SXSW day 1

Going backwards in time here with this recap of SXSW, finally just getting the time and energy to write it. After getting into Austin at 7:30am we crashed for a little while before heading downtown. I went to drop my camera stuff off at the Parish for the Young Man show later, then finally went to pick up my badge. First show we saw Tristen from Nashville, good rock group with a slight country vibe.

Same showcase saw Dale Earndhard Jr Jr who were very entertaining, I had heard the name before (kinda sticks with you) but never their music. Cool setup and a great cover of the Beach Boys God Only Knows had me sold.

After that I wanted to be back at the French Kiss showcase to get a handle on things for filming Young Man at 11. Saw the 123's who were cool although I didn't really focus too much attention on them as everyone was preparing for the show. I was very glad to see the Parish looking full, it's a big venue and could easily feel empty even with 100 people in it. But I'd say there were at least 250 people, maybe even more, and they were in for a treat.

Young Man hooked the crowd in from the beginning. The sound was on point and their energy was palatable. I took some really good video although the sound was rather poor because I was right next to the speakers getting a good angle. Should be able to still cut something up nice though, I'll be posting videos in the future. Particuarly I thought the band did amazing on their tune School,which careens through several movements and ends in a frenetic climax with the band rocking out in unison. Their chemistry really shone through on the tunes that allowed a good buildup, their set climaxing with another highlight Just a Growin'.

After the show we packed up gear and debated about what to do next. Luckily several people were interested in checking out the rapper Curren$y who I am a big fan of and have had the pleasure of filming play a show before. We made the trek to the Mohawk (another great venue, luckily hit all good ones on the first day) just as he was starting. The crowd was really into it and even though his set was short he made the most of it, rolling through lots of tunes and playing abbreviated version (often too much so) of many great tracks. Took one solid video, although the audio sucks for the first half:

After Curren$y was Big K.R.I.T. from Missippi who I had heard a lot about recently but again not his music. My brother and I were only able to stay for a the start because we had to load out our equipment from the Parish but it was good enough that we knew we needed to catch him later during the week.

Back at the Parish we checked out some of the Dodos who were closing the French Kiss showcase. I had only heard a couple of tracks from the Dodos before hand on some compilations but it was more the reccomendations of others that made me want to check them out in the first place. They were probably my favorite act of the Frenchkiss showcase (besides Young Man of course :) and definitley deserved the headlining spot. The crowd was really feeling them as they wove dense melodies with great guitar work and pedal effects. You could tell these guys really spent a lot of time mastering their instraments and playing together. We watched a few tunes and then went backstage to relax during the end of their show. Couldn't hear as well but it was amazing just to sit down and relax after the long first day.

So ended day 1 at SXSW. Gonna try and write these other recaps soon so I don't get too behind. I should have started keeping track of all this a long time ago, it will be great to have a record of all this to look back on someday.

SXSW half way point

I was originally planning to write a full recap of SXSW every day, but when you get here and everything gets going there's just too much happening. Not to say I couldn't have found time at some point, but it would have been at the expense of something else. And that includes rest, which has been on short supply after our 13 hour journey to Austin 7pm to 8am. Hopefully tonight I catch up a little on that, but even though our lodging is very convenient there is a kitten dwelling in the same room as us and it makes its prescence known, disturbing sleep at odd hours of the night.

Regardless of how sleep-deprived or rested you might be SXSW continues on, and with music pouring out from all corners it is easy to get overwhelmed. This is in fact is the year I am most without a plan, often going on the reccomendations of others. Slightly strange since it is my 4th SXSW, but in some ways maybe it makes the most sense. I've been working more this year than ever, filming a couple of Young Man shows and Dee Goodz' showcases that are coming up in the next 2 days, so it's been nice to find out about new groups and their shows without having to do my due diligence. I feel after this is all over I'll break down all the great artists I've seen as well as sort through all the video I've filmed over each day. Right now though I just can't muster the energy to go back through that all, much less get all the visual content uploaded.

