Dan Zen Light Shows

Compilation – click to enlarge

Dan Zen has been interested in Light Shows for most of his life.  He grew up watching Hilarious House of Frightenstrein – with Igor dancing in the oil drop psychedelics.  Zen also grew up in the sixties and seventies with hippie parents and a love of patterns and shaping environments.

For his first band, The Chessmen (1989), he created light shows for pretty well every show.  This was pre-digital projector times so were made from old slide projectors with their middles cut out to allow for custom spinning wheels or revolving tracks run by little motors.  Many involved op art or overlapping lines and circles.

Oil Drops were a favourite.  Zen would put several sandwich bags with different color oil and water into the slide area and squish them with a cam lever run by motors.  He also created overlapping circular plates with mixing fins and trays trays for squelching as seen in many of Thee Gnostics shows (1994).  Gorgolon Tape Release is pictured below.

With the dawn of digital projectors all sorts of light shows were possible.  For Zen’s Final Gnostic appearance (aside from reunions) a compilation of old home videos including video feedback were projected.  See if you can get through all of this song – it is worth it – there are some wicked sounds and visuals as the Hari Krishna come on to stage.

Thee Gnostics videos are filled with light shows and they can all be seen on the Flash site http://theegnostics.com.  More videos are planned for the future.  Many of the videos are on YouTube as well.

When Zen left Thee Gnostics (1996), he still did light shows for them as well as light shows for other bands such as the Ride Theory (Young Rival), Christmas and Simply Saucer.

Watch the video – Ride Theory

Some Simply Saucer pics – look at pics to right in photostream to see more patterns used for lightshow – from the Dan Zen tool, Tilator.  These flowed with the beat.

As Zen became able to animate to sound frequency in Flash he created light shows that moved to the beat of the music.  Examples were the Christmas show in Toronto (try it) and The Magic Shadows show in Hamilton (try it).

In particular, the demand for original Christmas vinyl records is extremely high, with one album recently having been sold on Ebay for $2000! For this show Bryden was backed up by Toronto’s Saffron Sect and the performance was enhanced with a wickedly cool light show created by Dan Zen.

For Thee Gnostics Reunion show Zen created a water based light show that moved when people pulled on a series of Cyber Medallions hooked onto the light show – this warbled projections of the inside of keyboards.  This was used as a wall projection as there was a projectionist for the night.  See the making of video.  The cyber medallions were given away to the audience after the show.

The latest light show for the Hawkwind Tribute show at This Ain’t Hollywood in Hamilton used Opartica Tunnel controlled live by Dan Zen – click the link and watch as there are a number of snips from songs in the one video.  There were also lights by General Chaos at the sides.  See Pics.

Did the lights for the Bob Bryden Yorkville Days CD Release:

And Hollow Earth

Here are some videos from the 2014 Simply Saucer show at the Casbah for the Baby Nova Tour – animated factories at controllable speeds and background supernovas.

SAFFRON SECT

All the best and try adding a light show to your event!

-13-

Dan Zen and Thee Gnostics Dance – Alien Juice

Click above to see Video.  Thee Gnostics at http://theeGnostics.com are a Space Rock band from Hamilton.  Dan Zen is the one with the big round glasses – Gaven in robe and Russ in Fried Potato Gang shirt.  Missing are Matt and Thomas although they are playing on the song.

Fun to get the gang dancing – quite the eclectic styles.  Please visit Thee Gnostic playlist on YouTube and leave a comment or two!

Thee Gnostics Psychedelic Space Rock Band Discovered in the Tarken Files

Thee Gnostics were a psychedelic space rock garage band from Hamilton, Canada in the 90s.  Archives of video, sound, pictures along with descriptions can be found in The Tarken Files.

The Tarken Files shows any Web video, sound, pictures and text.  Thumbnails for the files are presented with rollover scrolling text beneath.  Click on any thumbnail or use the arrows to browse more files.  A viewer will appear with either video, audio, picture or text navigation.

The video navigation has a full screen button at the right.  Hit escape or the reduce screen button to exit.  The sound navigation has a reduce button at right that closes the pannel but keeps the sound playing in the background while you browse pictures or text.  If sound is playing in the background, you will see a sound icon on the right side of the video, picture and text viewers so that you can adjust the volume or go back to the sound.

There are tabs at the right of the viewer that open the ratings, comments and information panels. To rate, roll over the rating at the bottom and submit.  The comments and information panels (and the text viewer) have a scroller if necessary that lets you scroll through the text.  You can also single click through the pages or double click to go to the top or bottom page.  The information panel shows you the views as well.

The Tarken Files have been excavated from a Galaxy Long Long Ago yet seem to also span the future.

Many a Love Guru Keep in Shape with Psychedelic Dancing as Exercise

Here is a post from ZenVlog that summarizes various interests in guroovity. Enjoy!

