Don't Get Me Started...

Feb Round Up

Slacking, slacking, dammit. Actually, over on the Double Shot blog Justin and I have been pretty busy; our preparations for talks to the BBC about "digital" marketing and to IT4Arts about the impact of IPR issues on artistic creation have led us down intriguing paths. Some of these are pointed at with something of catch-all post on the DS blog, but here I do feel duty-bound to point to this wonderful essay on plagiarism from a couple of years  back in the New Yorker by novelist Jonathan Lethem.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat scatter-gun way...

 
Friends and family news.... We were lucky enough to get out to Madrid to see Paul Schütze's latest photography show, Matter and Memory at Galleria Estiate. And Josiah McElheny's film Island Universe - with a score by Paul - fresh from its run at White Cube, Hoxton is now installed at the wonderful Reina Sofia gallery.  (The film is a companion piece to a wonderful sculpture installation now mounted in a beautiful glass house in the Parque Del Retiro; that's one of PS's shots of it above.)

Franck is running off in fresh directions. His latest incarnation is Sketchdub, a full-on dub-step project. Check his Justin Timberlake remix and the weirdly early 80s electro-pop anthem "Jittin' Out Bruv"

On the subject of electronica, Mary Anne Hobbs turned in a stunning Radio 1 show a couple of weeks back; West Coast Rocks took a peek at the scene emerging in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Of course, the 7-day catch up limitation of the iPlayer means you can't get the show, not legally anyhow. But MAH did make a (decidedly home-made) video accompaniment to the show.

In my Double Shot guise I'd have something to say about the collateral material coming out of broadcast outliving the original material, or something, but here I'll say instead that a. MAH really is a bit of a broadcasting treasure, going from strength to strength and b. I want to go to Low End Theory really rather badly. There you go.

Anyway, might not have made it to Low end Theory just yet, but we did have a real dancing treat this weekend just gone. Pioneering early 80s DJ Greg Wilson is well and truly cracking along with his comeback. His recent Essential Mix for Radio 1 was a corker and got us very excited about his appearance in Brighton at the Jazz Place. In the event, the night was so popular it shifted upstairs to The Loft. Wilson is the perfect party DJ - and I mean that in the most defiantly positive sense. The Loft on Friday was a heaving mass of very, very happy people (of whom we were not from the oldest - a rarity, it chagrins me to admit), as Wilson plied us with Chic and Amerie, Grace Jones and Freeze (A E I O U, anyone?) There's a little film of the event up on Facebook... and Wilson's own Electro Funk Roots site is something of a treasure trove - and a bit of a loveletter to a bygone era. In the meantime, this looks set to be the first of a series of monthly nights at the Jazz Place going under the rubric Disco Deviant. We are massaging our shins and ankles in expectation.

I mentioned some of the work Justin and I are doing at the top; I can't say exactly why we're thinking about such things as airport and railway station announcement chimes at the moment - nor for which client we're doing so, but I can point you at this fantastic collection of such sounds on YouTube. Charles De Gaulle wins hands down of course, if only for being the sound of a future which never was.

Also mentioned over on DS... "Tribes" guru Seth Godin takes a bit of a pop at the record industry. But get this... He sets up a distinction between the impact comms tech has had on music as opposed to the industry, concluding that for the former it's been pretty good. "This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible." Well hold on Seth.You're not setting up the distinction you think you are there; rather you're setting up a distinction between two different levels of business. Of course, the advent of digital has positively affected the music itself, not least in the speed of ideas-transmission between learning musicians discussed here last March. Instead though, Seth rather disappointingly goes on about pop stars and their limos, which frankly is as tired as banging on about bankers' private jets.

Various bits of metal news getting me excited... French Prog-Death specialists Gojira are back in the UK later this month... Mike Patton has scored his first feature film, Crank 2: Hight Voltage and confirmed that the Faith No More reunion IS happening this Summer. Tool are writing a new album, which is heartening, although I'm not sure where James Maynard Keenan is going to find the time given that he seems to be performing live with Puscifer and embarking on a documentary film about the vineyard he owns. And the metal-but-not-really-metal Amplifier will be back this Spring with a double CD, The Octopus, which we await with baited breath - they haven't put a foot wrong on the recording front so far. Oh, and how cool was it to see Meshuggah as the front page featured article on Wikipedia last week?!
 

Hot on the heels of Charing Cross's Astoria closing, The End - just around the corner and perhaps the West End's finest club back in day - has also, very sadly, closed down.

I love the idea that avant-funk trio Medeski, Martin and Wood run their own Summer camp. A very nice way to spend a week or so, I should think. 

