For this month’s edition we will skip the snappy description and get right to the meat of things. Door open at 7:30, music begins promptly at 8pm.

Come early and celebrate Jessi’s 30th birthday with wonderful oysters during performances by NY favorites Morgan Packard, Ezekiel Honig and Calmer. Josh Ott is going to be performing with Zeke and Morgan using his custom built ‘Superdraw’ platform. If you haven’t seen ‘Superdraw’ you really need to get out more. It really is ‘future-beautiful’.

Following the relaxing and atmospheric stylings of the early evening’s sonic explorations we have Isomer Transition playing selections from unreleased and upcoming projects from the transelectronic vaults. Following Isomer we have plenty of electronic future music to go around. Jen Lusker, a NYC fixture will be gracing the decks, followed by the infamous Patrick Gallagher truly mashing it up, and finishing the night off, in honor of his friend Jessi’s 30th is the legendary Derek Plaslaiko.

For your visual stimulation Chika will be bringing her unique brand of VJing to the big screen, and Zach will be taking pictures, so there is no way you can say you were there if you weren’t.

All that and enough bass to shake light fixtures from the ceiling. Not even close to kidding, it happened last month.
Bass, that’s right.

Here are the set times.
8:00 Morgan Packard w/Josh Ott
9:00 Ezekiel Honig w/Josh Ott
10:00 Calmer
10:40 Isomer Transition
12:00 Jen Lusker
1:00 Patrick Gallagher
2:00 Derek Plaslaiko

$5 admission all night - to help cover the cost for the sound and the performers. More would be amazing.

Come early and stay late. No need to eat humans, there is plenty of food at Coco66.

All of the Isomer Transition releases revolve around, and build upon a single story. The releases and song titles represent different chapters and scenes in this story. The story chronicles the adventures of Captain Rethan Doepfer and his team of renegade scientists aboard ‘The Mistress’, who are racing to locate and decode a mysterious transmission before it disappears forever. With each successive ‘Isomer Transition’ release (and select ‘Richard J Valeo releases) the story evolves, more information is revealed, and the saga continues.

The story so far…

Shadowlands

Captain Rethan Doepfer is called to begin his journey by a mysterious transmission. The discovery of the transmission takes place on the ISLOO (Independent Scientific Lunar Orbiting Observatory). The transmission is received from a point in space that should not be transmitting anything as nothing shows up at that spot on any scans of the region.
When decoded the transmissions tells of…

A Dark Star where none was previously.
Where Heavy Water can be found on Io.
A Red Giant located in a neighboring galaxy where none should be or could exist based on the current understanding of Physics.

Mission to Mars

Rethan Doepfer and his crew leave the ISLOO and travel to Mars aboard ‘The Mistress’. They are going to Mars to pick up Lara Dunhill, Captain Doepfer’s navigator and long-time companion, and to see what information the Martian Government is willing to share about the transmissions.

Loop Me Through To Control The Mains
The crew needs to hack the ship’s guidance control systems to regain control after a mysterious virus corrupts the navigational systems.

Deep In Space
The Mistress receives an additional transmission, but this time the content is encrypted beyond the ship’s decryption capabilities.

Space Madness
Rethan learns about the origins of the transmissions from Lara and is pushed to the brink of sanity by a mysterious illness.

The Exploration Of Region 13
The crew lands on Mars near Olympus Mons and discovers that there were inhabitants on the planet before them. The evidence is in a cave deep under the mountain, discovered by Lara and is linked the the origins of the transmission.

1971

1971 is the year that Captain Rethan Doepfer’s Great Grandfather first began transmitting encoded messages into space looking for extraterrestrial life, and subsequently set in motion the chain of events that would take Rethan on his journey today.

All of the scenes in 1971 take place on Mars

Close To Me (Dirty Edit)
While showing Rethan the cave and the proof that there was an ancient civilization on Mars, Lara and Rethan find themselves rekindling their long forgotten passionate affair.

Downtime In The Hangar
While Rethan and Lara are away a group of fundamentalist Martians try to sabotage ‘The Mistress’ and prevent the crew from investigating the transmission. They are eventually foiled by Arman, the ship’s head of engineering.

Complex Undertow
A medicinal and spiritual hallucinogenic pharmaceutical native to Mars, (slang: CU pronounced See You) - taken during the festival of the lights and during certain Martian tribal initiation rituals. Lara and Rethan take CU and have a vision quest, and discover Rethan’s Great Grandfather’s transmissions into outer space.

Mastery Of The Gravel (Where Did You Come From)
Upon returning from the vision quest Rethan and Lara fall prey to a plot to break them apart and sabotage the mission yet again. Rethan is drugged and seduced by the allure of an ‘easy life’ (giving up the mission) and Lara’s love for him is put to the ultimate test.

South Side Of The Mountain
Rethan and Lara are re-united, but Lara isn’t quick to forgive him for his weaknesses, even though he was drugged. Rethan proves to be the consummate captain, puts his personal feelings and dramas aside and gets on with their mission to investigate the transmission. All the while thinking about what the vision quest revealed to him and Lara.

Some time has passed and The Mistress and her crew have left Mars and are on their way to Jupiter when they discover that something is wrong with their orbit, bringing us to…

Orbits Decaying

The crew is on a long orbital slingshot around the sun to gain speed and reach Jupiter. Instead of increasing it’s orbit’s arch, something is causing The Mistress’ orbit’s telemetry to shrink rather than expand, causing great alarm for if they don’t get this maneuver right they will burn up in the Sun.

