fire away and ask! Also, if you would like me to make another instructional video on some aspect of using the Digitech Jamman Stereo, please request it here. I am at your service

Millionen Legionen – von die Fantastische Vier

Thomas D – Millionen Legionen – MyVideo

Ich werde die Tests besteh’n
die mir das Leben stellt
weitergeh’n suchend nach dem
was mich am Leben hält

Bin damit nicht allein
und werd`es nie mehr sein
weil mich zum erstem Mal
seit langer Zeit
Verbundenheit befreit
bin ich soweit

Fließe in den Äther
in den Kreis ohne Verräter
früher Schüler streck’ ich mehr
und mehr meine Fühler
nach dir aus

Komm hierher, komm hierher
Herzlich willkommen zuhaus’

Ich bin für dich da,
nein ich bin wegen dir hier
und für uns beide ist klar
ham’ wir ein Ziel im Visier,
dann setz’ ich alles auf Dich
mein’ Schweiß, mein Blut,
meine Tränen, meinen Mut -
bis hin zu Trauer und Wut

Ich werde dir mein Leben geben,
weil’s nicht anders geht
forder’ Dich heraus
mein Einsatz steht

Und Du findest in mir
mit was ich mich verbunden hab’
einen Schatz den ich mein
Leben lang gefunden hab’

Mit jedem Satz bitt’ ich
benütz mich, stütz Dich auf mich
mit dem Wissen aller Weisen dieser Welt
beschütz ich dich

Wo ich bin steh’n sie
und wo ich geh’ geh’n sie
ich hab sie hergebeten
doch die wenigsten seh’n sie

Wir werden erwachen
unter falschen Propheten
um als Kinder dieser Erde
unser Erbe anzutreten

Ich rufe alle Superhelden,
alle großen Meister, alle Highlander,
alle Krieger, alle guten Geister,
alle Superfreaks und Auserwählten
zu mir ins Hier – ich hab millionen
Legionen hinter mir

In den Wogen der Welt
wählten wir die wildesten Wellen
bis hin zu innersten Quellen
erlebten Lebensstromschnellen
machten uns bereit
wurden Weltenreiter über die Zeit,
blieben Wächter der Wahrheit,
Surfer des Sandwurms

Find more similar lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.com/aUj
Wir zwei war`n die Augen des Sturms
wurden Herrscher der Schwingung
und das als Nichtschwimmer
denn wir hatten es
und halten es noch immer

Und auch du Baby
warst schon immer mein Kind
wir waren Liebende
die ab und zu vor Liebe blind
umeinander trieben
waren zu verschieden
als das es hätte jemals
langweilig werden können

War`n zwei echt gute Spinner
absolute Beginner
wir hatten es
und halten es noch immer
streiften alle Ketten ab
die sonst die Leichtigkeit besiegen
konnten fliegen – ohne Flügel fliegen

Und heute rufst Du alle Superhelden,
alle großen Meister, alle Highlander,
alle Krieger, alle guten Geister,
alle Superfreaks und Auserwählten
und mich ins Hier Du hast millionen
Legionen hinter dir

Es war die Nacht der Vampire
in der Stadt der wilden Tiere
sie ziehen mich zu sich
wenn ich das Gleichgewicht verliere

Geh’ ich unter und verschmelz’
mit dieser Masse von Mutanten
seelenloser Wanderer
und deren Artverwandten

Und ich ringe zum Himmel
daß die Stimmung hier umschwingt
heb`die Hände zu Gott oder wer
immer da rumhängt

Herrscher über mein Leben
dieser Thron gehört mir
denn ich wohn`und regier` hier

Und dann erheb ich meine Feder
zum Schutz gegen den Schmerz
der vom Schlachtfeld der Liebe
zu mir rüber dringt

Obwohl es scheint als ob
hier jeder trübe Lieder singt
wasche ich mich rein
und betrete neues Land

Dieser Junge steht am Rand,
mit Nichts in der Hand
ohne Angst in den Augen
mit dem Rücken zu Wand

Und dann ruft er alle Superhelden,
alle großen Meister, alle Highlander,
alle Krieger, alle guten Geister,
alle Superfreaks und Auserwählten
und er ruft mich und hat millionen
Legionen hinter sich

#N30 7am. Occupy marchers meet at Liverpool Station, London, and spread out a banner to the sound of a drum band escort. This same banner would see a lot of action during the course of the day.

