Latest tour happenings

Well, it seems not even having a WordPress interface makes me update the bloody site
So I been gone for like month and a half, a very busy month and a half by the way, so that could be an excuse for not updating

The tour has taken me to a load of locations since my depart from Switzerland. I have gone to Italy and to the UK, “infecting” two more countries with the 8GB craze.

Right after arriving from Switzerland, I put myself again on a plane to reach Roma, host city of the Live Performers Meeting 2008. I went there as part of the AVIT team to give talks and help out, and performed as 8GB friday night, with a great deal of success. I even got an amazing present from a supporter: a clear DMG, Prosound and backlight modified!

While visiting Italy I had the great chance to squeeze one more gig in Milano, where I played with Tonylight, super mover of the italian scene! Pablito played as well and unleashed some dub techno with the Gameboy which was pretty amazing. Tony’s set was a ripper as well. I had the longest ever 8GB live gig ever too, I played for 2 hours! After that, I Djed for an hour and a half or so more I was really into a good mood.

Returning to Berlin for a couple of days, I then set my direction pointing to the land of the Queen: the United Kingdom. I had two gigs, one in London, and one in Sheffield, both hosted by the brilliant Jammin’ Crew.
The London gig was in Brent in a difficult situation, with the people in the club used to hearing superhits from old and r&b music!, but I managed to grab their attention by the middle of the set and then everything went up, and up, and up! Sheffield was a different, more relaxed gig in a bar a Tuesday. I got to meet up with Agent Thinleg, which was one of the best things that happened in this trip. He even brought poresents! (a scandoubler for my A1200 and a Turbosound sampler for Amiga)

That was, in a really fast way, a sum up of my last two months. Be on the lookout for further gigs, you just don’t know when we will hit your city. There are a load of target flags in our map that have not been conquered yet

On the non-tour related news side, we will be releasing a small part of the 8GB performance in a french DVD curated by Yroyto, and we will be making a 3″ CD release on the Retinascan label from Germany. Of course, the 8bitpeoples EP is up and coming, very few details are remaining to finish it (like the cover art)

Signing off for now!

TODAY vj.systems @ Electro-Lux, Luzern, Switzerland

Well here I am, in lovely Luzern, another city in Switzerland which, by now, has become one of my favourite european countries. It’s really beautiful, with awesome people and lots of things to check out, specially the strong drum&bass scene.

Today I will be VJing in the 8th edition of Ekectro-Lux, a regular night where visuals and music get together to form an enhanced experience in Sedel, a reformed prison-come-underground club.

Come tonight if you are in the area, because it’s going to be super.

8GB - Jorge Newbery | Video release!

After lots of work in it, we have released the final version of our A/V track Jorge Newbery.

We will be releasing this track soon (both in audio and A/V track form) so keep your eyes peeled for more news.

8GB - Jorge Newbery on Vimeo

Enjoy it, like it, spread it to your best friends

designtendencies

We have been linked by these chaps: designtendencies.
What is it? According to them:

‘The objective of designtendencies.com is to help you build your repertoire by adding at least 1 new image every day. The images don’t follow any specific logic or pattern, but they should, somehow, be “inspiring” and, after all, will part of your “seen images”.’

Looks like an interesting little project.
Thanks for consider us inspiring!

Up and coming gigs MAY/JUNE 2008

Remember to check out the UPCOMING DATES PAGE for our upcoming gigs and other activities.

We’re hitting Switzerland again, Italy and the UK all in a swift punch, so check us out.

If you want to book us you can do so by writing to bookings@kikencorp.com.
The following possibilities are available:
- Audiovisual set, 8GB
- VJ set, visual.systems
- Drum&Bass DJ set, AKR
- Freestyle/NüWave Hip-Hop/Geekbeat/Chipmusic DJ set, AK-47

Signing off from the Berlin HQ..

Lobit Global Ops Tour - Part II: Basel

As soon as we were done with Microdisko in Stockholm, and after eating some traditional swedish meatballs (köttbullar) in a nearby 24hours eatery, we headed toward Anna’s house to chill out for a while before taking a bus to the airport. We were scorted by Paza to the bus terminal, and after an hour twenty trip we got to the Skavsta airport where we proceeded through the usual security bollocks and crashed on the plane, trying to get some sleep, something very complicated in a very cramped cheap airplane, specially for Stu

Arriving to Basel’s Stu HQ at 9AM, we decided to skip past sleeping and do some tourism with Bubblyfish while Stu went for some well deserved rest. We visited the Basel downtown, took many pictures, ate something and had generally a fab time.

We were ready for some action now, so we set our things up and headed towards the venue, Schlachthofstr.10, an abandoned industrial resort of sorts, which was very nice and we were treated like champions. After our kind of lengthy soundcheck (to which we arrived late. Again), and waiting for Bubblyfish’s set, I set up her computer with my hard drive for recording the whole night.
I had the pleasure to meet with local artists Pocketmaster and SHMX.

Bubbly starts charming up the audience as usual and finishes smasing heads on the dancefloor, moment which I go up the stage and show them some proper action as well. It went out really well, specially having in mind that this was again not a “micromusic” or “8-bit” crowd. These are my favourite crowds, they just care about the music

The gauntlet was left for Stu who made the fucking roof fall apart as usual and left everyone sweaty and excited for the DJ who played after him.

We drank a lot, had a load of fun, ate some bratwursts and went to Stu’s HQ for some rest.

Next morning, I woke up to the tragedy of finding my external hard drive corrupted. Something went wrong on the recording and fucked up my drive, taking with it a load of data, like lots of music files and my whole VJ archive. I have backups, but I probably have lost 1 year worth of VJ loops. Oh well… got to backup more often

That afternoon we went with Stu and his superduper Roland Microcube amplifier to play some tunes at a nearby bridge, to the awe of the passers-by and enjoyment of our Basel friends who joined to dance for a bit.

