David's Blog

Dave's Little Bit On the Side: March 2008

31-Mar-08: Stuff

On the surface, this blog has been fairly quiet in recent weeks. However, behind the scenes, it's been a different story. About a week ago, I added one or two new entries and then decided that they were too personal to include and hence deleted them before they even saw the cold light of day. I needed to write them, to get the issues off my chest, because some of the problems discussed were really causing a great deal of distress, particularly the incident with my former friend J.K.M., who phoned last week to dispense one or two drops of his favourite brand of vitriol. He was obviously delighted when he discovered that he had caused considerable mischief, both to myself and to some of my associates and all because of some childish, imagined slight on his part. Silly, really. I can do without people like that, thanks.

I feel like I've spent the last few weeks running between jobs and not accomplishing anything of any real importance - just lots and lots of little jobs that contribute in some small way to the success of the project but nothing approaching what, in Caterpillar Management Speak, would be termed a BHAG (or Big Hairy Arsed Goal).

I'll get back on the horse this week. There's a certain pleasure that comes only through serious, hard graft and I miss that. These piddling little jobs have to be done to keep the anally retentive types happy and there's no escaping their relentless, unforgiving tedium but experience has shown that they'll become a problem if left unattended and their apparent importance begins to eclipse the real goals.

This weekend went surprisingly well. The radio interview with Terry Hawke passed off without any major incidents and a follow-up interview has been scheduled for late April/early May. Ideally, I'd like to go down to the Harborough FM Studio and chat in person because the phone is not the best medium through which to conduct an interview. I was quite happy with the way the questions went although the interview itself felt slightly rushed. I'm rarely, if ever, stuck for anything to say and, indeed, I can bullshit for England when required so it wasn't as if I was stuck for something to talk about.

There was yet more airplay over the weekend. Yours truly was the featured artist on the Tangerine Dream Fan Zone Pod Cast and all of the bands, past and present, were featured - even T-Bass, which was odd in that I'd only recently decided to cancel the project and well, it seems that the old vehicle just doesn't want to fade away. Artic Mist also mailed me with their play list from their March 28th show and Ion's Evensong was the first featured track. Again, more good news.

There was also a corresponding jump in the number of hits to the web site and also in sales too. Future Forever wasn't even placed in the Magnatune Top 50 on Saturday morning and, by close of play on Saturday night, was back in there at number 16. I checked again on Sunday morning and it had climbed a further 3 places to number 13. It's still there this morning.

This has been a busy month. It began with the Jean-Jacques Perrey gig, the AV Festival and the Numan concert. After years and years of being outside of the loop in terms of direction and thrust, it certainly feels like we're back on target and making real, serious progress.

22-Mar-08: Radio Interview

I've been invited to do a radio interview on the Terry Hawke Radio Show, which goes out over Harborough FM on March 29th 2008. Terry will be playing tracks from Ion and Skin Mechanix.

We were trying to remember the last time I did a radio interview. I think, although I'm not 100% certain, that it was with Radio Newcastle, way back in 2001, with the lovely Julia Hankin. That was a fun interview. Julia began the interview with the question "So, didn't this style of music die out 20 years ago?", which was a fair point, I suppose. We were busy promoting The Fabulous Neutrinos, an album which I like though I feel it's deeply flawed.

Anyway, thanks to the joys of the interweb, the interview will be broadcast worldwide. My bit should go out at around 2240 hours GMT so you'll need to watch the clock for the time difference and because Daylight Saving Time will start to kick in over that weekend.

I'm thrilled. It's been an excellent year for airplay so far. Slowly, but surely, the message spreads. Thanks to everyone who has helped set this up.

On a minor funny note, I have to admit that I was mightily amused when a well known UK distributor of CDs and downloads announced their forthcoming super-duper, hey, wow, look-at-this gig line-up the other night and, at the same time, spent ages bleating on about how this gig might be the last because attendance has been declining in recent years. Well, there are three reasons for this fall off in attendance.

The super-duper, hey, wow, look-at-this line-up is actually the same band that performed there last year and the year before that and the year before that and the... you get the picture?
This band are not going to be playing anything particularly different. The performance will consist of more of the same Berlin-school stuff, which we've all heard a thousand times before. 8 note sequences, lotsa sound FX, lotsa 'Tron pads. It's just numb.
The event will be filmed and the sound desk recording burned onto disc as a Virtual Ticket. These virtual tickets will then be sold to punters who can't make it on the night, even if they live in the same town. Now, believe it or not, these virtual tickets make the whole concert financially viable. Strangely, these same virtual tickets will, only a matter of days later, be found on a couple of bit Torrent sites for free.

I was even more amused when I pointed this astonishing set of facts out on a bulletin board and a member of the faithfull had a pop at me. Will he be going to the gig? No, he won't. Doubtless, he'll be at home that night, washing his hair.

20-Mar-08: No more Heroes...

We were deeply, deeply saddened by the news that Arthur C. Clarke had died last night.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I was quite young, probably around 7 or 8, when a few of his short stories appeared in my favourite magazine of the day, "Speed and Power", and "2001, A Space Odyssey" was the first book I borrowed from our mobile library just as soon as I was able to become a member. Alas, I didn't get it and the plot, like the orbiting space-wheel, went completely over my head.