Lastly a bit of FX pedal fetishism as Boing Boing (CHECK!!!!!) take a peak at the Electro Harmonix factory. Just how excited can one man get about valves? Very, apparently.

What's happened to Last.fm?

I wouldn't normally reproduce an entire post from the our Double Shot blog, but a. I feel pretty strongly about this and b. it feels relevant to both blogs. So here you go.

What's going on?!

I've been a Last.fm user for five years or so now; I can't call myself an especially early adopter any more with it than anything else, but with nearly 90,000 scrobbles and counting  I'd certainly claim to be a heavy user. More to the point I've been an especially vocal fan - a proselytizer, I guess. In workshop after workshop, panel discussion after presentation I've held Last up to be a paragon of algorithm-driven, stats-based personalisation. I've patiently explained why they trump, say, Pandora, with the latter's recommendations ultimately driven by essentially editorial decisions.

I've illustrated my enthusiasm with a pretty straightforward  look at some of my own personal tastes. I like metal. So that's Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, right? Well, no, I'd rather chew my own face off than listen to a whole album by either of them (although I should point out my personal, ie. non-musical admiration for both Halford and Dickinson, but won't go into that now... ) Similarly, I'd say I love classical music... but that two thirds of the standard nineteenth century repertoire leave me cold at best - a retching at worst.

Now the old ways of making recommendation very often run on genre, so an assumption that I might want to listen to 'Hell Bent for Leather' or Turandot based on a very basic understanding of my generic tastes wouldn't be unreasonable. But it would, to repeat myself, be wrong.

The power of Last.fm has been that no-one's making any decisions about genre, or about mood or really about anything. There's just an awful lot of computation drawing an awful amount of inference from an awfully large amount of information.

Which is what I've been more than happy (if always a little trepidatous) to get Last up in front of an audience at, say, a workshop, and see what its Recommendations Radio service would bung my way. I have an especially fond memory of doing this at Music Learning Live! at the Sage in Gateshead last year. I'd already primed the audience by pillorying my own tastes: extreme metal, dodgy prog, navel-gazing 20th century classical and wiffly psych jazz. What does Last go and play me? In quick succession, if memory serves: Van Der Graaf Generator, Mompou, something from Miles' Big Fun and Mastodon. Priceless.

So what the fuck has happened to it lately? Over the last few weeks I've noticed  - well, hardly "noticed", rather been appalled by - a massive deterioration in service, with recommendations further and further "off".

Now I can see how some things happen. Partly it's down to my machine being left scrobbling when others use it. My oldest son is Joe is a curiously diehard 70s soul fan; it's down to him that Stevie Wonder is in my most listened-to artists (and, of course, I have no problem with this). Joe's younger brother Franck, on the other hand listens to a shitload of undergound hip hop, d'n'b and dubstep. Meanwhile, I spent quite a bit of time over Christmas prepp'ing a NYE playlist which, the average age of attendees at said party being, er, early-40s, was pretty heavily early 80s: ZTT, post-punk, electro, and, yes, New Romantic.

So I would expect some weirdness in Last's recent recommendations, a bit too much hip hop say, or the odd but of 80s naffery. But the number of misses has been off the scale. Really. And there's other oddness as well. Why do I keep getting the exact same Pete Rock track? Why is every third track (at least!) Björk-related (a solo piece, or something by KUKL or the Sugarcubes), why so much Brazilian MPB (yes, yes, I love bossa and tropicalia - so play me some of that).

Now I am not for one minute suggesting this is the case, but were I a cynic I'd have say that the brutal truth of the CBS takeover had finally trickled down, that promotionally-driven choices were being made for me, that algorithms were being tweaked to allow certain material to float to the top. Like I say, I genuinely don't believe this is the case... but something is very seriously wrong. And I certainly won't be using it in a live presentation any time soon.

It's funny, about this time last year I was pretty dismissive of Idiomag. To their credit they responded intelligently, and although it's taken a while, their recommendations have gone from strength to strength in terms of relevance. This morning brought news of Sonic Youth working on a new album, D'Angelo collaborating with Prince and Lamb of God up to something or other. I'm not an especially big LoG fan, but nonetheless that's pretty good going.

So it feels a strange moment to be getting pissy about Last, the poster child of the collab.filt recommendations age. But I leave you with this: I  needed to hear Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' precisely never again in my life. Something, apparently, unrealised by the Last maths.

I can't tell you how much I hope this some temporary algorithmic weirdness; I want my Last back!