So far I'll say my highlights have been Glassers, Curren$y, Dodos, Dale Earndhart Jr Jr, and Twin Shadow. Most everything has been pretty good though save for a show ruined by sound bleed. Only 2 more days to go, and they might be the busiest yet so I better get some rest (shit it's 4am). I'll probably end up writing lots of stuff in the car...

SXSW & Dee Goodz' new mixtape: Floetic Justice Vol II

Very pumped for my 4th SXSW, leaving in less than 2 hours! This will be the first time though I'll officially be working, filming shows for both Dee Goodz and Young Man while I'm down there. I'll be posting more while I'm down there hopefully, going to keep this brief for now, but I must mention Dee Goodz' new mixtape that just dropped, Floetic Justice II: B.O.T.H. You need to grab this now if you're a fan of hip-hop, because it is killing. And I'm not just saying that because I work with Dee (I know this may seem like a Dee Goodz blog a lot of the time LOL), I am saying it because it is a great listen. DOWNLOAD HERE:

http://www.2dopeboyz.com/2011/03/14/dee-goodz-floetic-justice-volume-2-b-o-t-h-mixtape/

Here's our latest video from the previously mentioned Quest Love show:



You know we'll have more video after SXSW too.

Also pumped for my brother's band Young Man, they have at least one show every day! Congrats to them and best luck at the fest:




Now we're off on the road, 13 hour drive here we go.

My latest work

 It's nice to have different kinds of work going on these days, hopefully I'll eventually have the time to do a real movie. But until then I'll keep cranking away on whatever I can get, like this latest ad we finally finished for a bank in Clarksville, TN of all places:



Also just premiered a new interview with Dee Goodz and my new friends at GoodMusicAllDay.com:



Been doing a lot of stuff with Dee Goodz lately and that is about to continue when we go to SXSW in less than a week. The support for our new video (scroll down for that) has been tremendous, already our most viewed video in just 2 days! Thanks to everyone for that, we're going to be updating a lot in the coming weeks with more content. Follow @dgoodz on twitter (and me while you're at it @digitalrobert) and hopefully we finally get that Floetic Justice Vol II!

Dee Goodz & Questlove: Another crazy night.

Pretty crazy day all around actually. Starting a new commercial project today, same day our Bananas video is getting blown up so much they froze the view count at 300 to sort it out. And to top that off Dee Goodz has a show tonight at Mai in Nashville opening up for Quest Love. If you don't know Quest Love you're probably not reading this blog, he was throwing down a sick DJ set tonight props for all the good tune selections. Clearly I have a long way to go before I become a high-caliber DJ. Sure I can rock a wedding, but I can't do nothing like he can.

As for my man Dee Goodz he prevailed through some sound/DJ difficulties and tore the roof off the place. We're gonna get a video together of that real soon, props to Dee for getting me into the show for free. Met up with some friends and we partied hard, a great way to start off the week. Being that this is my birthday week and all I'm feeling starting off with such a bang.

Lots more coming soon, check out the Bananas video below and stay tuned for lots more videos on the horizon.

Also follow @dgoodz on twitter NOW, new mixtape is dropping later this week! Stay connected for details.

New Dee Goodz video - Bananas

Finally the time has arrived to drop my new video with Dee Goodz. This is our best video yet, and the hardest to edit, but it was well worth it. I hope you enjoy, pass it around.



Floetic Justice Vol II: B.O.T.H. is coming very soon...

New music and the lost art of the CD

It's been a while since I've bought a bunch of CD's at once. I hate to admit it but I mostly download now, sprinkled in with an occasional LP purchase on vinyl. But I think I need to get back in the habit, even if just a little bit.

As I listen to these new CD's (currently Pantha du Prince's Black Noise, which is excellent and something I should have bought a long time ago) I have come to realize how lost the CD has become on me. In this era of the digital age it has become the blank CD that has power, not the printed ones that retail for $17.99 but settle for $12.99. Hell this new Cut Copy CD I bought was only $9.99 on amazon, and it was just released a week ago! I guess they have to do something. I probably do download too much music illegally. Most of the money I spend on music is for shows and festivals, plus the vinyl records I buy from time to time. In fact lately I've felt a little out of the music loop, I used to feel I knew a lot of the up and coming bands and was really on top of that shit. My how the years have flown by, now many of these bands have either gotten really big or disappeared and a whole new crop has come up from behind.

