Monthly Archive for April, 2005

Meadow House - Tongue Under a Ton of Nine Volters

UPDATE This album is now available from the Resonance FM Shop.

Fans of Resonance FM and The Exciting Hellebore Shew will no doubt appreciate this collection of haphazard audio from poet and musician Dan Wilson a.k.a. Meadow House. I’ve been obsessing about it (Check out my AudioScrobbler chart).

For as long as I have known him, Dan has been a prolific producer and composer of wonky beats, hilarious suicidal poems and destressed noise. Dan is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and lyricist. He has a natural talent for melody, rhyme and harmony which he uses to effortlessly subvert the music industry. If Dan had a gram of commercial instinct, he could be as famous as Paul Mcartney, however I think he would rather entertain himself.

Meadow House - Tongue under a ton of Nine Volters
“Tongue under a ton of Nine Volters” the first album from Meadow House, a.k.a. Dan Wilson.

This album is partly a retrospective of some of the greatest musical moments from Dan’s first series, however for your listening pleasure they have been re-mastered by Resonance FM’s Xentos. These have been collected together and published by London’s ultra-alternative Alcohol Records.

For me, the track that stands out the most is “Lavendar Picking” - recorded spesifically for this album. This song is about the unfortunate consequences of trespassing in order to collect Lavendar for a girl. I suspect that the buzzy stringed instrument we hear through this song is the Elastic-Band Zyther, a trademark wilson instrument.

According to this review, we can expect to see it in all good record shops in a month or so. This album (ALDW1CD) will be released by Alcohol Records: P.O.Box 556, London SE5 0RL, England, UK

Update - Ed Baxter noted the following on the Resonance Forum: Send ten pounds sterling payable to “Alcohol” , PO Box 556, London SE5 0RW and we will send you a copy by return. Official release date: June 1st, i.e. reviews will not appear much before then, although Dave Mandl of WFMU and The Brooklyn Rail has received his advance copy already (check out Brooklyn Rail, March 05 for review). It should also be available soon on the Resonance104.4fm shop, with half the proceeds of these sales going to the radio station.

Crtical Mass 11th Birthday, London

Yesterday was my first Critical Mass of 2005. I would like to present a collection of my photographic observances of this occasion:

Art Bike, Crtical Mass
This bike will be familair to anybody who has been on a London Critical Mass or run the Dunwich Dynamo.

Unsurprisingly for an election month, the political messagae in Critical Mass was in greater evidence. I think it’s great that people are taking politics back to the streets, however I do feel that incorporating overtly anarchist/marxist themes into the event only makes the primary message less effective.

For me, Critical Mass has allways been a protest about the de-humanisation of our city streets. This is demonstrated by the fact that the city is totally unprepared for a moderately large group of cyclists on the road; in numbers that would hardly seem extrordinary in Bejing or Copenhagen.

Regardless of your political allignment, I think we can all agree that the lifestyle of the average british commuter is one of hellish public-transport or stagnant roads. There has to be an alternative to spending over an hour a day in a state of misery.

One Less Car
One Less Car…

The title of the event has a dual meaning: Not only a mass of people who are critical of the urban environment we live in, but the act of assemling enough people to briefly control the road and show how London might be with a more human-centric transport policy.

Continue reading ‘Crtical Mass 11th Birthday, London’

L’Espion: Semi-Covert Photography in Alexandra Park

One might think (judging by this photo), that the cyclist is unaware that he is being spied upon, however I must assure you that this is not the case.

Peek A Boo!

The object that I am photographing through is very small, and could not conceal me from even the most distracted passer-by. The cyclist is looking at me in puzzlement, because he sees a grown man attempting to hide behind a small fence-post in broad day light. Only once he has past me and risked a backwards glance does he realise that he is has been involved in an experimental photograph.

How could I take this concept further? Perhaps I could go on the London Underground dressed in an absurd costume (e.g. Giant Lobster, Ballerina, Aphid, Monkey ), and secretly take photos of people as they gawp at my akwardness.

