Cats

Feline welcome to Portland

My trip to Portland for BPOW!!! (the Battery Powered Orchestra Workshop) is over and it’s now time to reflect and report for the blog. Overall, this trip very much in line with the things I write about on CatSynth: electronic music, synthesizers, mathematics, urban landscape, photography, architecture, and even cats. Indeed, I know things were off to a good start when I arrived on Friday night and was immediately greeted by this cat:

Athena the cat from PDX

It turns out this is Athena, one of the cats that lives with Travis Feldman, creator of the Molecule Synth and the host of BPOW!!!.

Look for a few more BPOW- and Portland-related posts on these pages in the coming days.

World Cat Day

World Cat Day

Today many of our friends from Cat Blogosphere and elsewhere are celebrating World Cat Day. It was founded in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and other animal rights groups. Of course, it is a bit redundant here at CatSynth where every day is a cat day, but it is good to set aside a date in the greater society to recognize the contributions of cats.

While we haven’t done much per se to mark today other than lifting the graphic displayed above from Ann of Zoolatry, several of our fellow bloggers have fun posts for today.

The Island Cats have some cat proverbs.
Animal Shelter Volunteer has a collage of colorful and adoptable cats.
Georgia, Tillie and the rest of the cats from Halifax have a special card. They also agree with us that “cat day” is a bit redundant.
The Opinionated Pussycat has some basic facts about the date.
Purrchance to Dream has a world graphic with the whole gang (it seems like they’re always growing in number).

We can’t post everyone here, but you can hop over to the Cat Blogosphere for more festive links.

Weekend Cat Blogging with Luna: Napping near the Artwork

Luna napping next to the art

Cats always find interesting places to nap. For Luna, that sometimes means next to the standing artwork. We have quite a few free-standing 3D pieces in the collection at CatSynth HQ.

Luna will probably be napping quite a bit this weekend, as I will be spending most of it in the studio with Reconnaissance Fly as complete the final mixes for our upcoming album. In the evenings, I will be back here to work on a completely different musical project, my electronic solo show in Portland next Saturday. But Luna gets to sit in and supervise that one.

Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this Sunday by Samantha, Clementine and Maverick.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Robotspeak Adapter Build Workshop in San Fransisco 8/17/13

Robotspeak AdapterTest

via matrixsynth:

“Adapter build workshop.

This is a simple passive universal adapter allowing interfacing of a Eurorack or Serge with other gear.

“What do I get ?”

You get the pedal box with holes in it, all the jacks, some wire, directions, help building & a place to build it for 3 hours. (it really shouldn’t take more than 2 hours).
Free modular synth performance @2pm

PS: Yes you can use it to interface your eurorack with your Moog or Serge , or even your home stereo or VCR! Yes its a pocket mult, Yes its a pocket adapter a banana stacking mult/adapter.

To sign up contact steve.t at robotspeak dot com”

It’s in San Francisco, it helps with Eurorack and other gear, and their ad has a cat in it! How could I not attend?

Weekend Cat Blogging with Luna

Luna sitting

With the craziness of the Outsound Music Summit and an intense work week behind us, today is about catching up. And that means spending more quality time with Luna, who has been very patient.

More Summit reviews will be posted in the next few days, and I need to plan for upcoming shows and projects in August. But Luna will see to it that I go at a reasonable pace, with time for togetherness and relaxation.

I suppose we could use the common cat-blogging title “Easy Like Sunday” for todays post, but for some reason nothing ever feels “easy” even when it is wholly good and rewarding.

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted today by our friends Nikita, Elvira and Kiril at The Opinionated Pussycat.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

CatSynth video: Keytek CTS-2000 (Jeremy Soule – Menu [Secret of Evermore])

From acreil·67 on YouTube, via matrixsynth.

“Multitracked and heavily processed Keytek CTS-2000 arrangement of the menu screen music from Secret of Evermore. The idea was to do an elaborate “dub mix” on each track individually. Recorded 2009?

All synths: Keytek CTS-2000
Drums: Yamaha RX5, Yamaha RY30
Processing: Tapco 4400, Digitech RDS 3.6, Ibanez SDR-1000, Roland VP-70, Alesis Quadraverb, Boss PH-1, Peavey T-Max, Dave Smith Instruments Evolver, Alesis 1622

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f8fmyerfqmw…”