Dave's Little Bit On the Side: January 2009

 

27-Jan-09: Interview / Festivals / Freemen of Newcastle

Ron Berry and I have been invited down to talk to Terry Hawke at Harborough FM one weekend in March. This will be a catch-up interview, following on from last year's chat. We just have to firm-up a date with Ron and we're off. Watch this space for news.

I've approached a couple of local summer festivals with respect to performing a small set on one of the smaller stages though, so far, there hasn't been much of a response. I'm concerned because I mentioned the possibility of playing to a friend and his response was, essentially, "forget it!" meaning that they run a kind of closed shop i.e. you don't get to play unless you're part of the In-Crowd. We'll see.

Tonight will be slightly unusual in that I've been invited to for dinner by one of our customers, The Freemen of Newcastle, partly to discuss future revisions to their web site but also as a thank you for all of the work done on their site since its launch last year. Their new site has received a lot of praise in recent weeks and the steady stream of visitors from all corners of the globe has encouraged them to move further into the brave new world of the internet. We'll be adding a forum plus additional pages for the various companies incorporated into the Gild of Freemen. One issue which is moving ahead rapidly is the introduction of Lady Freemen. As the law stands, only men aged over 20 years can be a Freemen of the City but, with the so-called Beverley Bill currently going through Parliament, it's likely that we'll see a huge influx of Lady Freemen in the next couple of years, which means that we need to have an information service able to inform and instruct potential new members about what we do and how to proceed further.

It's nice when your customers say "Thanks!". It makes the job just that little bit more pleasureable.

26-Jan-09: UFOs and Aliens III

I am, as of this morning, totally brassed off with the whole alien abduction debate. Indeed, I am currently debating my participation in the Paddy MacDee interview altogether because I really do not want to have my reputation tarnished by this subject. We all know that there is a reason why no major scientist worth a damn will touch this subject and that's because a significant percentage of the whole alien abduction community are educationally subnormal and/or delusional at best. They are, by and large, incapable of even the tiniest degree of commonsense never mind the most basic form of critical thinking. The fictional character Fox Mulder used to say "I want to believe". Most of these whack-jobs will just say "I will believe anything that you tell me cos' I is a sucker!".

I guess the lowest point in this whole discreditable episode was the video supposedly from an alleged NASA scientist apparently dying of osteosarcoma aka bone cancer. In this video, he links alien abductions/UFO's with the Illuminatti, the Freemasons, secret alien bases on Mars etc etc etc. Straight away, the alarm bells start ringing. There's no identification of the source. The voice is disguised. The images used are commonplace on the net. The secret bases on Mars are no more than collapsed lava tubes that are as commonplace on Mars as they are on Earth. Conclusion : It's a hoax and a sick one at that. You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who would waste an afternoon concocting this nonsense.

What makes this bad situation even worse are the legion of idiots fully prepared to believe this crap. Most of the comments below the video are of the form "Dude! I so do not belive this! LOL! You ROK, Dude! Cool! LOL!", which shows the level of critical thinking being applied, as well as giving an insight into the intellectual/emotional maturity of those responding. (The rubbish spelling is not mine! It just cut-and-pasted the first couple of lines.)

It's worse when those with apparently scientific credentials try to build a case based on real physics. Take, for example, the alleged home planet of the alien "Greys". Their home is supposed to be a small planet not far from Zeta Reticulae, a binary pair in the constellation Reticula (aka The Reticule). Both of these stars are similar to our sun (main stream, G2 stars) though they're older and richer in heavier metals. So far, so good. Now, NASA pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at this binary pair in 1995/96 and declared that they'd found a Jovian-sized planet in orbit around one of them. This is no biggie. We've discovered hundreds of Jovian-sized extra-solar planets. Indeed, Jovian-sized planets seem to be the norm rather than the exception, so far as we can tell. However, NASA also pulled the data immediately after release and declared that the results were wrong. They'd made a mistake and the variations in brightness were due to experimental error. This should not be surprising since NASA was very find of shooting itself in the foot in those days. However, according to the UFO community, NASA discovered more than just a Jovian-sized planet and are withholding details. The alleged scientist then used Bode's Law to prove that there was an Earth-sized body in that system. Err, sorry. Bode's Law has been largely discreditted since 1846 when we discovered Neptune and whilst we can more-or-less detect Earth-sized planets around distant planets in 2009, we certainly couldn't do that in 1995.

