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!

So it’s been a pretty interesting year so far… And everything still feels all bright an shiny.

I started this year with a new job and very “opgewonde” as what to expect. The new job is awesome! I get to build cool stuff, learn rad things and be surrounded by cool tech all day. The people are awesome as well. It’s been a great experience so far.

I started doing capoeira with Jay Sizzle so as to get in shape… What a rad sport! It has also taught me to count to 10 in Portuguese. More on the sport to come I’m sure this year…

Drew put his hands up for Detriot and went to go train some people over there. In his travels he managed to pick up a 6th generation iPod Nano for me… in green!. What an awesome little gadget! Having to install iTunes (who needs it when you have MusicBee?) to manage the damn thing made me do something I haven’t in years: Listen to podcasts.

One podcast that Nico rickommended has been providing me with a lot of audio pleasure… and that my friends is “Joe Strummer’s London Calling”. The show is an 8 part (split into 16 29-minute podcasts) radio series and features Strummer and his awesome eclectic music taste… think reggae, rock and folk… real world music stuff. Read a bit more here or grab it on iTunes here!

Do yourself a favour and grab the series and give it a listen!

^5!

Study, study, study, work, study, Bloemfontein (punk as fuck), driving home, study, study, study, study, study, work, players… that’s pretty much been my last couple of weeks. Test week at varsity is over, exams are around the corner, and I seem to have a work ethic. Weird.

#1

Nearly There!

The drive to Bloemfontein on Saturday 3 October was about as exciting as the drive back to Pretoria on Sunday 4 October. Actually the drive back was more fun as we played some good ‘ol games of “I spy with my little eye” and some others I can’t remember off hand. The “festival” that we made the trip for was dusty, filled with punks and was actually everything I had hoped for. Nico and the team from Libery Valance rocked out… quickly, but rocked out none the less. Lungs filled with dust and drizzle, my homie MC was kind enough to “show us around” and took us to the Mystic Boer… hilarity ensued, pizza was eaten and smack was spoken. Good times.

#2

Image taken from here!

The second grand thing that has happened to me has been a sudden new found love of Tom Collins’. Greatest drink ever! I mixed some up at T-Bones braai on Saturday. They were enjoyed, too much and no one took photos for you to see. As a consolation prize, I managed to take this great snap of a nasty bug that was running around that night.

Pretty gross!

I have also taken the liberty of sharing the Tom Collins recipe I got off of Wikipedia:

Tom Collins IBA Official Cocktail

Type: Mixed drink
Primary alcohol by volume: Gin
Served: On the rocks; poured over ice
Standard garnish: orange, cherry, or lime
Standard drinkware: Collins

IBA specified ingredients:

• 2 parts gin
• 1 part freshly squeezed lemon juice
• drizzle of sugar syrup
• chilled carbonated water to taste

Preparation: Mix the gin, lemon juice and sugar syrup in a tall glass with ice, top up with soda water, garnish and serve.

Drink it!

#3

I’ve been eating loads of these awesome noodles. Go buy them, they rock. The Chinese shop where my tofu comes from sells them (Yat Kee Chinese Supermarket, Maroelana Centre, 27 Maroelana Street, Hazelwood). Add a little ginger to the mix as well for maximum awesomeness.

Thats all for now,
Rick Disco, over and out
^5!

It’s been so quiet up in here because of a damn thing called university… it’s been keeping me so busy that there just hasn’t been enough time to do a lot of other things. I did get to build some cool electronic stuff for this project of ours, so it wasn’t too bad!

Woah! A wireless receiver!

Want to hear more? Rest after the jump!

Sometime in between all the building electronics I got to play some electronics at a gig at a really rad venue in Jo’burg – The eXtreme Cosmic Bowling Alley! I grew some mad chops for the event, just ’cause I can! I’ll have you know, it was also much easier to say “Shut Up, I’m Dancing” looking like a biker.

Got chops?

On September 29, 2007 my sister got married! Natalie married George, pretty crazy huh?! It was a great day. Casey got all dressed up and accompanied me to share the fun. This wedding meant that I got a +1 in the brother department… good times! We danced a bit and drank some more and woke up with sore heads!

Natalie & George, married!

Some dancing…

Sore heads!

Their was also a lot of random partying in between all the studying… here are some snaps of those times over the past few months…

My homeboy Nico had his 21st birthday party… as you can see, it ended well!

Great ending?!

We also headed out to Rosendal in the freestate for a debaucherous weekend away in celebration of Nicoles 21st. It got pretty damn crazy out there so I have decided to only put up a photo showing the cool sound we had in Andrew’s car…

Cool sound? Indeed!

We hit Jo’burg for some parties and said goodbye to Horror Cafe (R.I.P) and them fantastic Secret parties…

Andrew and I are seen here, being badass!

Juri and Jenni, Kapow!

Good times!

Jenni and I went and did some bowling at the Cosmic Bowling Alley, what fun!

I wore a size 9, she wore a size 5…

NOFX also came to South Africa to rock out, so we got all punked up, got into Lynns car and became band sluts!

Me doing my best to be PunkAsFuck (P.A.F)!

Drew & I: PAFs for life!

Band sluts are disgusting

Then exams came along and kicked me in the stomach. Thanks exams.

But…

Now this bad boy is on holiday and ready to party it up again!

^5!