Dave's Little Bit On the Side: February 2008
23-Feb-08: Downloads
I broke my download virginity yesterday. First time for everything, I suppose. :)
Downloading isn't new. I've d/l's loads of albums in past but, thus far, they've all been free and/or public domain releases. However, this was the first time that I'd ever paid for an album. I stumped up the required monies via PayPal and received a download link a couple of minutes later. So far, so good. After that, I clicked on the link and, 30 minutes later, the album was sitting on my desktop, ready to import into iTunes. It played just fine, as I knew it would.
But this was a curiously hollow purchase.
There was no magic, no buzz, no elation. In truth, it all felt rather cold, rather sterile.
I'm of that age when I can remember the instant thrill and sudden rush of discovering a new album by my favourite bands of the day, Ultravox, Kraftwerk or Tubeway Army. Such a discovery was a real event back then - I was only 16 or 17 at the time - and recordings were few and far between. Releases came about one a year, maybe once every two years if you were lucky, and a new album really was an occasion to be remembered, savoured and enjoyed.
There was a ritual that went with every purchase.
Remember, you were buying a vinyl record, a 12" lump of plastic, which was a long, long way from the prestine fidelity that we take for granted today. There was a skill in picking the right disc off the shelf - you always chose a disc from mid-way down the pile. You never picked the one at the front because every Tom, Dickless and Hairy had probably pawed it with their filthy, grubby unwashed hands. This wasn't acceptable. A purchase had to be pure and sweet and virginal, untouched by human hand. Equally, you never picked a copy from the bottom of the pile because the weight of all that vinyl pressing down on the record at the back of the shelf could easily warp a disc and a warped disc could sound truly dreadful indeed. Hence, you always chose one from near the front, though still far enough from dirty hands, and far enough from the back to avoid being bent.
The next step in the purchase was the most difficult, certainly more spiritually demanding that admitting to your friends or your family that you were listening to uncool music. You had to brave the tired and disapproving faces of those self-appointed Guardians of Cool, the counter staff at HMV Newcastle. They were the strongest test, a real measure of your courage. If your desired purchase wasn't in their book of right-on stuff then you would inevitably feel their considerable displeasure in the form of a withering glance, a gentle guffaw or a snort of contempt.
Once past these Cultural Stalinists, you would inevitably emerge into a glorious afternoon filled with delicate summer sunshine with your equally delicate purchase under your arm and then, at every step, seek to protect it's fragile grooves from would-be assailants carrying shopping bags, shopping trollies and briefcases that were a walking, self-propelled minefield of sharp edges. Contact with any one of these objects could wreck your virgin disc and you would be destined to spend eternity listening to click... spend eternity listening to click ... spend eternity listening to click ... spend eternity listening to click See what I mean? Vinyl was that fragile.
The next step in the process was to get the afore-mentioned disc past your parents. "Oh. No. Not more plinky-plink music..." my mother would whisper to herself. "If it's as bad as the last one then I'll turn it into a flower pot next time he's out." said my brother because, back then, if you had the necessary skill, a gas cooker and plenty of patience, you could turn a 12" LP into a flower pot with comparative ease.
In those days, a record would go onto continuous rotation until either I wore out the needle on the player or the groove in the record itself. Hour after hour was spent looking at the cover art, usually an enormously detailed 30cm x 30cm image covering both sides of the sleeve and, if you were extra lucky, there were sleeve notes too or, better still, a gate fold disc.
If you were a Numanoid, you were in for an extra challenge because every Gary Numan release inevitably featured the man himself on the front in his latest typically unfashionable, hopelessly misjudged incarnation. I mean, FFS, white leather and blue hair... WTF was he thinking? More often than not, Numan would time the release of his new disc to coincide with the current tour and that gave you very little time to fish around in your mother's make-up box for some iffy blue eyeliner or to leg it down to Kard Bar in Newcastle for a matching red leather jacket or natty black jump suit.
