24-Sep-07: Winter Draws On

Yesterday, I mowed the lawn for the last time this year. Though the sun was bright and the sky clear, there was that unmistakable chill in the air that spoke, in hushed and respectful tones, that winter was drawing close.

Bollocks.

Now begins the long slow slide into the annual festival of darkness, made worse this year by the generally acknowledged feeling that we didn't have much of a summer.

I repeat. Bollocks.

Whilst I don't mind the dark nights, I don't like the shorter days. It's harder to get stuff done and I don't like working under artifical light. Dark nights are great for astronomy and observing but they're getting rare these days because the weather patterns have changed. Cloudy and wet is more usual for this part of the world.

Dark nights are great for hiding yourself away in the studio. It's possible to just pull the blinds down and lose yourself in your little electronic world amidst all of the flashing lights and weird buzzy noises. Most of what I consider my best material has been written in the middle of winter when the heady distractions of summer are either a distant memory or an eagerly anticipated dream.

Soon, the Houghton Feast will be upon us, a fun-fair and fireworks display organised around the annual Houghton-Hetton inter-village punch up. Though generally low key, this event became a little too heated two years ago and the Police had to step in to restore order. News of this wonderful open-air brawl even reached the front pages of the Evening Chronicle and even the local BBC News Magazine programme Look North ran a feature which is unusual because this is a media organisation not generally known for reporting anything except items on sick children, funny pets and football.

After that, it's Hallow'en, followed by Bonfire night and then the long, slow run up to Christmas and New Year. The urge to mutter Bah-Humbug is stronger than ever.

However, this year will be slightly different in that there is an additional event to brighten the mid-winter gloom - a school reunion.

The big question is... Should I attend? Whilst I generally enjoyed my time at Rutherford Comprehensive School, I left under something of a cloud because my A-Level results were not exactly spectacular. I liked most of the teachers, with the notable exception of Mr. Tonks, but I did not enjoy the company of many of my fellow pupils and I have to ask myself why on Earth I would want to meet up with many (or any!) of them again.

Jules doesn't think I should attend on the grounds that I haven't spoken to any of these people in 28 years and I truthfully wouldn't recognise most if I met them in the street anyway. I don't think I should attend because there doesn't seem to be much point in participating in what will doubtless become just a pissing contest regarding who earns the most money, has the biggest house, the ugliest wife etc etc etc.

But part of me is curious about my fellow pupils. Did they do well? Did they succeed? Did they make a difference? I still remember most of these people as they were in those last few days at school in June 1980. In other words, biggoted, opinionated, stroppy teenagers. They will surely have changed, as I have changed. I am certainly not the painfully-shy, out-spoken prick I was when I was 18. Or at least I sincerely hope I'm not. So what have they become?

And so I will probably attend though I will almost certainly hide myself away at the back, prefering the seclusion of the shadows to the bright lights where nobody can see the ravages of time writ large across my face and that my waistline certainly isn't what it was in 1980. But at least I still have all of my hair!

And, of course, it would be nice to speak to the likes of Ernie Moss and David Waugh, my old Physics teachers. David Laws and Elizabeth Leighton too and doubtless Maxine Hamilton-Birkmire will find it highly amusing that her most illiterate of pupils ended up working as a journalist.

It would be nice to patch things up with Arthur Lamb and perhaps thumb my nose at Peter Gaskill, my former music teacher but, alas, all these folk must be getting on in years and, doubtless, some of them will have drifted off into the long, dark sleep. However, I've since learned that my Head Mistress, Miss Kirkby, will address the gathering. Now, she was extremely ancient and gnarled back in 1980, a bit like Yoda's mother, and if she's survived to this day then there's a chance that the likes of George Dixon and Grace Gilroy will still be around. That would be good. They were special people and I use what they taught me nearly every single day.

So, 'winter draws on', as my Grandmother used to say. It's a funny time of year. Usually, the onset of winter is a chance to think about the past year, to remember what was and what might have been but, truthfully, 2007 seems to have gone by faster than any other year I can think of. Ah well. Time to start on my Christmas List.

 18-Sep-07: Echoes

I was on a real high last night and, truthfully, I still haven't come down yet, 12 hours later. John Diliberto of Echoes Radio emailed me to say that Ion's Future Forever CD would feature in their forthcoming playlists and this is just terrific news.

Echoes is a widely syndicated radio programme which goes out across something like 150 US radio stations from Maine to California and the audience is absolutely huge. This means that Ion will finally achieve what T-Bass and SkinMechanix could not - major US airplay.

