While I am attempting to sneak out of the studio in the near future to catch a few more of my favorite artists, it is a year of ambition. The brick wall structure in iCal reflects this state of affairs, and the feeling of accomplishment keeps me moving: continual work delivers fresh promise with every progressive step. As most waking moments are spent in pursuit of these ambitions (barring coffee time, which may still qualify), it is all the more marvelous to step out of the electron flow to a land of moons, makeup, music and madness.

It was a wonderful time, off the radar for three glorious hours.

Cynical words place us all in a frame of cynicism.

Empowering words create active hands.

Not once have I heard a living politician speak the way Barack Obama does in this video. Not once have I seen a living politician throw our accepted framework of political rhetoric aside the way Barack Obama does. Not once have I heard a living politician own the entire framework, both good and bad, as an existing point we all must work together to grow from.

Not once, before tonight, have I experienced a living politician running for the highest office of the land use old words in a new way.

After some sleep on this speech, and waking up feeling as though something wonderful is about to happen, I have a few more thoughts:

Obama is the only candidate to date who could give a speech like this. Given his diverse heritage and background, Obama is the only candidate who is actually representative of all concerned parties and of America itself.

Obama speaks to listeners with the assumption we are intelligent. This speech is not dumbed down to reach a presumed larger audience. He speaks as if he knows all his listeners are able to understand more than messages of fear, as if America is a nation of competent adults, not frightened children looking for a government to tell them everything is going to be fine.

No other candidate in the current election cycle can reach anywhere close to this kind of connection with the public. While McCain is busy pounding the fear of terrorists and Clinton is busy attempting to subvert super-delegate votes to triumph over the popular will, Obama began tackling a shared problem in America simply by speaking about it.

Troubles on the world seemingly tend to limited lifespans as fodder for big media, staying in the public eye only long enough to force a spend-to-forget reflex. Big troubles roll back cyclically. We're at the top of the cycle again, and China's oppression and killings in Tibet are in the news once more.

Somewhere along the cycle is also the plight of Burma, highly influenced by its shared border with China. The communist government in China holds vested interest in keeping non-democratic, shackled states as buffer zones. China supplies arms and aid to the military dictatorships in both Burma and North Korea. I don't disagree with engaging China economically... I believe many of the social advances within China are a direct result of barriers being broken by information, money and, ironically, tragically, almost as redemption... consumerism. However, when a government massacres its own citizens or enables the genocides of others rather than allow those citizens the exercise of self-determination, the response should be a swift rebuke from every free nation, regardless of how much money in trade is at stake.

The easy impulse is to turn sword against sword, but I know this perpetuates the cycle of violence when what is required is a full stop. To this end, I'd like to highlight a peaceful means of engagement: Twelve Offerings, my friend Jeremy Dickens' musical efforts as Logickal to create public awareness of the crisis in Burma and raise funds to aid the struggle. All proceeds from this recording go to the U.S. Campaign For Burma. While Twelve Offerings is connected directly to Burma, the feelings it evokes and awareness it creates are for every unfree people. It's available (with sound previews) through iTunes, Beatport or direct from Jeremy via Paypal.

Created live over three days, this is Ritual Musick of the finest warp. There is life moving within every ambient piece, and together the twelve tracks are far more than their sum. This music spiritualizes every moment and place conscious listening occurs. Twelve Offerings on San Francisco's subway system pulls the veil away: the homeless become radiant, the bus itself a mechanism of wonderment rolling on wheels of liminal magick, time exposed as fiction of the mind, light pouring from every surface and, in pulsing bursts, from every still beating heart.

I - An open doorway of sonic mystery: slow, reverberant, gong-like tones... their resonance slips vibratory tendrils around your brainstem, pulls you forward to a space far beyond headphones.

II - Clears the air of all obstacles, initiating a transformative process on your psyche: you become rarified atmosphere without definition. You become wind and you move through the sky.

III -Coalesces you as light rain falling on temple roofs, early morning condensate, animist communicative substance for the pre-dawn set. There is light here, but it's not from Sol.

IV - Brings the dawn, dew gathered into the shape of a human once again. Rivulets of shine thread through the world, across the plain, across your eyes, your skin, your lips, your heart, your everything. Light grows in power, day blasts through the shifting sky and the world awakens.

V - Centers the full power of the day in your chest, a single drone entering to work its magick then slip quietly into each and every cell. This light, as this day, is now part of you and will endure.

