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As a bit of a change, last weekend I decided to have some new age fun… with a vintage feel! To kick off the festivities Drew, Nico and I rolled through to Hotbox to watch Fulka and Bittereinder. The Fulka show was my main point of interest as I have been working with the band, building them some exciting light machines for their live shows. This was the machines debuts.

A quick run through on the devices… Controller boxes, audio in, LEDs out!

Thanks to Christian Henn for this hip pic of the lights!

The controller boxes: Running an ATMega328 with an Arduino booloader with a 3/4 inch mono audio jack coming in and a string of LEDs going out.

The LEDs: Fulka is a five member band, Fulka is five letters… Each member gets a magic box whose LEDs are on a badge that they wear with one of the letters of the band name.

The fun: Each box gets an input supplied to it via a cable… the cables are plugged into a controller and one of the band members chooses what audio input the box gets. The LEDs then synchronise with the beat of the audio applied and pulse to the beat of the sample.

So in reality, how Fulka used the devices: The members were hooked up to the drums, each letter getting a different bit of the beat. High-hats, kicks, snares etc. So the whole band was lighting up to the sweet sound that they made. Pretty kick ass. I may just do a post detailing this project, I may not

But for now, back to the weekend story…

Fulkas live show had some glitches but all in all they totally rocked out in a folk-tronic kind of way! Good time to check a music video from them?

Bittereinder came on and blew everyone away. Jaco is so good on the mic, backed by Tumi Molekane… it was pretty special. Read a bit more here!

We partied hard, danced, popped in at the cultural heartland of Pretoria aka Sheevs and crashed and burned once more… “Got weekend? Got Sheevs!”

Saturday morning treated me to a lovely day, lovely company and a brilliant breakfast at Pure Café… When in doubt, go there for that important meal of your Saturday healing, we were even treated to some soothing tunes from a guitar player and his upright bass companion.

The afternoon brought something pretty different… Nico, Narochelle and I kicked off our shoes and donned some pants to hit up the State Theatre in town to watch Mummenshanz… OH EM GEE! What a unique experience. I could use my lame words to descrribe the show, or you could just watch this totally excellent video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A5c4jjwanY

Boosh! Thanks to Narochelle for hooking that fun up!

Nothing gets you in the mood for some late afternoon Margaritas quite like the theatre does, so we pulled into my new favourite sundowners spot… Plus Restaurant… beautiful view, quaint vibes and The. Strongest. Margaritas. Ever! Getting excellent on these brought about a mad hunger which could only be solved by Bravos Pizza and solve it indeed it did!

Queue more drinking, Players and finally Café Arc where Robert “The Face” entertained us till we could not laugh anymore and boom Saturday was done.

Sundays are Sundays but this one ended with watching The Science of Sleep. What a great film, rickommended! Just don’t forget the subtitles!

And so my hipster weekend came to an end with big smiles and the best friends money can buy. Love you guys.

^5!