A night of fine musical and shopping entertainment in aid of The British Red Cross for Japan Appeal.

Sat 9 April at 8pm

DJ’s on the night include: Charles Webster, Chris Duckenfield, Inland Knights, Paul Wain… and more special guests to be confirmed.…and…the venue has a very nice Funktion One sound system.

Entrance £5.00

Door open 8:00pm close 2:00am

There will be raffles and an auction to raise money, please bring cash or your cheque book if you want to join the auction….we will be updating this page with details and photo’s of auction/raffle items.

Auction items kindly donated by:

artists and record labels ; Atjazz records, Buzzin’ Fly, Defected, Freerange, Miso Records, Sonar Kolektiv, Wonk, Atavism…some of the records are rare and/or autographed copies !

and from these fine Nottingham businesses ; Atomic, Fopp, Toni and Guy, Page 45, Wild, Montana, Broadway Cinema, The Lakeside Theatre, Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.

and a selection of fantastic artwork from local street art collective Subism (prints and original artwork) and the wold famous Jon Burgerman (original artwork).

Sat 9 April.

The British Red Cross is a registered by Royal Charter 1908,
is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949)
and Scotland (SC037738)

From today and the next two weeks 100% of music sales on our site will go to the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. Every single penny of your money will go to Japan including any PayPal fees and expenses we incur.

As normal, 24bit FLACs and CDs include the 1:8 scale Minimoog model, although we are rapidly running out of both CDs and Minimoog models. Alternatively there will always be the 320k MP3 and FLAC albums.

Every penny will be sent to the American Red Cross at the end of each week.

Please donate now…

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6th Planet app free draw, here are the winners who each get a copy…

Martin Wood
DrWig – visit his site for some excellent and free ambisonic VST plugins for Mac and PC.
Neil Allen

Many thanks to all fellow anthropoids and humanoids who added a comment, may the random numbers be in your favour next time.

Available now on the App Store for just 59p / 99c

Monkube.com
Sixty levels, ten worlds full of challenging obstacles, hidden levels if you’re good at the gameplay part, and master levels for the guy who’s done with the story mode and still can’t stop playing.

6th Planet features a full ten track ambient soundtrack by renowned artists and a comic book story created in coorporation with Vivifilm. Vivi-who? They’re an animated movie production company with two Oscar nominations on their impressive resume.

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6th Planet, brand new iPhone / iPod game from new indie developer Monkube. It’s a fusion of arcade game and comic book and features an electronic soundtrack from Leones, Robots in Space, Forest Fargloam and myself (with Gas-Microscopic). I also made some of the in-game sounds on my ARP Odyssey and old phaser pedal. Includes a full comicbook!

We have three copies to give away; just add a comment below to win…

Monkube.com
Sixty levels, ten worlds full of challenging obstacles, hidden levels if you’re good at the gameplay part, and master levels for the guy who’s done with the story mode and still can’t stop playing.

6th Planet features a full ten track ambient soundtrack by renowned artists and a comic book story created in coorporation with Vivifilm. Vivi-who? They’re an animated movie production company with two Oscar nominations on their impressive resume.

iFanzine.com 5/5
Five out of five chimps agree: this mega collaboration from Monkube and a number of art studios is the best darn iteration of “lunar lander” you’ll find on the iOS. Boasting perfectly fine-tuned physics, a wonderfully illustrated sci-fi story filled with as many twists as the game’s complex levels, and a pick-up-and-play interface, 6th Planet gives the iOS gamer just about everything he or she would ever look for in a videogame — and then some!

Qwertyhub.com 4.5/5
6th Planet it a fantastic game and is very easy to recommend. The gameplay is good enough to stand on its own, in fact, the game actually got more enjoyable the deeper into it I went (stages 48, 49, and 50 were my 3 favorites). Monkube didn’t stop there: every aspect is well developed to deliver much more than just a “good game”, it’s an excellent total experience.

Note: We delete all email addresses after we’ve contacted the winners.
Free draw will take place on Fri 11th March.
Add a comment below to win…

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A couple of recent interviews with

Wolfson Music: Interview with Mat Jarvis of Gas/High Skies
Think Before Type: Geek Music – Osmos / High Skies / Mat Jarvis – An Interview

There was a third, but I’ve just checked the link and the site seems to have collided with a dematerializer.

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Dustin Brown sent us this strangely fascinating video he created of para-dichlorobenzene crystals (mothballs) growing under a microscope, looking like organic pixels and set to Microscopic. We took the opportunity to ask him how he created it.

Mat Jarvis: How long have you been observing things under the microscope?

Dustin Brown: I started observing through the microscope in the early ’70s when my uncle gave me a monocular hobby grade scope (along with a lot of model rocketry supplies).
I first observed pond water, putting the tiny Daphnia “water fleas” on a slide at low power. Then I noticed tiny specks swimming around them; on higher power I discovered protozoa! It was later that I learned someone had already done this in the 1600’s, his name was Leeuwenhoek.  I purchased the book “How to Know the Protozoa“ by Jahn and spent hours finding and drawing species new to me.
I thought I would be a chemical engineer but ended up in Microbiology using microscopes to study microorganisms.