I first saw 2001, the movie, in 1979, at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. It was, and remains, a magical experience. This was my first real excursion with friends of my own age. I had escaped, if only briefly, from under the over-protective wings of my nervous parents. I was with Raymond Saxelby and Liz Gent, fellow sixth-formers from Rutherford Comprehensive. I remember being blown away by the visuals and the whole menacing, brooding atmosphere that saturated the film. Walking back across the Leazes Moor, I looked up at the clear, starlit night and wondered what the film was really about. Much like the book, I didn't get it immediately. Truthfully, I didn't get it for a long, long time. I hadn't thought much about allegory in those days.

Strangely, I'd been thinking of Arthur recently, mainly because there had been one or two "Arthur" moments in the last couple of days.

Earlier this week, Jules and I put on a web page demonstration in front of a small group of clients. One by one, the clients nervously approached the slim, elegant obelisk that is our iMac, each curious about what lurked behind the thin plasma screen and the sleek, seamless exterior, in a manner that was highly reminiscent of the scene in 2001 when the apes, led by Moonwatcher, approach the Monolith for the first time. It made me smile.

Almost at the same time, a group of youths - "hoodies" - made their slow, steady, insolent progress up Claremont Road, their predatory eyes checking each parked car for valuables, ephemera, cast-offs - anything that could be sold at a profit, or just stolen, because stealing is, in their eyes, cool. They bore a striking resemblance to Moonwater's adversaries and all that was needed to complete the picture was the jaw bone of a Wildebeest or an Antelope. Shame I didn't have one to hand.

I thought to myself "Go on. Just try breaking into our car. See what happens."

You see, we'd left Charlie, one of our Dalmatians, sitting behind the steering wheel and, even from my distant vantage point, I could see that his eyes were fixed intently on the would-be vandals, his tail wagging slowly, rhythmically, ready for a bit of Charlie style fun. The apes passed him by, which was a wise move. I would not like to mess with Charlie.

Back to Arthur.

Years later, I went to see "2010: Odyssey II" at a tiny, flea pit cinema in Gateshead. It was the only cinema in our area showing the film, which was a major disappointment. I still consider this the second best serious science fiction film ever, second only to "2001"!! Of course, the main star, Roy Scheider, died last month so it's a double-whammy as far as I'm concerned. "2010" is a more cohesive film, the narrative is linear and, critically, the visuals are secondary to the characters and the plot. It's a haunting film too, one that makes me stop and think every time I see it.

The star of both of these movies is, without a doubt, HAL-9000, the super computer.

I used to love the idea of having a thinking, talking, sentient computer sitting on my desktop. I still do but I think that all such computers should come with a health warning.

A couple of years ago, as an experiment, I hooked up a load of HAL-9000 samples to our old iMac so that, whenever something interesting happened, say an e-mail arrived or the machine powered up first thing in the morning, the computer spoke.

At first, I thought that this was fun. "Cool! Look! The computer talks..."

But, whoaaa, after less than a day, we began reaching for the volume control and, not long afterwards, the off switch.

HAL's voice became too intrusive. Typically, it would announce the start of the daily backup schedule or the arrival of an e-mail in the middle of dinner. This wasn't what you would call useful information. We didn't need to know it. Usually the e-mail was just spam - a penis enlargement advert or a 'get hooked up with hot girls in your neighbourhood' piece of junk. Or something about the backup disc becoming 85% full. Gee Whizzz.

See, the computer didn't know if the event was of any real value to its pet humans. It just did what it was told.

So, the next logical step was to teach the computer which e-mails were valuable and which were junk. Easy. Fix it with a spam filter. But that didn't stop the intrusive e-mails because not every incoming message was spam.

In the end, we switched the whole thing off, preferring silence to yet another voice in our heads and, to this day, my greatest fear is that we'll all end up with our very own HAL9000 sitting in our living rooms, keeping a watchful eye on us, on behalf of the government, and apparently for our own good.

However, I will stop and pause and think of Arthur today. Maybe he has at last solved the problem of what lies beyond. I hope so.

16-Mar-08: The smell of burning martyr

The air was rich and pungent with the smell of burning martyr yesterday. I decided, for reasons best known to myself, to spend most of the day sorting out the sequencer manual. I don't know why I decided to tackle that big job because I knew that a speedy and effective resolution would require much peace and quiet and an even larger amount of coffee-flavoured concentration. With 3 of our Dalmatian bitches in season at the moment and poor Charlie wandering around the house like a kid in a candy shop, it wasn't exactly peaceful or quiet. Actually, I think it would have been marginally morer restful if I'd set up a terminal in the middle of the A19 near Testo's Roundabout.

Sad to say, I have felt for some time that we had lost control of the whole manual project though, on reflection, it wasn't entirely our fault.

I began work on the manual in June 2006. One month and a bad case of bursitis later, the manual looked pretty good. I felt that I'd done a good job on it. It read with a single, consistent voice and although there were a few spolling wristaches, one or two examples of seriously bad grammar and a smidgen or two of very bad jokes, it worked. I was happy.

A couple of beta-testers read through the pilot version for me and they seemed pleased too.

One of my beta-testers, Dave P., took on the odious task of looking at the manual from the point of view of a technically-aware and experienced sequencer user and this is where the problems began. There wasn't a problem with Dave's efforts. Far from it. Our problems were caused by Microsoft's Word programme and it's apparent inability to successfully move documents between versions. Paragraphs would go missing, images would vanish, spelling mistakes would be missed, margins would change with no discernable pattern or logic.

The only reliable means of copying data between the three editors was to move single chapters, one by one, and then have poor old Jules collate these chapters into one volume, ready for printing. This was, frankly, a nightmare. No wonder she got to hate the whole process.

