Don't Get Me Started...

Bit of a round up

Been insanely busy lately... hence a bit quiet (ie. no high concept grandstanding) and about to take something of a holiday, so thought I'd just bang down a few "recently noteds"...

Thanks to Paul Schütze for pointing me at this fabulous Bldg Blog interview with Daniel Dociu, a Seattle-based artist and "Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul". The interview is insightful but, oh, the pictures, the pictures!  Dociu's work reminds me of the sci-fi book jacket and album cover art I grew up with - Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews, Chris Foss - but is plainly light years beyond it. And it's interesting that the video games field is perhaps currently the only sphere to let work like this live. Ravishing stuff.

Can I just say how much I've been enjoying Mary Ann Hobbs' weekly show on Radio 1? Some of the stuff she's been dropping - some extraordinarily deep house, grime, and of course dup step - is frankly the only music that's excited me even vaguely as much as metal for quite some time. The show goes out on Wednesdays between 2 and 4pam, so most likely you'll be checking it out on demand... so don't forget you've only got seven days to catch each show. This week's standout moment: a Brendan Moller remix of Appleblim & Peverelist. Sublime. Also check out MAH's blog and myspace.

Perils of DRM, Part One Million: a great story in the Register today drawing attention to Microsoft turning off the DRM servers on its defunct MSN Music service this Summer. Seems that anyone daft enough to have bought any music from it will either have to burn their files to CD or else they won't be able to keep hold of them once they upgrade their OS. I repeat: this is music people have bought. Nice.

Been doing a lot of work of late with the ferociously smart Justin Spooner, including a workshop with the Barbican in London for whom Justin knocked up this little diagram illustrating Chris Anderson's thoughts on the culture of Free (which is surely going to have as much impact as his Long Tail observations from four years back or so):

I bring it up purely because it reminded me instantly - and irrelevantly, to be honest - of the wonderful Atomium in Brussels, which I visited as a child and have remembered fondly ever since. Like, say, the moon shots or Concorde or Thunderbirds, it has something of the unrealised possible futures about it. Anyway, looking for some shots of it to show Justin, I strayed across its website and bugger me... a. the Atomium is 50 this year, b. there's shitloads going on to celebrate the fact and c. the website itself is quite the most gorgeous - if simple - pieces of interaction design I've seen in ages. 

I love their mission statement: "building a new world for modern human beings, giving them new dignity in a friendly meeting of all people". Sweet. Here it is, anyway:

Our mate Kate Lawrence has finally got her finger out and started posting again on Jumpstart Trainershoe. Now Kate goes to about a thousand gigs a year as far as I can tell, and while we don't always see eye on the tatse front, I have to say she's got a better sense of what's going on in what I guess I'd characterise as independent rock & pop than anyone I know. And, fuck, is she ever dedicated to it. Her latest posting takes Killing Joke as a starting point for some insightful  - and musically illustrated - musings on just how influential the 80s are right; I, for one, am convinced.

Nice spoof on social networking sites at nclüdr. A few of the gags are a bit overwrought, but the captcha on the register page made me laugh out loud. On my own. Bit close to the bone for some of the professional digital utopians among us, and, yes, I mean me. Thanks to Chris Jones for that one.

And talking of digital utopians... Bit out of date this one, but went along to Royal Society of Arts a few weeks back for a lunchtime lecture and Q&A by Clay Shirky, who was talking through some of the themes in his new book Here Comes Everybody. (I should say that there's been a lot of really good stuff happening at the RSA of late... a very impressive programme of lectures and talks about trends in media and communication.)

Actually, what was especially impressive about Shirky is that he's really not a utopian; indeed, he has a nicely self-deprecating line on his falling from faith on that front. He is enthusiastic about social networking and the like but is actually one of the few people in his field talking about this stuff in any political context: Belarussian flashmobbers, twittering pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt and so on. But he draws some convincing examples of how the new comms tech can be used for ill, too. Anyway, you can listen to the talk on the RSA site, along with whole bunch of other stuff, including the not-unrelated Charlie Leadbeater talk on his book We-Think.

And back where we came in: video games. My guess is that billions of words have been published about GTA IV in the last 40 hours, and I don't want to add much to them. But I was tickled by a line in yesterday's Independent. In an article entitled What is Grand Theft Auto, and why does it cause such controversy? the author, Rebecca Armstrong, presumably writing for a largely middle class, middle-aged readership observed "it's light years away from traditional video games like Space Invaders or, later, Sonic the Hedgehog". Well, thanks for that apercu, Rebecca. I'm reminded of Stephen King's observations about parents needing to "monitor their children's life in the pop culture", but if there are any parents of teenagers quite as out of touch as Ms Armstrong seems to think, I'd be staggered...

