**NightSuite**

Our sonic, raga-based explorations, and our visual experiments with projected liquid colour promise to truly come together for the first time with NightSuite, an installation created specifically for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.

Some snaps:

via @ Chelly

via @Ian_Muttoo

via @honeybee__b

via @devonmcgrath

via @icepopart

via @will_c_run

via @thebridgeisover

Happy 2014!

Happy New Year! Nothing like a new calendar year to force you to complete last year’s “to do list”, and posting this footage from the Summer was on there….definitely a favourite 2013 moment.

Synaesthesia @ The Garrison

4 humans + 1 machine + 1 projector with liquids

Garrison Jan 11th/2013 photo by @thebradee

Backstage: Ancient runes from previous musical civilizations, warning of bad monitor mixes…

Garrison Jan 11th/2013 Photo by Kenneth Laing Herdy

Photo by Kenneth Laing Herdy

Colour Gamut

So you’ve read our little mission statement, right? While it’s important to listen to and experience the special mood evoked in each raga, colour is important in many ways around here. Do you have enough in your life? Living online, we never get real colour. No colour on a computer screen is complete.
Being a sound guy, colour gamut is a concept I picked up only recently via this Michael Scroggins (of Single Wing Turquoise Bird) video (below). Essentially the term refers to “the complete set of colors found within an image at a given time” [1], and often its usage describes the limitations of a device or medium to reproduce that full spectrum of colour. How curious that the term came from music…

The video is great, especially if you have an interest in Californian counter-culture in the ’60s – I was always curious about the Hog Farm that is always referred to when mentioning Wavy Gravy. But I’m happy to cut to the chase here, as it illustrates lightsweetcrude’s preoccupation with liquid light projections: “These dyes and the overhead projector gave you a colour gamut you couldn’t get off of film, off of video or slides – it was really intense.”
I honestly wasn’t aware that this was behind the unusual intensity experienced when seeing liquids projected on a wall… Even just food colouring on some transparencies. Colour affects us, and the purity of colour might be an important factor in its effect.
You should really get your eyes off your screen for a bit today, and experience some green in a wooded area, or at least the sky – that might be the longest standing source of great colour going for our species. It’s interesting that they say when planning a meal to “colour your plate”. Getting some colour into your life everyday is as important as eating your veggies.

Photo credit: Paola Martinez Hernandez 5-26-2012

Photo: projection on the wall at lightsweetcrude HQ.

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Lee’s Palace!

Lee’s Palace! The one place I used to check out bands during my time at U of T that is still around and I still haven’t played myself. I saw many bands there back then: The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, The Phantoms, The Shuffle Demons, The Hopping Penguins, Punjabi By Nature, Chunk O’ Funk….. That great gig with Treble Charger and The Posies on a bill – that was a good one…. And many more that I can’t quite recall now… Now if you chat up some older scenesters, you might learn that Lee’s is also the venue where a legendary Black Jello / Neon Rome / Mike Marley and the Sailors gig took place (1986?) that involved an altercation between a soundman working at Lee’s and Black Jello’s lead singer, who pulled a Roger Daltrey, but he wasn’t a seasoned ‘mic swinger’, and it hit the floor, causing the sound man to attack. Quite a skirmish. Mr. Lee (RIP) himself was even in the thick of it and got hit in the head, if you believe the stories. Supposedly there’s some video footage, but it’s not in circulation yet… (I missed that gig, but am happy to say that I caught Neon Rome at an all ages gig that went down before this one). My point: Lee’s is one of the few true TO rock venues with history that is still around. And lightsweetcrude is psyched to play there tomorrow night. Come join us!

FaceBook event link

P.S. Of course…. something this cool would have to be co-opted by Hollywood.

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Bhimpalasi Cocktail

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