The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Alpha Beats: A is for Alien

Tonight, I got to hear my friend, Sunshine Jones, play his music live for the first time in about a year. As the cofounder of Dubtribe Sound System, he’s responsible for a catalog that goes back nearly 20 years. In the last few years, he’s been performing as a solo artist, playing some of his back catalog and writing some amazing new tracks. His weekly internet radio show, Sunday Soul, is essential listening for anyone who likes house music even a little bit, as far as I’m concerned.

Tonight’s party was at DNA Lounge, my old stomping grounds when Remedy held a weekly here a few years ago. I arrived while Jenö played his set, a blistering acid house set reminiscent of the early 90s. A little before midnight, Sunshine got his stuff all set up and ready to go.

He played a good selection of his back catalog, singing and ranting in his signature style, with a bunch of other fantastic grooves. I heard a couple of his own re-edits, including an amazing new version of Teena Marie’s Lover Girl. The crowd, full of familiar faces from the Imperial Dub weeklies, was loving every second of it.

Doc Martin took over around 2 and threw down a take-no-prisoners set of grooves that kept us all sweaty. His electro and house grooves come from out of left field sometimes, but he locks it down with a confidence that makes everyone hungry for more. I don’t get to see Doc spin very often these days, but every time I do, it’s a real treat.

This party was such a beautiful event—the best shindig I’ve been to in a long time. What a night!

Digeum Mix Session 01V

In celebration of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, I put together a mix of soulful house grooves. It’s a mixture of electro tracks and just good funky house tracks. I hope you like listening to it as much as I did putting it together.

Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 01, Session Victor. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. Running time: 1:18:47.

Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Backing Up Fail

After I left Mighty this morning, I went to my car to change into my dry shirt. Utah Street in San Francisco was empty. 50 feet away, some chick climbed into her Camry, started it up, backed all the way across Utah Street in a slight arc, and put her back bumper through my left fender.

I jumped out of my parked car and said, “Stop. You better give me your insurance information.” She got out, looked at my car, shrugged and started to drive away, “Doesn’t look that serious.”

“What is serious is that I’m going to call you into SFPD with your plate number if you drive off. Then, I’ll get your insurance info from the cop while you sit in jail.”

“But, I didn’t see your car! What were you doing?”

“My keys were on the passenger seat. I was sitting there, parked, and your stupid drunk ass backed into my new car.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Then you’re a shitty driver. Give me your insurance information right now, or I’m calling the cops.”

She relented, copied down her insurance information, and then skedaddled. Now that I’m looking at the slip she gave me I realize that I forgot to write her license plate number down. Way to fail, Apollo. Let’s hope she gave you real numbers, dude.

Incidentally, why do I see BMWs driving around the Silicon Valley without a scratch but my Pontiac Vibe is a target for everyone kicking their doors open? I don’t mess with your Honda minivans and Camry hybrids. Stop slamming your stupid doors into my little station wagon.

Digeum Mix Session 01U

Time to kick off the new year with a new mix. I decided to start off 2009 with a grooving house mix, featuring a bunch of different house grooves — a few electro thumps and a few more vocal house grooves. This was fun to put together. I think it sounds pretty good, despite a few challenging transitions.

Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 01, Session Uniform. Mixed by Apollo Lee in Sunnyvale, California, USA, on Wednesday, January 07, 2009. Running time: 1:10:24.

Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Back on Technorati

After getting delisted from Technorati a while back—due to a XSS attack (I think, nobody informed me)—I managed to get through to a customer service representative at Technorati and my block has been lifted.

Interestingly, Digeum, ApolloLee.com, and Osteocephalic were not affected by the delisting. I wonder if it had anything to do with Panera blocking this site.

Wow. Rank: 968,606. Really? That’s what nine years of blogging have achieved?

Awesome, dude.

(Thanks for the relisting, Technorati. I appreciate it.)

Goals for 2009

I set a couple of New Year’s Resolutions last year, which I didn’t get around to posting here. One of them was to write 52 tracks, which I finished. I slipped on a few others.

So, I’m going to post my goals for 2009 in three categories: personal development, music, and fitness. You ready? Let’s dance.

Personal Development

1. Get my passport stamped.
2. Draft an education plan.
3. Reduce my personal effects by 90%.
4. Build a useless, but awesome, web project.
5. Brush up my Spanish and French.
6. Learn Ruby on Rails and nail down object-oriented PHP.
7. Learn to blog and build an audience.
8. Make more friends and be more social.
9. Save up $10,000.

Music

1. Turn my 26 Stubs into completed tracks.
2. Draft a practice plan for flute, clarinet, piano, and composition.
3. Learn to play the guitar I bought in 1994.
4. Build a more comprehensive sample library.
5. Revive the Digeum podcast and continue posting Digeum Mix Sessions.
6. Commit to writing 12 articles for Osteocephalic.
7. Learn the ins and outs of Live, Reason, Logic, Traktor, ReCycle, and other software in my stable, including getting them to work in collaboration.
8. Build a portable sound booth
9. Learn to mix my tracks down so they sound really great.