Jan 23rd round up

It's been on the cards for a long time, but London's Astoria has finally closed. Pretty much every rock music follower in the South East must have memories from there. My own favourites, for what it's worth both, revolve around Mike Patton: the extraordinary Mr Bungle Californa gig (unquestionably the best gig I've ever seen - or am likely to see) and, a couple of years on (a more specific moment, this), a Tomahawk encore during which Patton pissed in a great arc right over the audience. Anyway, our memories aside, the closure is a genuine outrage. Central London will now effectively have no large scale rock venue; The Scala frankly sucks, the Roundhouse is a bit too heritage, a bit arts venue, and the Brixton Academy, for all it's a great venue is, well, hardly a central London venue. So it's all a bit shit really. No change there then.

On the Patton front, by the way, rumours aboud at the moment of a FNM reunion... really, they do.

Now, talking of disappointment, or at least its potential... Can this possibly live up to the hype, or indeed, to the trailer:

I caught the trailer in the cinema this weekend, ahead of the spectacularly execrable Spirit; the three minutes it lasted were beyond doubt the best we experienced in there. It's been pointed out to me that the music pretty much makes the trailer, but then that's a weirdly seamless  mash-up of Philip Glass and Muse... whereas the film's score is by Tyler Bates, who doesn't seem much to write home about so  there's already potential mishap there. (I gather that a more recent trailer features a Smashing Pumpkins score... they're going after Gen X with a vengeance on this one... )

And the film seems to be running into some serious difficulties even before release... so let's see...

A couple of people have pointed me at this pretty amusing map of metal names. I was especially taken with "Pointless Misspelling" (Def Leppard, take a bow) and "Umlauts".

Also on the metal front, I've been enjoying the Meshuggah-based ruminations of Ross Edwards on his blog Behold the  .... Part-cultural studies essay, part-aesthetic philosophy, it features such gem-like apercus as "Engaging works directly as sound is something that must be practiced in order to successfully overcome the programming provided by a society in which music theory is the top educational priority." Quite.

Props to Gizmodo US for alerting us to the wonderful faintly sci-fi, religious-icon-meets-military-tech-by-way-of Warhammer-40K sculptures and bas-reliefs of Kris Kuksi.

There's a bunch of stuff over on the Double Shot blog I share with Justin including some nice thoughts from J on classical music and comms tech and on what Clay Shirky terms Cognitive Surplus (read it - all will become clear) plus a bunch of media/music/tech round-ups from me...

Oh, and in a shameless familial plug, my son Franck's electronica project Figit goes from strength to strength, and in a slightly new direction with every third track or so. As ever, there's a bunch of new stuff on his MySpace page.

Dec 08 Round-Up

OK it's been a while... I'm currently far more active over on the Double Shot blog... so here's an admittedly pretty random round up of a month's worth or so of stuff I've come across (or, more honestly, been pointed at)... generally been thinking about... and not putting up over there...

Having brought us collections of everything from drone pop and raga rock to the rise and rise of wobbly, the good people at Boom Kat's "compilation" imprint 14 Tracks kick off the year with an irresistibly foot-tapping set of 2-Step minimalism, featuring Groove Chronicles, Spatial and Burial. All available to stream for free, of course, or to download DRM-free as a set for just under seven quid.

Actually, I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed with all the streaming music sites/music blogs/recommendations services at the moment... in a loving them kind of way, of course.  At the moment, around these parts it all seems to be about (as ever) Last.fm (most especially its Recommendations Radio), Blip.fm (though I'm still not sure about the purpose of Blipping, tbh), iMeem... Also dicking about with Muse Bin and The Hype Machine. (Tip of the hat to Kate Lawrence for some of those, btw... ) If I have a New Year resolution, it's to try and make these fucking things all work together seamlessly. Then again, I suspect I'm not alone in this.

While I'm on the subject (or thereabouts), I have to say, the quality of Idiomag - which I've dissed here before - is definitely improving. A larger data set as they get more users? That's what my money's on. Today I'm looking at articles on Prince, Erik Friedlander, Lamb of God, Brian Eno and The Butthole Surfers. That's not Last.fm levels of intelligence yet, but it's pretty impressive. And no Amy Winehouse stories, for months, so that's something...

I know I'm always quoting Bob Lefsetz here and over at DS; but, once again, I was really taken with his reading of David Foster Wallace (RIP) and what his work - specifically the rejection of Total Noise Culture - might say about contemporary pop and rock music. "... I wasn’t depressed reading this article.  It made me feel positively alive.  Because someone saw it the way I did.  I was not alone.  We lost a great soldier in the battle, but this writer had picked up the flag.  You succeed most when you get in touch with the common folk, the human condition.  But, that’s for losers.  And we live in a society of winners!"

Meantime...

