Russell Davies

swell maps

I dug this lovely old thing out when I was making this muxtape. But I'd forgotten how much I loved this cover. I bought it before I'd ever been to New York (or London much) but both were evoked so completely by the maps on the cover, and the contrasts between them - the New York grid and the London mess.

The design is credited to Red Ranch, who also did the Street Sounds Electro stuff, apparently, but I can't find much else out about them. There's probably a whole thing to be done about record covers featuring maps, but the only other one I can think of is the inner sleeve of Tormato by Yes.

seedy

I've talked to and about Richard Reynolds a couple of times on this blog over the years. About his t-shirts, and about Guerilla Gardening. And then, the other day, to announce the arrival of his book this packet of seeds turned up. Splendid idea. We shall be planting them soon. The book's excellent too. And here's Richard talking on Radio 3 the other week.

reasons people aren't coming to interesting2008 - a demographic analysis

People in their 20s aren't coming because they couldn't get it together to get a ticket.

People in their 30s aren't coming because they spend every Saturday in June going to weddings.

People in their 40s aren't coming because they're doing something related to the summer solstice and a mid-life crisis.

And, if you're still after a ticket, they are being traded here. If you're not going to be able to make it someone will probably snap yours up.

get ready and roll the cassette

I made a muxtape for a warm evening. Just in case we have another one. It's got all the cliches, nothing clever. But, well, you know. Roll the cassette.

school orchestra 2.0

Matt and I were cooking up some music plans for Interesting and started nostalging about our days in school orchestras and brass bands. And we realised that we'd like to do that again. And other people probably would too.

Like you maybe? Fancy dusting off that flute? Getting that cello back from your parent's house? Troming that bone?

If so, we thought we'd do the following. Organise a school hall for a good time. (I'm thinking Sunday mornings). Invite anyone who wants to come. Adults, Kids. Whoever. All instruments welcome. All levels of ability. All musical judgment is suspended. We'll have a bash through the kind of tunes everyone likes to play: Dambusters. 1812. Theme From Superman. Maybe even get some arrangements done of things we'd like: Little Fluffy Clouds, Smoke On The Water, whatever. We'll do it because it's joyous to play musical stuff with other people, not because we want to achieve perfection. We might need to donate a couple of quid to the school for the hall but otherwise you'll just need to bring your euphonium and a music stand. We know there are other similar things going on, but, you know, we're not doing that, we're doing this.

Matt will take on the role of musical director and I will be demonstrating the triangle skills that made me the envy of youth orchestras throughout the East Midlands during the late 70s and early 80s.

Interested? Stick name and instrument in the comments

social doing

I know no-one needs another blog post about twitter but here's one anyway.

I've been playing with all sorts of little social things recently - friendfeed, brightkite, etc - and they're all good, they're just a bit confusing. Although twitter seems pointless to many the point of it's pointlessness is clear. There's a big simple question - what are you doing? - and you answer it.

The verbiness of this question is it's genius. Where are you? provokes no poetry, what are you doing? is profound and playful. And when you play the verby game it forces you into thinking about the language, into doing something pleasing circumlocutory. Like this lovely tweet from Helen:

And it's all the verbs that make tweetclouds so interesting.

I know we're all supposed to be thinking about social objects, but social doing seems to be potentially potent too.

after interesting

Last year, after Interesting, we organised a room in a pub round for the corner for post Interesting drinks. Was that any good? I don't know, I went home.

This year we were wondering if we should do something more elaborate, but we don't have a specific venue or anything organised yet. Would anyone out there like to take that on - organising a post Interesting venue?

But, whatever we do, we're going to have Interesting music, because Matt Brown's kindly organised a Last.fm group for us. If you're coming to Interesting, join up and it will create playlists based on what we all listen to. Then we can all get on down to the sounds of Music For Airports and Cliff Martinez. Pa-ar-tay!

sunny

You can't beat London on a sunny spring day. This is Gordon Square. Splendid.

interesting all over the world

Excitingly, Jeffre has just announced Interesting Amsterdam on June 14th and David is putting a gang together to do Interesting NYC.

And the second Interesting South is around the corner. I really like the way they're evolving differently and separately, learning from each other. We do indeed live in Interesting times.

copy and paste

all my pictures taken in january 2008 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

I was quite pleased with the timelapse experiment here so I thought I'd try another thing. The above video is all the pictures I took in January, created by switching Snapz Pro on and holding down the advance key in the large picture view of iPhoto. I like that too, possibly because most of these pictures mean something to me, and obviously they don't to you. But you could make your own. Don't be wasting your cognitive surplus.