Meet the Virus Bots! They live on the mini Minimoog and keep Baby Virus company in the studio.
Photo: m.0
Here’s a clip of us in the studio throwing down a little glitch duet. iLL.F.O. vs. m.0, y’all!
This was shot during the weeks leading up to our first show, which were quite a blur of geeking, caffeine overload, and sleep deprivation. iLL is glitching a vocal sample in Ableton Live while m.0 is singing and tweaking out his live vocals.
Both are snippets from the Nerd Revolt remix of m.0′s “Lift Us Up”, coming out on Innerflight Music any day now. Keep it locked to Beatport for the drop!
Okay, so I’ve got a confession to make. Up until recently, I was a blogger without an internet connection. Yeah, I know– pretty lame, but it kept me super disciplined. Every week, between my day job, snowboarding, and studio time, I’d bike down to the café, load up on espresso, and get to work.
Here’s a clip of me in my mobile office, during my blogging Dark Ages.
Here I am messing with my Virus TI Pølar (otherwise known as Baby Virus). This is the machine that triggered my whole descent into madness. The filters are super smooth, the reverb’s fuzzy and warm, layering up to 9 sawtooth oscillators (sawteeth?) with the hypersaw is haunting, and you can get lost in the mod matrix. I’m madly in love with the distortion, which can range from gritty and bone-crushing to beautiful and surreal.
Every detail of this synth is on point– right down to the blinking logo on the back, which is synced with the tempo. That thing has a freaking groove setting, for god’s sake!
All right, I’ll stop gushing now… I’ve got some knobs to tweak.
It’s less than a week before we play at Photosynthesis Festival, so Nerd Revolt was on studio lockdown this weekend. The recent 90-100 degree days had set us back a bit… but once things got cracking at Command Central®, everything just flowed.
After a few improv jams last summer, we wrote our first track, “Doppelgänger”. Since then, our studio and live rig has expanded, our skills have been sharpened, and our connection has grown exponentially. This track symbolizes the beginning of our surreal warp-speed journey, so it’s been exciting to return to it with a new perspective.
Here’s a clip of ”Doppelgänger” in rehearsal. An outdoor party calls for some heady psychedelic shit, so we’re gonna stretch out the tracks and get deep into freeform mode. These two city kids can’t wait to throw down their beats in the mountains!
PS: If the footage seems a little shaky, we shot all of the video ourselves while playing melodies, tweaking knobs, and dropping the beats. DIY, motherfuckers!
Let me bring you back to the week of July 26th, 2009. I’d just returned from managing a trade show in Salt Lake City, and caught wind of the fact that Seattle was about to have a heat wave. I wasn’t too surprised– in the 3 years I’ve lived here, there have been ice storms, wind storms, blizzards, rainiest-month records… nature has been bringing the pain up in this place!
But that week, I saw a different side of nature. I witnessed the most amazing process I’ve ever seen— right in my living room! While everyone was bitchin’ and moanin’ about their non-air-conditioned apartments and piling into ice cream joints, I was brought on this rather surreal and freakish journey. I’ll start from the beginning…
The day after I got back from SLC, I went to water my plant Kapa’a. Lifting up his leaves, I was startled to find a few mushrooms growing under there!
I noticed these weird bumps all around the pot, and realized they were little mini mushrooms.
I had no idea how fast they’d grow, or if they’d grow at all. I didn’t give it another thought ’til I woke up the next morning…
…and saw they’d turned into these crazy stubs! I was pretty freaked out by the rate they were growing at, but no way could I have predicted that I’d get home that day and see…
…THESE! They were totally bizarre, alien-like, and fascinating. This was some Tim Burton type shit. I’d like to call this the “WTF” phase.
Here’s an aerial view.
Just 45 minutes later, the caps started to change shape.
I left for a few hours, ran back home and saw…
…that they’d all opened up! They were absolutely beautiful, and I was no longer creeped out by them. They were my new little friends (though they’d probably poison the Virus Bots ).
The next morning, I was blown away. They’d all grown into their full formation– exactly like the first ones I found. Within 24 hours, I watched these tiny babies explode into huge shrooms!
By now, I’d gotten super attached to these little guys. Since they gave me the creeps while they were growing up, I named them “The Heebie Jeebies”.
Excited about our blissful future together, I came home that day and was heartbroken to find…
…that they had all died! It was July 29th, the hottest day in Seattle history (103 degrees). Damn heat wave!
It was such an incredible experience, though. I was the only one who saw it all happen, so it was really special. I spent a couple days lamenting the loss of my ‘Jeebs— I didn’t even wanna look at the dead mushrooms. Then, a week later…
…I found these guys had popped up! I missed out on the whole process since I was busy being disappointed about the dead ones.
I’ll just take it as a sign that we shouldn’t focus on the things we’ve lost…
We might overlook our second chances.
Ladies, gentlemen, cyborgs, and machines:
What you are about to witness is highly confidential and has never been shared among the Earthlings.
Some of you may know of the life forms called m.0 and Miss Jade. What you may not know is that these humans are actually decoys who roam the Earth, collecting machines to bring to their cyborg lair and conduct experiments on.
This never-before-seen footage gives you a glimpse into the secret lives of Rekraktor Overlord and the iLL.F.O. Watch as they create mad science at Command Central® and bring it to the stage for the bass-hungry humans.
We will report back as we recover more evidence of this mysterious duo.
Stay tuned.
–The Federal Bureau of iLLness
Nerd Revolt: From Studio to Stage. from Nerd Revolt on Vimeo.
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