In the end, there were too many versions of the same document floating around as ZIP archives, SIT archives, PDF's and Word Documents, either on the net or on various memory sticks.

About a month ago, we decided to tackle the problem once and for all. We decided that one machine would handle all of the edits, the compilation and the printing. We wouldn't move documents between computers anymore except as PDF's that can't be changed (easily). We also bought a laser printer, a good one too, so there was no need to take the documents off site for printing and binding.

And so, full of good intentions, I sat down and began work on repairing the manual. I added around 3 or 4 pages of corrections, fixed some images and improved some of the explanations. That took me most of yesterday.

When I'd done what I could on the manual, I then went to work on our submission for the North-East Digital Awards. That took the rest of the day.

The end result is that it's now Monday morning and I am, frankly, exhausted. I gave myself virtually no time to relax and now my motivation is in the pan. I didn't do any sequencer testing this weekend. The studio is still a mess. I'm no further forward on the new Ion album.

So, I've given myself a polite and friendly slap on the wrist and made a mental note to myself that next weekend, Easter, is time off, time with the family, time in the studio. It is not time to play catch-up with the business.

Of course, the irony is that this blog entry is the first to be written with Microsoft Word. This was at the insistence of Jules, who doesn't read this blog very often but, when she last did have a butcher's, she felt that its impact and value as a diary was compromised by the large number of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors therein. My use of the English language is, at best, baroque and my spelling is occasionally atrocious so this move makes sense.

We'll see. It's another layer of complexity but I did like the way that the spelling-checker picked up that last sentence where I'd spelt occasionally, atrocious and language incorrectly. :)

This blog will be moving at the end of day. I've decided that T-Bass is be put on the back burner again, due mainly to the personnel problems discussed elsewhere. That doesn't mean to say that I won't be working on T-Bass tracks. It's just that they'll have a lower priority than the forthcoming Ion and Skin Mechanix album. As of tonight, the blog will be moved to the Skin Mechanix area and the T-Bass section of the site will be effectively moth-balled for the moment. I'll still leave a link in place because this blog has a fairly strong readership and I don't want to lose them like I did the last time around.

15-Mar-08: Fluffy Stuff II

Upon reflection, yesterday's blog entry was a real waste of space. It reads like a crappy little corporate mailout, the sort of thing that belongs in our News pages and, indeed, that's where it came from, simply because I didn't have the time, motivation or energy to come up with anything more interesting or incisive than those few scrappy words. What a disappointment. I really don't know what got into my head.

In truth, I've been more than busy. I didn't actually stop working until 8pm last night - new sequencers, new synths, the current crop of production instruments that are, at this moment, burning-in upstairs in the work room. I've also been imagining the new Ion album "Explore", sorting out the direction of Skin Mechanix as well as contemplating the demise of poor old T-Bass.

We've been talking about resurrecting T-Bass for years. We had some band meetings last year, which went well and everybody seemed generally in favour of taking the old band out for a spin around the block one more time. I wrote 3 or 4 new pieces and passed them around the various members for comments and feedback. Jules felt that there was some road miles in a couple of them, as did Dave, who came up with some excellent guitar arrangements and also some rather good pieces of his own. However, we heard nothing more from that camp for months and months, not until Christmas 2007, but then, due to a stomach bug, I wasn't really well enough to remember much of what was said. Certainly, there was no talk of reviving T-Bass, which was a major disappointment.

Then, last month, Dave let on that he's been gigging locally. It was quite clear that they hadn't wanted Jules and I to come along.

Now, he doesn't have to invite us along. It's not mandatory. And he knows I'm not a fan of acoustic guitars and all that happy, hippy, hand-wringing, heart-on-your-sleeve, pseudo-teenage angst that seems to be a obligatory component of such performances but he obviously didn't want us to come. I don't know why. It's a mystery.

Fair enough. It's his ball.

Ion has been asked to headline at an Awakenings gig in September and I've agreed to perform. So, have I gone back on my word and opted to participate in an event I said I wanted nothing more to do with? Yes, I have. But I have my reasons, which will become apparent as time moves on. I don't want to say anything more at this point because the discussions are commercially sensitive but I was impressed with the way that organiser Jez Creek has approached the whole event and that they appear to be doing everything they can to improve the attendance at these concerts including a better venue, proper advertising and working with other outfits to gain some better exposure.

The main reason I decided to give this gig a try was because it's an opportunity to work with Andy Condon of The Glimmer Room, who is one of the most talented musicians in the UK at the moment. Andy even has a remix out on the Mute label - Yes, I said the Mute label - and I really don't know why Andy isn't tooling around the UK in a Bentley, Porsche or something flashy. :)

However, the news from Andy isn't positive. The organisers say they want us to do some improvised stuff together and neither of us are keen on improvising. I'd far rather work something out in advance and give the punters a memorable performance beyond, of course, my legendary ability to fuck up completely by coming in too late, coming in too early or just playing the wrong bloody solo entirely. Funny how nobody noticed last time. :)

But the gig is 6 months away and that's more than enough time to work out what we want to do.

14-Mar-08: Fluffy Stuff

It's been announced that Ion will headline at an Awakenings event later this year (probably September 27th). Jules C will be assisting on keys and moog-aerobics.

This weekend, music by Ion and SkinMechanix will feature on the TD Fan Zone Podcast and on Terry Hawke's radioshow on Harborough FM. A live, phone-in/link-up is scheduled for April 2008. Whooo-hooo.... :)

A couple of other stations said they would be playing tracks but they haven't confirmed. We'll add more news when we have it.