VI - Temple gongs in perpetual, living weave as forces and powers released by the Light, the interplay of every being as the land expands in definition to take on the truth: it is, in fact, a deceptive, overlapping nexus of all time and space.

VII - There is peace here, a calm pause, a moment between actions which is an action itself: awareness spreads across the plain of existence in three expanding discs at height of heart, head and hands.

VIII - The conversation begins, in tones and drones of aching beauty. All beings are represented, from the smallest sparks between subatomic particles to the flotsam of single cells to the lumbering groupings we know as sentient creatures to the vast expanse of celestial colonies, their thoughts occurring once per light year through thin networks of interstellar matter.

IX - The work of the day is begun! Life has discussed, life has agreed, life has chosen. This evolutionary path, this entry portal, this way shall be opened and this shall move through into manifestation.

X - The realm is as it always was. The realm is something new. The realm is as it always will be. The realm is changed... you open your eyes and see, as if for the very first time. The realm is you.

XI - As you were created in this moment, in connection with every other action/reaction, every other living being from the rocks beneath to the friend beside you to the sun wheeling through the sky above, you move through the moment and carry it forward in the work. You are the moment, you are the work, you are the energy between everything. Footstep by footstep, you are the choice that life made.

XII - You are here. Burma is there. The people are asking for you. You become wind and move to heed their call.

Tonight is the flash-point of a brave new year, a personal mark on the track... an old finishing, a new starting, a now holding everything between this and the next February end. I've said it many ways since 02008 01 01... but tonight, for me, the work does truly commence. It's going to be a hell of year. I know this because I won't rest until it is.

Over the last few twelvemonths, I've mapped deep structural elements within, examined tightly wound zones I knew only by the barbed wire and lightning launchers ringing their barriers. I knew them, circled their cloaked existence, but didn't understand enough of what they contained to name them. If you can name, you can own... and re-make.

I cannot take all credit for my transfiguration. Often I was simply in the right frame of mind at the right time, aware enough to notice a silver key or magickal wrecking ball dangled in front of me by a friendly universe. One by one I have turned the rusted tumblers of entrances to long-sealed emotional crypts, felled the bulwarks of boneyard fortresses, opened trapped realms in my heart to exploration and merciful release. It hasn't always been pretty.

This image is of NASA's Skylab circling our home planet, 01974 02 08. It's a vision I hold in my mind. I use it to remind myself of this world's true nature when I need perspective, of the true nature of humanity and its relation to the spinning blue, of my true nature as an avatar of our shared existence.

By default, I've travelled the underworld all the short years of my life. I was born there, but it's no longer my most useful metaphor for psychological motivation. Like Buckminster Fuller's dismissal of the classic nomenclature up and down, I'm now leaving under and above to dust-laden superstition. They're useful for fairy tales, but I need an accurate descriptor: a name to own and re-make.

As with the sky, I've become aware the true directions of self are in and out.

Out is where I'm headed.

It's an extravagant line-up:

Tumult (rocking the Monome)

Trash80 (rocking another Monome)

X|K (MIDINES)

Nullsleep (NES/Game Boy)

Chibi-tech (NES + tracker)

A_Rival (NES + rap)

Starpause the K9D Kid (LSDj)

Only five Washingtons! Come out with me and hear modernity re-constructed in real time at The Mighty - 119 Utah Street, San Francisco.

In the first of these, Cycling '74's Andrew Benson gave a look inside the almost-released Max 5 to a very appreciative audience of patchers. Here's a small, quick list I gathered of some Max 5 grooviness coming soon from the Cycling elves:

- Goodbye [prepend set]! Message boxes have a right inlet specifically for this function.

- Lots of Maxers love the enhancements provided to 4.6.x by Nathanaël Lécaudé's Max Toolbox. Max 5 has new and requested shortcuts and key combos built right in.

- Taking a cue from Ableton's Info View in Live, there's a new Clue window which displays information on mouse-over. An annotation attribute allows you to add your own custom clues.

- The new UI is gorgeous, vector-driven goodness, courtesy of Raw Material Software's Juce. Resolution independent resize is sweet.

- Multiple live views on the same patch, at different magnification levels. As someone who often builds patches which spill beyond the bounds of a screen, this is fantastic. Changes update in all views simultaneously.

- Object name auto-completion. To quote Andrew, "Several of our developers bought iPhones during development and fell in love with auto-completion." It shows. Arrow through the drop-down list of auto-complete object choices and the Clue window shows information and arguments for each. Pow! Instant answers to "What does [somefunkyobject] do again?"