And then there was the music itself. Back then, there was much less music around than there is today.Music is ubiquitous these days. It's everywhere. In extra high, crystal clear, 24-bit Dolby Compressed High Fidelity.
Maybe it was my age, maybe I was just being naive but it was rare to find yourself utterly disappointed with a disc. Maybe the music was just better.
Back to today. Back to the download.
What do I get for my hard-earned cash? 10 tracks and a 96dpi graphic measuring little more than 2cm x 2cm. Mmmmm.... It feels so special. Not.
There it is, on my little hard drive. I have yet to copy it to a backup disc. I have yet to burn it to CDr. I haven't even dumped it onto my MP3 player. Why? Because I feel so utterly uninspired by this purchase. I feel completely numb. I don't feel any kind of rush, any kind of excitement. There's no emotional involvement with the piece. I doesn't feel like an event in my life.
If she knew, I'm utterly convinced that the artist who wrote this music would be deeply, deeply unhappy that her precious creation could mean so little to one of her fans. This isn't the way it was meant to be. It should mean far more than this. To me and I suspect anyone else who has managed to give birth to any kind of creation, music and films and books and radio are far more than commodities that can be bought and sold in the same way that you can buy a dozen eggs, a packet of condoms or a loaf of bread.
I got to thinking about how the experience of music has been so utterly transformed in recent years. Music has become as disposable as toilet paper, as commonplace as the air we breath. And so it's lost much of its power to inspire, delight, amuse, entertain and embelish life's experience to the point where it has little tangible value except to the artist's who create and, even then, there doesn't seem much evidence of that passion or drive in many of the younger musicians I meet at gigs. To them, it's just way of earning money, raising social status or pulling chicks. But when was it ever any different?
Anyway, I though about this long and hard and decided that, unless circumstances change dramatically, all of our future releases will be available both as downloads and, critically, as tangible CDs. Something for you to pick up, hold, examine, pore over, talk about, complain about, look for secret meanings and cryptic content in the album artwork etc etc etc.
And, more so, if funds permit and the facilities are available, I'll even consider having some vinyl pressed up.
22-Feb-08: Rip off Britain, alive and well.
It's good to know that rip off Britain is still alive and well and thriving, and that the army of medocrity is again making strong gains in the Shire Towns.
Let me explain myself.
Yesterday, I tried to order some display units for the sequencers. Sadly, the UK Distributor was sold out and another batch weren't due in until April. The young lady I spoke to called around a couple of their subsiduaries but, alas, they too were fresh out of the units.
Bugger.
I checked up on my list of alternative parts and found that I could substitute a Futaba device for the Itron Display. Great. I called the Futaba dealer. "I'm sorry, sir. He's out of the office but I can e-mail him and get him to give you a call." says the cheery assistant but that was last night and, 18 hours later, I'm still waiting for that elusive call.
I found another Futaba dealer - they don't have the part though they have an alternative but - and this is the best bit - it's in Japan. They can get it to me in 3 weeks minimum. And the price? £68 plus shipping plus VAT. That's a lot. A helluva lot. To put that in context, I would normally pay around £35 including shipping and VAT for that part.
So, what does this mean? Essentially, this dealer has realised that I'm in a bit of a predicament and I need these parts urgently otherwise I can't build any instruments. His urge to make a quick buck has taken over and, rather than do the right thing, he's plumped up the price for one of two reasons 1) that the high price will discourage me because handling just 4 or 5 items really is too much trouble and, after all, that Sun Crossword Puzzle isn't going to solve itself and 2) if I am so desperate to order through them then he'll do everything he can to make it worth his efforts. And, by the way, his efforts include ringing his pal in Germany who then calls Japan because he can't speak a word of Japanese. I can't speak a word of Japanese either, but are thid guy's services really worth that extra £33 + shipping + VAT?
No, they are not, which is why I ordered the Itron part I originally wanted from the US where I got it for $35 + shipping + import taxes.
That's the problem with doing business in the UK. There are an army of under-achievers all sitting at desks, making calls to other underachievers in the expectation that they will be paid a working wage for their toils. This is, of course, bollocks.