13-Mar-08: Birthday

Today is my birthday. I'm 46 years old. Whoooppeee.... (not).

The bad vibes finally lifted yesterday, in part because this wretched storm that has been beating the crap out of our house for the last few days has finally died down to a point where you can walk out into the garden without the fear of being creamed by a lump of falling stonework.

Alas, our greenhouse did not fair too well. It was on it's face when I came home yesterday and I picked it up and tied it to the fence this morning, this time with something more secure than just a bit of household string. It was in a bad state when it got hit by a falling roof tile two weeks ago and it's been hammered several times since then.

There's more stonework in the garden this morning, except that it doesn't look like it's come from our roof. I can see tiles missing next door. Not surprising, really. 70 mph gusts tend to do that sort of damage.

The crappy mood finally lifted last night when I broke the back of a certain sequencer project and began to see daylight at the end of the tunnel. I now have a logical path to follow to make this thing work. It's gradual, step-wise and involves technology we currently have in-house. There's no great leap of faith required this time around. The mountain just got a bit smaller.

Musically, things improved dramatically later. There's a possible collaboration project with a band called Mooch, Ion's Future Forever will be available on CD Baby and a radio DJ, Terry Hawke wants to do an interview over the phone sometime in April. All good news.

We're off out today, to the Captain Cook Memorial Birthplace Museum in Middlesbrough. Should be quite a chuckle.

11-Mar-08: Total downer

I am on a total downer this morning.

Yesterday was a tough day at work. I fixed a couple of bugs and made a lot of hardware that all worked first time, but I sense that we're falling behind again and that much of the good work that both Jules and I have done since the start of the year is going to come unravelled unless we solve one or two basic problems. There are never enough hours in the day and people never, ever do what they say they're going to do. But that's the nature of running a business in the UK at the moment.

I spent a major part of last night in the studio, yet again sorting out the cabling. The plan was to get back to work on some new music after a short break. However, months and months of studio work, of patching stuff on the fly, of adding temporary bits of kit to the rig, of stripping the rig and then quickly re-assembling the whole set up after a gig etc etc etc, have all taken their toll on the equipment. Wires everywhere. Wires that go somewhere. Wires that go nowhere. Wires that wrap around other wires. Wires that have failed. Wires that go to the wrong place. Wires with the wrong labels. Wires with the right labels jammed under other bits of kit. It really is enough to make you scream.

Actually, I did scream. Several months ago, I left a tape in the DAT machine and, somehow, a short length of tape had wrapped itself around the play heads. I switched the DAT on and it made a dreadful chewing noise. Finally, the machine displayed a persistent Error Code 02, which wouldn't go away.

Eventually, I persuaded the DAT machine to expell the offending tape, which was busted. Fortunately, it was a scratch tape, for recording ideas and temporary sessions, and so nothing of immediate, life-shattering value has been lost. However, I live in absolute fear and terror of the DAT machine breaking down because so much of my early stuff is still on DAT and if the DAT dies then we have no economically viable way of restoring the data.

That left me irritable. Then I found that the Sycologic MIDI switcher was dead. I hadn't used it much in the last couple of years but it was, nevertheless, a valuable tool. A shame to toss it in the skip.

I got to work dusting off some of the analogue machines. My Moog Prodigy is just a dust-magnet. It's underused but I have nowhere to put it to get better use of it. It used to hang on a wall and maybe it will again.

Then I fell over one of the keyboard stands - a temporary affair for a sequencer to sit on - and I decided that I'd just about had enough of the bloody thing cluttering up the studio so out it went.

This morning, the studio looks like a bomb has hit it. That's doubly depressing.

I didn't sleep well. So now I'm tired, miserable and pissed off. The optimism and confidence that last week's adventures had generated has all but evaporated and, this morning, I feel that continuing the adventure is futile, a waste of time. I'd be better off working in a burger bar or behind someone else's desk.

The only cure for this kind of out-of-kilter mood is, strangely, work. The more I work the better I feel. The more I throw myself into building stuff, designing and coding new equipment then the happier I become.

So, instead of bitching on about a few messed up wires and the shitty weather, I'll just stop wasting everyone's time and go get on with something useful.

09-Mar-08: "Okay! No more weird, sh*t, I promise..."

We're barely out of the first week in March and I'm already exhausted. Exhausted but enthused, empowered and energised.

It's been a fun week. As detailed below, there was the Dick Mills/Jean-Jacques Perrey talk/concert at the Sage Gateshead last weekend but we also took in the Chris Watson Rain Forest Installations at the Sunderland Winter Gardens, followed by another evening with the God of Gloom, Monsieur Gary Numan and, finally, the closing event at the AV Festival, Scatter.

The Chris Watson event was absolutely breathtaking - 4 hours in the life of a rain forest, compressed into just 20 minutes of audio - and held in the darkened, semi-tropical surroundings of Sunderland's Winter Gardens.

This was an unplanned and somewhat hurried adventure. Simply put, I forgot the event was on until 7 o'clock on the Thursday night and what followed can only be described as a frantic dash through the darkened, deserted streets of Sunderland to get to the venue in time, with the nagging possibility that there would be no tickets available on the door. Hey ho. :)

The event began with distant thunder atop the raucous chatter of crickets, frogs, monkies and a few bewildered humans. 20 minutes later, we emerged shellshocked but thrilled. The Winter Gardens are normally closed at night, which is sad because that's when many of the tropical plants give up their scent in the hope of attracting insects for pollination. The effect is highly intoxicating and, coupled with the audio installation, it was one of those events that I won't ever forget. Simply unique.