Take this year's Coachella for example. Several of the top acts (Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Kings of Leon even) I saw for the first time years ago when they were still gaining their following. Hell I even remember when Kanye played dancing in the district back in Nashville several years ago. Dancing in the fucking district ya'll. Now they're headlining arguably the best festival in the US (sorry Bonnaroo, you're 2nd though). I guess I'm still ahead of the curve in some respects, especially when it comes to seeing shows, but I do want to be more a normal music consumer and actually pay for the art which I so dearly love. Things sure are changing though, some of the best music is free especially in the rap scene where the mixtape is king. It's hard to convince anyone but young people to plunk down nearly $20 for something you can get for free, and they're not even the ones paying most of the time. Taylor Swift and Big Machine know this and worked it perfectly to have her become one of the best selling artists of this era. Oh Tay Sway.

Truly one of the saddest things about the movement to mp3's over CD's and records is the death of audio quality. Every single person who ever reads this is a victim of this terrible tradgedy. From laptop speakers to the shitty DAC's (digital audio converters) in iPods to the very coding of mp3's themselves we are amidst a crumbling of audio fidelity. And as a lifetime lover and still part-time consumer of music this saddens me. Things have picked up a bit with the development of great lossless codecs like .flac and apple's lossless version of the same thing, as well as the widespread usage of DAC's in home audio. Which btw if you don't own a DAC but listen to music off a computer on a nice stereo you need to get on that, it's one of the biggest improvements you can make and doesn't break the bank.

This being said I am obviously all for the digital age of music, as it has only made it's reach broader and consumption and research that much easier. We can never can backwards, and the CD will soon become a lost art form. I'll miss the cover art and the feel of it in my hands, but I'll do without the scratches and skipping that naturally occurs with heavy use. I've been trying to finish this post for a while now, and luckily that time has given me the chance to throughoughly listen to each of these CD's (the 3rd is The Kill's Midnight Boom). CD's help to cure my musical ADD somewhat, something I'm sure we've all battled with upon the advent of the iPod and iTunes. It's great to listen to an album back to front. Hopefully I'll be doing more of it in the future.

New live Dee Goodz video

 Dee Goodz help put on an amazing showcase last week, here is a sample of his performance:



Also I have changed the look of my blog and also figured out a way to encode youtube videos much better. Considering how often I do this I should have done this a while ago, too lazy to go back though. This blog is still very much evolving so bear with me on that front. Hopefully I have entertained at least one person along the way.

Been digging up some old videos

Still plowing ahead on new shit but being that festival season is upon us I realized I had a bunch of sweet videos from some of the best shows I saw last year that I never posted. Here was one of my favorite concert moments last year:

Set to drop the new Dee Goodz video for "Bananas" very soon, pumped about that. SXSW is right around the corner too, gonna be deep up in that this year. Can't wait, March should be a great month. Hell all of spring for that matter.

crazy night

Been trying to finish this other blog post about these new CD's I bought but I just haven't found the time. Definitely couldn't happen tonight. I filmed this crazy hip-hop showcase at the End in Nashville, was quite a spectacle (a very hot one too). It was interesting because I've been living in Nashville for a long time and I go to a lot of show but I had never one like this. 12 different hip-hop artists performed over the span of 4 hours, a marathon that payed off well with the debut performance of Gab (@_whoisgab) as the closer. I know 8 off 8th and I've seen a couple of other showcases in Nashville but it's pretty much rock groups of some kind. There is a demand for this shit. Maybe just few less performers next time, a bit longer set times, and definitely a different venue no offense to the End but they're not coming back. But all around it was a great show, the first time I have ever filled my footage capacity at a single event (which is currently 153 minutes with the way I format everything now in a combo of 1080p24 and 720pn24 between my Firestore and P2 card respectively, figured I'd go technical for a sec, I still do love my amazing Panasonic HPX-170).