This army of dolts has convinced itself that they're doing something useful, both for themselves and the ecomony whereas, in reality, they're just blood sucking parasites. They do nothing, contribute nothing, make nothing except vast and deeply unfathomable piles of shit. I am completely convinced that they're lovely, law-abiding people who have nice houses and nice kids and don't make any trouble or... whatever. But that doesn't make them any more than semi intelligent shitting machines.
This may sound particularly bitter and, frankly, it is. However, this government and the administration that came before it have done everything in their power to convert the UK's economy from one based on manufacturing to one based on services. UK Industry has been virtually wiped out and never a day goes by without some witless European gnome announcing yet another initiative that is designed to either protect the environment or the consumer when, in fact, all it does is encourage more and more manufacturer's to head out east.
This is a worthless and short-sighted concept. Yes, there is a boom in manufacturing in the East. One of my synth-nerd friends has announced this week that he and his family are off to settle in Malaysia for the forseeable future because his management skills in manufacturing can earn him more money out there than they will here. That's utterly shameful.
Sooner or later, the workers in Asia and China are going to demand higher wages and better living conditions than those they currently enjoy and why shouldn't they? Thus the cost of their goods will go up and manufacturers around the world will have to look elsewhere for the next available sweatshop. So where next? The former Soviet Union? Latvia? Or why not the Indian Subcontinent?
But the cost of living is slowly rising out there too. We've already seem a slow migration of all those lovely call center jobs from India back into the UK. And thus the UK's least known sweat shop industry is suddenly reborn as if it was a good thing. More people providing more services. Great. Not.
The entire UK social system is built upon an inverted pyramid. Those who earn nothing, produce nothing and contribute nothing sit upon the shoulders of those who do produce something. The UK economy, upon which we all depend, once led the world in manufacturing and industry, science and technology. Through politics and laziness, we've been reduced to little more than high-tech mondey launderers and a nice place for the tourists to visit so long as it isn't raining.
21-Feb-08: Enough to make ya jaw drop...
Do you remember the first time you saw the movie Star Wars? Or the first time you heard a piece of music that truly made your jaw drop? Or saw your favourite band playing live in the flesh?
I do.
I saw a clip from Star Wars on the BBC's now defunct science programme, Tomorrow's World, and it blew me away. I was quite literally frozen to the spot by this short, maybe 50 second piece of interstellar space dogfighting. I thought "Wow!" and, you know, I still do.
That same programme showed a clip of the band Kraftwerk and their weird, homemade instruments. I thought "Wow!" and I still do. Little did I know then that, 30 years later, I'd be following in their footsteps.
I had another of those "Wow!" moments yesterday when I downloaded the online game EVE. EVE is a virtual world, like Second Life, and is based around a space-travelling, trading environment. It's massively multiplayer, meaning that you can have a very large number of people inside the virtual world at the same time. Yestersday, I was just one of 25, 000 individuals exploring this strange, new Universe.
The reason I'm including this brief sourjourn in the blog is that the graphics in EVE are some of the most stunning I've seen outside of a Holywood blockbuster. In fact, they go beyond those available inside your average summer popcorn seller and evoke memories of Ron Thornton's stunning CGI for Babylon 5 in the 1990s.
I've included some screen shots of my first forays inside EVE. What's special about these pictures is that they are rendered in real-time and a rate which makes them almost completely seamless. Sat in front of my 20" iMac screen, they feel stunning. No, awe inspiring is a description.
I've started my training. I joined a clan and chose a specialisation - Engineering. Now I'm learning to navigate and fly my little spaceship. It really is terrific fun.
Right now, I'm in the free-to-use, get 'em hooked trial period, which lasts 14 days. Once those first 14-days are up, you have to pay for EVE and although it's not expensive in fiscal terms - say, $15 a month and I spend that on chocolate and coffee - I began to wonder how I can afford this tiny outlay each month and how much it will cost in the long term.
Thankfully, common sense took over shortly afterwards.
