anatomy · of · distance

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.

On Saturday evening, I went to Josie Long's Splendid Evening, a night of comedy at the Southbank Centre. It was quite entertaining. Long I can take or leave; for all her fuzzy-jumpered indiekid enthusiasm (one gets the impressions that she spends her time between gigs knitting in libraries with Camera Obscura and MJ Hibbett on her iPod), she tends to labour jokes for a bit too long before letting them go.

The other comedians were mostly quite good; Arnab Chanda, the American-accented son of British expatriates, was quite entertaining (at one point, he recounted taking part in a school play of "The Sound Of Music" at the international school in Saudi Arabia, with the Von Trapp children being played by a multiethnic, international cast: "'Why do the Nazis want to kill us?' Have you looked in the mirror?") Luke Roberts spent most of his set going through the first two rows of the crowd, insulting people from a set of index cards (memorable insults included "People like you the way students like the Wombles. (pause) Ironically.", "If you were a book, the reviews on your back would be suspiciously short and full of ellipses", and "You're slightly nicer than Jeremy Clarkson."). The highlight was probably Irish comic David O'Doherty, whose routine deftly weaved through a wealth of material, all of it funny. (At one point, he talked about the things people do which, a few decades later, are revealed to be killers, and speculated what this generation's hidden killer could be; one candidate was Sudoku.)

This evening, I trekked out to deepest darkest Richmond to see Momus' performance at the Richmond Lending Library. (This was the second ever performance in a public library I had seen; the previous one was also by Momus, only somewhere around Balham or Tooting, in the southernmost reaches of the Northern Line.)

This performance, which I only found out about yesterday, was ostensibly about the restless spirits trapped inside books. Momus (attired all in black, including a hood) introduced himself as "Hieronymus Proctor", a Scottish spiritualist, and then invited attendees (of whom there were perhaps 10) to choose books at random and read a sentence from them, which he then would spin into a tangent, philosophical reflection or evidence of eldritch and unholy things beyond the veil between worlds. Oh, and he also performed a few songs, including Beowulf, and a new piece he's working on with one of the chaps from Gay Against You. The new piece sounded really good, btw; a bit like Talkshow Boy or something. I look forward to hearing the album.

Momus will be back in London in late June, when he will be wandering the south bank of the Thames and telling tourists that they're in Tokyo or something like that. Which should be worth going along to.

The Pikelet gig went really well. We didn't sell out, but we filled the room comfortably, and there was a very good vibe there. People were really enjoying the music, both the support acts (Red Bulldozers and The Crisps) and Pikelet herself (the room was completely silent as she played, and when she finished each song, there was mass applause).

The acts themselves: Red Bulldozers (aka local singer-songwriter Ken Chu) was pretty good, in an understated way, though played a rather brief set, not being able to get his laptop working for some of the backings and thus doing mostly guitar-based numbers. He played quite skilfully, and should be one to watch. The Crisps were pretty good, in a slightly folky sort of way. And Pikelet was amazing to behold; she would sit down in front of the microphone, grab a floor tom, tap out a rhythm, and when the loop pedal played it back, tap out something else on a snare, or add some guitar or accordion or vocal harmonies (often in several layers), thus building up a wall of sound, which she would then sing a song over. As you can imagine, all conversation had stopped as people watched what she'd do next.

teamwoolf came by and did an ace job at the door/merch table; thanks. Meanwhile, I spent most of the gig in the DJ booth, spinning tunes between sets.

( here's what I played )

But yes, it was a great night. Anyway, for those who missed it, Pikelet's playing support for Darren Hanlon on Wednesday night; if you want a ticket, hurry, as it's going to sell out.

I've now managed to upload two songs from the Momus gig in Paris to YouTube:

Pierrot Lunaire
Nervous Heartbeat

Enjoy.

After months of indecision and vaciliation, I've finally come up with a name for my musical project, to replace "The Random Numbers" (which sounds too much like Randomnumber and/or The Magic Numbers).

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Abstract Transient.

There's the obligatory MySpace page here. So far it only has two tracks: the Motifs remix I did and my 2004 hit, "This Is A Heavy Product".

I've just gotten around to posting more video from my Australian visit: I've just posted two from the Talkshow Boy gig at Pony in January; Catclaws, and his cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and The Specials' "Ghost Town".