Of late, I haven't really wanted to do another Ion disc. Even with better than expected airplay, the sales have been disappointing. But this isn't really about money, is it? It's not about profit and loss. It's about doing something that's fun and enjoyable. It's an adventure, not an excercise in accountancy.

The signs are that Ion will be one of those projects that takes a while to get going and build up a bit of momentum. Skin Mechanix didn't exactly get off to a flying start. It took about 3 months before people really started to take notice. Why should Ion be any different?.

 14-Sep-07: One small day...

Some days this job sucks.

Some days you spend hours fighting faceless, anonymous bureacracy only to end up precisely nowhere.

Some days, you spend your time fighting idiots who don't care what they do or how they do it just so long as you don't interrupt their conversations about Big Brother or whatever.

Some days, you just wish you had never started this project in the first place.

But yesterday was not one of those days.

Yesterday made the past 5 years worthwhile.

The "Wow!" factor says it all.

 12-Sep-07: Thought experiments

I went for a long, long walk last night with two of our four dogs, Reo and Charlie. I took these two because they're calm, quiet and they get on well with people. Plus, they don't go picking fights with other dogs 4 times their size.

The sun was already well below the horizon when we set out, with twilight finally yielding to the sodium-tinged blackness of night. Jupiter was low down in the south and one or two stars were only just visible, each playing peekaboo with the intermittent cloud cover.

The Meadows is nearly always peaceful after 8 o'clock and you rarely meet another soul once you leave your front door. I actually prefer walking after midnight, when it's really quiet and the only sounds come from nature - mice, foxes and the occasional owl - as opposed to the usual nocturnal sounds of Houghton - house alarms, speeding cars and the odd drunk. But this is a work night and I have to be up early in the morning.

This walk is special because I love the silence of the Meadows and, in particular, the owls. They slide through the still night air like nature's very own Stealth Fighter. Last time I was up there for a night walk, I got to within 2 feet of a Little Owl. It was sitting on a signpost and it looked at me and I looked at it and we simply passed eachother with little more than an "evenin'". Had this been the Dark Ages then such an encounter would have been treated as mysterious, a portent of things to come. Maybe they still are.

I had a great deal of thinking to do, thinking best done in the privacy of the outdoors, away from TV sets, people and the ever-present computer. Jules was busy with a VAT return and I've learned to stay out from under her feet when she performs that particular feat of magic.

Yesterday was a rough day, made worse by one company in particular (Farnell) but I will say no more, partly because it's not very interesting and partly because I found a better, cheaper solution that will be here by Friday and not November.

Why was isolation and solitude so important tonight? Well, I wanted to test an idea I'd had with respect to generating more material for the T-Bass project. T-Bass is a difficult band to write for. The format is rock-oriented, structure-based music. It rarely deviates from the standard verse-verse-chorus rock song form and finding new tunes and melodies is quite, quite difficult unlike the SkinMechanix and Ion stuff, which more or less writes itself.

I had this idea that I could sing some of the pieces first, starting out with a melody line and a verse and then finding a chorus that flows smoothly from it. The key here is the word smoothly because a lot of the existing T-Bass stuff seems to be a little disjointed and un-natural, forced even. I think this is partly because I've never had any formal musical training and partly because there's a gap between developing an idea and implementing it at the keyboard and I haven't yet learned to bridge that gap in a manner which works properly.

I tried a few ideas out in the house, humming and occasionally singing, but these efforts just made the dogs bark. Plus the acoustics in this house are not brilliant, the phone never stops ringing and there's too much work to do on sequencers and VAT returns etc and trying to lose yourself in an escapist idea it just pure folly.

And so I set off into the wilds to try out this idea, with just my spotty companions as witness to this strange adventure. And you know something?

It works.

I came up with two or three ideas that I was able to hum first and then sing out loud, with scat lyrics added over the top to help cement the theme in my head. Once the verse and chorus had found a home, the song just wrote itself. Simple. The fun came in adding little sideways diversions, taking the piece in another, somewhat unexpected direction.

So now I have a new tool to exploit. But first, I have to find a way to do this in the house, in front of a keyboard. I still can't do it in front of anyone else, mostly because it sounds dreadful and also because I really don't have the confidence.

But I'm thrilled again. And I also wonder what the owls will make of the strange human that spoils their night time killing spree with his strange, strange mating calls.