Friday night was the much-anticipated Gary Numan gig, with Mr. Numan playing another of his themed concerts, this time around the Replicas album.

I'd been looking forward to this gig for months because Replicas was the album that kick-started this whole adventure. How did it start?

I was 18 and earning a bit of extra cash babysitting for a kid down the street called Damien. He was a little terror, an absolute sod and, on many, many occasions, I was more than tempted to smack the little git upside the head but didn't because, well, I'd seen the film The Omen, and fear of Satanic Retribution is a very effective restraint. Normally, I would take homework with me and occasionally coach Damien with his maths or physics but, on one occasion, half term I think, I took my then girlfriend along. Damien loved Lorriane on first sight. He was only 10 years old but he seemed to be fully aware of the opposite sex and all of the mysteries they held or, as I maintain, still hold because I don't fully understand the female of the species and I'm 47.

Damien had a copy of Replicas. He didn't like it. It didn't do anything for him and he was going to toss it in the bin but I put on the first track and was instantly transported to that strange place that Tubeway Army was all about. A real "Wow!" moment. However, as "Me! I disconnect from you!" gave way to the timeless "Are 'friends' electric?", I could hear screams coming from the kitchen. I took no notice. I suspected it was some horseplay and that Lorriane was just protesting in her usual vocal manner. I was wrong. It wasn't just a bit of horseplay, because Damien, having successfully distracted the babysitter, was attempting to remove my girlfriend's undergarments. Worse still, he was apparently unmoved by her protests.

I dragged the two apart and made sure they stayed at opposite ends of the house for the rest of the evening. I think Lorriane went home early and I don't blame her. I think we split not long after.

But, undergarments aside, Replicas pushed a switch and I became an instant fan. I still am. But I think you would agree that it's truly unique way to remember the first experience of a piece of music. :)

The gig itself was good but less passionate than previous events. It was also much shorter than other Numan concerts. Maybe Numan was tired or just scared of turning 50 the next day. Normally, you get at least 2 hours of material, a fair mixture of old and new, and then the encores but this event stopped after just 1.5 hours. Numan said that they'd run out of Replicas tracks but a look at some of the EP's of the day suggests otherwise. I think it's more likely that the venue told them to be finished by 10 pm so that they could close the doors and re-open for the heavy rock club that followed immediately afterwards - which, incidentally, was virtually deserted when we left. Shame.

But the gig itself was special because I've never heard the majority of these tracks performed live. "We have a technical" was particularly good, as was "When the machines rock", which had been given a massive injection of adrenalin to make it a huge, pumped up instrumental rock track. Even the solemn and somewhat boring "I nearly married a human" became something special.

But the evening will be best remembered for tracks like "You are in my vision" and "Praying to the aliens", which took on a new life. Enormously enjoyable.

I like this period of Numan's history because the vocals counjour up some brilliant imagery. He's so much better when he's not hating God all the time.

"Fade to scenes of violence, like a TV screen but silent,
"Where the victims are all paid by the hour.
"The wreckage of our here, lies broken in a corner.
"and everyone pretends they like to live that way.

After the gig, we bumped into our good friend, Kathy, who is always fun. Alas, we also ran into a gent I will refer to only as "TP", someone I didn't really want to see. No worries. After a mercifully brief conversation, "TP whirred away, into the night, like a nightmare on wheels" in search of a large breasted, passionate female who he claimed had been groping him at the front of the stage, though I suspect that she was simply an invention intended to impress anyone who would listen. It didn't.

We made our way to the after-show Party but this was a massive disappointment. Just a darkened room with a sticky carpet populated by teens trying to look cool and hip but failing miserably. Were we ever that young? Were we even that sad?

Instead, we spent ages chatting to Kathy outside the gent's loo, which was the only place you could go to escape the deafening racket coming from the rock club below and the allegded party above.

We left close to midnight, tired but happy.

Saturday was the closing day in the AV Festival. I had planned to go to the Chris Watson talk on Sound Recording but I had too much work to do and, frankly, I was still tired from the previous day. However, we did make it into Newcastle for the closing gala, an event called Scatter.

As we walked down Dean Street and onto the Quayside, we could hear the performance from the other side of the river Tyne. As a strange kind of synchronicity, a lone piper was standing not far from The Pitcher and Piano bar and was playing a slow, timeless lament as radio noises and incoherant samples appeared out of nowhere around him, creating a kind of etherial magic that both inspired and energised. Your really, absolutely cannot bottle this stuff. This is the kind of moment that you spend years yearning for and which all too quickly disappear into memory.

Inside the Baltic, the performance area was full of high tech radio receivers coupled up to large scale video projectors with the sound of eerie, distant radio sources all around us. The main attraction for me was just figuring out what the various computers were doing. I guess that Dave the Physicist took over from Dave the Artist on this occasion. I had terrific fun working out just what was going on. The participants appeared to be tuning in to radio sources both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, selecting those which appeared to be the most data-rich and mixing them in with a variety of other sounds. They were also broadcasting to the whole planet too, in keeping with the theme of the festival.

I used to love messing on with radios when I was a kid. There's a kind of romance at work here, a nostalgia of sorts, the mystery of tuning between stations, listening to fragments of broken and fractured conversations from the other side of the globe, maybe listening to radio hams communicating with warships sitting in the middle of the North Sea, or listening to the Police Band as the Boys in Blue did their best to catch the local Bad Boys.

