Another from our friend sushiluv:

Daphne poses with a Roland V-Synth.
Also featured at matrixsynth

Luna sits at the controls of the studio here at CatSynth HQ.
Please visit Andrée at meeyauw for more Cats on Tuesday.

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This Sunday we have another great find from the Interet Music Archive (archive.org). “Synthss” by nox30 is part of the compilation Música Experimental Brasileira ( Brazilian Experimental Music ), with artists from all over the country. You can listen to more tracks by nox30 and the other featured artists here.
We are constantly looking for interesting music to feature on our podcast series, but we welcome submissions and requests. You can use our handy submission form, or contact us to get your music featured on the CatSynth Channel.
Time for another “CatSynth pic”, and so we turn to our friend Mimì from polynominal:

Here we see Mimì jealously guarding her SidStation from anyone who might dare to touch it (like me).
The SidStation is a full-function hardware synth based on the SID chip from the old Commodore 64/128 – people of my vintage are probably quite familiar with these systems. The SID was quite ahead of its time feature-wise, and now it is a great vintage concept.
The last performing stop on the tour last week was Saturday in Seattle:

Not exactly the Space Needle, but still some impressive communications towers, and not too far from our venue, the 1412 Gallery:

Photo by Polly Moller
I played a solo set, which I think was the best one of the tour, musically. I look forward to hearing the recordings soon. And of course, we did our Polly Moller and Company show:
Polly has written a bit about our performance in Seattle, including how it was somewhat sparsely attended. This was in part due to the “Much Bigger Show” that occured in direct conflict to ours, and counted much of the experimental/improvised music community as audience or participants. We did get a chance to hang out together with them at Murphy's Irish Pub afterwards, where much drink, conversation and merriment was had by all…
Just a quick note this afternoon, from Astoria, Oregon. Our second show of the tour (third, if you count 1510 in Oakland) will be here in Astoria tonight, at the Astoria Visual Arts center. And I will also be performing a solo set to open, again with electronics and my folk and toy instruments.
We have posters all over town, and a great write-up in the Coast Weekend, a local paper.

Astoria itself is an interesting little town, at the mouth of Columbia River on the Oregon coast:

The coast highway runs through and north across the river into Washington state.
Here are a few photos from town:



And here is the band at the “Astoria Column”:
More on the performance itself after it actually happens. Also, I might go backwards in time to our show and day yesterday in Portland…but in the meantime, Polly has already journaled the first two days of our tour…
While enjoying her beanbag chair, Luna deigned to be photographed (again) with the DSI Evolver synth:

I think this is an appropriate post as I head out for the tour. It is music related, and Luna gets to hold the top spot for a couple of days…
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The tour for Polly Moller and Company began last night with out kick-off show at 1510 8th Street in Oakland:

We were a trio last night, rather than a quartet. Guitarist Bill Wolter joins us tomorrow for the trip north.
I also performed a solo set to open the evening:

(Photo by Polly Moller)
Once again, I am playing the ektar (single-string instrument).
This is the first performance in which I used two laptops (both PC and Mac), mainly because not everything I wanted to use last night ran on a single system. I also took advantage of the excellent piano present at 1510. I improvised against the electronics, trying to match the timbre and “vague pitches” – the piano was also picked up by the mic for processing. And I opened the set with a brief rendition of “Alley Cat” (which has been stuck in my head after the bad kitty chaos festival from a couple of weekends back).
I will be doing another solo set for our show in Astoria, Oregon.
Well the :plug3: headphone festival is done. Thanks to the deletist for putting this together once again.
I'm going to have to keep my report short, given that I have to focus soon on tonight's performance and the tour. So here are a few photos:

The above photo, which features Cypod performing, also gives a sense of the venue and how the audience works. The venue, “The Lab”, is an art gallery and performance space. The audience were clustered around stations where they could see the performers, but listen by plugging headphones into provided jacks.
Attendance was somewhat sparse, but people seemed interested. And the calm, sparser audience also worked with the venue, which had relatively minimalist media art on display, and plenty of empty space. All of which puts me very much at ease, it's part of why I like playing galleries.
Below, we see Bruce Bennet and Michael Zbyszynski performing:

And in the background is another friend no.e from Santa Cruz, who performed after me this year.
So here we are, all set up and ready, including the obligatory animals (cat and fish):

Unfortunately, someone seems to have gone wrong with the audio interface (E-MU 1616m) just as performance time approached – everything was still on, but not functioning, which I have seen happen occasionally with the E-MU interfaces and sadly means an embarrassing silence and reboot – fortunately I was able to recover by playing the evolver while rebooting, and I think the set came out OK in the end.
Unfrotunately, one of the casualties was being able to make a recording, so no podcast from yesterday :(.
But it was still and overall good experience, venue and people-wise, and thus worth the effort.
It might also be worth noting this was the first performance where I listed myself as “CatSynth” on the bill…