... speaking as one of those "losers"... I had a lot of fun over Christmas and New Year with Djay, a an MP3 mixing app for those of us without DJing chops... or kit... or vinyl. Tellingly, I was using it to enliven middle-aged parties. Franck is busy knocking out avant-electronica sets with it. I'm cool with that, really, I am.

And then...

As ever, props to Paul Schütze for pointing out some of the more thought-provoking stuff out there. This posting on the intriguing Odd Music site about a Croatian "sea organ" is especially wonderful. I won't even begin to describe how it sounds or how it works; just check it out.

OK, OK, so he needs to get up to speed with Hassell, Zorn and Can, but still... Now I'll probably be crucified for this, but I couldn't resist... I'll let the screen grabs speak for themselves...

Ahem... sorry about that. And, yes, Stevie being quite so high on my Scrobbling is, of course, entirely down to Joe.

Oh, and lastly on a music, er, tip... a couple of things to say about jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny. Metheny was one of my teenage heroes, and majorly. At some point I'll write at length about precisely why I find him one of the most confounding artists alive (really, I will... sometime after I get round to writing about the aesthetic/philosophical conundrum that is shred metal. Go on, bate your breath.)

To get an "in" on my Metheny-related struggles, check this clip... It's Metheny "sitting in" with Pete Townshend, apparently in London in 1990 (but where?). That's Herbie Hancock on piano, I believe. Now the first thing to say is that, as a piece of music - as a complete piece of art - it's pretty woeful. Townshend was a phenomenal songwriter, no mistake, and at their height I'm convinced The Who were extraordinary. But this is watered-down stuff, it really is. Sub-Vegas. But, but, but... fucking listen to Metheny. It's funny, you read the comments on these clips and there's a bunch of jazz dudes saying (at best) "ah, bless" and a bunch of rock blokes going "ugh". No-one's listening to that guitar. Listen to it! It's like McLaughlin on Go Ahead John, or Eddie Hazel on Maggot Brain or that guitar on the Rotary Connection's Black Gold of the Sun (is that really Phil Upchurch?!): it's the sound of something breaking through from a parallel universe. Anyway, I'll shut up; watch this and listen:

Now the other thing I wanted to say about Metheny is that his website is an object lesson in how to run a music artist's site: packed full not just of info (although even that puts ahead of many in the pack) but full of insight into its subject. The Pat Recommends section is particularly intriguing, and really tells you where this mas is coming from. It's funny, when I heard that Metheny was thinking about The Way Up as a politcal statement I was nonplussed. But it's plain from his reading list that this is an artist  genuinely engaged. Taleb, Dawkins, Barnes, Ian Buruma's book on the murder of Theo Van Gogh, Sam Harris' End of Faith... you get the picture.

And the Music 365-based PM Radio Player rocks.

OK, enough music blah. We mentioned the James Lovelock Guardian interview on the DS blog a while back. Belatedly I have A couple of things to add...

Firstly, check out the ads on the right hand of the page. I'm guessing these are served up dynamically, but whatever, it's pretty amusing to see ads for 25 quid Solar light & charger alongside an interview with a subject who calls "green lifestyle" "ostentatious grand gestures". Think I'm making this up?

Lovely.

My other point is about journalism rather than algorithms. Specifically, why does the journalist struggle with the idea that Lovelock is quite so cheerful? Strikes me as as showing pretty slight understanding of human nature to confuse an intellectual stand point with a person disposition. And that's leaving aside the vague possibility that someone might actually be cheered by the prospect of the race's demise... Weird.

Mind you, if that's dumb journalism, I'm not sure where to start with this pretty self-aggrandising attack by Jonathon Jones on William Burroughs in the Guardian earlier this week. "Burroughs is the modern writer adored by people who don't read enough modern writing. Everything he did was done better by others." Well that's us told.  There's more. "Above all, I don't see how anyone's adolescent admiration for the Burroughs prose machine can survive an encounter with the novels of Thomas Pynchon - the true, dazzling titan of the avant garde novel in our time." There's the self-aggrandising bit: you don't get Pynchon, but I do. Pathetic.

Let's end more positively...

I've been taken with shipping, haulage and logistics for some time now... aesthetically, that is. (The the roof-top bar at the hotel I stayed in on a recent visit to Istanbul overlooked the mouth of the Bopsphorous; none of my fellow drinkers shared my enthusiasm for the hundreds of ships stretching to the horizon.) So I was quite beside myself when this list of super-sized shipping cargo went up on Oobject.

As if that weren't enough, check out these pics of giant floating bridges. Look out for the Chinese crane lifting Newcastle/Gateshead's Millennium Bridge into place.

Oh, and one last bit of loveliness from Oobject: 12 classic bits of Raymond Loewe design.

