InVisible

Ilandoruntis is the recording of my ninth gig at Exil in support of Nik Bärtschs’ Ronin. Ilandoruntis by Jens-Christian Fischer Ilandoruntis

I spend my summer holidays with friends in a remote place somewhere in Denmark on an old farm. It is a time of talking, laughing, sharing stories, crafting, sports and good food. And sometimes there’s music. In previous years I shared some of my songs, this year I performed a set with guitar and iPad and a portable speaker for a few friends one afternoon. As usual, I recorded the set - this time I tried to capture all tracks and not just the resulting stereo mix. As usual with technical things (and musical technical things in particular), it went wrong and out of the 7 armed tracks, only 4 had a signal. Luckily that included the raw guitar and the synths (as well as two of the effects tracks). I was able to re-create the missing effect tracks and the only thing that was really lost, was the drum track. ...

One thing leads to another. Someone I know knows someone, we exchange emails and he sees that I make music and asks me to perform some live music at a private event. Thus was born “Cafe noire”. It had been many months since I performed and I was nervous about how much I would be able to bring to the event. It turns out that I’m really happy how the performance went. I was able to create an ambient sound scape that conveys a mood and that I still enjoy when I listen back to it. ...

I was travelling home from Basel last Friday afternoon, when two gentleman sat down across me on the train. One of them mentioned, that he just had stowed his cymbals, and that he was in a band that was an on a small european tour. We started talking and found out that we shared views not only on music but also on a lot of other topics, more or less related to music. ...

Last year I bought some cheap DMX capable lights - a Full Color Brick and a Mini White Par. Both work fine without any additional contols - the Color Brick can fade through various colors and the Par can be set to a specific white value. It is clear, that this is not enough, so I got a cheap USB to DMX interface to control the two lights and start out in Light Show Business. Also, there needs to be software. A quick search for DMX software turned up QLC+ - a free, cross plattform, open-source software. What’s not to like? ...

Almost exactly 6 years after I talked about Habits it is time to pick up the topic again. It seems that starting a new year brings out the desire to work on self-improvement in me. And that means working on all of the things that “one should do” regularly (like brushing teeth). A couple of years ago, I tried the BJ Fogg Tinyhabits method to intrduce new habits (it seems that the topic of Micro Habits is the new hot shit anyway) and failed spectacularly. I don’t even remeber what I tried to achieve then. Other habits have been more successful: 2 years ago I bought an Apple Watch and have been closing my rings almost every day ever since (I’m on day 703 of 1000). I learned that I needed to be able to make exceptions (being sick is one of them, helping kids prepare for final exams another) and be ok to breaking the chain. Still I have been walking to work almost every single day for the past two years. ...