Of course, the bad news yesterday was the Joe Zawinul, keyboard player, passed away, and that tempered the mood somewhat. I only discovered Zawinul last year by accident, during a concert on BBC4 and I liked what I heard though the man himself seemed difficult and temperamental. I subsequently learned that he was an old school keyboard player, with an emphasis on developing real chops as opposed relying on technology to mask your lack of skills. Anyway, a real shame.

 10-Sep-07: Oh God! It's that time of year again!

It's September and the heat of the summer sun is slowly fading into the quiet coolness of those wonderful autumn nights where it's warm enough to work outside in your shirt-sleeves, to enjoy the heady scent of honeysuckle and lemon balm and all of the other spices and herbs in the garden without being chilled to the bone. Alas, the nights are drawing in again but there's now a stillness in the air which is disturbed only by the gentle buzz of children playing quietly at the front of the house.

It's now possible to sit back and simply enjoy the peace and tranquility of life in Hughes Manor, now that our 7 year nightmare has ended. Our old neighbours have moved out, gone to make someone else's life a joy to behold and we now have new neighbours, Pat and Norman. They're both retired and as much in need of peace and quiet as ourselves. Bliss.

No more tuneless dance music belting out at 120dB, clearly audible though 2 10" thick brick walls and a 10 foot air gap, nobody cutting up paving stones on a bandsaw at 10 o'clock at night and only 2 cars parked in the driveway instead of the usual 5. Yeah, 5 cars in front of one house. Jeese. Better still, the estate is no longer full of various chavs, pikeys and assorted ner-do-wells, all trying to out-cool eachother in their various Burberry Flat Caps and Kappa Slappa Nylons suits.

So, life here is peaceful once more. Apart from one small issue.

Yes, September sees the return of those wonderful eight-legged bastards.

This is a modified version of a blog entry from last year, reproduced here for the benefit of Jules. Ahem. (I've modified it to remove a couple of gramatical errors and all of the bad language. I make no effort to be family friendly but the anglo-saxon content simply detracted from the piece.)

From my blog, dated 15th Septmebr 2006.

The house is silent, at peace. Apart from the gentle whir of the Mac's internal fan and an occasional burst of digital noise from the JD990, the only sound in the room is the clock on the studio wall. This is chance to relax, a chance to loose oneself in one's thoughts, to think big thoughts, big beautiful ideas and big impossible dreams.

But then another blood-curdling scream fills the house. The shrill tone cuts you to the bone and the small voice in your head brings forth a silent scream of it's own. "But this can't be! Have they returned? I thought they'd gone?".

And then the madness takes over. Your soul begins to blaze, your heart begins to pound and every concious thought transforms you from your peaceful, resting state to that of the hunter, a red-eyed, screaming banshee on a mission to settle old scores. Will this be our last battle?

And then the scream begins. It is a scream filled with a blood lust. It is a scream that demands vengance. A scream for all humanity.

The lady of the house stands motionless, gripped by a primal fear that is timeless and ancient. She is facing this enemy once again. The expression on her face announces her terror as she points with a slowly wavering finger, her lips trembling. She points at something dark, something alien, something that does not belong.

It is the old enemy.

This enemy does not know mercy.

This enemy does not know compasion.

This enemy lives to hunt. It lives to kill.

But this enemy does not show its face willingly. It prefers the anonymity of the dark places. It will hide here until later. It will hide here until it feels safe to venture forth, propelled forwards by 10 billion years of blood lust. Safe to hunt. Safe to prey.

.... Okay.... Okay... Enough of the Clive Barker/Stephen King stuff...

Yes, it's September again and that means it's time for those eight-legged bastards to put in their annual appearance.

Yes, we're talking about spiders. Arachnids. Every year, around this time, they come in from the garden and wander around the house in search of a place to hide, so that they can ride out the winter, and a mate. Yeah. They're hunting for a little spider-babe of their own... so that they can go make lots of other little spiders.

Awww... Ain't that sweet?

Well, it would be if it wasn't for one thing. For some reason best known only to themselves, these little hairy shitheads always make a b-line straight for Jules.

Maybe in a previous life, Jules was the Spider Woman. Maybe she was some kind of spider- royalty. Jules C, Queen of the Spider People. Maybe she was a long, slender, vampish femme fatale from some 30's B movie and wore long, slender, vampish dresses. Maybe she wove a web of intrigue around her so that, later, she might devour any man who happened to fall under her spell.