And so it goes. Conjecture dumped upon rumour spread thinly by academic under-achievers through poorly disguised hoaxes.

Notice the language used in the above sentences - 'supposedly', 'alleged', 'apparently'. Notice also that whereever possible, I provide references for you to check my facts. It would be nice if these muppets where able to do the same.

I won't be spending any more time on this subject until the night before the broadcast when I'll bone up on some astronomical facts. The whole focus of the interview will be on astronomy and getting involved in some real science. It won't be about wasting my time looking into any more of this sub-X-Files bollocks. Life really is too short.

21-Jan-09: UFOs, Aliens and Star Parties

Last night was our annual Star Party. Typically, such events involve a small number of elderly gentlemen standing around in a field, waiting for the rain to stop and/or cloud to clear. Last night was different. A clear sky, a good crowd and lots of new faces.

Weather forecasts earlier in the week looked bleak with a lot of cloud and rain promised. However, as the week progressed, the outlook appeared more favourable and, by the time we reached the site, Vallum Farm, just off the B6318, the sky was Glorious!.

Living as we do in the middle of a well populated northern town, it's rare that we see the Milky Way. However, last night was very clear indeed as well as fairly free from bright lights so the broad strip of light running through the zenith was easily visible.

Jules and I hovered between scopes. Venus was nice and bright, as was the Orion Nebular (M42). A couple of scopes were pointed at this object so it was a good way to illustrate why bigger is better. In a 4" Refractor, you can easily make out the brighter stars in the cloud including the well known Trapezium but the fine detail is not so easy to discern. Over on the 10" Maksutov, the fine detail is much more apparent.

Whilst waiting patiently in line for a peek through another scope a pair of el Cheapo Bresser Binoculars bought from Lidl for about £10 were thrust into my grubby mits. The views were astonishing, easily better than my aging Halinas, which makes me think my Halinas are out of alignment somewhere. As soon as I have a spare £10, I intend to go buy a pair.

I spent a few minutes playfully searching out a bunch of elusive objects from years gone by. M35 was the first star cluster that I spent any real time exploring when I first started out, mostly because it was right next to the planet Jupiter at that time. Since then, I've ignored the cluster. It was good to see it again, this time from a dark site. It seems bigger with more nebulosity than I remembered. M36 was another beautiful sight that I'd not seen in a while, dense super-cluster full of tiny stars.

The best thing about a star party is that you get to try out a number of different scopes - some fare well under these tests, others less so. I checked out the same object is two different refractors, a 4" Vixen and a 4.75" Skywatcher. The Vixen was a bit disappointing and I suspect that the collimation was off. The stars were not pin-pricks whereas those in the SkyWatcher was exactly as I expected. The images contrast was also considerably better in the SkyWatcher.

The worst aspect of a star party is the cold and I wasn't fully prepared for the toe-numbing pain that comes from standing on cold ground for too long in just dress shoes. Jules retired to the car early - and I don't blame her - but I stuck it out until I could no longer feel the ground under my feet. Home plus a hot cup of tea beckoned, and we left at around 830 pm more or less as the clouds enveloped the site.

This was a good star party, possibly one of the best in recent years, though not in the same league as those heady days in the 80's, when the society went meteor-watching from the neatly cropped lawns of Close House in the middle of one of the warmest summers I can remember.

I've never understood why star parties are always held in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere when there's nothing to see except little grey fuzzy patches of light, all of which look exactly the same as eachother. What's wrong with holding a star party in the middle of summer when the nights are warm and you don't need six layers of clothing to keep the heat in? What's wrong with holding a star party when the Moon is in the sky? The Moon is much overlooked, imho, and beginners get a real buzz out of seeing such a familiar object in a new light.

I guess the solution is more star parties.

The research for the Paddy MacDee slot is ongoing and, frankly, the ever-ending stream of bullshit continues to amaze and astound. And yet, every now and again, one comes across a nugget of truth, a small slice of reality in amongst the delusions piled high upon fabricated details and poorly imagined psuedo-science. An example... 2 pages of A4 speculating on why so many UFO's were sighted over the UK in recent months, which the author concludes is down to the UK's involvement in the Large Hadron Collider project. Sorry to piss on your chips, mate but the Large Hadron Collider is at Cern, Geneva, which is in Switzerland and, err, isn't currently working cos' they had a problem with a coolant leak. The author finishes off this little diatribe with the statement "I'm not a scientist but..." No kidding, mate. No kidding.

