DGMFS

Paul Schütze - Air Into Light exhibition

My good friend Paul Schütze has a week-long pop-up show opening in a couple of weeks' time in London, featuring prints based on the designs Paul created to accompany the digital release of his back catalogue. Here's what Twilight Science has to say about the show:

Twilight Science editions will present a Pop-up exhibition from the 12th -17th of March 2012 in London: Eighteen editioned prints, each designed to accompany a different musical work. The prints will be shown with a perpetual mix of said music and a scent diffusion courtesy of Editions De Parfums Frederic Malle. Works will be available to order as signed, numbered archival ink-jet prints. Venue: Maggs Bros, 50 Hayes Mews, London W1J 5QJ.

More in the ongoing Koloss build up

Can't resist posting this trailer for Meshuggah's upcoming Koloss. Also, seems that Amazon has got clips up of every track on the album.

Via Metal Hammer and Paul Schütze

William Gibson on the demise of the recording industry

Over on the professional blog of my consultancy Unthinkable, I’ve been quoting liberally from Distrust that Particular Flavour, the first anthology of non-fiction from the man who pretty much single-handedly reinvented science fiction at the turn of the 80’s and has been writing solidly for the thirty years since: William Gibson.

Gibson is deeply insightful on a bewildering variety of topics whose only catch-all is surely “human culture” (strictly lower-case). He’s especially strong on music – both its praxis and the cultural business around it – and I write this as someone who emphatically doesn’t share his enthusiasm for punk (although I’m with him in his unabashed love of Steely Dan).

In any case, I found myself nodding fiercely at these lines, taken from a speech given to the Director’s Guild of America in 2003:

Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite.

It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction among several.

This is spot-on, even if drawing no partuclarly forecast-y conclusion (as he says elsewhere: “The day I reply with anything other than... 'I haven’t got a clue’ [to the question of what the future will bring] please, shoot me.") None of us truly knows what’s going to happen to the role of the professional musician, but we do know that it is about to change profoundly, as it is for all professional artists, and the impact of this on the musician’s actual output – that is, music, or art more widely – is something we ignore foolishly, although ignore it most of us surely do.

Chimp Spanner: Möbius Pt 1 playthrough

Tasty guitar playthrough here from prog-metal instrumentalist Chimp Spanner (whom I missed playing in London a couple of weeks back thanks to an untimely cold). What's especially impressive about it is how effortless he makes it all seem.

Via Metal Underground

Me, Tim Ferris, the Brighton half-marathon... and a public apology to Sarah

My best friend Kate informs me, with some evident and frankly justifiable disgust, about just how many people seem to think it’s in any way interesting to tweet how far they’ve run that day. So Christ knows how she’s going to feel about me blogging about a run, but there you go.

Eagle-eyed regular readers will have spotted barely any updates to my reading list sidebar in, well, about six months. Two words explain this: Timothy Ferriss. Ferriss is a Californian ‘lifestyle designer’ and if that phrase fills you with horror then I have to tell you that when my partner Sarah ordered Ferriss’ book on body hacking The 4 Hour Body, I was horrified and somewhat sarcastic with Sarah about it, so what follows is, apart from anything else, a kind of public apology. Because about a week after the book turned up from Amazon, I picked it up from Sarah’s bedside to relieve a bout of insomnia, and found myself three hundred pages in at 5am. I would call this, without a hint of irony or exaggeration, a life-changing moment. And that’s why I’m writing a rare post about events in my own life: because not to do so at this point would be disingenuous. The 4 Hour Body and its predecessor, The 4 Hour Work Week (which we might term more of a life marking manual, and which I will be discussing elsewhere), have had a more profound effect on my real life than most of the science fiction, political philosophy and history which normally receives attention here.

I won’t go into detail about the many areas The 4 Hour Body covers. For one thing, there’s over 500 pages of it and for another, it’s received plenty of attention elsewhere – and not always positive, it should be said. I will say, in headlines that it has led me – and Sarah – to utterly re-assess our diet and exercise regime, and much else about our general effectiveness professionally and personally.

What I wanted to talk about specifically was what reading Ferriss has done for my running. I’ve run – or jogged, as we used to say – on and off pretty much since leaving school. My standard run for most of that time has been 10K, which I’ve always run in an hour, give or take. Nothing to write home about, but nowt to sneer at either. Even when I’ve taken considerable periods off, it’s only ever taken me a couple of runs to get back up to 10K, and with a recovery of maybe 3-4 minutes.

