Hiatus - Puppyhammer Flow and Musicality Session. 

The winter has had me a little down lately, so it's back to the grindstone to get reacquainted with flow and my Puppyhammer bae.
Filmed at the Lafayette Regional elementary school gym in Franconia NH (Apologies in advance for the poor contrast with the orange background) This compilation interlaces 6 separate takes at both 60 and 120fps. Each take was a combination of drilling patterns and free flow spinning with an emphasis on musicality and rhythm.
I've been focusing a lot this year (when I actually get my butt to the gym) on using lilting and plane breaks / bends to weave complex rhythmic structures and geometries into my flow to reflect musical phrasing, motif, and rhythmic structure. In poi mode, this usually involves rapid shifts between split time and tog (same) time - I've been finding that split time has a nice way of adding a sense of rhythmic roll that compliments the hi-hat in pop music, while interjecting sudden snaps of tog time through a lilt accentuates the snare. This has also been working pretty well in meteor mode and contact meteor regimes, but I have to work pretty hard to keep the rotation rate matching the beat due to its high inertia - little mistakes tend to take a while to bring back into the pocket. Antilobes/petals in antispin flowers on a 9-square grid have become my weapon of choice for lockstepping with the melody - there's a bit of quartertime / diamond mode stuff at the end showing that process at work.
Footwork has been a long slog because it is almost always subservient to keeping the puppyhammer under control, but it's been falling together more over this last couple of years. As far as musicality goes, the footwork really helps accentuate the bassline...I've always thought of bass as a "gooey" texture in music, so it's pretty natural to use Ba Gua style footwork to make the overall body movement kind of "slerpy".
For more info about learning how to play this prop and to join the puppyhammer / Oxbow meteor object manipulation community, you can join us on Facebook at:
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