Although I really would love to get totally and blissfully lost exploring space and earning big bucks as a hot-shot space pilot within EVE, because I am, deep down, just a grown up wannabe-Luke Skywalker, I know that this is a bad idea. Why?
Because I have a real life, a family and work to do.
This is the danger of artificial worlds like EVE and Second Life. When you compare their beautifully rendered CGI landscapes and feature-rich, multi-media content to, say, spending a wet weekend in Houghton-le-Spring, they're a damned attractive alternative. By a mile.
Alas, lovely though they are, it's ever so easy to lose yourself completely in something that isn't real (yet) and, all the while, the real world, warts and all, goes on around you. I guess that this is the attraction of soap operas.
If I didn't have a family, my dogs, loads of friends, a job that I love and something that might, one day, resemble a musical career, such an alternative world would be very, very appealing indeed.
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18-Feb-08: Busy, busy, busy...
This morning, more or less as usual, I walked Jules up to the Bus Stop in the freezing cold, accompanied by our minder, Charlie. The folk gathered at the bus stop looked their usual, miserable selves - worn out, tired and cold, and I wondered what they'd been up to at the weekend. I wondered what they were going to do when they got to work. Complain that the weekends are too short? They certainly looked like they had a bad case of the Monday Mornin' Blues.
Weekends seem to come and go so quickly these days. I have a time sheet that I fill in on a daily basis and it tells me that last week was very busy indeed but, in truth, I have no clear recollection of where the time went or what I was doing. The only exception was when I was attempting to get a bug out of ZEIT's force-to-scale editor and time just seemed to drag and drag until, of course, I spotted the mistake, which was a real slap-on-forehead moment.
I switched off e-mail at around 1230 on Friday, mainly to avoid a couple of customers who have a habit of bushwhacking me with difficult questions like "Where's my sequencer, Dude?" just as I'm shutting down for the weekend, and got on with finishing off a couple of signal cables for the machines on the bench at the moment. With those fitted and tested, I got down to work on the design for a simple hybrid digital/analogue synthesiser voice based around a couple of digital oscillators and a CEM3372 filter block I bought recently. That went better than I expected and I was able to move on to the board layout but, before I'd even looked at that issue in any great depth, the clock read 1630 and it was time to make dinner.
All of a sudden, it's Saturday and I have little recollection of Friday night except that I was in a deserted night club in Second Life listening to some not very inspiring sequencer music.
Jules and I nipped into Newcastle on Saturday afternoon for a spot of shopping. Firstly, I needed a stand for my Yamaha RBX170 bass guitar, which has become a more-or-less permanent fixture in the living room basically because I tend to pick the thing up and riff away at every opportunity. The instrument feels very comfortable to use and I am somewhat dismayed by the realisation that perhaps I really have found my instrument after something like 28 years of learning to play keyboards. Anyway, I needed a posing stand simply because leaving said instrument perched on the back of the sofa or a chair is guaranteed, sooner-or-later to end in a tearful episode.
We also nipped into H & M on Northumberland Street to resolve one of my most pressing needs... socks. Socks are a mystery in this house. I never seem to have a fresh pair and, if I do, they're always full of holes. I am tempted to stick a couple of radio tracking devices on this latest batch, to find out if they actually do take part in the annual sock migration. I've heard that they head south and spend the summer months in Ibiza chilling out to ambient space music and getting trashed on cheap weed. There's another theory that Jules simply tosses my sweaty, unwashed socks into the charity bag for the RSPCA. We're not great fans of the RSPCA in this house. We don't like vindictive organisations with double-standards.
Back at home... well, between an excellent episode of The West Wing and an astonishing boring film on BBC2, I got thrashed (mercilessly) at Scrabble and only just managed to avoid a humiliating defeat when Jules innocently asked if I.Q. was a legal word and, oops, if I didn't just spot that I had an i which, suitably placed, gave me a tripple-word score of 31 with only one tile remaining.