And yet, and yet... I’d had for some time the sneaking suspicion that I could do rather better than this and as early as the summer of 2011 I’d dipped my toe into a bit of interval training and improved my overall time.

And then I read the 4 Hour Body, which has extensive coverage of running technique. Ferriss set himself the challenge of running an ultra-marathon without the usual prerequisite training of lots of long runs, instead opting for short distances – fast, along with a whole rota of strength training techniques associated with cross fit training. Now here’s some controversy over what happened to Ferriss’ challenge to himself, as two years on from the book’s publication, he seems still not to have run an ultra-marathon. But I set myself a rather less demanding one: to run the Brighton half-marathon without ever running any preparatory long runs. Because what I wanted to concentrate on was technique. Ferriss experimented with various running techniques and especially the famous Pose style of running developed by the Russian athlete and trainer Dr Nicholas Romanov. While Ferriss doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse Pose running, he does take away the following as having the most impact on his running performance:

• Take short steps, and fast
• Land on the balls of the feet
• Pick your legs up behind you
• Lean forward
• Keep your arms and hands up and still

I changed my style to accommodate the technique recommended by Ferris (very painful on the calves for three or four runs). I stuck to short runs, mostly on a treadmill, increasing my speed, eventually running 5K in around 24.30. I also, latterly, adopted the protocol Nate Green recommends: 10 x 20 sec 11kph, 10% incline bursts with 10 sec rests (actually Green suggests 12% and 12 kph – but this was killing enough). Also in there: weights and swimming – lots of swimming. Oh, and the dreaded kettle bell dead lifts and swings. More about those bastards some other time. In all my prep, six months of it, I did just two 10K runs, just to see if I was kidding myself. Nothing longer.

And the result? The race was this Sunday, and I can report that I ran it pretty comfortably in 1:48.42, a time with which I’m very happy. Pretty sore the following day. 48 hours on barely a twinge.

So, why write about this here? Because I think this all demonstrates the principle which underpins much of the 4 Hour Body and much of The 4 Hour Work Week: MED, or minimal effective dose. Boiled down, the principle is straightforward: what is the minimum amount necessary to achieve the maximum results?

It would be all too early to characterise this as self-help snake oil salesmanship – a lie that great results can be achieved without hard work. But let me be clear about something. The kind of MED training I undertook over the last six months was emphatically nowhere as easy trudging on a treadmill for an hour a time at 10kph or so (the Nate Green protocol, by the way, leaves me nearly puking). What I have cut down on, instead, is the amount of time involved in training. That’s where the "minimal" comes in. It has, for me, been revelatory - not least because it runs counter to many of the ways I've tackled life's challenges in the past - and MED is a mindset I am attempting to apply to much of my life. I’ll report back here and, where appropriate, on the UC blog, on how it all goes.

Nike's incredible 0.16kg running shoe

According to Gizmodo, the Nike Zoom Streak 3, weighing just 0.2kg, was worn by 1st, 2nd and 3rd place runners in the 2011 World Championships marathon. Now, incredibly, Nike have developed the 20% lighter Flyknit Racer.

Via Gizmodo

Meshuggah: Do Not Look Down

Well, here's the second preview track from Koloss, and fuck me it's astounding. Slow-ish, and grooving again, and in many ways closer to Destroy, Erase, Improve than anything since. But utterly compelling, ravishing. Thordendal's solo made me shout with delight on first hearing, as my bemused partner can testify. Bring the album on now.

MESHUGGAH - Do Not Look Down by NuclearBlastRecords

Forgive me, a student film by Emmet Holmes-Boyes

This is a very impressive student short film by my son Frank's good friend Emmet. I'm putting it up here, well, because it's good and you should see it, but also because Frank did the music for it.

Forgive me - student film from Emmet Holmes-Boyes on Vimeo.

The Caretaker: outtakes from Patience (After Sebald)

The Caretaker is Leyland Kirby, latterly the force behind V/VM; specifically it's a project in which recordings on 78s are recombined into entirely new and often strangely moving new music. This is a set of outtakes from his soundtrack about the life of WG Sebald.

More great prog metal: Red Seas Fire

Yesterday Means End from Sweden, today Red Seas Fire From England: more complex, brutal prog metal with great breakdowns and harmonically sophisticated, operatic choruses. In the words of the band's SoundCloud page: "We aim to fuse cutting-edge metal and erudite progressive sensibilites with strong melody lines and ambient electronic soundscapes to create fresh and eclectic waves of noise to shake your ass to." Quite.

Red Seas Fire by Red Seas Fire

Via Paul Schütze, via Got-Djent.