But the interesting point is... what were all of those lights in the sky?

Truth aside, this kind of twisted, turned-on-its-side logic is so seductive. It provides answers to mysteries without actually explaining anything. There are truths obscured by hand-waving and semi-mystic babble. When you demand evidence, you get faith. When you demand facts, you get rumour. When you ask for proof, you're told that you're just like the others, an unbeliever.

Anyway, if you want to hear the full monty, listen to the show. :)

21-Jan-09: UFOs and Aliens II

I've been having tremendous fun researching UFO's and related phenomena for the Paddy MacDee interview. Those expecting a hatchet job and summary fireworks will be disappointed because, in amongst all of the highly speculative and downright idiotic bollocks (for want of a better word), I've discovered a few issues that are worth exploring further.

You have to wonder why, for instance, the MOD are happy to rubbish sightings made by trained observers such as Policemen and Pilots without actually reviewing the evidence. A good example would include the large number of sightings in the Midlands over the Christmas period, some of which were videoed. The MOD, bless 'em, dismissed these sightings as meteors and low-flying aircraft and all without actually reviewing the video footage. It's that kind of attitude which makes them appear aloof and arrogant.

Let's talk about something sensible instead. Please.

Future Forever, albeit a small portion of the track Eternal Flame, has been remixed. This is a first, as far as I know and, better still, I actually like the end result. I think Watchwolf did an excellent job.

You can listen to it here.

20-Jan-09: UFOs and Aliens

The interview with Radio Newcastle's Paddy MacDee as been fixed for 2300 hours on Tuesday 3rd February 2009.

I've been given some advice on how to handle the debate by one experienced in such issues - my friend Alazarin from Second Life. The approach should not be to engage in personal attacks. Instead, the goal should be to undermine the credibility of the little evidence available that supports any theory that we, as a species, are being stalked by Reptiloids.

Of course, tonight will be the night when I am abducted, taken on a whistle stop tour of the Andromeda Galaxy, Venus and Zeta Reticulae, and then spend the next four days strapped to a table with a supositrode up my bum. As Alannis Morrisette would say "Isn't that ironic?".

19-Jan-09: Win some, lose some II

Whilst playfully checking my Magnatune sales figures on Saturday morning, I discovered that we'd earned yet another royalty for one of the Ion tracks, this time The Silent Scream. It's not my favourite track mainly because I got the mix wrong but royalties are a nice little earner and it's good to know that the music is reaching an even wider audience. However, I do like to know who's using my music and in what context.

A couple of quick Google's brought up the identity of the company who had licensed the track. They're a Canadian video outfit but, and this is where the wheels come off this particular wagon, one of their current projects is all about the work of Franklin Carriere, Champion fur trapper.

I am, and always have been, opposed to the fur trade. I think it's cruel and inhumane. Now, please don't give me any guff about being a hypocrit because I wear leather. Yes, I wear leather. I know where leather comes from. That's why I wear man-made shoes and natural clothing whenever possible. I don't wear leather as a fashion statement. It's a functional item that serves a purpose.

I hate the fur trade because those who trade in fur and those who wear fur don't seem to care what happened to the animal who originally owned the coat. They don't care if it suffered. They don't care if its last hours on this planet were spent with a leg caught in a trap, slowly bleeding to death. They don't care that the fur-trim on their lovely new coat was sourced in China and probably came from someone's pet dog or cat. I think we, as human beings, should treat animals with the respect they deserve.

I've written to the video company asking for clarification of where the track will be used and said that we would be very unhappy if my track was used to glorify the practice of fur trapping, which I consider cruel in the extreme. I've also written to Magnatune's boss, John Buckmann, to see if we can block the use of the track if it is to be used in a manner that we consider unsuitable.

Later...

I've received a message from John at Magnatune, which indicates that I can't legally stop these guys from using my track. I gave Magnatune permission to license the music and they've paid for the license so it's their's to use as they see fit. I guess this is the down-side of licensing tracks. John did advise that we could ask them not to use the track in any video with a fur trapping element.

