Went to Margate at the weekend. Was nice. Good exhibition of seaside photos at the Turner Contemporary. It's slightly odd when your own childhood milieu is served up as historical oddity but the frisson of nostalgia mixed with 'oh god it was horrible' is still nice.
The most instantly powerful bit for me was a photo called "Illegal raving in Brighton" by Stuart Griffiths. You can see it on Vice. I have no memories of illegal raving in Brighton, or anywhere, but I got an instant hit of memory from the detail of the lads sitting on the roof. It was their combination of jackets, jeans and trainers. So specific and unique to that moment in history. I don't have much of a sense of smell, I don't find it instantly evocative as many people do, but clothes do that for me. They connect me to the my past in a way that most bits of culture don't. Those jeans and trainers.
I haven't done one of these for ages. I miss it. Partly because it means I have to make a new snippet of music at least once a month. So I've started again.
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And doing that has had me going back looking for all the miscellaneous music files scattered around various external drives and streaming services, trying to sort it out and having a listen to old stuff. Made me realise some of this is actually quite alright. Slow to develop but there's something to it.
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And that reminded me that I haven't played with Endlesss for ages so I had a go at that over coffee. Huge fun. It creates little loops and lets you download them. Here are a couple:
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We went to see the Faith Ringgold exhibition at the Serpentine today. Magnificent. I especially liked the portrait of Mr Charlie; "a large grinning head of a patronizing white man". (And reading about the term Mr Charlie was interesting too). Mr Charlie looks a lot like Mr Burns. I wonder if that's a coincidence.
It's been too hot to have any original opinions. But this would probably be Episode Two of my Not Actually A Thing Podcast 'It's more complicated than that'.
“Amazing that the chess clock never found a more general application. A more enlightened society would have made it as indispensable to conversation as shoes to walking.”
I liked that. Then I listened to this Revisionist History episode, which included an extended bit about the difference between chess, blitz chess and bullet chess. It's all down to the clock and the time allowed.
The chess master interviewed said that if top class chess players were allowed as long as they wanted per move every game would end in a draw. The thing that makes chess hard is the time constraint. And that blitz chess and bullet chess are often won by different people to the regular sort. The shorter time makes for a different game.
Gladwell compares this to standardised tests in the US which add a time constraint to the questioning - basically you have to read things quicker than you can can actually read them and develop strategies for guessing a reasonable answer without being completely grokking the piece; "processing without understanding"
This feels a lot like work right now. It made me realise that speed is the key difference between my current job and every other one I've had; everything's just so much faster. Maybe I should get a chess clock. That feels like a useful, enjoyable framing, a way to tip yourself from panicked to excited.
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Anna wrote a blog post about a coffee we had and made me sound much more coherent and useful than I actually am. It became moderately successful on the links and twitters which made me worry that people think I fancy myself as a Strategist. This is not the case. If I'm anything I'm a Communications Strategist, which is very different. It's the difference between being a Doctor and being the guy from Doctor and the Medics.
God, I hate this song.
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Anne has been complaining about 'the moon' all week. She's not anti-moon. She's anti all this moon nostalgia. I knew what she meant but couldn't quite understand why. This tweet explained it:
Sorry but baby boomers have controlled the media my whole life, every day has felt like the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and JFK’s death and the last day kids ever played outside
If I was going to do another experiment in aggregating/sampling podcasts it would be called It's More Complicated Than That and season one would be about Plastics & Recycling and this would be the first episode. And this would be the second. Well worth a listen
I done another mix. Quite pleased with this one. Starts off all pleasant and ambient. Robert Haigh. Richard Norris. Ore. Then I got a bit bored and added some Yazoo. At which point it goes a bit random. Not bad though, except for the bit where I accidentally knocked the pitch up.
We walked a slightly overgrown country path this afternoon, nettles reaching in from both sides. So we were walking with our arms pinned behind our backs, like defenders in the penalty area under the new handball regulations.
Which, I realised, would have been a really good metaphor, if I was a sportswriter.
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.
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.)
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I did another mix. Better in some parts. Worse in others.
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.
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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.
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.