Here's to 09...

Some recent Double Shot posts

Just a quick recap on a few of my recent posts to the Double Shot blog...

On "mega niches".

Still no Beatles catalogue in the iTMS... but they are going to feature in a Rock Band-related video game.

Loving the Typealyzer, which runs a site's or blog's content through a a Myers-Briggs-related algorithm to analyse said site's creators personality.

Also love the idea of multi-headed video-conferencing... but it's not a viable realty yet.

Wyane Wang releases a full length flick on YouTube's Screening Room, but only in the US, naturally.

A whinge about the rather terrible Lincoln Center website.

More delights from 14 Tracks.

Lovelock in the Guardian.

Gate of Flesh

For a while now - with hideous slowness, truth be told - I've been making my way 100 Modern Soundtracks, the BFI book penned by the extraordinary Melburnian polymath Philip Brophy, watching the films listed and looking out - or more accurately "hearing out - for what Philip discusses. As with other work by Brophy, most notably his other BFI book 100 Anime, it's not so much non-canonical as anti-canonical, as scrupulously unconcerned with dubious low brow/middle brow distinctions as a three minute Naked City turn.

So using it as a "guide" is an entirely redundant... but using it as a prompt for exploring the world of the aural in film is something I'd highly recommend. One rediscovers old favourites (Akira, Blade Runner), finally catches up with things one always thought one should (Days of Wine and Roses, Le Samourai) and comes across things way off all but the most adventurous cineaste's radar - ie. not mine.

Into this last category falls Seijun Suzuki's 1964 flick Gate of Flesh. Check this trailer.

It's a remarkable film, on one level a disturbing story about young women in Tokyo forced by destitution into prostitution in the aftermath of WWII and under US occupation. On another level though, it's not far from a psychedelic freak-out (more 60s than 40s): strikingly jarring montage, super saturated colours (and colours are a real thing for it: throughout, each of the hooker protagonists wears her own colour - and only that colour) and then, the sound. I'll leave that to Brophy:

"Sound and music behave identically, screaming, writhing and contorting, forcing sound to fight with image with the same motional savagery of these women of flesh, struggling to live."

Paul Schütze news

Coupla bits of news about our good friend Paul Schütze.

Paul's contributed the score to a film by New York sculptor Josiah McElheny mounted as part of a show of the latter's work at White Cube in Hoxton. The gallery's website says of the film: "The exhibition also includes a film, with a newly commissioned soundtrack by Paul Schütze. Filmed on location in Super 16mm at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, each of its five sections depict the types of universes in the installation, and each section is titled based on the theoretical structure of each element, such as Small Scale Violence, Frozen Structure, and Late Emergence. The music and the editing convey a rhythm that shifts, freezes and develops in relation to the scientific speculations about other worlds." The show runs until November 15th.

Paul's website also features a download of 20 minute excerpt from a new sound piece inspired by James Turrell's Roden Crater project. I was lucky enough to contribute to the project (on guitar) along with Ko Ishekawa (sho), Kevin Pollard (piano) and Raoul Björkenheim (guitar). Paul himself plays percussion and organ.

Finally, the excellent Mutant Sounds site has posted up downloads of an early 80s cassette-only release by one of Paul's earliest outfits, Melbourne's Laughing Hands.

Decisions, decisions...

I've been grappling for some time with how to separate out "professional" postings from stuff in which I'm more generally interested. Not that the lack of posting here recently would indicate very much conundrum-ing. And not that there's very much distinction in my life between these two areas in any case.

Nonetheless, I figured that some of my clients probably don't need to hear my thoughts on Meshuggah and Chomsky and male menopause - at least not too often - so I'll be writing about matters of purely professional interest, along with my co-director Justin Spooner on our blog at the Double Shot website.

Where that leaves a posting like, say, my Words & Music entry is a moot point, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Turkey bans Dawkins

Not sure of the full details on this, but according to a news piece Richard Dawkins' own website, it looks as though pressure has been brought on the Turkish ISP Turk Telecom to block access to the site following "complaints from lawyers for Islamic creationist author Adnan Oktar", which is thoroughly depressing.

The Guardian has covered the story too, as has The Times and The Telegraph.

More great Clay Shirky stuff

We've raved about Clay Shirky here before; the tech Utopian who isn't...

Thanks to Justin for pointing out this video on Kevin Kelly's excellent blog: Shirky's address to (I think) an O'Reilly conference) in which he talks about the move from passive media - principally TV - to today's engaged media. His anecdote about a conversation with a TV producer rang especially and horribly true.

You must watch it, not least to hear what may become our war-cry: a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.