I spent Sunday morning working on a pilot website for The Freemen of Newcastle upon Tyne, which was just a porting exercise but also an opportunity to polish some new scripting ideas. After that, we had a business meeting and resolved to finally buy a decent laser printer for the sequencer manuals, which has been an outstanding issue for many months now.
Of the machines we looked at, the Samsung ML2510 looked like a good choice and PC World down the road at Dragonville had a couple in stock and at a good price too. I make no secret of my dislike for PC World. Yes, some of their staff are little better than knuckle-scrapping Neanderthals who could perhaps better serve society by preventing so many crash-test dummies coming to such an unpleasant end, and their pricing policies almost certainly break certain Trading Standards but the real reason I dislike PC World is because I keep running into so many of my sad-sack former friends in there.
The last time I was in there, I bumped into Rob Noxious, a former collegue who has managed to take morbid obesity to a whole new level. I remain astonished that the human body can adapt to such astonishing abuse. Rob attempted to greet me like a long, lost brother although his revolting personality and lack of personal hygiene were the principal reasons for leaving my job at Caterpillar. I made it quite obvious that I would rather clear the drains at the local abbatoir than standing talking.
Back at home, Jules and I installed the new printer and, pretty much as expected, all did not go according to plan. As with most consumer peripherals, Samsung target their installation instructions at their core market, Windows Vista Users. I am not sure if it's because Samsung and their ilk just assume that Macintiosh users are more intelligent and therefore require far less assistance than Windows users or if it's just that installing a new printer on a Macintosh is so much easier but the instructions for OSX are about a quarter of the Vista equivalents.
After much head-scratching, made worse by constantly having to remove a small collection of Dalmatians that had gathered to see what the new, shiny plastic box was going to do, the printer burst into life. However, both Jules and I remain less than impressed with this 5-star machine. The print quality isn't bad. Actually, it's pretty good but I'm just concerned that we've made a rod for our backs with this device. Part of me is slightly convinced that we should have spent a little more and bought a full duplex device. Anyway, at least we can now print the manuals at home, which removes a major headache.
Jules got on with dinner and I sat down to play with the latest incarnation of Second Life's Windlight viewer. The last time I tried this application, I discovered a whole new way to reboot the Macintosh. Flakey isn't the word. However, this incarnation is just the bee's bloody knees. Windlight is the new viewer for Second Life. It's been in beta-test for a couple of months now and is designed to greatly enhance the whole Second Life experience by generating more realistic atmospheric and water effects. It does this in spades. I mean, this is seriously good. Plus it didn't crash once.
Later on, I went back into Second Life and met up with my friend Kirsty Hawkshaw. Kirsty has a new album out entitled The Ice Castle, which you can hear over at Magnatune and she's also a fantastically talented Second Life designer. And, as soon as I got there, I realised that Kirsty now has her Second Life Voice Input working so I figured that it was time I got mine working too.
I've avoided this for along time, partly because speaking in public makes me nervous and also because I have a strong "Geordie" accent. Some folk assume that anyone with a regional accent as opposed to a posh, received pronounciation accent is just a bit of a thicko, country yokel. These first impressions are not accurate and I prefer that they get to know me before they discover that I am actually a bit of thicko, country yokel. Anyway, I figured that now was the time to just try it and, a couple of mouse clicks later, and yours truly was talking to Kirsty in London, a guy called Mark in Holland and a girl called Tatiana in Australia. This was real time, global communication. Wow... I remain truly in awe of the folks at Second Life. More so, I actually feel sorry for the folk who are blind to the possibilities, the richness and the enhanced experience that Second Life offers.
And so it's Monday morning and we're back to work. According to my little thermometer, it's -4 degrees C outside and bloody freezing in here but I'm happy because I'm listening to a podcast created by the guys at the Tangerine Dream Fanzone and both SkinMechanix and Ion feature in their playlist with the tracks 'Ultravista' and 'Flying over blue waters' respectively.
You can hear the podcast here.
It's weird but I don't have the Monday morning blues.