I bumped into a college lecturer friend. He seemed as bewildered by the art as he was by the science. Without wanting to sound like an absolute arse - though I probably will - this was just another day at the office for me and so I was more than a little dismayed when he started taking the piss. Not impressed.

Anyway, I'm not sure what Jules thought of all these bleepy-bloopey noises. I think she's becoming a little punch drunk with all of the sonic weirdness of late so I didn't push my luck. We left after little more than 30 minutes but I felt terrific.

I've made a promise to myself to get back into the studio and start working again. First of all, it needs a good clear out. Some of the wiring needs sorting because it's in a right old state. Some of the old gear needs tossing in a skip too. I looked at my busted and broken Monowave synth and decided it needs a major facelift. It's a special instrument, number 2 of the 25 that were made and it has suffered horribly. When it was last sent in for a quick repair and an upgrade, it came back with one ear badly smashed up, as if it had been dropped, possibly on purpose. Shame. I guess we'll never know. It deserves better.

So, a busy week. Four gigs in less than a week. That should keep me going for a while.

Meanwhile, there's talk on one of the forums that is exciting - there is much talk of inviting T-Bass to perform again. We will see what happens.

03-Mar-08: Radiophonia / Jean-Jacques Perrey

Caution : this is a long post, probably the longest in the history of this blog. Indulge me. I like to talk. This time I have something to talk about.

On Saturday, Jules and I took at trip into Newcastle to see the former head of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, Dick Mills, give a talk at Radiophonia, part of the current regional AV Vision Festival. Dick's talk was on the history and legacy of the Radiophonic Workskop and, pretty much as expected, it was a bright and breezy whistle stop tour around the founding of the workshop, some of the early work, the key staff staff (Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram etc) and (inevitably) their work with Doctor Who.

It was an enjoyable talk, well thought out and well illustrated though Dick was plagued by problems caused by Microsoft's crudy Powerpoint application. It just doesn't work and Microsoft just don't care enough about their users to actually fix the damned application.

The hall was pretty full of the usual mix of sad sacks, desperados and wanna-be boffins and, aside from the ever-present bobble-hat brigade, there was a surpring number of cool dudes and even chickies filling the seats. Usually any women at such events are there because their boyfriends have dragged them along. Yeah, Yeah, I know. I did exactly the same with Jules but, remember this - she later morphed in Jules C, Queen of Moog-Aerobics, so I can (and should) be forgiven. Still, fewer nerds and more chicks has got to be a good thing.

Rather than just leave for home, we stuck around for the next session, which was a showing of a DVD documentary/interview about the French Musician, Jean-Jacques Perrey. Perrey is someone I'd heard of in passing but I had to confess that I didn't know his music or his history. The DVD proved to be extremely interesting and very funny. Perrey's history is very much a case of a talented and at the same time extremely lucky musician - the two rarely go together - who was very good at meeting the right person at the right time, leading to collaborations and friendships with, amongst others, Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Robert Moog and Gershon Kingsley.

Jean-Jacques' is perhaps best known as the father of sampling, a technique he discovered by cutting up lengths of tape and sticking the ends together to create rhythmic loops based on natural, found and electronic sounds. The technique has it's origins in musique concrete but, today, we call it sampling.

It was a fun video and I wished I'd been able to hang around for Jean-Jacques' demonstration in the afternoon but, alas, the real world demanded that we head for home. Shame. There was a concert that night featured Monsieur Perrey and I had a nagging feeling that missing it would be a shame. That feeling persisted right through dinner until, at 1840, I announced, much to Jules' chagrin, that I was off into Newcastle again. Though less than thrilled at spending Saturday night at home on her lonesome, she understood because she knows what I'm like when I get like this.

This left me with 50 minutes to get into Gateshead, park the car, find a cash point and walk to the Sage Gateshead. I managed it. Just. Of course, I had to deal with the ticketting staff at The Sage, who bring a whole new meaning to the word 'relaxed'.

Hall 2 of the Sage Building is like a mediaevil torture chamber, kind of a thunderdome for pre-teens. It's on 3 levels, each more damnable that the last. The ground floor is mostly given over to the "Mosh Pit", sort of a modern day gladiatorial arena though with fewer severed limbs. It's surrounded on 3 sides by seats that would make San Quentin's Old Sparky feel almost comfortable.

Level Two is much the same, except that you get to look down on the peons in the pit below, maybe throw them the odd bone or spit on them should they fail to please the Emporer. I have no idea what Level Three is like. I was able to discern shadowy, indistinct figures moving around in the gloom but they could have been anyone or anything up there. I now have a reasonable clue of what was going through Dante's Mind when he conceived of the Seven Pits of Hell.

The evening kicked off with a fairly eclectic DJ set that failed to inspire one way or the other. More or less as soon as I found a place to park my tired little legs, worn red and chaffed from friction burns caused by wearing jeans too tight for my own good, I recognised a voice I've not heard in 20 years - not since my days of lecturing at Projects UK in Newcastle. I'm still not convinced that it was the individual in question but, to protect myself from any potential ego-googling fisticuffs, I'll change his name slightly.

Larry Brewis could - and probably does - bore for England. As a lecturer, you meet all types of student - the talented, the creative and the passionate as well as the average, the dim and the hopeless. Brewis was none of these and yet all of these at the same time. I have no doubt that he was talented but his speciality subject certainly wasn't music and so it was all the more astonishing that Jules and I found ourselves in one of his concerts, a piece called "Dice and Chance" or something like that. Jules went to sleep and, head down, began snoring. Loudly. I began to laugh. So did a few other luckless souls.