This ended a very nice tour experience, with Bubblyfish returning to Geneva to catch her plane to new York, and me travelling on the ICE next day to Berlin.

Pictures of the Basel experience on our related flickr set.

Lobit Global Ops Tour - Part I: Stockholm

Some more days spent in Geneva, in my own private apt by the Rhône river, some tourism done, and I took a train to Basel on Thursday 17th, to meet with Bubblyfish and Stu and catch a plane to Stockholm, for our gig for Microdisko. We arrived kinda late to the city so we met with our hosts, Jonas and Linnea, accompanied by Mr. Nitro2k01, and went straight to south Stockholm to our hosts’ house. There we ate some delicious vegan lasagna, and were joined by Psilodump and Paza Rahm for a nice night which ended up veeeeeeeery late.

Next day we would browse around the surroundings, learning about Sweden and its culture, finding wild deers on the neighbourhood and very wild agressive ants. We then aimed towards downtown, the “old city”, where we didn’t miss the oportunity to eat a swedish style hot dog, in preparation of the gig that was ahead of us.

Kafe 44 is a comfy place, we arrived there at least one hour late (oops) for soundcheck, set up everything and got the night started right away. Jonas, a.k.a. xXm, DJed with this brilliant swedish device called The Pacemaker, which is now very high in my geek gadget want list. Bubblyfish followed up with her usually “bubbly” sound, charming the audience like no other. I followed up with an eclectic set for this time, going around a few aspects of 8GB I use not to delve into. Following me was the amazing Stu, who completely destroyed the venue, effectively provoking the local feminine populace to go wild and into the stage for some dancing action (with a little help of yours truly).

We left the venue and went straight into the airport to return to Basel, for this next day we had to play the Basel Micromusic HQ gig.

Check out more pics of this blog entry at our related flickr set
Videos of the performances on YouTube:
Bubblyfish @ Microdisko Stockholm - April 2008
8GB @ Microdisko Stockholm - April 2008
Stu @ Microdisko Stockholm - April 2008

Euro Tour started with a bang!

Long time no report so here I am, writing this from Berlin, Deutschland, my homebase for operations during the Europe Tour!

Mapping Festival was a blast, It’s a shame I couldn’t get to see all that happened there (only catched the first weekend), but what I’ve seen was well worth it.

The “Crazy 8-Bit night”(seems like they knew well with what kind of people they were dealing :D) was a complete success, and we rocked to around 300 unsuspecting people at Le Zoo/ L’Usine. Bacalao started the action, accompanied by VJ Kolouch, the little deer :D. After that, Bubblyfish and Chika did their thing, as cool as always. It was my turn then, with the very unstable replacement system for the A/V setup (one of my iBooks broke in New York). I think I managed ok despite the tech probs (The Pioneer DJM800’s MIDI implementation is not as nice as I thought, it has some stupid errors), people enjoyed the set, and I set the things on the right temperature (ie: hot) for the next act: Meneo. it was their crazy onstage action as always and I really enjoyed their set. Bacalao finished the night while we were chillin’ in the backstage.

Click the following pic for a video of the 8GB performance:

After this long night and waking up really late, we went around Geneva with Meneo, Entter and Kolouch, “fascinated” about the watch-frenzy going on in the city…

We then reared our heads towards Le Zoo again, I had to VJ for The Bloody Beetroots. This happened at some minutes past 3AM, and for an hour. I enjoyed my set but again I faced some tech difficulties. My iBook is goofing up with its performance and I do not know why.
After this, it was mad party time, until the wee hours: I remember staying in Le Zoo until 11AM!

Check out for future posts about the rest of the journey

Pulsewave ROCKED. Europe, here we go!

Well well, Pulsewave’s been a BLAST that I will certainly never forget!
Not only could I enjoy performances by brilliant artists like Baron Knoxburry, Mark Denardo/Graffiti Monsters and Minusbaby, plus the visual maestros Voltage Controlled and vade, I also enjoyed my set very much.

Pulsewave has to be a unique chipmusic venue in the world. Awesome ambient, cool venue hosts, it’s PACKED since hour ZERO until THE VERY END, pretty girls, friendly guys… what else can you ask for?

My set consisted of mostly new tracks from 8GB, like Piolaboy (featuring Mendoza superfriends Fauna othe lyrics), Turdbus, Same Thing, East 105 St. and others, many of which will be available in our up and coming 8bitpeoples release, as well as classics like Jorge Newbery and my cover of Kraftwerk’s We Are The Robots.
The set also included a lengthy power outage. From what I’ve been told, I was to blame, the set was so massive the electric system imploded

You can see more pictures at our flickr, and video proof, even of the power outage, at our Vimeo page , where you can also find some of the videos available in the old k.corp website (and some new ones)
Now we’re heading to Europe, to play in the world-reknowned Mapping Festival! 11th of April there will be an 8GB performance and 12th of April we will VJ the night at Le Zoo
/L’ Usine, famous Geneve venue.

After that, the 18th of April, there will be a Microdisko Stockholm gig with Stu, Bubblyfish and 8GB, and the 19th we go back to Switzerland to rock it hard in Basel, again with Stu and Bubblyfish, and the addition of VJ Kolouch.

Hope to see you somewhere around Europe.
Send us a mail for booking us! –> bookings }a t { kikencorp }d o t{ com

8GB @ PULSEWAVE TODAY!!!

Check out the mad NES ROM flyer made by NO CARRIER, with gfx by minusbaby and sound by Baron Knoxburry:

Pulsewave Is Turning Two! from Richard Alexander Caraballo on Vimeo.

See you there tonighty!