How do you hook up a camera to the microscope?
If one is fortunate enough to have a microscope with a trinocular head they can mount the appropriate camera on this “third eye”. My film camera, at the time, was an SLR Minolta and nice images could be obtained by removing the camera lens and positioning the camera body near the microscope eyepiece. I started with a tripod and black felt to block room light. It could get good images but I was constantly knocking the camera out of alignment with the scope. It was then I took a Minolta camera lens ring and built a mount around it. This mount friction fit snugly over the eyepiece.   (No more black felt or bumping out of position :-)

What kind of equipment did you use and what basic equipment do you need to try it yourself?
Camera:
My current camera is a Nikon CoolPix S570
Most cameras can be used but the camera will probably need to either have a removable lens or, if not, be able to zoom.   A camera with a lens and no zoom will probably only image a small circle of light surrounded by black vignetting. The only way to know for sure is to try the camera up close to the microscope eyepiece and find the optimum position and zoom level.  This information will dictate how one positions the tripod or builds the camera mount.

Polarizing filters: Continue reading…

What a year Osmos has had! No1 in the iOS App Store and Apple’s iPad Game of the Year(!) as well as the PC/Mac/Linux version selling 250,000 copies in a week in the Humble Indie Bundle just before Christmas.

Hemisphere Games, the creators of Osmos, have posted some of the end of year awards it has just won along with the chance to help. It has four nominations in the Best App Ever Awards that you can vote in…
Best Use of iOS Hardware
Most Innovative Game
Best Game Graphics
Best Game Controls

Please follow any of these links and click away; we’d really appreciate it if you could find the time to vote :-) Votes close 25th Jan.
(Each time you vote a Minimoog gets tuned and fed)

HemisphereGames.com
Anyways, this is the time of year when various reviewers and websites post their end-of-year awards and ask their users to vote on the best games of the year. Happily for us, Osmos for iPhone and/or iPad has received a bunch!

• The big momma of all these is Apple’s selection as iPad Game of the Year! Woot woot.
• Macworld chose Osmos as Puzzle Game of the Year!
• IGN awarded Osmos with Coolest Atmosphere and Best Soundtrack of 2010. It was also nominated for Best iPhone Game. “The combination of the exquisite electronic soundtrack, the cool, colorful look of the different motes, and the zen pacing makes Osmos the coolest iPhone/iPad game of the year.”
• IFC selected it not just as a top iOS game, but as one of the top games of 2010 on any platform. Seeing Osmos amongst such titles as Limbo, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed, Super Meat Boy, etc. is wild! “Rises head and shoulders above so much of the games content to be found on the App Store because of its thoughtful mechanics and abstract presentation. …beautiful and the ambient trance soundtrack transports players to blissed-out interactive nirvana.”
• Osmos has been nominated in this year’s Crunchies for “Best Touch Interface”. These are some pretty far-reaching awards, with other categories including nominees such as Twitter, Facebook, the iPad, Netflix… crazy company!
• Pocketgamer called it one of the ten best iPad games of 2010.
• TouchArcade selected it as one of the best ports of 2010. “Osmos is one of those titles that feels like it was made for a touch screen, and after owning the Steam version on my laptop, moving to the iOS version felt like an upgrade. Really, no matter which version you play, Osmos is stellar from top to bottom.”
• iLounge put out an iOS buyer’s guide, with all kinds of interesting articles and suggestions. They’ve included Osmos in their Top 100 Games of 2010. “Beautiful like a jellyfish tank set to ambient music from a hip lounge, Hemisphere Games’ Osmos challenges you to grow in size to overwhelm or absorb organic blobs in pool- and space-like settings. As soon as you think you understand the action, Osmos introduces the ability control the speed of time, and the challenge of outpacing new rivals. Brilliant and unique…”
• The APPera named it one of the best iOS games of 2010.
• Oh, and while this isn’t a top list, it was fun to read how “people should have wasted their time on” Osmos rather than Angry Birds. “[Osmos] is everything that games too often are not: beautiful, satisfying, sometimes even relaxing. It’s a full PC game shrunk to the iPhone, and there are some gorgeous touches. For example, that popping you feel after using the slow-motion feature and hearing the soundtrack drop in pitch? That’s a new synapse firing off in your head.”

Toot toot!

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An appropriately snowy scene for this free to download January wallpaper, taken at Microscopics HQ during the recent absolute-zero freeze.

Click to enlarge, then right-click/control-click to download. We’ve included two different ratios, which should fit most monitors. As is usual for Wordpress blogs, all rescaled  images are cruelly rendered myopic, but focus will be restored when enlarged/clicked.

1600 x 1200

1920 x 1200 widescreen

Snow

Posted on MickKarn.net

24th July 1958 – 4th January 2011

It’s with profound sadness that we have to inform you that Mick finally lost his battle with cancer and passed away peacefully at 4.30pm today, 4th January 2011 at home in Chelsea, London. He was surrounded by his family and friends and will be deeply missed by all.

Posted: 4th January 2011

I was hugely saddened to hear of Mick Karn’s recent passing. He was bass player with glam rock/ art rock/ European disco/ Chinese electronic folk band, Japan. They were hugely influential with many musicians, myself included, who grew up listening to them, and in particular Tin Drumtheir last and most successful album. Mick’s fretless bass sound was distinctive and experimental, yet also accessible. He will be missed.

 Here are a collection of random Mick Karn and Japan videos, on which he played bass, vocals and various wind instruments.

  Continue reading…

Paul Frankland (Woob) sent me this sneak peek for his new Max & Harvey animated film project coming later this year…

Max and Harvey – Silk (Trailer)

It’s a trailer for an animated 7.5 minute feature film, Silk, due out soon. Now that’s what I call widescreen.
Two dogs, two choices, two very different adventures… Can’t wait.