Give Me Your Hand
During a routine dish adjustment outside on the ship’s main communications array Tannoy, the ships communication’s engineer, almost plunges deep into space due to a malfunctioning safety harness. Quickly Rethan saves him by snapping off his own oxygen tank and uses it as a propellant.

Hot Salsa
The food replicators break down and only produce Hot Salsa for two weeks. Strange things start to happen when the salsa all becomes rancid and the crew starts to mass hallucinate. The replicators are fixed, but something is still off with the food. Strangely everything now has the smoky bite of Chipotle and the crew is wondering of it is really safe to eat the food again.

Parametric Pressure
During a water harvesting run it is discovered that the readings for the near-ship asteroids masses are off from what they should be, based on actual grappler arm load readings. Lara runs diagnostic calculations on the parametric phase-shifting control modules and finds that the pressure readings are off by over 30%. It is then discovered that the virus that initially infected the guidance control systems re-calibrated the Parametric Pressure gauges to cause the decaying orbit. Lara re-calibrates the pressure gauges and re-engineers the control system fixing the orbit. By using information from the transmission she is able to re-configure the Ion Drive, creating the most efficient and powerful drive to date.

Landing Near The Center
The Crew, finally able to harvest water from local asteroids, lands a scouting party on one with an irregular orbit to investigate some extremely bizarre readings: carbon, frozen water and amino acids. They gather samples and barely make it off the asteroid before it suddenly veers off course, almost as if it was piloted, and disappears in a trail of water vapor and star dust.

Searching For Clues
Having sling-shot around the sun and able to travel at unheard of speeds, the crew makes it to Jupiter in record time. Now that they are at Jupiter the transmission has stopped and they can no longer triangulate the transmission’s location.

Captain Doepfer and the crew of The Mistress launch a probe in the vicinity of the transmission’s origins and let it collect data while they dock at the Jupiter Orbital Observatory for some much needed R&R, repairs and ship maintenance. That damn food replicator certainly needs some adjustments.

The Hardware Excursions Vol 1

This series are audio documentations of the 2 unique transmissions that damage the probe and are the cause of it’s problems. They take place on a parallel plot line and are told by the artist ‘Richard J Valeo’ on Io Records in April.

The Hardware Excursions Vol 2

While the crew is docked at the Jupiter Orbiting Observatory the probe encounters some transmissions that reconfigure it’s circuits, almost causing it to crash into Io.

On The Verge Of A Breakdown
The probe, armed with Lara’s proprietary toolkits and programs decoded from the initial transmission, the probe battles the mysterious damaging transmission as they attempt to crash the probe. Ultimately the probe succeeds in warding off the electronic attack and repairs the damage done to it’s circuits.

Harvested and Collected
Finally done with it’s mission and armed with the data it was sent to collect, the probe returns to a geo-synchronous orbit along side the Jupiter Orbiting Observatory and awaits retrieval by The Mistress and her crew.

The next chapter in the story is called:

Bright Lights, Big City

to be continued…

Every once and a while something nice happens, and today it took the form of a spot on the RCRDLBL.COM home page. Please click here and both download the tracks and leave a comment about ‘Isomer’. The more downloads and more comments that happen/appear the more likely they (the website people) are to do a full-fledged feature on ‘Isomer’. That seems like it would be a good thing, right? Right.

Here is how all this came about. A few months ago I emailed them letting them ( RCRDLBL.COM ) know about ‘Isomer’ and what he was doing and asked if they would be interested in hosting some of his tracks on their site to give away, helping to promote his current releases. A few days came and went, and as things go, I completely forgot all about it.

Then, about a month later I heard back from them saying they would be interested and instructed me to upload some material to a special place and let them know when it was uploaded. At the time I was very busy preparing for an upcoming gig and wasn’t in ‘Isomer promotion’ mode so I put the email aside, and *ahem*, completely forgot about it.

A few days ago I was going through my inbox and came across the email. Shit! I wondered if it was too late. last night I fixed up my bio/press kit (so hard to say good things about one’s self, but in this game that is how it is played) and I uploaded it to them and shot them over an email. The very next morning (that would be today) I got a response letting me know it was up. Nice.

Today I put together a brief promotional email and sent it out to my list to help promote the feature on their site. We’ll see what happens.

The moral of this story is, if you keep at it, eventually you can cut through the noise, if only for a minute. :)

(The ship was made out of paper, tape, a bottle cap and speaker wire, in 1984)

I am moving towards a more organic approach to machine music. More generative, more glitchy, yet at the same time more human.

New track preview:

I am happy with the simplicity, and happy with the arrangement. It isn’t in-your-face but it certainly is engaging and thought provoking. Leave a comment if you like it.

The folks over at Boomkat had something nice to say about “Orbits Decaying”. Really, no sideways compliments this time. Here are their exact words…

“New from RJ Valeo’s Isomer Transition project, this EP collects a fresh batch of futuristic minimal techno, all of which is imbued with a far more elaborate production sensibility than is normally permitted by genre conventions. 4/4 as tracks like ‘Searching For Clues’ and ‘Hot Salsa’ may be, there’s no shortage of clever sound designs to revel in via some close headphone listening. Great stuff, suitable fo rhome listening scrutiny and deployment on more forward-thinking dancefloors.”