anatomy · of · distance

I'm back in London now, having returned this morning from Indie Tracks.

Sunday's weather was, alas, nowhere near as nice as Saturday's. starting ominously grey and proceeding to rain. I slept in a bit, and then went to the site, catching the start of The School's set, but then bailing to see The Marshmallow Kisses. The School are, of course, the doo-wop-influenced pop group from Cardiff, and their new material sounds good (if you don't mind that sort of thing, of course). The Marshmallow Kisses are a Chinese/Japanese duo who do bossa-nova-tinged pop songs; they had Tim from Hong Kong In The 60s playing guitar, Brad from One Happy Island playing trumpet, and someone else on violin, and were quite nice in an understated way. After that, whilst having lunch with Tim, MeiYau and Chris (of HK60s), we heard 1960s folkie Nick Garrie making his return on the outdoor stage; he sounded a bit like Nick Drake.

I then saw US indiepop combo The Smittens play in the train shed, and then Hong Kong In The 60s play a nicely understated set in the church. After that, I saw a set from a solo electropop artist from New Zealand, who goes by the name of Disasteradio, who was quite animated and surprisingly entertaining for a guy with a table of synths. Apparently he's one of the Camp A Low Hum people. I also saw a bit of European electropop duo Stereo Total playing outdoors; by then, it had started raining, and people were standing around in their raincoats under umbrellas. The festival was closed by Art Brut playing in the train shed (which I missed, though I heard enough from outside, in the stationary buffet car that served as a bar outside), followed by Teenage Fanclub on the outdoor stage, and then two discos until midnight. I ended up catching the train after the last one to Butterley station (after it did a test run), and then sharing a taxi to Ripley with three girls who were going to Mansfield.

There was also a mix CD swap box; one put one's CD in a box, took a ticket, and then claimed another one later. I made a mix CD and put it in the box, and ended up fishing out a rather promising-looking one (it includes All-Girl Summer Fun Band, Mirah, and AIH's Scissors, Paper, Rock).

Some statistics: I bought two 8Gb memory cards before Indie Tracks, one for my camera and one for my audio recorder. The former, I managed to fill up almost completely (mostly by using the video-taking mode of my camera); the latter I recorded a good 4 hours or so of audio on; mostly recordings of sets, though I managed to also get some of the amazing vintage lounge/bossa grooves the Elefant Records guy queued up to play between sets, in the hope that I might get them identified at some point. (It is rather convenient that my audio recorder fits neatly in a top jacket pocket with only the microphones protruding; it's half of a quite serviceable gargoyle rig.) I also used about 200Mb of the 1Gb of credit I bought with the 3G wireless card I picked up in preparation. I imagine the rest will go pretty quickly when I'm on the continent next month.

Anyway, this was the best Indie Tracks so far. Assuming that I'm still in the UK or Europe in a year's time, I'll be sure to be at the next one.

Btw, photos are here.

Yesterday, Colin Clary of The Smittens ran a songwriting workshop. I arrived a bit late, due largely to the train schedule along the line not quite syncing up with the event schedule, but it was good. He took ideas and suggestions from the crowd and started writing various songs with them, playing them on guitar, with people contributing lyric ideas, melodies and such. One thing I took away from it is that one needs to just sit down and do it, otherwise one will be stuck on all the songs one didn't write.

Bands/music I saw include:

• Little My. A bunch of kids from Cardiff in animal ears playing chaotic indiepop. I saw part of their set, though left to go to see Sucrette.


• Sucrette. A Japanese band, consisting of three girls (on keyboards, vocals and drums) and a guy (on guitar and laptop). They sound like classic Japanese pop; no other country would combine 1990s Eurodance drum patterns/synth arpeggios with jangly guitars in quite the same way.


• Fitness Forever. An Italian lounge-pop band who sound somewhere between 1960s film scores and cruise-ship disco from the 1970s, and pull it off with panache. The guitarist (the chap in the captain's hat with the sunglasses and the cigar) is the unchallenged winner of the title of Most Stupendously Bad-Ass Motherfucker at the festival.


• I caught part of Camera Obscura, on the outdoor stage as the sun was setting. They played well.


