Hi friends! I’m overdue for an update, November has been a busy month.

If you’re in the Portland area, Synth Library Portland has two upcoming benefit shows ✨ The first one is on Friday and it made the top picks from the Portland Mercury. I’ll be helping with the vinyl DJ lounge (really just a table next to the bar) where we’re going to be playing something chill in between the live performances.

The next day (Saturday 11/29) I’m doing a livestream set for GSG’s ‘Synthon! Voice Off’ event. I’m on at 9pm PST. When we had this theme two years ago, I did a “late-night radio” noise performance. My work has continued to evolve and it will be fun to see how things turn out.

I started volunteering at Synth Library Portland in October and it’s given me some really neat opportunities to expand on what I’m doing. The first thing I knew I wanted to play around with was the test equipment rack. I think when I showed up on the first day and told the organizers “hey, I could do a video walkthrough on this” they didn’t believe I would go through with it 😆 It took a few hours of practice to get there, but I was able to record a 20min sampler of the kinds of sounds you can create. I’ll be doing more but I think I’m going to wait until we can move into a larger space in the spring so there’s more space to work. The current rack is crammed into a corner right next to the bathroom which is a little awkward.

One of the areas where I knew I wanted to volunteer was the workshops. When I saw we had one scheduled on turntablism I was intrigued. I put my name on the list to volunteer and told the instructor I had no real experience but would help wherever I could. A couple weeks before the event he suggested we do a lesson on beatmatching so I could be in charge of one of the practice stations. As soon as I tried it I knew it’s my kind of thing. I really like the tactile aspects of how you can manipulate the sound.

The workshop went great, we had two full sessions with students at a range of skill levels. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get any practice time in since then and I don’t have my own decks at home yet. So instead I’ve been working on some of the basic skills for DJing using the free version of Serato with an unexpected option for a controller — my SP-404mkII.

If you want to see where this takes me, I created a second Twitch channel for it (the way they decided to handle the DJ agreement sucks but I don’t want to risk getting my main channel banned if I want to play Pink Pony Club once in a while.) @dj_audrey_eee is not the most inspiring handle so if you have suggestions for what my DJ name should be, let me know!

If you made it all the way to the end, send me a note and let me know what you’ve been listening to lately.

Take care 💜 — Audrey