#N30 the drum band escort lead us along the streets of London where we visited the other picket lines where workers were on strike against public sector cuts.

#N30 Heavy police presence for the Occupy morning march

If you don't want to see your pension being cut, look away now.

Occupy London morning march heads along the streets of London towards the picket lines of other protest groups against public sector cuts.

The Occupy camp at St Pauls, where the structures for the banners were made.

The banners, completed. I was honoured to be among the many lending a hand to build them, and to be among those carrying them. Unweildy things, they are, but damn effective! Make your own at www.demoteck.org

George, a former public sector worker whose pension has been cut - again.

Occupy march grows are we head toward the merging point to meet other protesting groups from the public sector.

The polices subtle way of saying they didn't want us going down that street.

Occupy join with protestors from the public sector

thousands take to the streets of london to protest public sector and pension cuts.

Lots of mums brought their kids on the marches. One told me “sadly, she will probably have to do this for the next 20 years, so i figured now was a good time to learn how its done“

More of the protesters. I wish, at this point, I had bought a camera instead of my phone, as I couldnt get a good shot of the thousands here!

Occupy protesters, shortly before the picadilly action, which I have no shots of as I had gone for food. Cursing myself cos I wish I had gone in with them.

Post Preston House action, Police move in on occupiers who were simply returning from the march and not involved with the action.

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So when you know good people in the visual arts world, it makes sense to collaborate! Being in the fortunate position of knowing some fantastic film makers and visual artists, I had the opportunity this year to work with the very talented Shaun Garea. This is a man who single handedly runs a production company (Estrata), works with musicians on Mike Patton & Billy Goulds “Koolarrow Records” and produces films, documentaries, and, as it happens, comics!

And because words really ARE inadequite for describing the amazing job Shaun and his crew did on the video for “The Arsonist”, I shall stop typing and let you check out his work for yourself!!

The Arsonist – a short film by Shaun Garea, music by Jordan Reyne

“The Arsonist” was filmed by Shaun Garea – http://www.shaungarea.com – on location in Christchurch, New Zealand. Music by Jordan Reyne, actors, Keri Wheeler (the scientist) and Charles Grubb (as the adventurer). Dedicated to the people of Christchurch.

And now the comics – which give a background to the characters in the video:

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Slavoj Zizek addresses the crowd gathered at Liberty Square – October 9th 2011

… 2008 financial crash – more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of use here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinately the way they are. We are not dreamers, we are awaking from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself.

We all know the classic scenes form cartoons – the cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath it. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. this is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on wall st, “hey, look down”.

In April 2011 the chineze government prohibited, on TV, in films and in novels, all stories that contained alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. If people still dream about alternatives, you have to prohibit the dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition, because the ruling system has even supressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, an asteroid destroying all life and so on, but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times:

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in SIberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors so he told his freinds “lets establish a code- If a letter you get form me is written in blue ink, it is true, what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false”. After a month his freinds got a first letter. It says, in this letter “Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, the movie theatres show good films from the west, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink”.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are mising is red ink – the language to articulate our non-freedom. The was we are taught to speak about freedom, war and terror and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here – you are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here, but remember carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days – you know, like “oh we were young, it was beautiful” – remember what our basic message is – we are allowed to think about alternatives, the tabu is broken, we do not live in the best possible way. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we dont want, but what do we want. What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember – the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of the false freinds who are already working to dilute this process in the same way you get coffee without caffine, beer without alcohol, icecream without fat. They will try this into a harmless moral process – a decafinated process. But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans, or to buy a starbucks cappucino where one percent goes to the worlds starving children, is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and tourture, after marriaga agencies are outsourcing even our lovelife, daily, we can see that for a long time, we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

-

We are not communists. If communism means the system that collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism that is even more dynamic than your american capitalism, but doesnt need democracy, which means, when you criticize capitalms, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy between democracy and capitalism is over.