Later still...

I've just received a rather nice letter from KCDC's videographer, Richard Frisky, regarding the use of The Silent Scream. We've been given his assurance that the track will be used in one of their videos entitled Fall Comes to Lac La Ronge and not to promote an activity that is cruel to animals. An excellent resolution! :)

Next up... UFOs.

I've been invited to appear on Radio Newcastle's Paddy MacDee show to talk about UFO's and related phenomena from the point of view of an astronomer. Whilst I do believe in life on other planets and I have seen objects in the night sky that I was not able to identify, I don't go along with a lot of the ideas and concepts that some conspiracy theorists come up with to explain alien abductions and close encounters of the stainless steel probe up the jacksy kind.

Of course, if I'm ever abducted by Greys then I may reform my opinions of the misuse of those stainless steel probes up the jacksy.

More information as soon as details appear.

15-Jan-09: Win some, lose some

I've been waiting for news of a fairly high profile lecture/concert, which was supposed to take place towards the end of March. The organisers had talked it up and felt that it would fit in exactly with their plans. Hence, I was, initially at least, optimistic that it would go ahead. Alas, time moves ever onwards and, despite several polite pokes, there was no meaningful response. I began to realise that this event just wasn't going to happen.

True enough, the rejection letter turned up last night. Apparently, there wasn't enough space available in the schedule to slot me in and so, reluctantly, they'd decided to reject my proposal. However, they added that if I would like to be considered for the 2010 event then I should re-apply.

Sorry, but no thanks. I won't bother if it's all the same to you. The same outfit turned me down in 2007. They've done the same in 2009. I have no reason to believe that they'll accept my proposal in 2010 either. I've suspected for a while that they run a closed shop - you only get on their books if you're one of their friends - and at least two other lecturers have confirmed this suspicion. I have to conclude that any efforts in their direction are just wasted. The same applies to the EM/Space Music concert I proposed last year. They can go whistle as far as I am concerned.

I was, as you might expect, fairly disappointed. However, this morning, another e-mail was waiting in my In-box, this time from sonicsteve, a Radio DJ working out of Wisconsin, USA. It went like this:

"Listened to the first album at work, all day. Loved every track, brilliant work. Can't wait to air it. Just finished downloading the second album, can't wait to get into it. I can't thank you enough. I've been doing the radio program for about 12 years and the music gets better all the time. The radio station is mostly a jazz and classical station. The jazz radio DJ's have been slow to come around, but EM is making in roads and they are slowly giving EM a measure of respect. "

I was pretty pissed off at missing the lecture thing. Not so now. The lecture would have been yet more stress and more disruption, which I can do without at the moment. Besides, we have other plans in that direction so this loss is no major issue.

Better still, Steve's letter helped me get back on track, made me realise that there's more to life than wasting your time with a bunch of overpaid bozos. And that has to be a good thing.

13-Jan-09: Brick wall time and the joy of alternate strategies

I hit a brick wall on Monday night, a real solid creative brick wall. Nothing seemed to work, nothing seemed easy, nothing came forward, with the exception of a couple of stale, well worn riffs from many, many years ago, which, none-the-less I felt that I might be able to polish up and work into something new. That was, after all, how Flying over Blue Waters and Minerva came about. However, overall, it was pretty slim pickings all round.

Part of the problem is that I kept wondering, indeed keep wondering, how I'm going to top tracks like Flying... , Future Forever and Evensong. That's going to be a tough one to crack. Everytime I hear those tracks I think "Wow! Where did they come from?" and, truthfully, I have no idea. They came about by accident, by experimentation, by just playfully buggering about in the studio. So, if that's what it takes then let's get to it. Time for a spot of playful buggering about.

One successful strategy that worked last time around was to distance myself from the creative process. In other words, let someone or something else take the strain, perhaps delegating the job of composition, particularly the small, fiddly bits that are the most difficult to come up with. It's akin to painting with broad strokes and letting the computer fill in the details. Okay, this isn't going to produce a finished work, certainly not in a style that is recognisable as mine, but it's a starting point.