Jules was the fortunate one. The rest of us had to sit through this musicial equivalent of nappy rash, each wearing our critic's "brave face", and hoping to God Almighty that he wouldn't ask us to truthfully tell him what we thought of this acoustic navel fluff.

Anyway, I spotted Brewis sitting a few seats away from me. He was talking - no, shouting - at a male friend who looked bewildered and bored in equal measure. I kept my head down and Brewis was too busy boring his mate to death to notice me.

I was distracted as a rather nice young lady sat down beside me. Once seated, she took out her phone and began frantically texting, just as the next act came on stage. I'm sure the recipient was one of the performers. A group of around 12 musicians under the banner of 'The Sage Improvisation Group' appeared and, frankly, I wasn't optimistic. On paper, it sounded crap. Lock 12 people in a room with various synths and drum machines for a week and see what they come up with.

I was wrong. Dead wrong. This was wonderful stuff. I have no idea if the music was any good or if I was just in the right frame of mind but this was plain, honest, back-to-basics music making, the kind of thing I dreamed of when I was kid and just starting out on this weird and wonderful journey. Tape effects fused with distorted rhythmic beats, synced to in-ya-face electronic weirdness. Just bloody perfect. It wasn't pop. It wasn't structured. It was perhaps more than a little self-indulgent but I enjoyed it. In spades.

However, throughout the performance, there was a persistent drone from somewhere in the Hall. From an engineering point of view, it wasn't loud enough to be heard properly but I knew it was there. And it was certainly intermittent enough to be bloody annoying, a frequent omni-directional hiss coupled with a rather juvenile giggling, kind of like feedback-induced Beavis and Butthead.

This cause was Brewis, discussing the relative merits - or otherwise - of the music, the musicians and their technology. All of his comments seemed to be aimed squarely at the denigrating those on stage whilst, at the same time, bigging up his own efforts. Wanker. The sweet little chickie sitting next to me was obviously just as annoyed because we both looked at Brewis with an expression that clearly indicated that one more word from his spotty face would result in him having his dick removed with a broken beer bottle.

Brewis remained silent for the rest of the performance.

Alas, the young lady disappeared and, rather than listen to anymore of the DJ's acoustic meanderings, I went for a walk. The options were limited. The bar was too crowded to stand and wait for a glass of luke-warm, watered-down kangaroo's urine dressed up as lager but The Free Trade Inn was too far away to get to without further chaffing and so I just stood on the smoking terrace with the rest of the social outcasts and watched the river twisting into the night.

Jean-Jacques Perrey took to the stage exactly on time. He's 79 and I sincerely hope, hand on heart, that I don't have to wait that long before an audience takes to my electronic musings in the same way. They went wild. Jean-Jacques and his collaborator, Dana Countryman, were treated and greeted like they'd found a cure for male pattern baldness. Straight away, Jean-Jacques began his affable self-effacing banter with the crowd, who lapped up every single word. The duo then jumped into a barrage of jaunty, fun, bright and energetic pieces that sounded so very familiar but yet I couldn't place them. This was music from my childhood, an accompaniment to adverts, cartoons and TV programmes from 40 years before. This wasn't serious, po-faced art music. This was the child-like, fun, maybe innocent face of electronic music and - although it took a while - I got to like it.

The audience went mad. Clearly revelling in this adulation, Jean-Jacques joked and giggled with the audience, each feeding off the other to create a kind of party ambience that you just don't get in electronic music concerts these days.

Jean-Jacques and Dana Countryman left the stage after an hour but were quickly back for an encore - Jean Jacques' much sampled track trance hit, EVA. Originally composed in the 60's, EVA contains elements that are immediately familiar to those who follow the likes of Jarre and TD, and this is when it really hit home. The guy is a genius. I've heard this piece many, many times over the last 40 years and yet I never knew who wrote it. Now I do.

Jean-Jacques' left the stage amid demands for further encores, which, alas, were not forthcoming though he did promise to come around again fairly shortly. I, for one, will make the effort.

The walk back to the car took ages. It was raining and blowing a small gale but I didn't care. I was happy.

This gig was an illumination. It confirmed suspicions that I've harboured for a long time. It's an ugly little half truth that certain folk in the current UK synth music scene don't like to admit and won't readily accept.

There really is an audience for electronic music.

Before we go any further, let's look at the current UK EM scene.

There are, in place, a series of unspoken, undocumented but never-the-less true tenets that hold the scene in place, or hold it back. Take your pick.

The scene is populated almost entriely by middled-aged men with just enough disposable income to collect every single Klaus Schulze CD that there ever has been, currently is or is ever likely to be. They are, however, universally short of cash when it comes to buying your latest release.
The fans and the artists are one and the same. Everyone in the scene is a practitioner. Everyone who comes to a gig is either working on a new album or has finished the latest installment and will release it at the gig, either as a limited edition CDr or as a download on Musiczeit.
"Tangerine Dream are shit. They sold out in 1976. Baumann and Jolliffe should be made to come back and publically horsewhip Edgar Froese, who is the Devil incarnate, a heretic who should never have let his son join the band because that was, like, just uncool. Man."
Although few will openly admit this, even on pain of death, the gear REALLY IS more important than the music.
Audiences for this kind of music are always small. But that doesn't matter because only a select few have the mojo to be permitted access to this quasi-religious experience.
There is no point in advertising electronic music gigs because nobody ever turns up to them anyway, even if the venue is right in the middle of a busy city centre full of teenagers out on the pull.
Electronic music concerts must be held in weird and wonderful venues such as planetariums or planetariums because, like, man, that's what the music demands. If no planetariums are available in your neighbourhood then the gig will be held in a scruffy bar in the wrong end of town run by a dodgy team of former convicts.
Women are the exception rather than the rule. If a woman turns up at an electronic music gig, she is either with someone, lost or mad.
"Tangerine Dream are still shit. They passed their best in 1976 when Baumann left. They should never have stopped playing Rubycon. Period."
Earning money from electronic music is not just bad, it is truly evil because the music transcends time and space, and matters of materialism and economics devalue one's artistic purity.