Frankly, I dunno, which isn't a very satisfactory answer. I do know that we're talking about the Common House Spider (Tegenaria duellica) or it's slighlty larger relative Tegenaria gigantea.

All I know is that I'm sick of these little buggers. Every night this week, my downtime has been interrupted by one scream after another. Like our smoke alarm going off, Spider! Spider! Spider! announces the arrival of another intruder and our hero, Captain Dave, must sprint into action to save the day, newspaper in one hand, jamjar in the other.

It would be so easy to just stomp on the little sod. It would be so easy to squash the little bastard into the carpet. But I prefer not to. The beast must be subdued. Tamed. Controlled. I corner the little bastard and then, somehow, slide the jamjar over the little sucker's head without breaking its legs.

Thereafter, the lid is placed atop the jamjar and Boris the Spider gets to spend the rest of the evening inside his very own, personal conservatory. There's usually a couple of coffee grounds left in the jamjar so Boris gets an extra special caffiene buzz, which will keep it up all night and probably accounts for why the little bastards always seem so jumpy.

"That's a really big one!", says Jules, as part of the ritual. I don't understand the fear. I really don't. Yes, the little bastards can run. Yes, the little bastards can jump. Hell, they can even bite. But I've never met one yet who could stand up to a twat on the head with a rolled up copy of the Newcastle Journal. And really big isn't very big at all. The body is usually no more than 15mm, though the legs add another 10mm either side. That's 35mm. An inch and a half in old money.

So I really don't understand the fear.

Liberty will not come until the next morning. I have learned not to release spiders at night for two reasons. One, they just make their way back to the house and annoy you all over again and two, the little bastards can jump and then you really don't know where the hell they are. Up your trouser leg? On your t-shirt? (Did a shiver just run up your spine?). Safer just wait until the morning.

When morning comes, yours truly gets the job of escorting the little hairy shithead (in its makeshift conservatory) over to the nearbye playing field where it is released back into the wild.

And where, hopefully, some blackbird or thrush will make a meal of it.

Eight-legged bastards.

 05-Sep-07: Noise! Noise!

One of the joys of this life is that creative bursts come when you least expect them. Sometimes, you can feel them approaching, like the distant rumble of thunder on a summer's day and you know it's time to start hunting for an umbrella or, instead, just get your kit off and go dancing, naked, in the rain. Incidentally, there should be a law in England that makes it mandatory for all of the tight-asses and miserable b*stards to go dancing naked in the rain at least once a month so that they can see there's more to life than celebrities and Big Brother. But I digress.

Sometimes, these creative bursts creep up on you unannounced. They're a delight when they do turn up, like the surprise guest at a dinner party or perhaps finding the forgotten £5 note you hid from your beloved lest she spend it on disinfectant or soap up at the Co-op. A welcome if unexpected arrival.

The worst possible case is when they linger just at the edge of perception, tantalisingly close but oh-so-just-out-of-reach that it makes you want to scream. I'm stuck in this phase right now. But there's a reason for this.

Right now, Hughes Manor is surrounded, on all sides, by building work. Over the road, there's the Shepherd's building site, an experiment in socio-engineering to see if human beings really can live like battery hens, crammed in so tightly that there's no space for anything remotely like privacy.

Then, at the end of the cul-de-sac, BT are installing a new trunk to supply the afore-mentioned building site. That's been going on for more than a week now and the sound of a deafening roar of a rip saw hacking through the pavement has been getting closer all week. Now it's arrived.

To finally put the tin-lid on it, our new neighbours are having a garden makeover and this too involves the use of a lot of power tools and much Nuts-like conversations between the participants. i.e. "Phoooawwwwwhhhh!!! Look at the tits on that!!! Wouldn't you like to slap the fat and ride the waves, eh??". except that the lady in question is the local priest's housekeeper and she's over 70!

This is Hell on Earth. This is like being trapped at an Autectre Concert, with out of tune, industrial noise coupled with undecipherable, gutteral vocals coming at you from every possible quarter.

Peaceful, tranquil and quiet is not how I would describe this small corner of the world. And, throughout all of this, yours truly is trying to concentrate, to dream up the impossible and then build it. It's actually difficult trying to figure out if it's time to put the kettle on. I feel completely numb.

Please God, if you are there up in Heaven, make these noisy bastards go away.

 03-Sep-07: Where to now?

I decided that August would be a non-musical month, a break away from the studio. Hence the lack of musical postings.