• I saw Emmy The Great playing in the train shed. Though I was mostly towards the back or sides of the audience, not seeing much of the band, and the acoustics there aren't great. Anyway, Emmy and her band seem to be following a cue from a lot of other folkies, such as Jeffrey Lewis (and, indeed, Dylan) and rocking out more.


• La Casa Azul, or a Spanish guy in a white jumpsuit who alternated between playing piano ballads and singing/playing guitar in front of a video screen projecting videos of computer-generated musicians playing backing parts or videos based on 8-bit video games. He was entertaining, even though I can't understand a word of Spanish.

The festival seems to be bigger than last year, with more tents, food and merch. The organic nachos from the Undergrowth Cafe (with bean salsa and olives) were excellent; there was also a curry place and the old burger shack from last year. And in the evening, someone set up a pork roast near the entrance to the train shed, and we were met with the gruesome spectacle of the charred, tortured body of a whole pig on a spit, its eyeless, notched face bearing witness to great agonies. The whole thing made me think more of mediaeval woodcuts of the suffering of martyred saints than of an apetising meal. As the night wore on, they cut strips off this porcine Saint Sebastian and sold them to people, until all that was left was the ghastly head. I can see why people become vegetarian now.

I saw what will almost certainly be my last ever Lucksmiths gig last night.* And my second-last-ever one the night before.

They played at the Luminaire on Tuesday night, and the Scala last night. The audience was a mixture of expatriate Australians (not the bogans you find here who consider JJJ to be "alternative", the good ones) and the usual indiepop kids from London and all over England. They played a lot of their songs, and I was chuffed to hear my favourite one, Transpontine, on Tuesday.

I took my cameras, of course, and also took an audio recorder I recently bought. The nice thing about it is that it fits into a top jacket pocket with only the twin microphones unobstrusively protruding, and can get quite passable recordings. Anyway, here's a video from the Luminaire gig, with audio from the audio recorder.

There was an afterparty at the Lexington (a bar/pub/venue where a lot of the twee pop kids and Upset The Rhythm lo-fi noise hipsters hang out these days); I went there, and stayed until 3am, getting home as it was getting light.

Anyway, it was great to see them again, and a bit sad that a Melbourne institution is coming to an end; it's like the Punters' Club all over again.

* Well, not counting the possibility of my finding myself unexpectedly in Australia in the next few months, or indeed the possibility of them reforming in 20 years' time and playing a tour for former Fitzroy/Carlton coolsies, now working as executives in publishing firms and managers at arts institutions.

I'm currently in beautiful brutalist Birmingham at EuroPython. So far, I have seen a talk on RjDj, a platform for making generative/algorithmic music (which is based on Pure Data), which looked very interesting. And just now, I saw Cory Doctorow's keynote, where he gave a comprehensive overview of metaclass design patterns in Django. Actually, I lie; he talked about how bad copyright laws threaten free software and the right to innovate, with Python being essentially a McGuffin. Nonetheless, it was a good talk (though I've heard most of it before at Copyfighters' Hyde Park meetups and on Boing Boing).

I've recently gotten into the habit of going for evening walks, typically after eating dinner. Which is easy enough to do in the midsummer, when the sun sets shortly before 10, and one often has a glorious sunset, or at least the wistful poignancy of the day's last rays, beckoning one out of one's room and into the streets. Which, I guess, is one of the advantages of living far from the equator (in the summer, anyway).

Today was a particularly splendid sunset; see below for evidence:
( Photos )

Whilst travelling through Australia in February, I found, as one does, that the total weight of my baggage kept increasing. As such, I stepped into the post offices in a number of places (Melbourne, Glebe, Narooma (NSW) and Bulimba (Brisbane)), packaged up my surplus belongings and mailed them back to the UK.

Today, the last of those packages arrived; it was the one I sent from Narooma, almost four months ago. The package I sent a few days later from Bulimba (also by sea mail) arrived some two months earlier.

No idea why. Did they end up on different ships? Was one of the ships held hostage by pirates on its way to the Suez Canal? Or did they, on a whim, send it the other way around the world?

This just arrived in the mail:

HELLO BUYER?