13-Feb-08: Eisbrecher / Ohne Dich
Earlier today, I was over on Youtube.com watching the video to Eisbrecher's Ohne Dich as discussed below, and something began to bug me, one of those annoying little under the psyche kind of bugs that just needs to be looked at for no other reason than it's Tuesday and the weekend is a long way off.
Incidentally, before we go any further, Ohne Dich translates as Without You and not, as some wag suggested, Without a Dick, so there.
Anyway, back to this thing that's bugging me. I'm convinced that the guy in the video is Andy McCluskey from Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark. The singer looks like him, struts like him, even performs that rather twatty butt-wiggle dance that McClusky does. However, I wasn't aware that OMD were into German Goth Rock. In the early days, I pegged them as avant garde funsters with a wry sense of humour but this is an uber-serious, angst-rock-with-attitude kind of song with a sprinkling of extra mogadon to make the whole melange work to best effect and not OMD's slightly limp and querky cup of tea at all.
But I guess, hey ho, this sort of thing happens all the time on the interweb and it's a Tuesday and I never could get the hang of Tuesdays. Oh. I just said that. I'm losing it. Possibly.
I've had Ohne Dich buzzing around my head all weekend - no bad thing I might add - and it's been colouring everything I've touched musically since I first heard it but still, that video... It's bugging me... Is it Andy McCluskey?
It seems piddling to focus on such a small detail but I have OCD, so bollocks to you if you think I'm a nutter. I am. So what? Get over it. You're reading my therapy sessions so who's the bigger whack job, me or you? :)
I went back to Youtube, jumped to the bookmark and... Huh? It's gone. The bloody video has gone.
Bollocks squared to the power of N, where N is a very large number.
Will the mystery of this feau Andy McCluskey ever be solved?
Never fear. This is Youtube. There are always dozens of duplicate videos and... thar ya go... The same video is slightly further down the page though why one copy would suddenly disappear without warning is strange.
This is weird. This version is slightly different. Huh?
I type OMD into Youtube's search engine and scrolled down the list of videos. Shazam!... there's a video called Pandora's Box, and that, strangely, rings a very loud bell. I play the video... I've seen it before, many, many years ago, back in my nocturnal period.
... and guess what?
This is the source for the Ohne Dich video and the guy in the video IS Andy McClusky after all. See, I'm not going bonkers. Okay, so maybe I am... yeah, I am...
Pandora's Box is a homage to the silent movie star Louise Brooks, who had a brief but brilliant career in the early 1900's. All of the footage of Louise Brooks is from the 1928 film entitled Pandora's Box and, imho, she looks like a bit of a babe.
The movie looks fun and is probably some kind of morality tale of good girl gone bad. It was banned by Hitler as degenerate art and that, in itself, is reason enough to see it.
It looks very much as if someone has recut large sections of OMD's Pandora's Box video for use by another band. There doesn't appear to be a video for the original piece. Humm... Another mystery. For another day.
So, after all of this... will the real Ohne Dich please stand up?
11-Feb-08: The Mosaics / Harrogate / Second Life
Jules and I went into Newcastle on Thursday night to see The Mosaics play at a pub called Bernaccia. There were three acts on and there was no door-tax so we figured there wasn't much to lose.
I don't know the name of the first act. They were your typical 4-piece Indie-band and they aquitted themselves well. Not quite together, a little rough around the edges and more work needed on the vocals but they were a good opener. I kinda felt sorry for them when the floor cleared within seconds of them starting but that's just the shitty way audiences behave these days. That couldn't have been easy to watch but they kept it together and didn't let such stupifying rudeness bother them.
The next band turned out to be a solo performer on an acoustic guitar and, frankly, I groaned inwardly when I saw what was about to happen. I've had a belly-full of angst-ridden, hand-wringing acoustic guitarists bitching on about the evils of the modern world with lyrics like "You promised to buy me some lovely new ribbons to tie up my bonnie brown.... Yark!". Pass the sick bucket, FFS. Frankly, I needed to hear another po-faced wannabe intellectual like I need a balsamic vinegar enema. But this guy was different. Very different. A lot of energy, a lot of variety in his set and the kind of interaction with the audience that you never hear these days. Just brilliantly funny. Probably for the first time in my life I was sorry to see an acoustic guitarist leave the stage.
