roomnoise

Here’s a video pitch I did for Web2NewYork about ticketsandmusic.com. Thought it came out pretty good in terms of ’site in a nutshell’.

Tickets & Music building API for ticket information

Calling all architects and those with friends who are, a project I did development for is now live. Its an architectural design competition for proposals to rebuild a stretch of land near Levittown or an area near Huntington Stating off the LIRR. Some really nice prizes and a chance to get involved with shaping the future of suburban landscapes.

The site was developed from the design work and direction from the great 10x. The whole thing came together quite nicely.

Finally have a site up for my new music project, Quiet Lights. The music has a nice subtle tension to it. Everyone in the group has so much to add and I’m pretty excited about the things we’ve done so far.

Also, Ric’s documentary which QL did the music for (and featuring some music from my previous project, Rival Songs) will be completed soon. We also have a promo in a CBS Criminal Minds spot. They used the music from our track Throat Cut (stream it here). You can check it out here:

Criminal Minds Promo - Featuring Music from Quiet Lights from Quiet Lights on Vimeo.

I’m pretty stoked to finally roll out the soft-(re)launch of Tickets and Music. I wanted to create a way for people to get access to the best deals for a given show from any location. I don’t think searching the 3rd party brokers is always the best way to go, sometimes they have the only deal and sometimes they don’t.

My new group/project did the music for this (we don’t have a name yet, thinking about Lake Fire). Shot by my talented friend Ric Serena The work the artist featured here is just incredible. Really shows how far you can stretch the art of linoleum cuts.

Artisan Documentary Teaser - Dave Lefner from Ric Serena on Vimeo.

Its nice when 3 separate art forms can come together beautifully into one.

When I first moved to NY I wanted to take a break from playing in bands and maybe concentrate on other things. Of course after about 2 weeks of being up here I was going crazy and wanted to start making music right away.

So I fell in with this band Argentine, it was great. They had shows booked and next thing I knew I was playing all over the city and was contributing to the next album. I couldn’t believe my fortune at finding a group of people so fast that thought of music the same way I did, something I never had in Orlando.

Well, the project fizzled in the middle of recording the next album. However, I’m still friends with and making music with many of those same people today. Here’s one of my favorite tracks from the sessions that will probably never see the light of day. Its got this great lightness to it interlaced with longing. I play the organ, lead guitar, and do the backup vocals. Its one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever played on: 2 In the Afternoon.

Argentine - 2 In the Afternoon

The older I get the more I look for simplicity. That’s true for music, cooking, code writing, designing, you name it. Spaces and blanks seems to resonate and calm me. I’m forever looking at my apartment and wanting to throw everything out or put everything into a basement and pull out things one by one based on if I deem them worthy to remain part of my life.

So I love it when I see/hear/taste things that share the same aesthetic. And from time to time I’ll be posting them here. The current thing is this song ‘Three’ by Gregor Samsa. Its a simple keyboard line with a vibraphone hit and a super-hushed vocal. And its amazing. Like a perfect DOC margherita pizza or a simply-made bourbon cocktail.

Three - Gregor Samsa

Rival Songs recently released a video for Q.E.R.R. 2.7 off our new EP. Its a creepy vibe, but I think has some warmth to it too.

We should have the EP on iTunes/Rhapsody/Amazon soon.

I like to do the bulk of my site stuff in rails.  I’ve also always wanted to setup a wordpress blog.  Oh, and I’m a total convert to mod_rails.

So it only took a minimal amount of fretting on how to merge php and rails together in my apache server when I discovered that the mod_rails dev version has exactly what I needed…PassengerEnabled!

See this little config setting completely bypasses the serving of your site by mod_rails so your PHP code is free to get served by, um, mod_php5.  Its brilliant and all you have to do is this:

git://github.com/FooBarWidget/passenger.git
./bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

then in your http.conf file add:

<Location /blog>
PassengerEnabled off
</Location>

and that’s it! it completely bypasses the wordpress folder (assuming you put it in public/blog) and leaves you free to figure out your next hurdle.

It was so brilliantly drop-in simple…the way I love things to be.