Granted, much of the time it's a black screen, but that's because (a) my camera's crap in low light, (b) Adrian kept running around the venue as he performed, (c) Pony is somewhat dimly lit, and (d) what (a)-(c) didn't stuff up, YouTube's video compression did. The sound came out well, though.

Next up: see if there's anything from the Motifs gig that won't melt into a grey blur.

I've finally had enough time to sit down with my PowerBook and upload some video from my Australian visit to YouTube.

I present to you: Baseball playing "It's Gonna Be Hard And It's Gonna Hurt" at the Tote on New Year's Eve. With Cameron Potts punk violin action!

Update: And here's "Lines and Lines and Lines".

I'm From Barcelona were ace.

It was much as the previous gigs, only with a few more new songs. They had the whole spectacle: the entrance to the sound of a Queen sample, the several enormous balloons inflated and thrown into the crowd, who kept them flying like a game of volleyball, the bags of confetti. The band were attired in their slightly cartoonish hipsterwear, and Emanuel was his usual charismatic self, even crowd-surfing on one occasion. The new songs were pretty good; there was one (just performed by 3 members) about making friends with grizzly bears (influenced by the film The Grizzly Man), and one inspired by The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou; and the band got up to their old tricks and broke into reggae towards the end of one song.

There was lots of audience participation, with the audience being invited to sing certain words, clap, and play kazoos, as well as batting balloons around. There was a really friendly vibe.

The support band, Irene, were excellent as well; somewhat smaller, and not quite as over-the-top, but in a similarly joyous indiepop vein.

I want to know what they put in the water in Sweden, and where I can get some.

I woke up this morning, looked out through my window, and found London blanketed with snow.

( let's see... )

Today, we have learned the True Meaning of Winter.

I've just posted my review of the albums and gigs of 2006 to my blog.

Executive summary: the albums of the year are by The Blow, CSS, Gersey, I'm From Barcelona, James Figurine, Mojave 3, Momus, The Radio Dept., Spearmint and Wolf & Cub. The gigs of note were Belle & Sebastian, Jens Lekman, dataPanik, AIH, Os Mutantes, François and the Atlas Mountains, Spearmint, CSS, I'm From Barcelona and Ninetynine.

For those who don't read thenulldevice: Why MySpace is evil by design.

And there's more about MySpace here, including about the spam/adware/spyware history of its founders. Which goes some way towards explaining the spammy, user-hostile design of the site.

This evening, I went to the Piano Magic/July Skies/Epic45 gig at the Luminaire. It was great; all three bands are really good (if you like atmospheric shoegazey music).

July Skies played some songs from The English Cold, their concept album about the shadow of war over the English countryside in 1939, as well as some new songs which will end up on a new album, due out next year (finances permitting). The new songs were pretty good, and I look forward to hearing the new album.

The Piano Magic set was great. They started off with I Am The Sub-Librarian, following into No Closure, and taking it from there. Think driving grooves, vocal harmonies and the odd wall of oddly melodious howling guitar. One new song they had was titled England's Always Better (as you're pulling away), which started off sounding a bit like Black Box Recorder and then went into somewhat darker Piano Magic territory; it was basically their attempt at that classic theme, the malaise-at-the-heart-of-Englishness song. As this was their 10th anniversary gig, there was a brief interruption between songs as some members of the audience presented the band with a chocolate cake (which, after the gig, was cut into slices and made available at the bar) and sang Happy Birthday. Then the band resumed, playing Password (complete with its massive buildup of an ending).

I've finally gotten around to jumping on another bandwagon and now have a del.icio.us account; it is here. (Yes, I do realise how naff "acblicious" sounds, but "acb" was taken.)

It'll probably displace the somewhat clunky linklog on my website, just as Flickr displaced my homemade photo gallery system.

My second batch (or first non-sample batch) of Moo MiniCards arrived today. It's a pleasantly shaped box, of solid, glossy card, containing 100 of the small cards, which, for the most part, look great.

Unfortunately, Moo's printing process cropped a few of the cards incorrectly; one card (of which there are 4 or 5 in the box) has a block of solid black at one end of the image. Another was cropped slightly higher up than I intended it to be.

I contacted Moo about this and, within an hour or two, they had replied to me, sending me a voucher code for a free box of 100 MiniCards. Now that's what I call customer service. :-)