WE ARE AMERICAN CLUB BASED IN PHILPPINES,WE ARE EXPOTER OF COCAINE I.E WE SELL COCAINE TO ANY OF OUR INTERESTED CUSTOMERS AROUND THE GLOBE.IF YOU ARE INTRESETED TO ORDER THE PRODUCT PLEASE KINDLY CONTACT OUR SHIPPING AGENT FOR YOUR DELIVERY.WE WANT TO KNOW HOW YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO BE DELIEVER TO YOU,THOUGH WE HAVE OUR OWN METHODS OF DELIVERY.AFTER YOUR ORDER THIS HOW WE GET THE PRODUCT ACROSS TO YOU BY OUR COURIER; NOTE IF YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO BE DELIEVER TO YOU AT HOME WE DO ALSO IF YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO BE DELIEVER TO YOU AT THE AIRPORT WE DO.THOSE ARE THE TWO METHODS BUT IF YOU HAVE ANY OTHER SUGESTION THAT YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO BE DELIEVER TO YOU,YOU ARE FREE TO TELL US.HERE IS THE AMOUNT FOR THE PRODUCT,THE COCAINE IS JUST 5KG IN A SMALL BAG PLEASE NOTE THERE IS NO RETAIL. THE AMOUNT FOR THE PRODUCT IS;
$5000.00[USD] YOU WILL HAVE TO DEPOSIT $1500.00[USD] THEN CONTACT OUR SHIPPING AGENT,FOR YOUR IMMEDIATE SHIPPING/ DELIEVERY; MS.______ ____[__________@_____.com]

BEST REGARDS

MR. DON LUCAS[MD].

Over the past few months, I have been working (in my copious spare time) on a remix of a track from the last Momus album. I have hinted at it here and elsewhere, though not said much. I finished it last week and sent it to imomus, who liked what I did with it. (In his words, it "captures the original and carries it deep into dub reggae's 'jungle of wires'".) So, anyway, here it is:




I may have some other remixes for other people out soon.

An unusual thing happened yesterday.

In the morning post, there were two bulging green envelopes. They looked like greeting card envelopes, only containing something that obviously wasn't greeting cards, and bore Irish postage stamps. They were addressed to a house in a nearby street with the same number as my house; apparently the post office mistakenly dropped them in my mailbox.

In the evening, as I was setting out to buy some groceries, I took the envelopes and went to the street where they were addressed to. As I approached the house, I noticed a middle-aged woman walking back to the door. "Excuse me," I said, "is this number --?" "Yes."

I handed her the envelopes, saying that they ended up in my mailbox. "How did you get these?" she asked. "I live at number -- ----- Street. The postman must have accidentally dropped them in my mailbox."

"Oh, thank God for that. I've been waiting for them all day. They contain fresh shamrock for St. Patrick's Day. Thank you for bringing them to me."

Fact: when given coffee, Britons (typically) do things to it which would almost be punishable by law in Australia or Italy. The result is nearly always undrinkably awful coffee, though the locals don't seem to notice.

Some abuses of coffee I've noticed include:

• Leaving bags of the stuff unsealed. The supermarkets now sell ostensibly passable ground coffee, conveniently packed in bags with valves to keep it from oxidising. Not that this means much to the locals who rip the bag open, take a shot's worth, and leave the rest to oxidise. The result: the rest of the bag produces dull, flavourless coffee.


• Bizarre coffee-making practices. I have, on more than one occasion, witnessed someone put a capsule into a Nespresso machine, run half a pint of water through it, pour some milk in and throw it in the microwave. Eventually, perhaps this practice will catch on in Italy, where they'll call it the "Angliano"*.


• Generally running too much water through it until you get bitter watery mud like out of an urn at a suburban McDonalds in the 1980s. A certain hipster bar in Shoreditch is notorious for this; why do they even bother having an espresso machine?


• And then there's actually drinking instant coffee, or considering Nespresso to be a proper espresso.

When, I wonder, will the inhabitants of this green and pleasant isle learn the proper handling of coffee?

* "Angliano" = an Italian slang word meaning crazy (literally "gone English").

As of today, I am no longer in the prime advertising demographic. In theory, nobody's ever going to try to sell me an iPod or a backpacking trip to Thailand again; from now on, it's only foot lotions, lawn-care products and insurance.

