Freshit Release 3 — SAWF: So Let Me EP

Come its December 15th release date, you should be enjoying the cool tech of SAWF’s new EP So Let Me on Freshit Records. The sleeve art features one of my night shots from Shiodome in Tokyo, April this year.

Future Disco 3

Sean Brosnan returns with the third release in this rather excellent series. Jump in to find another inspired mix of house-tinged contemporary/nu/new [choose your own genre-tag here] discoid tunes. As with the previous releases in the series, Future Disco 3 is a mix best experienced start-to-finish — Sean has the production of ‘this is a journey’ setlists programmed somewhere deep in his DJ DNA. Enjoy on a sunny day with your feet up. Or on the dancefloor. I’m proud that some more of my clubland photos again feature in the accompanying booklet.

Horse Meat Disco Vol. 2

It’s coming. You know you want it. The second CD compilation from the Vauxhall disco gods doesn’t actually include any of my photos, but the promo video features my Horse Meat Disco-related pix in abundance. Check it on YouTube….

Form 696 is a Bad Thing

The London police have apparently decided that Keeping Track of ‘Dangerous’ Music Scenes will be easier if they mandate the organisers of events to help them keep tabs on both performers and punters, via some new paperwork, Form 696. This is a Bad Thing, and smacks of past efforts to keep young people Firmly In Their Place when it comes to music and nightlife. We’re written about this in more detail over at BigShinyThing — have a read, check out some of the links (including petitions and FaceBook groups dedicated to stopping Form 696 in its tracks), and if you …

Chipamp

While working I’ve been listening to music on my Mac on my ER4s. Which is nice, but I don’t like wearing headphones all day. I didn’t want to go out and buy a set of high-end ‘PC speakers’, although something like the Fujitsu TEN might be fun for an afternoon. And anyway, since I bought my B1s, I’ve had a pair of decent speakers spare — either a pair of Neutron 3s, or Dynaudio Contour 1.1s, depending on which I keep as rears on my main system. So I decided to build an amp instead. Looked briefly at a few …

Martyn Ware Interview

Uh forgot to mention — we recently got to talk to Martyn Ware for BigShinyThing. Read the interview in full on the site.

Glanceware Music Navigation #2

For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion? I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore …

Glanceware Remotes?

So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way. On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, …

love will tear us apart

… 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…