The change is posible. How? What do we consider today posible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You ca travel to the moon, you can become immortal by bilogenetics, you can have sex with animals, or whatever – but look at the feilds of society and economy, therem almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich – they tell you its impossible, we will lose competitivity. You want more money for health care? They tell you “impossible, this means totalitarian state”. Is something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we have to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living, we want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists, is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature, the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property, the commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight. Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. they are telling you we are non americans here, but the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really american have to be reminded of something. What is christianity? It is the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? Its an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now, and down there on wallstreet, there are beggars who are workshiping blasphemous idols, so all we need is patience.

The only thing I am afraid of is that we will, at some day we will just go home, then we will meet once a year, drinking beer and nostaligically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case. We will go on – you know that people often desire something, but do not really want it. Dont be afraid to really want what you desire. Thankyou very much.

More information at:
www.occupywallstreet.org

So, in the interim between me getting a move along, and you guys wanting to get the hell online and do some shows, I thought I’d post about the one I recommended a lot of you as the simplest place to start – Stageit.

Compared to the VR world of Second Life, and the hybrid platform Streamjam, and even some of the other broadcast channel setups, Stageit is by far the simplest to use. Second Life might have the most established economy and advertising infrastructure, but it sure can be a pain in the proverbial if you haven’t done this kind of thing before. Stageit, as it happes, is also quite lucrative. Refreshingly, compared to the other broadcast channels, it doesn’t bombard your viewers with adverts for laxatives in the middle of your most poignant love song (or hard out shred-solo).

The only tricky part about playing in stageit at all is sorting out “stage one” of the signal chain – ie getting your sound into your computer. A lot of you will have done this without realising, as it is a similar setup to what you use for home recording, so if you are set up for that, chances are you can almost plug and play If not, or you want to make sure, head over to “Part 1 – Gear” The two key ingredients are an audio interface and (possibly) a mixing desk, so often, you will already have this stuff lying around.

Once you have that side sorted out, you will also need a webcam. The best kind to get are ones WITHOUT an inbuilt microphone as these cause embarassment with audio sources. If yours does have a mic though, its not the end of the world, you just have to be wary of selecting the right audio source when it comes time to play!

Head over to www.stageit.com where you should see something like the image above. In the top rigth hand corner there is a grey box that says “log in” and “sign up”. Click on “sign up”. Its actually a pretty simple and transparent process. You can set up an image and a profile blurb and so on. Setting up an actual show is the only slightly tricky part – its on the blue bar near the top, two accross from the “stageit” logo and says “create a show”.

You will be asked to pick a time and date. Make sure you have selected your own timezone, and set your show up to be at least a week into the future so you can promote it. You can set the number of tickets to anything you like too. Be aware that Stageit limits its show times to 30 minutes, plus a 20 minute encore, but it will show how much time you have left for the lengh of the broadcast so dont panic about being cut off.

Having set up your show, you should ge advertising. Depending on what territories your listeners are from, you might want to do time conversions for different territories. I have a lot of listeners from Second life, so I use SLT, as well as in the states, UK, Germany and New Zealand – so yes, it can be a headache. The best tool I have found for timezone conversions is “world time buddy” which looks like this:

and can be found here.

Before you do your show, you should have a soundcheck to make sure everything is working. You can do this without being on air. Just log into Stageit, click on “my shows” (in the blue bar area ner the top of the page) and then on “upcoming performances” (in tiny green writing at the top of an almost blank page). You will then see a green button around half way down the screen and on the left that says “go to stage”. Click on that.

You will see a grey column to the left appear, and a chat area to the right. The grey area will have a white box in it asking you to allow an application to control your camera. Click on “allow”. You should then see yourself on screen.

Below the screen is a set of tabs for controlling audio and video quality, and source. Click on the audio tab and check that the sound source is set to your soundcard. You can also use a scrollbar to set the quality of the sound. If you have an insanely low bandwidth you may want to take it down a notch. I never do and have never had issues with lag or stuttering. You can do the same in the video tab aswell – setting the video quality as high or low as you like. Seeing as your shows are about music, if you are on a low bandwidth connection, turning down the image quality is the better option. In all honesty though, I never have listeners reporting any problems when I have both audio and video set to max.