The Mosiacs were on last and they played a short set. They were good but we both agreed that they lacked passion and also look tired, as if the constant gigging thoughout the last year or so has taken a lot of the energy out of them. We still enjoyed the gig and I'll go see them again but only for a longer set. 40 minutes isn't enough to do these excellent musicians justice.
Harrogate
Last Friday, Jules and I went to Harrogate in North Yorkshire for the day. This was our first day out together in more years than either of us could remember and that isn't a good thing. When we were undergraduates at Newcastle Univrsity, we used to explore the North East of England and Northumberland as often as we could, partly because it's a wonderful place to live and also because we just like exploring. Sadly, we haven't done much of that in recent years.
This wasn't a trip planned in any great detail. We just hopped in the car and hit the motorway. It didn't take long to get their either, less than an hour.
It was a lot of fun and I more or less managed to put work out of my mind for a while. The Mercer Art Gallery was a bit of a disappointment. I liked the Tom Fairs/Bonnard exhibition but the gallery was far smaller than I'd expected and one of the managers kept giving me the old stink eye for some imagined slight on my part, or maybe because she was just a mean tempered old battleaxe. I have no idea.
We found The Pump Room Museum more by accident than by design. We both caught the delightful whiff of sulphur long before we saw the building and Jules promptly stared at me in a manner that suggested that I was responsible for the pungent odour. Humpf! I was not.
I would have loved to wander around The Pump Room Museum but, alas, I was not going to fork out £6 for a 10 minute show.
Later on, we visited St. John's Church right in the city centre and, as a treat, we had afternoon tea in the World Famous Betty's Tea Rooms.
The drive home was somewhat demanding due to an accident on the A1. You have to applaud the Highways Agency for installing all of these traffic information posts with their wonderful, bright messages that tell you to slow down because there's been an accident ahead. It's a great pity that the majority of road users, being a bunch of total fuckwits, apparently don't take any notice of them and continue to drive just as recklessly as they did before, determined to get home as fast as they can or to be another statistic on a road accident survey.
Second Life
Jules went to bed early that night though I stayed up to indulge in a spot of Second Life. I found a rather cool little Goth club and just camped in a corner, listening to the tunes.
One tune in particular really struck home, Ohne Dich by the German band Eisbrecher. This isn't the sort of thing I would normally listen to but this song pushed every button - energy, arrangement, electronics, guitars - and I felt very, very happy. It's been a long time since I felt that happy about anything musical.
I asked the Second Life DJ what the track was and it didn't take me long to track Eisbrecher down on You Tube.
If you're curious, here's the video for Ohne Dich
The good vibes persisted throughout Saturday and they're still with me now. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come.
05-Feb-08: Yes, more lovely airplay!
News arrived late last night that Echoes Radio had added Ion's Evensong to their playlist. Evensong has been in and out of their playlist for 2 or 3 months and this means major exposure via 150 syndicated radio stations right across the USA. This has been the best couple of weeks for airplay we've ever known.
I was so thrilled that I released Universal, the Ion/SkinMechanix set recorded during the Symposium on Improvised Music at Newcastle University last December. Go to the ThinkingMetal home page and click on Listen to hear the full set.
I said that this piece would never be released because the ideas felt weak and under-developed but, with fresh ears, I feel happier about letting them out into the wild. Actually, some of the pieces do seem to work quite well and I can even hear ways to improve them, which is always a good indicator that a track has the right kind of energy.
04-Feb-08: E-Mail, the On-Line Shop and lots of lovely airplay!
The experiment with E-Mail seems to have worked so I'm part of the way towards a solution to this dreadful addiction of mine.
Alas, the GoogleMail account is no longer valid. I switched it to an alternative almost as soon as I started to use the service. It's too far removed from the POP service I've learned to live with over the years.
