Sonic Canvas 01

Digital crate-digging + AI art featuring music by Kenny Dope, Alok, and Ella Eyre (featuring Never Dull), Matvei, Brando, Nathan C, and Très Mortimer

Welcome to Sonic Canvas, our presentation of electronic music and mind-bending AI art.

Follow Steel Orca on Twitch

I've been revamping my entire site (and life) over the last three weeks when I've been on vacation from work.

This website and the newsletter's design have undergone a drastic update (you're seeing the first issue now). I am trying to choose a design that's easy to reproduce bi-weekly and enjoyable simultaneously.

In no particular order, here are some of the updates I've made:

This is not Sonic Canvas 001 for people who have been reading this newsletter/blog up to this point, but because I recorded this stream this time, I'm resetting the issue counter. The next target is 020.
I created a Mixcloud account and will upload each stream mix there every time I do one worth uploading to build my DJ profile.
I recorded and uploaded a video of my stream, which is available to members of this site upon signing up.
The general approach for the art each week is to take the album art from the record I pick, feed that through Midjourney, and put the most exciting result beside the original album art. This is easy to reproduce, and I like this approach. I'm generally unclear on its ethical ramifications.
I updated my Twitch account to make it more attractive and professional.
I added the Now Playing extension to my streams so people can easily see what song is currently playing on each stream. To me, this is a significant improvement in the general viewer experience.

My general approach (after having thought about it the last week) is that I'm going to do an official mix every two weeks (which seems reasonable) and a newsletter/blog post associated with/therein. That is much more reasonable than every week (given the editing and research involved) and allows me to milk the individual posts longer for social media clout. Overall, I'm much more comfortable with this plan and how it fits into my life.

That said, if you haven't watched any of my live streams yet, I've just got to say that I'm pleased with the artistic result of what I've put together for them. I never thought it would be so easy to articulate my vision for a DJ/AI art stream in my basement with 320 kbps audio and 4K video. The future is now. The stream (and the mix) is not perfect by any means, but as someone wiser than me said, "Done is better than perfect." Ideally, I will iterate this and only improve from here.

Anyway, it's almost the end of my vacation, but I wanted to say that I'm thinking of you, and I hope you're doing well.

Enjoy the mix.✌

Justin