Grafitto on a canal-bollard, Lea Navigation near Old-Ford Lock

Is this Edvard Munch’s Scream or perhaps Jack Skellington?
The Scream

BusinessWeek ‘Blog’ exposes Laura DiDio’s wonky techniques

This article from BusinessWeek’s new blog-format section is just great. Steve Hamm has attempted to pierce the veil of obfuscation and mis-information surrounding certain analysts reports. For example the Yankee Group published claimes that businesses are just not interested in Linux and Open-Source technology; furthermore they alleged that businesses are fleeing Linux and Open-Source products in order to embrace the wonders of proprietary software.

Reading between the lines, Steve has demonstrated that the headlines often show the exact opposite of what the survey found; a survey without any screening or randmised sampling; which actually shows a considerable level of satisfaction with Linux and Open-Source products.The only groups who seem to express a dislike for Linux are companies who have already invested a great deal in Windows 2003 Server. I think we can assume that they have taken the Microsoft Injection.

On the other hand, one might wonder why Steve Hamm is bothering to debunk Laura DiDio and the Yankee Group, whose reputation has been utterly trashed by Pamela Jones of Groklaw. Communications from the Yankee Group, are written in doublespeak so obfuse that it could have come from the Ministry of Truth.

The big irony is that without the trust of trade trade journalists like Steve, analysts like Laura are worthless. Once journalists start to question the statistics behind the spin, analysts like Laura will find themselves without anybody willing to trust them.

Busted and Patents

If, like me, you are sick of hanging with Big Willie, and long for something fresher than even the Fresh-Prince could offer, then look no further than my own selection from the brave new world of independant internet only films..

BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. by Flex Your Rights

A confontation with a cop
“Now you can make this hard or easy on yourself..” - the film reveals a number of methods that police officers use to intimidate citizens into giving up their rights.

This film is utterly chilling in a cringe-making sort of way. Its a sort of “Sliding Doors” for kids growing up in a Patriot-Act inspired police state. The concept is that just because Americans may bend the law from time to time, does not mean they have to give up their constitutional rights.

In the first scene, a mean old highway cop pulls some kids over for speeding and then, we cringe with horror as the nosy cop proceeds to violate all of their 4th Ammendment rights, and in the end busts them for posession of canabis. In the second scene we see how different things might have worked out if the kids knew and stood up for their rights. In the alternate version of the story, they get away with little more than a speeding fine.

The moral of the story is that police officers may intimidate people into not asserting their rights, but a failure to do so is to invite false-arrest and injustice.

Download this film now and give copies to all your American friends!

How Software Patents Actually Work by Gavin Hill

RMS Talks about patents
RMS on the perils of Software Patents…

This is a light-hearted short animated film that asks what might happen if the law changes to allow Software Patents. This may sound like a rather unlikely subject matter for an animation, which is why Gavin’s animation is so brilliant; It communicates the essential issues in under 5 minutes, without getting boring.

Software patents pose a genuine threat to the Open-Source and Free software industries. Patents deprive us of the natural ability to build on the intellectual work of our predecessors. If most software inventions were patented, then act of writing a simple commercial program would be a one-way ticket to patent court. This is because few programmers know which seemingly obvious computing concepts are actually the patented inventions of companies like IBM or Microsoft.

Download a copy now and post it on a CD to your MEP.

A Shark Tale - Rubbish

My solution to the problem of rampant movie piracy is to make films so apalling, they are not worth the bother of downloading.

For example, the brilliance of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” was in my opinion utterly self-defeating. That film has been at the top of the Bittorrent charts for the over a year. Being at the top of this chart is at best a Pyrrhic victory for Pixar.

If the film had not been so good then fewer people would be bothered to copy it. Surely Pixar realize that the CGI revolution is not intended to raise quality, but to make mediochre concepts (that would be too costly for traditional animation) into feature films.