This Saturday was the 20th, and indeed the last 20th of the year, so I put together a track for The 20th Project. I only posted it this evening, not having come up with a name until now;

It started off with me tinkering with my new NanoKey and the new Kore sound pack Native Instruments are giving away for free (about half of the sounds are from there), and was influenced somewhat by thinking of the end and beginning of another year and the cyclical, regenerative nature of all things. Listening to it, I hear a bit of a mid-late 1980s 4AD influence there (think This Mortal Coil or somesuch), along with perhaps a bit of OMD and possibly some early AIH (!).

Also, two days earlier, I came up with this (as yet unfinished, and untitled) track, in a more chill-out/loungepop/symphonic trip-hop sort of vein:



I'm also working for a remix for another artist, which is maybe 40-50% done, though more on that later.

This weekend, I went up to indietracks' <i>A Christmas Twee</i> event this weekend, catching a train up to Nottingham yesterday afternoon, checking into a hotel there, and then catching the familiar Rainbow 1 to Ripley. (Ah yes, the Rainbow 1. I think that at some point in the next few decades, the Victoria & Albert Museum or some similar institution will have a retrospective on the 1990s rave-techno futurist aesthetic; alongside, say, the complete works of The Designers' Republic and a PlayStation playing WipeOut, they'll have some photos of Trent Barton buses.) Alas, as the bus was passing through Heanor, I realised that I had left the mix CD I had painstakingly assembled for the secret-Santa box in my bag in my hotel room. FAIL.

Other than that, it was good; attendance was a bit on the low side (a lot of people instead went to an all-dayer in Nottingham a few weeks ago), and I only knew something like eight people there (about half of whom were involved in organising aspects of the night). The bands were OK, though I wasn't blown away. The headliner was Phil Wilson of 1980s C86esque indiepop band the June Brides; they weren't one of the bands I've gotten into, so I couldn't say how good the show was; other than the fact that he did a skronky/jangly C86 cover of Kraftwerk's <i>Neon Lights</i>, which worked rather well. The other bands, Horowitz and Mascot Fight, were both OK though neither blew me away. (Mascot Fight's frontman going on dressed as a snowman was a nice touch, though.)

The actual event was in a marquee attached to the front of the station building on the Midlands Steam Railway, which appeared to be used for some sort of Christmas events during the day. There were animatronic reindeer and snowmen and similar winter wonderland denizens mechanically boogieing in the background behind the stage, which added a certain something to the festivities. There was also a whopping great steam train parked outside at the platform, its wood-panelled carriages shrouded in steam, which seemed to come up from beneath them. (I'm guessing that the actual steam is piped through the train to power/heat the carriages, rather than being converted to electricity in the locomotive.) Some carriages' electrics seemed to be in better shape than others; while some were very dimly lit, others were lit up like, well, Christmas trees. Being in the interior of a wood-panelled 1950s rail carriage, its lights flickering, and thick white steam shrouding the vestibule, was quite atmospheric, like something out of a David Lynch movie or something. Anyway, the guard's coach on the train had been converted into a disco, with DJs spinning records; in between sets, the train would be driven a mile or so up the line, then the locomotive would move to the other side and it'd go back, in time for the next band, while people sat around and talked in the carriages, drank ale from the bar in the buffet car, or else danced at the disco.

Staying in a hotel in Nottingham, I took advantage of this and took my laptop with me, managing to get a few things done on a remix I'm working on on the train there and back. (East Midland Trains generously provide power sockets in economy class, which is not bad for the £6-14 each way a seat costs if you book early enough.) I find these days that I'm most productive on music either in cafes or on train journeys (those of 1+ hours). Which means I should probably make more excuses to travel around the UK's railway network.

Poll #1290453 Obamarama ding dong
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

What happens next?

My new compact camera, a Fujifilm Finepix F45fd, arrived on Friday. I've spent a little time playing around with it.

My first impressions: it's small (much more so than the Canon compacts I've had) and feels satisfyingly hefty (the body is mostly metal, rather than the plastic used in the A570). The lack of proper manual control (there's no shutter/aperture priority and, perhaps less importantly, no manual focus) could take some time to get used to. I've yet to test it in a gig situation, though the dynamic range still seems a bit low compared to my old G2. (How it compares to Canon's higher-pixel-density non-Super CCDs remains to be determined.)

