Russell Davies

Unboom

Unboom from russelldavies on Vimeo.

It's been a while since I've had a day to waste on a fruitless music project, so spending the hottest day of the year wiring old electronics together in a boiling shed seemed an opportunity too good to waste.

The idea was to create a sort of musical instrument, designed to play low level slowly changing ambient by loading up various different musical files into various different machines and letting the pieces fall where they may. Sort of random, but not very. You'll see in there a combination of old rack minidisc players playing into the aux of some vintage cassette players, some newer Aldi boom boxes playing from flash drives and some miscellaneous bits and bobs. The plan is to get some of these cassettes working on autoreverse too.

I think I made the original music files too 'thick', there's not enough light and shade when everything's playing at once, not enough change, but I think there's something in this.

It's a bit quiet too. I just recorded this on my phone. I'm not quite sure how to capture the lovely feeling of sitting there with a cup of tea as the sounds bleep and bloop all around you.

Brass Fisk Large

I was clicking around ebay when I came across this poster.

The simplicity of it is lovely. And the names are superb. Brass. Fisk. Large. Real words. Sounds like a band. Or a Charles Stross code name. Or an instruction for dealing with archaic machinery.

Brass Fisk Large will definitely be the title of my first album of dense, chugging, prog house.

The joy of the internet is that you can find out what happened. (Fisk got in, Brass and Large lost to Conservatives. They'd all previously been elected in 1973.)

UNRELATED

I did another mix. Better in some parts. Worse in others.

Flourishing is nourishing

Another tiny music moment! It's like a flood. 5 seconds into Love Come Down by Evelyn Champagne King, there's a little hi-hat flourish that makes you glad to be alive. It says 'we're doing more than the minimum here, we're paying attention, we're fired up and you're in a safe pair of hands". Makes me skip every time I hear it.

UNRELATED

After chronicling my misadventures on the wheels of steel I thought I'd try and do it again. So I bought a mixer off ebay and I've been mucking about playing records. Above is my first attempt at recording something. WARNING: it's a mess. My beat matching, well, doesn't match. But, you know, it's got some tracks on it you might not have heard for a while.

Still a problem, apparently

It's a while since I've done a big, set-piece presentation on a big conference stage. The kind with anxious organisers and long-suffering AV people. This thread (and this fork) brought it all back and reminded me of the horror of presentation remotes. There's clearly still a market for something obvious yet satisfying.

I bet the problem is that they're also trying to make it 'discreet'. This is the bit of the battle they should give up on.

That's what the button was about.

Brendan had a similar thought. 

 

To be real

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about a tiny bit of a record that I really loved. I imagined it would be the first in a long series of tiny musical aperçu. So, without further ado, ten years later, here is the second one.

Got To Be Real by Cheryl Lynn has a couple of these supreme little moments. The first is the glorious shift in the vocals, where the lead voice shifts into the backing vocals and, somehow, sort of, into some sort of synthysound shriek that manages to be piercing without being shrill. It's ecstatic. You hear it first at the end of 'to be real' at around 50 seconds. And then again in an extended way at 2:42. And throughout.

And then there's the breakdown at 2:49. I love when a band switches into unison. But this is more than that, it's like a cutaway diagram. They slice open the track and show you the funky underpinning that's been bouncing you along all this time. Oh, you say, we've been riding this all along. And then they build the track back up around you. It's like being in a time-lapse of the construction of St Paul's Cathedral. So good.