When you are ready to start playing, hit the “go live” button to the right of the audio and video control area. Keep an eye on the chat too, as anyone tying in there, you should respond to and the audience are what makes it fun to be there. If they tip you, it will show up in chat too, and you should make sure you have any links you want to post into chat (for places people can order your albums for example) are on your clipboard for easy pasting into chat. You can also set up links to merch and music in your channel page, but I find the chat is an effective suppliment, as it is in real time.

Enjoy!

I was playing a show at the Brunswick, which likes to play with boundaries so much that it is in Hove and Brighton both at once. I had trouble finding it, but onyl because I tried following people with guitars and found out that that was 50% of the populace. After the show, in the windowless gig room, we got chatting. People are chatty in England. I like it.

It turned out Ben was a very talented visual artist with a style that combines all the best elements of storytelling, humour and horror. For those of you who don’t know, I have a thing for the visual arts, and visual artists too we talked about doing something collaborative, in that way one does over a cider, where one is never entirely sure if things will pan out, but hopes it will. We parted ways after scrawling website addresses and emails on soggy beer mats.

When the upcoming album, “Children of a Factory Nation” had the release delayed to co-incide with tour dates later in teh year, it seemed the perfect opportunity to hunt out some unusual and interesting multi-artform ways of presenting the stories within it. It’s times like that where I am very thankful to know as many talented filmmakers, authors and artists as I do. Added to the people we already had plans with – the globe-trotting, groundbreaking, Eloise Coveny who was working on an animation video for Johnny’s tale, and Anarchy Books’ chainsaw weilding mastermind, Andy Remic, who was organising a writing competition – Ben’s artwork seemed like the perfect fit. A few emails and rough sketches later, I was very excited to see what would come next.

So, without further waffle, Ben’s work is presented below. What I will add is that working with such wonderful people as those named above makes me proud to be a creative type, and able to hold my head up at least half high when snarly tax-office types accuse me of engaging in terrible folly for even imagining that the arts is a valid persuit. In the name of creativity being a very valid persuit indeed, here are the picures, as promised.

Lastly, if you’d like to have a copy of your own, cos of technical hitches, the comic has become one of those special things you can only get at gigs – unless you order one of the 15 copies my partner and I printed at home and cut ourselves in our dimly lit flat on a rainy afternoon. Our eyesight has since deteriorated too much to do any more by hand, but the images, in full, will also be part of the magazine that comes out after the album release with all the related projects presented, and will be released digitally, with the track itself, closer to the albums release.
Until then, enjoy, and thanks for stopping by to read.

October
15th: York – house concerts
21st: Llandudno -Cottage Loaf
22nd: Chester – Hangman
31st: London – 93 Feet East (Supporting John Watts)

November
3rd: Guildford ­- Backline
4th: Brunswick – Hove
10th: Sowerby Bridge – Puzzle hall
11th: Liverpool ­ – Mello Mello
12th: Ewloe – Crown & Liver
13th: Norwich ­- The Bicycle Shop
24th: Bolton – Railway
25th: Llandudno – Cross Keys

The Digitech Jamman Stereo is a loop machine. A wondrous device I have worked with for almost two years now. It allows you to sample yourself as you play, and plays those samples back in a continuous loop. What it means is, you can record a guitar riff, or a vocal phrase, and have it replay indefinately, whilst you play over the top of it. Unlike most of the competitors out there, the Digitech Jamman Stereo allows you to record both vocals AND guitar, albiet on the same channel. This blows the scope for making full, harmony rich performances as a soloist wide open.

With that in mind, I’ve made a video on how to use them for those of you who are looking into buying one, and the few of you that are worried that it’s all very complicated. This vid should show you the opposite – it’s actually really simple. I am a clutz at the best of times, and this thing is simple enough for me not to get wrong too often

There will be another two videos coming up in the future about the Digitech Jamman Stereo with some tricks for advanced users, and a couple of secrets about how to synch them up if you are using more than one (which is one of the ways to separate the vocal and guitar parts). For now though, enjoy messing around with your loop machine! They are an inspiring gadget and make a lot of very creative things possible.

And yell if you have any questions I will answer to the best of my ability!

jordan

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