or 4 hours!
Ceephax acid crew played at Loppen (oldest rock venue in scandinavia, located in freetown christiania) back in 2012 if i remember correctly. I did visuals and the theme and dresscode was "cat techno"
Best gig ever. His gear lineup is insane. All original equipment with years under his hands.
It was mindblowing to see him orchestrate all the machinery and express the complex and melodic acid he is so known for.
Here is a video from the night, i made it start after a part showing how we welded old tv sculptures to be used for the visuals. Enjoy, i surely did!!!
Thanx ceephax!!!
(Edit: i wrote a ton of visuals software for that night only, some of it is listed here: https://github.com/sloev/psyphon_terrain) really miss dancing to "mediteranean acid"!!!!!!
Yeah wish I could too but didn’t have the capital to bag a chalet and sort things out with my silly friends and I think have a wedding at the and weekend. Also I miss it was when later in the year and was sunny outside at you cool just roll around in a pile of minirigs and buckfast. Also the dichotomy of us making our chalet immaculate and some other person throwing a kettle through their window and us both getting the deposit back
It reminds of bugjam.co.uk at Santa Pod in the 90's where we were dancing to www.theprodigy.com* in a poky little marque tent upto our ankles in mud it was that packed, they needed a bigger tent for sure!
Apologies if you were there that weekend and got woken up at 6am by someone driving around in a Porsche with a loaded sound system playing Josh Winks Higher State of Consciousness on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8POlIHkSI&t=200s) at full volume on a constant loop. That was me! :-P
Saw the Prodigy on the tour for "Invaders Must Die", when I thought they were over already, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the show. Not sure though whether it can still be great with Keith Flint missing.
I saw Ceephax playing at one of the weekenders, there was a small shuttle bus ride to a beach, and everybody danced in the sand. Lot of surprised locals looking at this crowd of strange people raving in the middle of the day. A ton of fun and a really good time. Super skilled and humble guy.
Danny is a man of 1,000 aliases. It's worth looking into him.
There's some aliases project that he hasn't publicly connected to him yet (such as https://www.elektrobopacek.ch - which is technically a personified recording studio and at times a collective although it's 80% Danny) and he makes "guest appearances" all over the place such as the telemarketer in Xosars, "The calling" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY)
Legowelt and Ceephax Acid Crew have come to dominate my listening over the past decade. Favourite Legowelt release ever (in the guise of The Psychic Stewardess) is Spiritual Foundation: https://shop.hott.mx/album/strange-life-records-slr037-spiri.... I'll never forget how much I was already loving the album on first listen, then Shinobi Theme started playing: my absolute favorite game in the late 80s.
I fell into Legowelt rabbit hole few years ago. That was basically all I listened for couple of years. Then I was so happy to see him live playing on a small venue on Helsinki 2018. The gig was sold out but I payed good money for the doorman to let me in. Raved on a first row whole his set. Good times.
The video has been entirely hand-made on a C64 with the graphics characters from the built-in charset aka PETSCII. No other software than a blank C64 screen was involved. Made by the very talented Raquel Meyers.
This is the perfect marriage of music and animation. I absolutely love it.
Here's a video of her creating an animation, the technique is called KYBDslöjd or Live Type In, I think all the key-presses get recorded, then the sequence replayed in time with the music.
So I ~lied~ erred when I said that there was no software other than a naked C64 involved - thank you for the heads up! I saw a talk by Raquel Meyers at a tech/art conference a few years ago, where she explained a few of her works, including this particular video. I guess I just forgot about the software because I was so impressed by the stuff she made :)
I always liked the Selection Sixteen EP by Squarepusher, it's quite accessible compared to other more of his frantic tunes. Link -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNU-hASBtAY
To be fair, his brother Squarepusher is bound to be different from MOST musical artists. Brilliant stuff, though. He’s a fantastic artist. In particular his ‘Ultravisitor’ album is a work of remarkable depth and forward thinking. Strongly recommended.
He's just from the same era. Been around for ages - this is a right blast from the past. "Hackers" used loads of contemporary hacker subculture and adjacent culture. I guess part of that was Megatripolis and acid techno stuff, which is why there's shared DNA here, all the "rave visuals" stuff from the 90s, although this kind of eats that for lunch and spits it out.
Yup I'm of that vintage too but not of that culture specifically. He's definitely at a different level than "Hackers" was, but Hackers really typified a culture that didn't really exist except for perhaps a one-off here and there.
It was bits and things - I think the writers of Hackers leant fairly heavily on the CDC, from the US, but certainly for me the hacker subculture of that era crossed over with rave stuff originating out of the UK and the film makers picked up on that. We used to use BBSes to find parties.
Iain Softley, a Brit who had worked for the BBC, did music videos before directing feature films. One of his first films was a biopic of the early days of the Beatles. He filmed his movie largely in Buckinghamshire, but also all over New York and into New Jersey. That included a location of Stuyvesant High, which is the high school of certain members of MOD.
Rafael Moreau is the son of an architect and a painter, nephew to a CIA asset, rodeo rider, and film student under none other than David Mamet. He actually came under FBI surveillance after writing the script for Hackers.
There were production groups in the US and the UK. One of the location unit directors had worked on Hair, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Ragtime. There were multiple consultants including Goldstein, Mitnick, Dave Buchwald (who is also an art photographer), and the one credited as "hacking consultant" is Omar Wasow, PhD in African American Studies from Harvard.
The graphics portrayed in the film and the representation of the mainframe are meant to be unrealistic and represent the characters' thoughts and feelings about the data and events, not to be examples of real-life things. People often pick at that part of the movie after accepting the intro with the circuit board city, the spinning phone booths when the phone are clearly in a bank along one wall, and a lot of other inconsistencies with real life.
The whole vision for the movie from Moreau and Softley was a highly stylized, visually interesting version of the subculture. Softley added the rollerblading specifically so the movie would have more motion and a little less sitting at terminals. I don't think we can expect it to be anything other than an artistic representation of eclectic, bright styles.
I saw him once on a whim at a New Years Eve gig without knowing anything about him, and was very impressed how good of a live show he puts on. Very fun and even a bit goofy, yet also having a careful mastery over both the instruments and the DJ setup.
The link is to http, the server does not redirect to https. So it works.
When manually adding the "s" (or using a browser that tries to upgrade on its own), then yes, certificate error. Not only that, ignoring it the server responds with an error.
Simply use a browser that does not try to enforce https.
Camelot Arcade is delightful, it's what it sounds like - electro if it were made by cool dudes in King Arthur's time.
His videos are a bit cheeky but fun. Someone else already posted a link to Eurozone, it's worth a watch.
Some of my favourites:
Hovagen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ftnHe5K88)
Sneaker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhZzSdgnDF8)
Legend of Phaxalot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on8C1mEKp88)
and also, a shoutout to the hippest city in Canada (tho he was probably talking about the UK variant): Haliphax (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dev3_-cHvhY)