- Color schemes. The entire application is default color customizable. Sets of colors can be saved and recalled instantly, for say, "dimly lit performance" view or patching in the "well lit lab" view. Different background colors for locked and unlocked patchers.

- Mouse over the left edge of an object with an inspector and a small spot to click appears. Click and, viola! the inspector opens. Inspectors used to be Max patches themselves, but the new method has inspectors created on-the-fly if I understand Andrew correctly.

- Drag and drop audio files directly into [buffer~]. *throws double devil sign*

- I know most Max users are already aware of the new Presentation Mode, but to see it in action is to love it.

- New debug tools = excellent. Watchpoints will seriously change the way I track down problems. You drop Watchpoints on patch cords and they auto-number. Open the Watchpoints window and you'll find a numbered list display of all your Watchpoints with their data changing realtime as it zips through the cables. There's a floating audio meter for hovering over signal patch cords, too.

Andrew also mentioned most third party external packages have been tested and are working well. So the various quick-patching favorites like Peter Elsea's LObjects, Emmanuel Jordan's Ejies and Peter Castine's Litter Power suite should be there from go. I generally only use third-party objects for proof of concept or if there's something I absolutely want potentially greater efficiency in, but it's nice to know they'll be available from the start. The only third party externals which will likely need complete rewrites are those with graphic interfaces.

Cycling have paid great attention to usability in Max 5, with the majority of changes aimed at improving user experience and providing a consistent and modern framework for programming in Max. It's not really an upgrade in the sense of providing new toys for making noise... it seems more the foundation for future development, a new beginning taking the best of the past 20 years and making it space-worthy for a new era of exploration. I'm excited, and very impressed by the way they've balanced familiarity with improvements to workflow and environment. Presentation Mode alone is a workflow gift from the gods. Add in a common interface across platforms and the possibility of an eventual Linux port and you realize this is the real deal.

Lastly, Max 5 will live on the same partition as Max 4.6.x. Excellent news... now I won't need to buy a new machine while I'm waiting for the next Pluggo build based on Max 5. I seriously cannot wait to take advantage of the new interface capabilities for a new wave of Daevl.Plugs.

Yes, I'm in. This is what it looks like inside The Machine. It's a bit smoky, true... I'm reworking the spacetime twister for greater efficiency. Once it's oiled up and humming properly we'll be able to slide across dimensions like pixels in glass.

This image was grabbed from an iSight stream passed through basic frameworks in the Pirate Video app I'm currently reworking with mattbot. The effect subpatch owes its origins to Andrew Benson's excellent ab.diffpass.jxs: differential filtering with decimation. I've killed it, Frankensteined it, killed it yet again and brought it back to life with blurring, some offset and a few other shaders on top and this is what it spits out now: gritty noir with just a wisp of lo-bit gauze.

A giant fortress destroying forward, crushing everything in its path... what's a lone simian to do?

Most of these times we run. We take to the trees and brachiate out of harm's way, leaving behind life as we knew it: a thin smear of dreams and possibilities. The Machine rolls on, bits of our lives and loves dripping in its tracks.

Not this time.

This monkey is faster, smarter and more motivated than you've tried to flatten before, Machine. I'm already running beneath your immense chassis, in the vast space between your grinding walls of plated cogs. Your main entry hatch is just above me. Soon I'm going to jump, climb in, take over.

You've been running driverless far too long.

This time, Machine, I'm coming for you.

Rather than basking in the vintage NASA vibes of Effect69 at San Francisco's Backlit Lounge tonight, I'm in the studio hacking on new plug-ins and Pirate Video. Since I can't be there, I'm contenting myself with the hard house beats of the new Effect69 album, Contact Made.

Effect69 mastermind Chris Martinez is a long-time friend and highly skilled tester of plug-ins. Above, you can see him dropping house science on the crowd at last month's Backlit. His new work is filled with four-to-the-floor heavy rhythms and bass for days. I'm fairly certain my heart rate is still up and my fingers have been driven to faster key press rates while listening to Contact Made tracks on repeat tonight. Superstars, 5-HTP, F*ck The Big Beat and, of course, San Francisco are relentless booty-movers.

The release party was held in Second Life, at Chris' super-tech club, Contact. Extra-special remixes were given to the Second Life crowd in attendance. I especially love the Chemical Brothers We Are The Night remix.

Shhhh... if anyone asks, yes, you were there.