Music of Sound

After being somewhat overwhelmed by spending a few full on days in Ho Chi Minh City and then Hanoi, we headed off to Ha Long Bay for some much needed chill out time! Ha Long Bay is a three hour bus trip from Hanoi, and the only downside was that it was the first time in Vietnam we had to share close immediate space with other tourists… The group of five Chinese Americans in our bus really made this part of the trip arduous – banal conversations at a level that everyone HAD to hear them, combined with the use of the word DUDE and AWESOME in every second sentence meant it took about 3 minutes before everyone else in the bus donned their iPods & reverted back to their own worlds…

Thankfully on the return trip we managed to manoeuvre ourselves into the other bus and enjoyed the trip back a lot more because of it… but ahhhh Ha Long Bay was just so beautiful! I had hoped to shoot some timelapse of dawn but it was too cloudy, but the mist made the area feel even more beautiful… We went to Ha Long Bay with Indochina Tours (what a great byline: “Luxury you deserve!” Indeed) and they were excellent – a big boat with plenty of room to avoid said loud mouths – highly reccomended!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apart from just cruising through this dramatic landscape we also stopped in at a floating village – literally this entire village of a couple of hundred people is entirely floating, located in a very sheltered inlet.

 

This is the school rooms for the local kids:

 

 

We also did a trip to this inlet, which was home to a massive cave system…

 

 

 

Bliss! It was a very relaxing side trip & so nice to be taken care of & not have to worry about anything other than which cocktail to order next!

 

 

Oops – I missed this blogs 5th birthday! First post ever was 18th September 2006 followed by 1,415 more… Thanks to wordpress and hostgator for making it possible, and thanks to everyone who has engaged with it! If you are a new visitor, do hit the Archive link up top as there are some gems buried there!

 

 

If you like stats here’s a few: during the month of September 2011 this site had 17,679 unique visitors, receiving 46,352 visits, served up 118,118 page views, 727,909 hits and 19.86GB of data! A total of 1,561 people subscribe to the RSS feed…. And other than for my own projects it remains free of advertising!

 

And guess what I got for my 5th birthday?

 

 

While I was away in Vietnam woodsmith extraordinaire Todd O’Hagen finished my new Mathew Goikes designed & licensed modular synth cases: a 15U x 150 HP case and a 6U boat! I’ve just started installing the rails, power supply etc… and then will start migrating all my modules across… The wood almost glows and it really feels like a musical instrument! I had the layout sorted in modular planner, as below (larger layout image here) but Malekko just went & released the Wiard JAG and I’ve just ordered two, so I have some module juggling to do to fit the combined 36HP of them in… C’est la vie!

 

 

If there is a sudden burst of analogue synth from Kilbernie in Wellington next week you will know I’ve fired it up! And just like a 5 year old I cannot wait!!!!

 

 

And maybe a new film?

 

> Don’t forget!

 

 

> Lets face it, quadratic diffusers look great! I don’t mean the BIGGEST quadratic diffuser ever like this one which is apparently based on a prime number of 138,647…. I mean smaller ones…. ask google image search for some examples! But if you want to build one QRDude is your friend (now why do I suspect the person who programmed that has a pony tail??)

 

Spectrum analysis via this

 

 

Cute! Get the Kontakt pong toy glockenspiel here for $5

 

Theres nothing more valuable than hearing your own music with objectivity, but this is maybe taking it to an extreme… I was hunting for some old music files and came across these two tracks, both of which are getting close to ten years old now and it was such fun to listen to them & wonder about them…. What was I thinking? Where was I living? What was I doing? What tech was I using? (from the session file the first track was mixed in ProTools 5.0 & fair reeks of Metasynth abuse, the second I collaborated with dear friend Kev who played keys on it & I think a friend of his played guitar)
Ah nostalgia, its the blurry gift that keeps on giving…

Both the tracks were released by Stinky Jim on his excellent label Round Trip Mars, the first track, R&D – Divergence in 2001 on a compilation called Sideways and the second track Keve Kev meets Low Key – Defrag was released on the sequel Sideways Too – more info on both here

R&D – Divergence 2001 by timprebble

Keve Kev meets Low Key – Defrag 2002 by timprebble

This visit was also motivated by research – whenever I go on a trip somewhere one of the places I spend time searching is at Flickr as I figure it is likely that someone has been to the most visually interesting places everywhere and likely taken photos & uploaded them, so I put Vietnam into Flickriver and idly noted anything that looked interesting… This process motivated me to go to Ha Long Bay (which I’ll post some photos of once I’ve dealt with the timelapse I shot there) but one set of photos from Ho Chi Minh City stopped me in my tracks. WTF was this place? The basement of the Reunification Palace? I am SO going there!

So this palace was originally known as the Independence Palace and was the home and workplace of the president of South Vietnam before and during the Vietnam War. It was designed by architect Ngo Viet Thu and is a fantastic, grand building. But what makes it fascinating to visit now is that at 10:45 on 30th April 1975 a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the main gate ending the Vietnam War, and the building has been immaculately preserved in that state ever since!

 

 

 

 

 

Walking around this building you could not but help try and imagine what had occurred here….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting to note they chose a Pleyel grand piano, also Debussys favourite piano – I would LOVE to have had a play in such a beautiful reverbant space….

 

 

Note sure what this was used for, but it looks like what I imagine David Lynch’s screening theatre would look like….

 

 

But for all the dramatic luxury upstairs, what I found most fascinating was the basement! These windowless rooms were obviously the engine room for communications and planning…

 

 

There were too many tourists to do much recording here, so I shot a lot of photos and video but I did stop & record a gorgeous huge sinister rumble from the air con in the basement…. Hit play before you scroll down, the drone suits the photos!

BASEMENT AIR CON RUMBLE by timprebble

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I said don’t push the red button!!!