Whilst Species was a lot of fun and I enjoyed putting it together, I still felt that it could have been better. I felt that I ran out of inspiration towards the end, that I was reworking old stuff just to extend the running time of the final disc. There's nothing wrong in doing this - lots of composers pad their good stuff with seconds and out-takes just to meet their contractual obligations. They just don't like admitting it to their fans.

Instead, I spent most of August exploring Second Life, a VR simulation, which I've mentioned in previous posts.

Second Life seems to polarize opinions. Some see it as a fun way to experiment with an alternate personality, able to participate in activities not possible (or even legal) in the Real World. Others see it as a commercial enterprise, with money to be made, won and lost. Others see it as another outlet for their artistic endeavours, as a means of visualising objects that might not be possible or physically viable in the real world. However, many observers see Second Life as fake, entirely false, childish even. To them, it's and populated by losers and no-hopers looking for an escape from their cruddy personal circumstances.

All points of view have their merits.

Anyway, I set out with three main objectives - firstly to explore, to see what could be done and what might be possible. Secondly, I wanted to see if there was any future in this environment, both artistically and financially. That's the challenge. The net is full of lots of ways to waste your time. And money. Thirdly, I just wanted to have fun, to meet people who I would not normally encounter on, say, Houghton High Street, or in some of the bulletin boards or chat rooms I frequent.

I tried to be serious in my activities but, frankly, the place is just so much fun that you can't really help but get involved with people and situations that are well outside of your comfort zone. And why not?

The key to Second Life is the people you meet and the contacts you make. And I met all manner of people - some strange, some interesting, some obsessed. And, yes, I met the full spectrum of complete loonies too, some far worse than others. What more can I say, except that you should just be thankful that some of these people are sitting at home in front of a computer instead of walking streets.

But I also met the clever ones, the creative ones, the real deal. I met a good healthy mix of artists, musicians and producers, all beavering away at music and video that wouldn't look out of place in my record collection. Or yours. In fact, I met all manner of creative types who are seriously pushing the medium as far as they possibly can. I also met the bankers, the entrepreneurs and the risk-takers, all following the money in search of the next big thing in the internet. And then there were the dreamers, the idealists and the visionaires looking for what? I'm not 100% sure. Second Life is like the World Wide Web was 10 years ago, before all of the poisonous little frat boys took over and filled it full of hate and bile and adverts for cheap Viagra and even cheaper porn.

I found all manner of new and exciting ways to create and develop what I'm trying to do here, and, with the help of some very special people, I began to see how to realise ideas and concepts that I've had buzzing around in my head for more than 15 years.

Suddenly, it's possible to re-create the album covers I put together for my first CD, The Infection of Time, and not just as static, unfeeling tableaus but as dynamic and fully-interactive pieces of artwork.

The original VR environments for The Infection of Time were created on a Silicon Graphics R4000 Elan graphics workstation, which ran at a heady 100MHz with just 64Mb of memory. I think even our microwave oven in the kitchen has a faster processor. The package I used was called Showcase and it wasn't really geared towards 3D graphics. In fact, I don't think the folks at SGI even realised that you could build moderately complex 3D environments with this rather basic word processor.

I christened the creation The Reality Engine, which was the original title of the album. The concept was a huge structure in space that was central to the Universe in that it controlled Time. Infintely old and positively archaic, it was serviced by anonymous, empty robots who pulled levers and oiled huge cogs without any real idea of what they were doing or why they were doing it. The whole thing was an analogy of my life at that point, a fairly subtle in-joke dressed up in pseudo-sci-fi mysticism aka bullshit. Yeah, the whole thing sounds a bit infantile after so many years but, hey, it was just an idea, a whimsy, a feeling that needed to be explored. Big deal. It was 1995. Weird things happened all the time.

Now, it took the Elan 10 to 15 seconds to render just one scene, longer if someone else was using the machine over the network. Second Life can animate more complex scenes 10 to 15 times a second plus the objects can move, either as part of a program or under control of a script so that some degree of intelligence is possible.

I want to build this structure, see it move, see what else can be done to marry the images on the screen with the sounds in my head, to see what other people make of it, see if the robots do know what they're doing and why they're doing it. But developing such environments will take time and money, both of which are in fairly short supply at the moment. To paraphrase the physicist, Lord Rutherford, "Gentlemen, we have no money, therefore we must use our brains..."

Second Life may be a lot of fun but to generate the funds to help realise these ideas, I need to produce more music and sell more discs. And so the next step is to get back into the studio. The juices are moving again, the urge to make a lot of noise has returned.