The camera also has about 25Mb of internal memory, which it can use to store photos in the absence of a SD/xD card. This is only accessible using PTP. (There is a Linux FUSE filesystem for PTP named gphotofs, though for some reason this wasn't working on my (Debian) server (though it did work on Ubuntu)). The camera has a function to copy photos between the internal memory and memory card, and photos get renumbered to fit. This appears to be acceptable.

One thing you can do more easily in Britain than in Australia is hop on a train to see a band in another town later that evening; partly because Britain has trains which run at more or less reasonable frequencies and partly because there are other cities with interesting music scenes within two hours' travelling time. Anyway, this is what I did last night, going up to Derby to see The Deirdres' possibly last ever gig. (Well, last before three of their members go abroad for some months.)

Having heard about it at somewhat late notice, all the cheap tickets for the direct train were long gone, and so I booked a ticket on a cheaper route, which involved catching a train going towards Carlisle, getting off at Tamworth (a small town in the Midlands where two railway lines cross each other at a split-level railway station), and catching the next train to Derby. I did this, arriving at about 20:30, and catching a cab to the B&B I was booked into. (The B&Bm, incidentally, was alright; I booked a small attic room for £20, and this was good enough. Though the wireless internet they advertised seemed to be switched off at night, and the "full English breakfast" included in the cost took so long that I ended up leaving without it to catch my train.)

Anyway, the Deirdres gig was great. It was all themed around things that hibernate, and at the door, one had to name something which hibernates, which would then be drawn on one's wrist in lieu of a stamp. The band members were all in appropriately themed animal costumes; there was a caterpillar/butterfly, a hedgehog, a bear, and a few others. (One member, Keir, was out of costume; his costume was meant to be a computer, but apparently broke; he said it was because it was a Windows PC and not a Mac.) Their performance was much like the others I have seen; on the surface, it looked ramshackle and chaotic, but the musicianship holding it together was impressively tight, and, of course, there was the usual exuberantly ecstatic vibe to it, not too unlike I'm From Barcelona (only without the balloons or confetti).

They also screened the debut of the video of Milk Is Politics, between the second and third support bands. The video's theme has little to do with the song title or its lyrics, instead being a somewhat twee, slightly silly adventure concerning eggs. It's pretty much what you'd expect a Deirdres video to look like, and is rather ace.

Btw, Gemma and Sophie of the Deirdres are going to be in Melbourne for two months (from January to the start of March); hopefully they'll get to do some gigs then. (I could totally see them on a bill with, say, Aleks & The Ramps or The Motifs.)

Last night, I went to Dorkbot, the arty/geeky show & tell, at the Limehouse Town Hall, meeting up there with masterkill.

The talks were varyingly interesting; the first one was by installation artist Joel Gethin Lewis, who described various interactive installations, using lights, music generators, motion-tracking cameras and floor-mounted displays, which he had built for clients, and showing video of two (one at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2006, involving columns of light and vaguely ambient music which responded to the presence of people, and one in Tokyo, involving computer-rendered shapes on a floor-mounted display responding to kids running around them), which was fairly nifty. The next one was by an elderly computer artist named Harold Cohen, who basically described his life's work. He had started writing LISP programs to draw, and training them to draw human forms, basically by adding lots of rules. Then he moved on to vaguely abstract plantlike forms. Curiously, his later images, riots of only vaguely representational colour, seemed less compelling than the imaginary humans in earlier ones. The final long talk was by a woman named Sarah Angliss, who had built installations with servo-controlled puppets and a carillon consisting of tuned, wirelessly-triggered bells. She had brought some of the bells to demonstrate, but hadn't brought the right program or somesuch, and as such couldn't operate them. Oh, and organiser and musical livecoder Alex's OpenDork presentation was pretty cool; he made a system of mapping different syllables to ways of hitting a (simulated) drum, and demonstrated a script where he typed lengths of syllables like "pakareto _ _ _ ku", which would be transformed into a continuously looping drum tattoo.

When the Opendork presentations at the end came, I gave a brief one about how I went about cracking the proprietary file format of a drum machine plugin. Anyway, I've put the slides up here.