During an idle spare moment last night, I downloaded a couple of algorithmic music generators. One of the first I discovered was Flow, which is special for me because it was the first package of this type that I tried way back in 1999. Indeed, in many ways Flow kicked off the whole SkinMechanix project because it sounded different, unique even, and an ideal source of weird and whacky samples.

Many of these auto-composition packages promise a lot though mostly they deliver an incoherant, garbled mess that absolutely would be perfectly at home in your average mental asylum or University Music Department - same difference, some would say. This absolutely isn't what I had in mind. I've included a few examples just to illustrate the point.

However, I think it's fair to point out that some of the material created by Amazing Maze does have potential, albeit in another direction entirely. This isn't Ion at all but I did keep the application on disc, for a rainy day.

On the other hand, AmbientGrains uses granular processing to munge up existing music into something that sounds completely different and yet, at the same time, completely identical to every other piece of granular processed sound you've ever heard. However, with a bit of tweaking and some better choices for the source material, I did come up with something that sounded like a useful starting point. Click on the above link. Recognise the source track? It's Ultravista from The Secret Life of Angels.

Next up, I tried Chill, which came a lot closer to the mark. Nice pads combined with delicate sequences. A bit too sugary sweet and new-agey for Ion but promising all the same.

So, there. Some starting points. Something to mull over in the wee hours. Maybe it's not what people are expecting from Ion and I really have to stress that I am not joining the Funny Noise Brigade but they're sketch pads, something to muck about with. I really would have liked to try out something like Koan but it no longer seems to be available and it's replacement, whose name I can't remember at the moment, wouldn't run on the iMac. Hey ho. So it goes.

12-Jan-09: New album

I've started work on the new Ion album. I have a few ideas, some crude recordings and a rough framework but at least it's finally moving ahead after numerous false starts.

Part of the problem has been getting into the right frame of mind to begin. Ion came about more or less by accident, during the long, hot summer of 2006, when I was alpha-testing a new revision of software for our ZEIT sequencer. The process involved has been documented elsewhere and the result, a track entitled The Silent Scream, made it to the first Ion album, Future Forever.

That particular track gave rise to a whole new way of working. Instead of meticulously planning an album as I'd done with Infection and Neutrinos I sort of sat back and let the muse go where it wanted to, allowed it to wander hither and thither unhindered by goals and deadlines. There were no real constraints, no real targets, no real objective, and the result was an album that, from my point of view, stands up pretty well. It's not perfect and there are a few things I would do differently but, by and large, it's okay.

Getting into the right frame of mind is critical. I've learned from experience that to make an album that is true and honest then you absolutely have to divorce yourself from any concept of financial reward. Equally, you must avoid trying to push the music in a direction that you think will please the intended audience. imho, these goals are completely incompatible with the process of making good music. You have to make the album from a need to satisfy your creative muse and not from a desire, no matter how strong, to improve your bank balance. What I'm saying is that you have to get back to the idea that you're doing this as a hobby, not as a career option.

So that's what I spent the weekend working on - a process of asking questions, hunting for answers, turning over new concepts, and all in the privacy of your own head too. Just like Future Forever, this won't be a concept album. It won't have a message, as such. As before, I'll just let the listener decide for themselves.

The title was going to be Surface but that has since morphed into Shimmer and the artwork, as I see it in my head, will have some kind of watery theme. Possibly.

08-Jan-09: Sales

Sales over at Magnatune have started to fall away, pretty much as expected. Hardly surprising really. Both Future Forever and Secret Life were released more than 12 months ago and peaked last June so it's not really surprising that sales are on the slide.

However, there was a nice little surprise tagged onto the end of the 6-monthly statement received yesterday - royalties from all of the streaming channels that we've been signed up to, outlets such as iTunes, eMusic and Napster. I read the statement several times, just to be sure that what I was reading was a true and fair record. These contributions certainly more than made up for the shortfall in direct download sales.

Sorting out how many album sales this represents is not easy because the list of sales is mixed, partly by track and partly by album and, frankly, life is too short to go through the list in any detail. Suffice to say, the list is very long indeed. Most of these sales earn us just one or two cents and perhaps would be hardly worth bothering with, right? Wrong. Combined, they represent several hundred dollars, and with dollar/pound exchange rate the way it is at the moment, it means that I can start to think seriously about buying a new Macintosh for the studio.

