Hello to all of the many spam-bots and east-asian web crawlers that visit my Blogonomicon!

I would like to introduce you to something very special I have been working ardently on.

For the moment, I’ve been calling it the #Hextacle. I suppose you can call it whatever you like.

Here is a picture of the work thus far:

The finished product will be somewhat mechanical. This is traveling to Vermont for the #Ziontific music #festival on Friday, June 17th.

This is the back piece to a cabinet with a lot of lights and little critters I’ll be attaching shortly with epoxy. The cabinet will ride along 10″ steel wheelbarrow wheels along the trails of music festivals, and make various stops, whereupon it will “deploy” into a six-foot-wide display with even more lights, a fog machine, a UV-iridescent giant bubble machine and other fun things.

Essentially it’s used to capture live-looping from festival-goers, which is later mixed into something vaguely resembling music. I did this for the first time at StrangeCreek over Memorial Day weekend and it was awesome… collected over 4 hours of material in one night. Now I’m making it a more permanent #Thingamabobicle.

If you’d like to follow along with the development of this crazy thing, please pop over to https://www.facebook.com/SmaB0i where I’ll continue posting as the cabinet is finished over the next 3 days.

Here are some examples of content derived from the live-looped sessions (some have more post-production than others):

The bulk of the important stuff (the speakers, some of the lights, the live-looping kit and the recording equipment) runs on batteries so I’m not at a loss if I can’t get the jenny going or don’t want to haul the extra weight around. The rest is going to materialize over the next couple of days as I have some drawn-out blueprints and a great many details in my head (I’m pretty good at visual memorization and proprioceptive tasks); fundamentally the primary requirements are that it house an 11″ deep by 18″ tall by 15″ wide speaker box; it will need a minimum of 2 (but ideally as many as 4) 10″x10″ collapsible shelves that will fold down when not in use and lock into a 90-degree angle when fully deployed to use as a stand for equipment like the live looper, and eventually, my Korg Kaoss pads and perhaps additional equipment I add over time. I would like to get a battery array going instead of the jenny so I can have the whole rig lit up while in motion, but that’s going to require at least $200-300 of batteries, plus an inverter and some electrical work, and I’m guessing that won’t happen until next spring. In the mean-time, the single-cylinder generator is enough to power the blacklights, the fog machine, the bubble machine and all of the non-battery stuff (laser lights, pulsating LED strips… it’s rather extravagant).

Time to get downstairs and return to the craft.