I was able to check e-mail many times over the weekend without the fear of some a**hole trying to put a crimp in my day. That said, I checked the business account this morning and not one of the 86 messages sent since Friday when I last logged in could be described as 'abusive'.
But it felt good to be able to go online and not have to worry about receiving a shitty e-mail.
As a result, I spent a major part of the weekend sorting out our On-line shop. From the customer's point of view, it really was too difficult to use, mainly because my original implementation was geared around a much bigger shop supporting many more artists and products. That whole master plan came undone when we came to add those products to the online shop. One major synth music retailer sold me a stack of discs at his special dealer rate, which got us off to a flying start. It meant that we could offer a wider range of popular artists at prices that looked attractive. Alas, a few weeks later, the same synth music retailer then offered those same discs for sale on his web site at a price which was lower than his special dealer rate. I really didn't expect that sort of shitty behaviour, especially from a business partner and, with that in mind, we just canned the whole shop idea and decided to specialise in our own mechandise only.
When I came to re-building the shop, I tried to get into the customer's head. What did they really want to see? If you've been to a web site and want to buy a product, you normally just click on the relevant button and jump straight to that section of the shop dedicated to the artist in question. My original version took you to the front entrance of the shop and more or less said 'Figure it out for yourself'. A lot of customers figured that it was much, much easier to just jump to the competition's web site.
Hence, all of the artists now have their own section of the shop, which can be accessed with one click of a button. We've also made it more obvious that you can choose payment methods, which wasn't at all obvious before. This is an important area of sales to get your head around. It's the differnce between making money and not making a bean.
And, as if to prove a point, after weeks and weeks of inactivity, we had our first order through the shop, less than a day after its virtual refit.
More thrilling is the amount of airplay that SkinMechanix are receiving at the moment. I received the following in my mail box this morning.
"I will broadcast your track "Skin Mechanix-Dimension Jump" on my radio show this Sunday 3 February in the 2nd set (after 9:25pm PST). "Alien Air Music" features international electronic music and has run since 1984 here in Los Angeles from KXLU radio at Loyola Marymount University. Broadcast time is Sunday evenings 9-11pm (PST). Webcast and contact info are listed below. If any equipment failures at the station should occur that prevent this SundayÕs broadcast, I will reschedule it for a future date and notify you again.
Keep up the great work!
Pat Murphy, Host and producer, Alien Air Music
KXLU 88.9FM, Los Angeles
webcast info at http://www.kxlu.com
.. shortly followed by...
"ArticMist Radio Playlist"
Your music has been broadcasted in ArticMist Radio this week.
Jorge Sergio...
PROGRAM 96 (01st February 2008)
Steve Roach: Moved Beyond (Fever Dreams) Oxygene8: Close Your Eyes (Freak of Chance) Skin Mechanix: Waving At Mono (The Secret Life Of Angels) James Ross: The Haggis Set (James Ross) Richard Bone: Protozoa, Mon Amour (Serene Life of Microbes) Code Indigo: Ten Degrees Per Second (Chill) Flook: The Tortoise And The Hare (Haven) Achillea: Achillea - Prelude (The Nine Worlds) Achillea: OdinÕs Hill (The Nine Worlds) Nicholas Gunn: Bridal Falls (Beyond Grand Canyon) Ialma: Na Distancia (Nova Era) Briganthya: Noite (Ash¸ra) Nautilus: Green Was The Colour (Along The Winding Road) Jorge Sergio: Sight (Unreleased) O'Carolan: D’as de Luna Nueva
I think this is the best airplay we've had in many, many years. It's very encouraging indeed. Better still. I just noticed that Ion's Future Forever is creeping up the Magnatune chart yet again.
Again, this is very encouraging. For years, I've felt that our music has been ignored. I was never sure exactly why that was. I had a few suspcions that are better left buried in Quicksand for the moment but it is genuinely thrilling to see the music being played all over the world and sitting in Top Ten charts amongst artists who are household names in the USA.
And to think that a lot of this started in a tiny little room in Houghton-le-Spring. :)
