Summer at Last

June 19, 2005

Finally a couple of sunny days in a row. Sitting out in the shade after painting the terrace (again, finally). Busy few days — flew up to Edinburgh on Friday to take a brief from Leith, which was my first flight from City Airport. Only about 15 minutes by car from here, check-in 30 minutes before flying, which mean that for an 0800 flight I could get up at 6am and still make it. And fabulous view from window seat banking out over docklands on the way up, beautiful adagio cloudscapes over the Thames estuary flying back in the evening. …

love will tear us apart

May 30, 2005

… the individual crackling surfaces of analog media in their instantiation — ‘my’ copy of that 12” single vs ‘yours’. Installation proposal: ‘love will tear us apart’: an archive of the different surface noise on once-lovers’ separately-purchased copies of once-shared albums, made by subtracting the signal common to both copies, leaving only the remaining patina, unique to each disc…

Eyeless on Stage, July

April 29, 2005

Eyeless In Gaza are one of the great bands that emerged post punk… They were truly unique… Martyn Bates is one of the great white soul singer voices, by soul I mean Ian Curtis not Jamiroquai. I still love them —Alan McGee, March 2005 And after 18 years, they’re back on tour. I can’t say that anything they’ve made in the past (um) 25 years does much for me, but it’s hard to resist the temptation… just one encore from Caught in Flux would make it worthwhile…

Jack and FLAC

April 29, 2005

Have updated my music player to use the JACK low-latency realtime library for output, and replaced Mplayer with alsaplayer as the media player. Have also dropped the Meridian 518 and Yamaha decoder from the output chain, feeding audio straight into my Bryston via the music box’s onboard DACs. Given the hardware (and purpose of the box), there’s little benefit to be had from the low-latency features of JACK, but the realtime support helps keep the output smooth in the face of other stuff running on the box (CD ripping, for example). And something in the combination of the simplified signal …

Days Like These

November 29, 2004

Every day, I receive emails, newsletters and catalogues informing me about some small subset of the thousands of potentially interesting things on in London. If I’m really paying attention in the moment, I might actually get around to typing some of them into my ipaq and maybe even get around to booking. More usually, though, the moment that I see the information is a moment when my attention is mostly occupied with something else: looking though email for an important messsage from a client, or opening letters in the hope of finding a long-chased invoice. Most event invitations simply get …

Routine Bites Hard

November 15, 2004

Stencil on White’s Row on the weekend.

Glitch

November 3, 2004

Indescribably beautiful glitch on my music server tonight, randomly time- and pitch-shifting parts of tracks as they playback. A reboot cured it, but seemed completely appropriate for a day when that idiot and by extension his wranglers ended up still in place, perverting the world…

Vivid

September 28, 2004

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every …

OMD Aggregators…

August 16, 2004

Where are all the online music service aggregators? And the lawsuits to follow…

With Nude Media, All You Hold is But A Cache of What You Own

July 15, 2004

That’s the crucial fork between my view of digital media and the more traditional one (wherein MP3s, for example, replace vinyl as object in one’s possession). If your local copies are simply expedient cacheings of that to which what you’ve purchased rights, then restrictions on formats, limited freedoms of transcoding, and the other restrictions that are currently being wrapped into DRM, are obviously inappropriate, arbitrary restrictions the only benefit of which is to support particular business models. This isn’t new news. But…

描写