Fitness

1. Acquire a CrossFit Level 1 Certification.
2. Buy a barbell and bumper plates.
3. Achieve an 80% or greater completion rate for CrossFit workouts of the day.
4. Lower my body fat percentage to below 10%.
5. Return to the kayak.
6. Build a reliable pullup bar in my garage (so I can do WODs on rainy days or without hauling a kettlebell and dumbbells to the park every time).
7. Move the Personal Bests on pbwiki here.
8. Get strong enough to successfully snatch and clean the 24 kg kettlebell and perform muscle ups.
9. Set new personal bests in the benchmark WODs, specifically (current PRs in brackets):
   • APFT: 300 [257]
   • 2 mi run: 13:30 [14:32]
   • 5 km run: 20:00 [24:17]
   • 10 km run: 50:00 [56:47]
   • Angie – 30:00 [49:20]
   • Annie – 20:00 [13:15 – scaled]
   • Barbara – 45:00 [63:27]
   • Cindy – 15 rounds [10 rounds]
   • Diane, RX – 30:00 [15:29 – scaled]
   • Elizabeth, RX – 30:00 [09:22 – scaled]
   • Fran, RX – 10:00 [12:26 – scaled]
   • Helen – 10:00 [15:30]
   • Mary – 5 rounds
   • Nancy – 15:00 [30:09 – scaled]
   • Michael, RX – 15:00 [25:35]
   • Murph – 50:00 [62:33]
   • Randy, RX – 15:00 [12:44 – scaled]
   • Filthy Fifty – 25:00 [33:12]
   • Fight Gone Bad – 350 pts [237 pts]
   • Evil Dozen – 30:00 [36:30 – scaled]
   • Nasty Girls – 20:00 [28:01 – scaled]

All this stuff should give me plenty of scrambling to do this year. What are your 2009 goals?

Nine Years Already?

On this day in 2000, I started blogging in this space. Nine years of the Oracle of Apollo later, I’m scratching my head and wondering if the time for this site has passed.

I have no idea how to build an audience for any of my blogs, even the ones that are updated continuously with content. When I have periods of updating this site frequently, there’s no significant uptick in readership. Some people I’ve known for years have no idea this site exists, even though it’s printed on my name card.

The most hilarious, relevant, and useful posts here get no readership, but my analytics tells me that a steady stream of robots and spammers continue to visit the ancient posts that are only really of interest to me.

This leaves me the conclusion that I fail at blogging, have no idea how to build an audience, lack the ability to determine what kinds of things I can post here that will attract an audience.

What kinds of things make you click the entry in your RSS reader or make you want to come back? What kinds of things get posted here that you ignore?

Finishing 53 Tracks

At the beginning of the year, I decided that I wanted to write 52 tracks in 2008 and post them all on a new blog I started in March. There were some weeks that I had no output at all, but for most of the year, I carried my Korg padKontrol in my backpack, so I could write tracks on the train. I commute an hour each way in the morning to San Francisco for work and the idle time on the train affords me the occasional opportunity to work on my music.

I noticed toward the end of my marathon of ambient tracks that, if I made it to track 52, there would be 49 tracks in Ambient Improvisations. Well, I might as well throw down the extra one and make that “album” an even 50. So, today, on New Year’s Eve, I churned out three tracks over the course of the day, all three of which I built using my M-Audio KeyStation Pro. That brought my total to 53 for 2008. What do I win?

If you had asked me in January if I’d consider writing over six hours of music at 40 beats per minute, I’d have laughed. I write house music, after all. It’s easy to get locked into a single-minded idea of genre. It’s even easier to doodle around, produce nothing, tweak rough drafts over and over, and obsess over perfection. The exercise of improvising music for seven minutes, mixing it down, and letting it go is cathartic.

I think for 2009, I’m going to make it a point to use my 26 Stubs to craft songs. Buying DJ gear and reviving Digeum with Jay allows me the opportunity to see if whatever those “stubs” become mixes into other music I love. I’m really excited about music again and, if the 50 sleepy ambient tracks did nothing else, I think 2008 won me that excitement.

Digeum Mix Session 01T

Jay Def came over to my grandmother’s house to hang out on December 26, while I was in the area. While we’re both in the same place at the same time, we might as well throw down some beats, right? We shut the door of the family room, so as not to disturb my grandmother’s reading, hooked up my little baby speakers, and started off our tag team set.

We each played three tracks and tagged the other DJ in. Jay found his groove on my VCI-100 pretty easily and we were off to the races. With his special tracks on my little Firewire portable drive and my iTunes playlists, we played for almost two hours. It was a blast. Thanks, Jay!

Digeum Mix Sessions – Volume 01, Session Tango: “Two to Tango: A Treasure Valley Tag Team Session”. Mixed by Apollo Lee and Jay Def in Payette, Idaho, USA, on Friday, December 26, 2008. Running time: 1:52:34.

Go give it a listen and leave a comment with your thoughts.

(This makes the 20th mix session at Digeum since the beginning of September.)

Christmas 2008

Yay, Christmas. I’m still foggy on why it is that the price of gas has dropped by three dollars over the last four months, but my air fare to Boise is more expensive than it was last year. I guess that’s not the most important thing in the world to focus on, but I’m worried about money. We’re all worried about money.

I flew into Boise on Tuesday, rented a car, and had some food with Jay at a burrito place in a strip mall. Afterwards, I had a 65 mile drive through snow and ice to my grandmother’s house. I’m totally not used to driving in snow. I went really slow.

A fun three days followed of hanging out with my family and doing a tag team mix session with Jay. There’s something cathartic about being mostly away from the internet (not completely, thanks to my iPhone). I shoveled Grandma’s driveway twice, visited with my family, and found a new lock for my storage box (without actually getting to open it up–it was snowed shut).

The night I was heading back to California, though, it snowed a foot or so. There’s nothing quite a much fun as driving back to the airport in a rental car with an inch of ice on the freeway.

Now to let my wallet recover.