My other life

I've finally got round to getting up a website for my real life: Double Shot, the consultancy I formed in 2007 with my partner Sarah Turner . Of course, these things are in perpetual beta, right? So a full archive of my writing is yet to be added to the site... watch this space.

I have to say that one of the real revelations of getting it done was using the free-use web building tool Weebly, which, though a tad buggy at times is an absolute joy. The quality of online tools, from Google Docs to Mindmeister is improving at an exponential rate right now - the collaborative ones most especially. Of course, we need ubiquitous broadband connectivity for the to come into their own... but give it time...

Anyway, feedback on the site would be appreciated.

New Paul Schütze show

DGMS's good friend, composer-musician, installation artist and photographic artist Paul Schütze has his second solo show at Alan Cristea on Cork Street, London opening on May 14th. The show - an exhibition of lightboxes and photographic prints - is entitled Twilight Science, and according to its creator "explore(s) states of transition both of materiality and perception and demonstrate(s) the mutability of familiar environments and materials". The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome catalogue featuring an essay about the work by philosopher John Gray.

Paul also has a new website up here and a new t-shirt design available from MoreTVicar.

Some recent gigs

Thought I might just jot down a few words about some gigs I've been to recently, more to refresh my own memory than anything, and to get my thoughts clear about them.

Opeth & Arch Enemy, Brixton Academy, London, April 26th

Hot off the press this one - which is to say, it was last night. Didn't have high hopes of Arch Enemy, having walked out of their (I believe) last London gig at the forum, but didn't expect them to be this bad. It's pretty much the kind of metal Seb Hunter talks about Kurt Cobain having killed off in his amusing though ultimately cop-out not-sure-if-I'm-writing-a-book-about-metal-or-a-Sunday-supplement-piece-about-coming-to-terms-with-my-father's-death  memoir Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict". Despite the band's roots in the Swedish death metal scene, this was truly old school, right down to the cheesy drum solo and blinding pyrotechnics. Still, you get what you pay for with them and the (distinctly beered-up) audience seemed to love it.  The athletic Angela Gossow - who's undeniably a fantastic vocalist - certainly had the barely post-pubescent males in the mosh-pit eating out of her hands.

Anyway, difficult to be disappointed at something for which one has no real expectations. Not so Opeth. I think last night was the fifth time I've seen the Swedish Prog/Black metallers and thus far the only really disappointing show of theirs I'd experienced was their appearance at the Roundhouse a couple of years back. And in fairness, that was entirely down to the venue, which - great though it undoubtedly is - simply doesn't work for rock gigs. Not since its makeover at any rate; way too "heritage". (Don't let that you put you off getting the Roundhouse Tapes album, though - it's their Yessongs, and I mean that a a compliment). Last night is another matter though. This should have been awesome: the perfect London (large)metal venue, a fuller house than I've ever seen there and a Saturday night following a pretty much perfect English Spring day.

And yet it was really quite dreadful. My companion and I left about three songs in (although, to be fair, this being Opeth that was after 40 minutes or so). I'm not sure what's happened to them, but it sure is curious. The first thing to note is that on every occasion I've seen Opeth they've put on an immaculate show, in every sense: beautifully played, well-paced and always with fabulous sound. It was the last which immediately let them down. You can expect a mix to take a few minutes to settle down, especially at the end of a multi-band bill (DevilDriver and 3 Inches of Blood had played in support but were unwitnessed by this writer). But if anything, the mix last night got worse.

Now this isn't nit-picking. This music is as much about the quality of the sound as it is about about anything - or, rather, relies massively on that quality -  so last night's wall of mush is what I suspect most people "hear" when they listen to metal. But it wasn't just that; the whole performance lacked vitality and commitment - the key ingredients of every show I've Opeth put on previously. And, frankly, much of the playing was pretty sloppy - not least the often wayward double kick-drumming, which is meaningless if not atomic clock-precise.

To be blunt, the band seemed entirely indifferent, and even bandleader Mikael Akerfeldt's notoriously laconic inter-song banter seemed cursory. A real shame. It saddens me to write it, but I suspect this well be the last time I venture out to see "Opeth, from Stockholm Sweden... "

OK, enough... more quickly, other recent shows...

