Feeling Crabby

Many years ago when computers were dangerous and new, I was given an Oric 1 in return for some work I did. This slab of plastic and mysterious, magical innards had a rudimentary sound chip which allowed me to program in notes and actually to play several notes at once. The very first piece of music I put in was a Crab Canon by Bach which had the brilliant time-saving property of being the same when played backwards or forwards and hence meant only half the amount of data input. I don't have the recording I made of it or even the Oric but I have been able to create a new version which you can listen to here. It's not long. Go on. I know you want to.

I Was the First Person to be Rickrolled

In the heady days of the first year of my first job I was beginning to start the record collection I'd always been promising myself. The extent of my music collection up to then was basically Mike Oldfield and an unnatural obsession with Virginia Astley. Somewhere in the occasional single-paragraphs that Ms. Astley warranted in such publications as the HMV instore magazine, I gleaned the fact that she had a brother who was a producer and singer-songwriter of gently left-leaning tendencies. So when I saw the 12 Inch of Never Gonna Give You Up, I snapped it up and was mortified to hear the then-ubiquitous sound of Stock, Aitken and Pete "Hornby" Waterman. The person I was really after was - JON Astley the one-time Brother-in-law of Pete Townshend - and indeed slightly odd recording Artiste. And just so you don't suspect me of RRing myself, here's a strange video embedded.



The reason for setting down this memory is the fact that I actually Rickrolled someone myself today. One of our number is leaving the company and going to work in Newton-Le-Willows - the home town of our Rick himself and I conveyed the ostensible link to the relevant company via IM to a colleague who was mortified to have been caught. I did buy Roadblock but I really did know that was SAW.

Possibly trying Too Hard

Can you believe that they let me into Bulgaria with this photo?

Well today's payday-celebrating downloads were A+E by Graham Coxon and Leyfdu Ljosinu by Hildur Guðnadóttir; those Wire reviews really work. First is loud and lo-fi - second is quiet and loud and ethereal. All very wonderful. Half of the offspring are away camping for the weekend and other half are at home quoting from a recent purchase. In order to counteract all this trying-to-be-clever I am aiming to re-read ALL of the Adrian Mole books prior to the promised next installment.

Remember Lavolta Lakota

Bass Phase


Two Bass Guitars y'see. Though they both never played the same thing. If I get time and the space for 30 Meg, I'll do the full 15 minutes

Quants

These decisions rest heavy on the world,
A few sparks in the ether of grey markets,
Framing credit default swaps and hedges,
With dancing money, imaginary cash,

Multiplied by values impossible to say,
Enough to buy or bring down countries,
To start programmes of defence, offence,
To construct spacecraft to the stars,

And with cartoon dollar eyes we'll forget
Food and shelter in the races we define,
Maybe include ourselves in the easy money,
The destruction of all principles,

We won't die anarchists, poor and weary,
Or fall back to the edges of history,
For worldwide funding buys us out,
We are nothing but input to the quants.

On Getting Something For Nothing (Again).

I'm struggling to identify the economics of all the free VST stuff I've downloaded over the last week or so. From an innocuous advert on a local paper website, I have managed to get a VST Host and  myriad instrument and effect VSTs which give me as much functionality as I used to have with a room full of kit and cables. On top of that some of the specialised instruments have sounds approaching the real thing - saxophones with the sound of spit through the reed, cellos with a mis-hit scrape of bow on wood. As an added bonus the single, twenty-year-old keyboard which I kept is still able to keep up and control this studio-in-a-box. .All I need to find now is some actual musical talent to put them all together. And some time I suppose.

Another frightening thing is that even with 10 instruments all with their own independent effects channel, the render is still able to turn this into a single sound file at many times the speed of the actual live music. It seems quite possible to produce a whole album to a high standard using kit that would fit in a briefcase. As none of this has cost any money I can at least spend something on important things like food, and the car, and comics.

SauerKrautRock

... or on being very disappointed. A few days ago I wrote about being excited that Probe Records was moving from its boring industrial unit to a unit within The Bluecoat. It should have stayed where it was. It's a box - a bloody box. The place has no soul - well there is some soul but only on record. All the records are there and the CDs and the vinyl on the walls but it has no shape - no atmosphere - it is a machine for selling music and nothing else. I don't want to be around when Julian Cope or Pete Burns find out. I can't bring myself to post the phot I took - I hope they do some decoration.

Well I still bought something rather than just waltzing in to swipe a free copy of The Stool Pigeon, which incidentally has shrunk from NME size to fanzine size and is all the better for it except that I can't quite read it now all the text has shrunk - maybe I'm in the wrong demographic. (Get on with it - what did you buy? Ed.). Thanks to a recommendation from Scaryduck I bought Neu! 75 - note careful positioning of The Pling there - and beautiful it is. From Motorik drone to distant and plaintive distorted guitars. Unless you count Kraftwerk as Krautrock, this is my first in the genre and how could I miss it? It's been round a few times now and it is wonderful.

However I have more music to report on from Radio Two's Swing Time slot this morning which was Light Flight by Pentangle - the theme to Take Three Girls - which I am sure I remember watching despite only being five when it came out.

See Emily Play

Emily Howell does not exist. She is a computer program which from the video attached to this article at The Times, is quite competent. I cannot agree with Mark Lawson in the Guardian who will one day be caught out by something created by computer. Music is defined by numbers - some of it requires high quantising but the bottom line is that there are limited number of notes and a limited number of ways you can put them together. Computer-generated music can and will be indistinguishable. Any other approach is just pompous and snobbish.

My absence has been due to flu which was bad. Not sure if it was of the swine variety and to be honest I'm not sure if I care - I certainly didn't care on Wednesday last week when I just wanted to lie down for a month. All gone now apart from the tiredness which means I'm not particularly bothered about writing any more today.

Mr Turing's Dog

At last a way of uploading other files. I know you'll tell me it was easy but I'm happy.

Random Sequence

Bell Ringing