Of course, it takes a company like Dreamworks SKG to show us how it should be done: The makers of the fairytale sit-com series ‘Shrek’ have come up with a cornucopia of averageness that makes 1970’s Hannah-Barbara cartoons seem like a smorgasbord of imagination. This is animation for tartrazine fueled five year olds. Films like this convince most adults that all animation is rubbish, and has the artistic merit of a discarded Happy-Meal box.

“Shark Tale”, aims for mediocrity and hits the spot again and again, with the precision of a samuri archer. This film was more perfectly bland than even Big Willie’s previous outing .

Will Smith Fish
I couldnt watch much further than this… what did I miss? Probably nothing.

If the MPAA hauled me into court for my many crimes, I will tell the judge that I felt the deepest regret almost as soon as the download was complete. I will tell the judge that my sadness was so utterly overwhelming, that I was forced to stop watching shortly after the bit with the “Will Smith Fish”. Lets hope that this display of remorse moves the judge to end my questioning and I get let off with only a mild prison-sentence or beating. This would indeed be mild compared to being made to watch the rest of the movie.

Should the questioning continue, he would learn that my sorrow was not for my own terrible crimes, but for humanity as a whole; I was crying for the crime of making this film in the first place. The shame of being on the same planet and sharing 99.999% of my DNA with the people who made this film. These for me are much greater causes for regret.

I cannot truthfuly say that the whole film was bad, because I was only able to manage the first five minutes. The moments I saw were a form of cinematic torture; I am sure they play this movie at the Guantanamo Odeon.

In the five minutes I saw, I was apalled by the hideous character design; fish and invertebrates with human faces. I imagine H. P. Lovecraft had nightmares about such things. Perhaps monsters like this do exist in the Sellafield out-flow; however the concept of these talking fish is more of an afront to the dignity of life than anything Lovecraft’s fever’d mind could have invented.

If the Great Old Ones were to return, from their (fictional) starry prison, they would have no need to torment or dement mankind because the animated talking fish will have allready made us into feebrile idiots.

Plodcasting: The First User

Not so long ago I released my first Plone product - Plodcasting, a Podcasting tool for radio stations. I can now announce I have my first user: A radio station based in Japan. I’m currently helping them squish all the bugs; In return they are helping me test it. Lets hope that Resonance FM get their FM License renewed so that they can be my second customer.

Thanks the the Oguradio team, I’ve also managed to cobble together the first few pages of Plodcasting Documentation.

Take on Me - A-Ha

Somehow a website called MP3 arena has been getting away with offering an enormous quantity of copyrighted MP3 files. You would be wrong and amoral to use this link to download “Take on Me” by A-Ha.

Or if you want to download choons at 1/10th of the price of the iTunes Music Store (and in Ogg Vorbis too), try allofmp3. This Russian website will custom encode the music you require, entirely free of DRM.

Warning - using these websites might earn you ten years in the cooler courtesy of the RIAA.

8-bit peoples

Recently I’ve been haunted by the cute, funky bleeps and clanks of 8-bit music. Especially pecan medley by an artist named yuppster, which includes a short but stirring tribute to the seminal eighties hit Take On Me, which is notable for its use of rotoscoping.

Feeling inspired, I tried to find out how to make music like this, but it seems that there is no easy way - you have to plug Game boy carts into your brain-stem or compile some somethings. I even tried installing the CPC6128 emulator on the Mac and loading up an old music program, figuring I could use… I don’t know, some Audio program… to record to MP3. but the interface was taking too long and my initial squirt of enthusiasm was soon smothered in the labyrinth of procedure.

It all got me to thinking about the lo-fi music I grew up hearing on my Amstrad CPC 464 and how evocative negative space can be, like the black backgrounds in those old games. Since Wipeout hit the Playstation about ten years ago, all the blank space in video games seems to have been taken up all kinds of stuff, adverts, flashing things, rendered landscapes etc. Sometimes this is how I feel walking through London - it’s like a hundred He-Man adverts a minute, all screaming for my attention. I defy you, He-Man! I am Skeletor!

skeletor