Low, St George's Church, Brighton, April 16th

I don't get to many gigs in my "home" town, so this was a real treat. Duluth, Minnesota's Low have been busy creating their own little world for nearly a decade and a half now - and I can think of no more accurate definition of art than doing just that. The trio of guitarist/singer Alan Sparhawk, drummer/singer Mimi Parker and (relatively) new bassist Matt Livingston play the most elegant and stripped down Americana imaginable, a truly fragile music. The church was the perfect location setting for them, and I have to say they held the mid-week crowd pretty rapt.

About two thirds into the set Sparhawk started to let rip - by Low standards, at least - with soloing which owed more than a little to Neil Young. Indeed, if I had a criticism of the show - and this is purely a personal preference, no, need - I'd like to have heard the band veer towards a more abstract Dead Man territory.

But that's a quibble; this was a pretty sublime concert, in truth.

Devil Sold His Soul, Islington Carling Bar Academy, London, April 10th

I first caught the UK's preternaturally gifted and ludicrously young DSHS at the Pressure Point in Brighton at the tail end of last year and fuck me they were genius. They've taken an awful lot from Sweden's Cult of Luna and taken it somewhere else again: a glacial, minimalist and genuinely modernist metal with none of the genre's presentational tropes whatsover.

Six months on and they're heading a three-band night at the distinctly soul-less Bar Academy in Islington. Latitudes and This Will Destroy You open up the show, and I have to say that there's a real scene/style bands like this are carving out. They both draw as much on God Speed! You Black  Emperor or even Sigur Ros as they do on, say, CoL , and the "epic" is what they're trying to achieve. They fall short though, to be honest. Latitudes lack the chops, whereas TWDY can play but aren't great writers, and both seem to lack the rigorous self-disciple of Cult or Devil, or for matter, 65 Days of Static, who my son Franck is pestering me with constantly right now.

Still, I dig their ambition.

The Devil performance, though, is puzzling in other ways. They've certainly come a long way in just a few months, but whether their journey has been a wholly good thing or not I'm not so sure. Front man Ed Gibbs has certainly grown in confidence in this time; he has something of the potential rock god about him - albeit a deranged one. But something's happened to the music; it's gone just  a bit too anthem-y, and the fragile-verse-blistering-chorus Nirvana template they're beginning to stick too I think sells their naturally icy inclinations short.

Don't get me wrong; I think they could be huge - deservedly so - and I really enjoyed the gig, in a full-of-gig-lager kind of way. But when they tour the UK with Cult of Luna this summer they're going to have to up the ante again to come even close to the rigidly modernist Swedes.

All which said, I'm looking forward enough to the double bill to go and see it in both London and Brighton on consecutive nights...  Bring on a frosty July!

Sonic Yout

And a second plug of the day... this time for my son Franck, aka Yout, whose rather lovely brand of nicely-crafted sampladelica gets its first commercial release through the Steal My Oil label this week.

You can hear more of his stuff on his MySpace page, of course.

Bit of a plug

Just a quick word to say that my good friend and colleague Paul Finn, an extremely talented graphic and interaction designer and a typography obsessive has just launched his new portfolio site which I urge you to look at if you're in the market for some intelligent, highly-crafted design work.

Paul's pretty nifty on the dancefloor as well, granted that that's probably not particularly relevant...

Stephen King on video game violence

Stephen King has pitched into the war of words steadily growing around the Massachussets legislature's hearing of House Bill 1432 (HB1432), which seeks to curb the sale of "violent" video games to "minors". The whole process has been covered extremely thoroughly in the excellent GamePolitics.com ("Where Politics and Video Games Collide): "HB1423 is a “games-as-porn” bill which would seek to restrict minors from buying violent video games under the same rationale used to block them from buying sexually explicit materials... "

In a column for Entertainment Weekly, for whom he writes as culture correspondent, King argues that the bill is both wrong and pretty much bound to fail. His arguments are liberal standard procedure and most of the way I agree with them: video games are just a convenient target for politicians and allow them to ignore the true causes of ultra-violence in American society: the gap between the rich and poor and the easy availability of firearms.

It's the last point where I start to diverge from King, not because I think that the US gun laws aren't a bit fucked, but because we've heard the arguments from both sides over and over and seldom get any observations with any subtlety, originality or recognition of the historical and social complexities at work. Jesus, even Michael Moore (not exactly the most subtle of polemicists) pointed out in Bowling for Columbine that Canada's gun laws aren't that different to the US's, despite dramatically lower murder rates.

Anyway, it wasn't that which caught my eye. It was his insistence that bringing up children is a parent's job and not the state's which chimed - though, er, problematically. "Parents need to have the guts to forbid material they find objectionable...and then explain why it's being forbidden. They also need to monitor their children's lives in the pop culture — which means a lot more than seeing what games they're renting down the street."