So there will be more blog updates and definitely more videos in the near future, spring is about to get crazy! Hell SXSW is less than 3 weeks away, going to be throwing down harder than ever this year in Austin. Dee Goodz is playing along with my brother's band Young Man on top of more people coming to the festival than ever before. On that note I sign off...for now...

I can see clearly now

Just got a new pair of glasses the other day, things do look different. I've been without a pair of prescription glasses for a while, and I pretty much can function in every way without then. But when I saw a groupon for $150 off a pair of glasses at a store near my house I couldn't resist. It seemed like time to see again.

You see I'm nearsighted, meaning as the distance of my vision increases the blur factor comes into play. It is not that I can't see things far away, it is just that detail is lost. But I'm finding that they only really help in certain situations. For instance I couldn't wear them now, it would make staring a computer swing uncomfortable pretty quickly. And I've developed quite a tolerance to look at computer monitors several hours a day normally, although they are for sure way easier on the eyes these days.

I was slightly disappointed about my result with wearing them at a movie I saw recently (127 hours, which is incredible btw). Sometimes a little bit of blur works well with film viewing. After all motion pictures is a trick on your vision, running at 24 frames per second (30 on TV, or 29.97 really) convinces the eye there is constant movement. So a little blur is nice, the new sharpness kind of threw me off. Where my glasses really make a difference is outside. This is where the vibrancy of life really comes out, the detail is wanted there. Because in general I don't mind life a little blurry. I'll post a picture of them soon, for now it's time to get back to work.

New Dee Goodz video coming soon

It's been too long between updates of this thing, gotta get better about that. Thankfully I've been spending a lot of time working and filming new shit, not just sitting on my ass. It's been a super busy start of the year, doesn't even compare to last year. I'm liking it for the most part, except when the stress of deadlines hits or when there's so much to do I don't know where to start. But that's work I guess.

This next project is something different though. This is going to be pure craziness. Teaming up yet again with Dee Goodz and Black Rob we filmed some wild shit on Friday for our next music video. I know we just finished one last week, but Dee Goodz' new album Floetic Justice Vol II: B.O.T.H. is coming out by month's end, and so is our video. And this is going to be the most insane one yet.

Yup. Crazy. So stay tuned for that. And next time I'll write about something not work related. For my sake and yours.

Deerhoof report - live in Nashville 2/4/11

The Deerhoof show was awesome last night, I really do love them. This show was at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville, TN, and it was my 4th time seeing them over a period of 6 years. They've been doing their thing since the late 1990's now! I've seen them as a 3 piece and 4 piece band (which is what they were last night) and I definitely prefer the 4 member setup. They ripped for a solid 80 minutes of whimsical, feel-good indie rock. I didn't recognize a good bit of the material, most likely because a lot was off their new album Deerhoof vs. Evil which I immediately purchased on vinyl after the show.

Deerhoof has so much material under their belt only the most die-hard fans would know it all. Their latest album is their 11th, and craziest of all it was their biggest gap in new material from being their last album was released in 2008. They did still manage to play several of my favorite tunes off Milk Man and Apple O which are my two favorite albums. Their music is definitely not for everyone as it's weird and funky, but their energy and obvious enjoyment of what they do spreads throughout the crowd when they do play. Here are a couple of videos from the show that I took, and some more pictures below that:

New music video for Dee Goodz - "Lisa Lopes"

We finally finished the latest video for Dee Goodz, the track is Lisa Lopes off his forthcoming mixtape Floetic Justice Vol II. It was a simple shoot but I think we got a lot out of it. It has been great working with Dee Goodz so far, dude has a lot of potential and it has been a blessing to finally to be making some music videos. It's something I've wanted to do for a while and just never got it together. Our next one is going to be even better, so stay tuned.

Music Video: Dee Goodz - Lisa Lopes