Once again, into the breach

As in my myriad artistic endeavours, I am once again overreaching.  I've maintained a blog before, but it had no stated focus.  I also have facebook and twitter accounts, plus 5 myspace accounts (4 belong to my various projects).  It is, of course, a fool's errand to add yet another project to my life, but here we are.

My intent with this blog is to share whatever insights I gain into learning new skills, and ideally, synthesize knowledge between seemingly disparate disciplines.  To that end, let me introduce my projects...

Longing for Orpheus: My furthest advanced electronic musical project, in a New Age/Ambient vein.  So far, I've released two self-published albums, doing everything up through the mixing stage myself, then hiring a mastering engineer and relying primarily on CD Baby for distribution.  I also did basic promotion work (radio and internet radio) for both albums.

Ice Queen Alias: A dark synthpop band that includes myself, my fiancee, and a friend of ours.  We're still in the writing-only phase, and have few songs up on MySpace.  I'm putting a lot of work into this project at the moment, and hope to start performing in local dark scene venues within the next six months (that's been a stated goal for well over a year, though...)

Artificial Emotion: My third and final music project, this is more along the lines of what people usually think of (in my experience) when you say "electronic music."  My concept of what fits here is ill-defined - it's kind of a catch-all for experiments and things that don't fit stylistically within the other two projects.  The one unifying concept is a sci-fi theme; I originally created the project with the purpose of writing a "Trance Opera" concept album, with a robotic protagnist (lots of vocoder!), and still hope to get around to it someday. 

After Enigma - A Guide to Nu Ambient Music: Like its title implies, this is a web site dedicated to defining and exploring "Nu Ambient" music, mostly via album reviews and artist profiles.  It is, sadly, the most neglected of my projects. 

Live Theater:  I consider myself a regular performer with three production companies in my area - The Wimberley Players, The Way Off Broadway Community Players, and The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin.  For the past few years, I been performing in about four shows or so a year.  Multiple times, on recieving a role in a well-known show, I've trawled the internet for the thoughts of other actors who played that role, and have never found any relevant hits.  One aim of this blog is to rectify that.

Vexel art:  I just discovered the word "vexel" the other day, and it amuses me tremendously.  I have used the freeware GIMP tool a few times in the past, and it turns out it's a vexel tool - you can create persistent vector-based "paths", but in the end, you render them out to a big map of pixels, and that's your end product.  I've used GIMP for simple image manipulation in webpage design (for the pages linked above), and to design a couple of t-shirts before, but I've just recently (in the past few months) begun freehand drawing concepts, then using GIMP to create more "polished" versions.  I'll probably create a DeviantArt page soon, and post the link here.