I completely agree with King on this, but writing as the father of three teenagers, I have to say, it's quite a challenge. As a teenager myself I had, in retrospect, astonishingly liberal parents, but there were still some - effectively - "banned" things in the house (Derek and Clive for one; if memory serves my mother unfortunately heard their cancer sketch while her beloved uncle was dying... of cancer. Excerpt: "Without [cancer] we wouldn't have a way to die, would we? Fucking good of [God]! Not to torment us with being eternally young and being able to fuck everyone. No! He gave us this great gift of fucking cancer, that's very kind. I wouldn't have thought of that if I'd been creating the universe, would you? Bung in cancer? No, I'd have left that out." Quite.) I didn't necessarily agree with them, and I'm not sure I do now (that D&C sketch makes me laugh out loud every time I'm afraid), but I developed, at least, a sense of acceptability - and a means of discourse about it.

I stress that because King's insistence that parents "explain why it's being forbidden" is the key here, as is his notion of keeping up with your kids'  "lives in the pop culture". What's implicit in his demands of parents is that they have some kind of intellectual relationship with their kids - especially as they become teens. Of course, it's impossible to know exactly what's going on in your kids' lives - indeed, it would be a little creepy to do so. And, modern comms tech being what it is, it's all but impossible to ban something from the house in the way my parents could. But to engage with them, to at least try to understand them and their culture is surely vital.

Also, if I'm frank, it's more often than not a lot of fun. Isn't shooting the shit about, say, Plan B's visceral dissection of honour killing in "Tough Love", or just why the Coke GTA piss-take is both hysterical and sinister (random recent Hopkins household examples, I grant) just a tad more interesting than discussing Nigel Slater recipes or Habitat wish lists or fuck knows what else constitutes an "adult" life?

Whine house

I was initially very impressed with online personalised music magazine Idiomag, which seems to collate stories from across the web according to prefs the user either sets manually or imports from elsewhere. I wasn't sure about the print mag paradigm they've gone for (page turning corners, indeed), but the principle was a good one. However...

My prefs come out of my last.fm profile; the fact that my classic soul-loving son Joe - yes, really - leaves Audioscrobbler on while listening accounts, I assume, for the otherwise disproportionate number of pieces I get sent about soul, R&B, blues and so on. I'm cool with that; nice to have Aretha or Uncle Ray in there with Tool and Meshuggah and articles on 70s Herbie Hancock.

And - having a pretty good understanding of how recommendations services work (and that's what this is, after all) - I quite undertand why it might offer me a story on La Winehouse. The first time. But not after I'd binned it ("Don't show me articles like this again". Once. Twice. And now daily. Yes, I'm being offered Amy stories daily and I bin 'em every time. Along with a whole slew of shit that I couldn't possibly want.

Two possible conclusions:

Their algorithms are a bit crap. If that's the case they need to get it sorted, and pronto. We've all come to expect a lot of these services. To this day I still get creeped out at how well Last or Amazon "know" me...

...or... and this is what I suspect...

There's a level of editorial intervention going on which gets in the way of the maths and stats. Now adding a little serendipity into the mix is not per se a bad thing (see my comments on Reciva's "Most Overlooked" promo), but it has to be done smartly - and subtly. And it has to take notice of when a reader says ENOUGH!

Well, I'm saying it now. Sorry Idiomag, but you've lost me.

"Most Overlooked"

I've been enjoying the fantastic internet radio portal Reciva for some time. I just wanted to point out here the "Most Overlooked Stations" promo on their homepage. What a fantastic way to avoid the ever-diminishing-returns tendency of collaborative filtering-driven recommendations services (Amazon, Last.fm etc... love 'em as we do) or the reinforce-the-big-hitters "Most Viewed" approach of, say, the BBC homepage.

Hardly groundbreaking, but it makes me smile every time I see it... even if it is driven by agenda-driven editorial interventions.

Greer on Culture vs Kultur

Thanks to Nick Reynolds for alerting me to Germaine Greer's fantastic piece in the Guardian in which she talks about the widespread abuse of the word "culture".

""Media" is our way of referring to the multiplicity of means of conveying information. If, out of this never-ending cacophony, we select what the British call grand opera, and listen to it on our iPods on the way to work, we are not suddenly tuning into culture, but choosing to concentrate on a single strand."

Greer doesn't say so explicitly, but it seems to me that behind the confusion of "culture" with (as Greer points out) the German "Kultur" is a concern on the part of the media and, er, th establishment, that they might frighten the children (ie us) by using the word "art". Which is, let's be honest, pretty fucked.