I know a lot of musicians who are still very reluctant to go digital, to fully commit to the new media. Music is all about getting your music across to an audience. CD sales are (for us, anyway) dead flat and only a few hardy souls who prefer a solid, tangible product in their hand over something ethereal and not quite real like a digital download seem to want to stick with this medium. Fair enough.

But the reality of the world is that money makes stuff happen. It means that we can survive just that little bit longer, start to look a little further than the next set of household bills, maybe start to wonder what if?

Yeah. What if?

06-Jan-09: Gigs

BBC News was banging on about the new wave of New Wave-sound-a-likes last night, and so word is spreading fast that the 80's are back. Better still, proclaims the BBC, so are loud clothes and BIG HAIR. Great. Just what we all need. Another round of bands like Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Dollar. At least SSS and Dollar were better than the latest round of dross that the X Factor stuffs down our collective throats. Now I'm being a bitch. Tut, tut, Hughes. Behave yourself.

After a break of 2 months or so, I went back in the studio last night and began assembling plans for a series of new gigs. Digital backing is neat in that you can quickly create multiple versions of the same set to suit the length of time available. I quickly put together a rough layout for a 30 minute, a 50 minute and a 90 minute set, with each set consisting of a core collection of tracks - mostly Ion material but also some of the legacy stuff from T-Bass, typically old standards such as Tranquility Bass and Lovesong coupled with revised versions of Mariner and Four Wheel Jive. Most of this material is deliberately up-tempo and melodic, designed to appeal to a wider audience, and not just EM fans. All of these tracks have been scheduled for a make-over in the next couple of weeks so I have my work cut out.

In many ways, this process brought back the same warm fuzzies I had in say, 1996 or 1997, not long after the release of The Infection of Time, when the world felt like it was opening up in so many new ways. It really was a thrilling time. We'd enjoyed rave reviews, received a lot of airplay and shifted a lot of discs. It felt good to be so well received, good to enjoy some of the limelight, joyous to be finally getting somewhere after years of living in Never-Never-Land.

However, not long afterwards, the world turned sour. The EMMA Organisation, which had done so much to help and encourage our development, simply fell apart. Berlin School Music took over and began to dominate the UK EM scene, and our sales went through the floor. More so, political differences between various factions, combined with some truly vitriolic 'fans' made life very, very unpleasant indeed and, quite simply, our little adventure came to a very abrupt halt.

That was 10 years ago and the time feels right for another bite of the apple. Maybe it's just our time again but the hairs on the back of my neck are standing tall and they haven't felt like that in many, many years.

05-Jan-09: Happy New Year

Happy New Year to one and all. I hope you enjoyed the holiday.

We spent most of the Christmas break recovering from head colds. Actually, Jules still isn't over hers but has gone to work anyway. Another day in bed might have helped a little but I think she was keen to get the New Year under way.

We spent New Year's Eve with Ron and Julie Berry though I suspect I wasn't very good company. My nose was still streaming a little and my persistent tickly cough just wouldn't let up for a minute, and so I was a miserable little bleeder, I'm afraid. Sorry, guys.

Last week, we received the very welcome news that Ion's track Tangents had been voted joint-5th by listeners in ARFm's "Long track of the year". I felt that the field was very strong indeed so this was particularly welcome news. Plus, ARFm's is still, by and large, a prog-rock station so it represents a good solid cross-over between genres.

This morning brought the news that Future Forever had been voted joint "Top Electronic Album of 2009" along with The Glimmer Room's Home Without the Journey. That's really cool. I'm happy because this news couldn't have come at a better time.

Last week, the BBC roundly reclared that the 80's synth sound was back with a vengeance. (See article here) They went on to note that of the 15 bands considered likely to make it big in 2009, 10 were electronic/synthy type outfits. They're at it again this morning, this time detailing the adventures of a London-based musician, La Roux. (Read the full piece here) Of course, they tend to focus at the Big hair and the whole New Romatic Thing but you pretty much expected that anyway, didn't you?

So, 80's synth music is back and bleepy noises are again cool. "Guitar music" says the Beeb, "has had its day, for now anyway".

Superb. What more could you ask for on your first day back at work?

(Hint: a couple of sequencer orders wouldn't go amiss, would they?)