Let's look at each one of these points and both compare and contrast with tonight's experience:

The audience demographic was not exclusively middle-aged men. There was a full sweep of ages and, critically, genders - teenies bopping in the mosh pit, a few middle-ages couples standing around, some watching, others being watched. The octogenarians were on stage.
Most of the folk in the audience were out for one thing - a good time and a chance to bump uglies with a member of the opposite sex. Nobody except the artists on stage was plugging a new album.
Tangerine Dream are not shite. They never were. They are the Godfathers of the scene. They have traced a path right the way from the pioneering work of Jean-Jacques and Bob Moog and are still producing music today. Whether it's good or not depends upon your tastes but you'd be surprised at how many younger folk chill out to Messers Franke, Froese and Baumann. (Deny this at your peril...)
The gear is just a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less. There are good tools and bad tools but, essentially, your measure as a musician is not dictated by the number of synths you have or the number of sequencers you can chain together.
The audience tonight was around 400, most of which were paying customers. There were more people in the toilet when the stage had cleared than there are at most UK EM gigs.
The Sage did a good job at advertising the gig. Press conferences, billboards, TV broadcasts all meant that the attendance atthe festival was good.
The gig took place in a concert hall with a decent stage, a good PA, an excellent lighting rig, fully trained and professional front-of-house staff and a professional, knowledgable sound crew.
There were more men than women in the audience but the women were mostly there by choice rather than as an add-on to a gear-obsessed male.
Tangerine Dream still aren't shite, no matter how much you bleet on that they sold out to Richard Branson in 1973. They've grown and evolved, just as the EM scene has grown and evolved into several different genres, not just Berlin School. Stand still for too long and you risk becoming a dinosaur.
400 people all playing £5 a head and with corporate sponsorship from a large number of major organisations across the region meant that everyone was earning from this little number. Money isn't dirty. It doesn't devalue what you do. It only hurts what you do if it becomes the prime focus of what you do.

Where am I going with this?

What I'm saying is this. Electronic music doesn't have to be elitist. It doesn't have to be surrounded and cradled by a blanket of intellectual worthiness or wear the carefully constructed aura of studied, serious art. It can be populist. It can hold its own in the modern musical melange.

So why has the UK EM scene disappeared almost completely? Why does the UK EM scene seem so keen to disappear so completely?

In my not-so-humble opinion, it's down to two elements - a lack of confidence and a lack of ability. The main exponents don't believe in themselves enough to be able to perform their stuff in front of a real audience and, by real audience, I mean an audience that isn't made up of their back-slapping friends. Equally, they don't have the basic musicality and/or communiations skills to be able to get up on stage and put on a show. Music is, after all, about communication. Instead, they disguise their lack of skills with a bewildering array of technology and substitute sonic weirdness for musical ideas. A significant number of the practitioners boast of their enormous musical collections going back several decades and yet their music still relies very heavily on just one or two influences from one or two periods in their long and complex creative journey - specifically Klaus Schultze, circa 1979-1983 and Tangerine Dream, circa 1973-1976. Both of these outfits are still going today, 40 years after they began. They've moved through many phases and styles as their moods change and develop and yet the UK EM scene appears fixated on just one period.

So why am I still bitching on about a scene that I left sometime last year? Fair point. I'm unhappy because the scene has all but disappeared. I'm unhappy because we had an audience, an audience that liked our music, enjoyed what we did and bought our discs, not in ones and twos but by the bloody thousand. I'm unhappy because I tried to get a gig last week and the organisers were reluctant to accommodate anything that wasn't exactly the same as every other act on the bill. I'm unhappy that the scene has been taken over by one or two individuals who run it as though it was their own personal fiefdom, controlling who is in and who is out, controlling access to the music, controlling sales and, whether you like it or not, sales are the lifeblood of this operation. I don't do this for the money but there comes a time when you have to stop subsidising gigs, stop paying for petrol out of your own pocket or disgusing trips to remote locations in tiny towns in front of maybe 20 people under your company expenses account.

Whilst I maintain links with one or two friends, I'm not actively promoting our music to the usual culprits within the UK EM scene. Instead, we've been pushing all of our albums towards radio stations, in the hope that greater airplay would encourage more and more people towards our online shop, the plan being that, eventually, we wouldn't be castrated by the dealers and all of our tunes would be marketted and sold by download sites, with the exception of the physical discs bought through our shop. That strategy is starting to work. Download sales at Magnatune have been very encouraging. Future Forever is back into the Magnatune Top 50 again - it's currently sitting at number 18. Other sites have faired less well but we'll do what we can to help them.

So, back to the gig.

What I've been searching for is a new audience, a new set of venues and, in particular, a new scene. I think I've found it. Jean-Jacques Perrey is not a household name and yet he still managed to draw a good crowd, in much the same way as other mainstream acts are able to do. The same is true of the University gig last year. The audience was nearly 70 souls and not the 8 or 9 paying guests that normally turn up to your average EM gig. This is good news.

So, the next step is find this new audience and get gigging again.