Click to View Vlog
or see: Part 1 | Part 2

The movie The Love Guru is coming out soon – looking forward to it!

All gurus of love psychedelic dance as one of their forms of exercise.

Dan Zen dances to The Garden – a social environmental Indian / Arabian / Persian sounding a Capella yodeling psychedelic song! Please see the video on YouTube. Or download the song from SoundClick. Or visit the Dan Zen page on facebook.

Dan Zen wears his San Francisco Groovy Guru robe. The one he wore for the International Groovy Day poster. Should we choose a day for that? Or should it just be any day? Oh… also check out the Love Mash – the robe shows up there too and it would be cool if some more people made Zen Mixes and maybe someone will make us a love mash!

Dan Zen also “starred” in a movie called the Guru Monster Movie. Some of that can be seen pictorially on Thee Gnostics mySpace page – more to come as TheeGnostics.com site happens.

In 1996, Dan Zen traveled to San Francisco and wore a guru robe – quite a beautiful traditional green robe with yellow embroidery. He was at the Macromedia Conference where Shockwave was unveiled. A flower lei held his festival pass. An Indian guard, after much deliberation, came up smiling and said, “You know… in my country… the women wear those robes”.

Get dancing people! Loosen up – no steps to follow – you can’t go wrong and it feels great – puts you in touch with your body and nobody has to know! Unless… you start vlogging it with Zen Mix!

Fritz Wolfgang Sigismund Fassbender Song with Missing Black Sock Wig

Dan Zen wearing a wig of unmatched socks fondly plays Peter Sellers playing Dr. Fritz Wolfgang Sigismund Fassbender in What’s New Pussycat 1965. Sellers wears a long black wig and looks really groovy. He’s a bit of a mess personality wise.

See the video

The song deals with wanting to be hypnotized into being Fassbender – the song was written at the tail end of the Chessmen times part way into the psychedelic times of the Chessmen – still to be recorded and on the way to the Swinging Gurus and the space band, Thee Gnostics – soon to come out with some videos…

Grab the MP3

The song was made from all voices – I ended leaving the backing guitar in for a bit of filler. But all else is voices with minimal effects aside from some delay and reverb. I have been looking forward to doing more vocal sound recordings. I have started in on some experimental works to follow some of the experimental vocal works during Gnostics and side projects.

Mismatch Socks 1
Mismatch Socks 2 from Inventor Blog

-08-

Hip Cats Social Networking Site Makes Top Google Spot 7 Years Later…

Finally made the top Google page for Hip Cat and Hip Cats. I spent years fuming over being ousted by the likes of Cat Hip Displasia Injuries ;-). Try out the link and please click on Hip Cats!

Google Hip Cat Search Results

Hip Cats was and is a social networking site that was started in 2000. It allowed you to create a persona, make a friends list of people you wanted to hang out with, rate other hip cats, date them, see their favorite music, movies, and books – all connected to Amazon affiliate. You could message other hip cats and view them in different Hip Cat genres like beatnik psychedelia, goth, urban, surf and their words would get translated – good would become groovy, etc. There is a buzz section where users can post reviews, events and creative writing as well as custom moods to view Hip Cats through.

It was a very early dynamic html (DHTML) site that featured updates to certain parts of the page without loading the hole page – which is what AJAX is used for and all this Web 2.0. It was cross platform and still works today which is pretty amazing considering it is a thousand lines of JavaScript, and another five thousand lines of Perl.

The site is self modifying where hip cats that are rated poorly drop off the scene – their data is mailed to the creator.

In the first few months, thousands of Hip Cats were created, top ten Hip Cats messages were sent out to people, and friendships were made. I tried to get other companies or groups to take Hip Cat scenes. There is a SHIFT magazine scene but it went out of business. There is a Beatnik Museum scene but I do not think they added the link. I almost got Austin Powers to take it but it turned out that they thought I wanted to pay for advertising. So it was all very frustrating not to be able to get people to take a free scene and populate it with their fans. It had so much potential.

Light Show for Christmas Psychedelic Band

I have been working on a tool in Flash to put shapes that move to music on top of pictures and apply blend modes and filters – I hope to launch it in the Spring.

One of the filters that I am experimenting with is the displacement filter. This light show comes from my experimentations and was used as a light show for the psychedelic band, Christmas / Reign Ghost from the 70’s and late 60’s at Sneaky Dees this weekend. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS at the bottom of the show to see different pictures:

http://www.danzen.com/lightshow/

My friend Gaven Dianda, who was in thee Gnostics and a few other bands with me is in a band called Saffron Sect and they played backup to Bob Bryden for the show. He played some really nice guitar and the crowd loved it.

Here is a link to a YouTube video of the show. The sound was great but the sound in the recording is distorted. I was manning the show so I could not take much video and it is just with my little camera.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNUxCHoT5Ok

It was a cool show!