Russell Davies

power chords and gnarliness

There's a fantastic podcast/interview here with top science fiction author Rudy Rucker. Two bits of language appropriation stuck out for me.

He talks about gnarly computation, using gnarly to  "suggest a kind of pattern characteristic of living beings, somewhere between simple symmetry and total chaos". That might be what I'm trying to get at when I talk about the complexity brands should have. (Quote from here.)

And he talks about SF power chords, based on those riffy, powerful chords heavy metal bands use. He's getting at the really big hitting, genre-defining ideas that sometimes seem a bit cheesy but actually always work. For SF he lists them as:

blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, holograms, immersive virtual reality, robots, teleportation, endless shrinking, levitation, antigravity, generation starships, ecodisaster, blowing up Earth, pleasure-center zappers, mind viruses, the attack of the giant ants, and the fourth dimension

It'd be worth thinking about what the power chords are in whatever you're working on - and are you just avoiding them because it's unfashionable?

media panic

The Long View is always a captivating programme but I particularly like this weeks - comparing the media scares surrounding video games now and those combining that disreputable purveyor of sex and alternate worlds; the novel in the 18th century, specifically Samuel Richardson's Pamela. It also points out the evils of the sofa, of which I'd not previously been aware.

musical tribe

Here's a good little programme from the BBC World Service's Who Runs Your World? series, looking at various Musical Tribes around the world. Some of the content is a little obvious ('goth is associated with the colour black') but it's still good to hear a diverse bunch of voices talking about their own lives. And, because it's the World Service there's a more global perspective than most media outlets provide.

corporate blogging stuff

Here's an interesting interview with Anil Dash of sixapart, who's a smart man.

state of UK comics

Here's a Resonance FM podcast featuring an interview with Kev F Sutherland about the state of comics in the UK and around the world. I'm not a big expert but this seems to be a useful primer on what's going on in comics around the world.

And then here, there's also discussion of legendary British comics character; Dan Dare - Pilot Of The Future.

someone put this in a phone, immediately

The ever interesting Music thing points us at a brilliant project from Noah Vawter at MIT. It's called Ambient Addition. It's a walkman-like device that listens to the sound around you and turns it into music on the fly. It filters the ambient noises through a vocoder and pre-arranged chord patterns to give you harmony and takes more stacatto elements and transforms them into rhythm tracks. It's genius. You can still be of the world around you, but listening to something melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. It's best explained by his video here.

helicopter quartet

A wee post on The Rest Is Noise led me to a load of great stuff about Stockhauasen's Helicopter String Quartet. Which although first performed in the 90s feels immensely and appealingly of the 70s. It's always teetering on the brink of being a Look Around You-style parody but it's actually rather intriguing.

Stockhausen's notes and description of the composition are fascinating. The score just looks brilliant:

And, judging from this extract, the thing sounds pretty splendid too. I suspect the last 20 years of popular music have rather prepared us for Stockhausen's always changing, resolutely unconventional sound and he doesn't seem as jarring as he might have to previous generations. I'll have to get the CD.

trumpets

A visit to Alex Ross led me to the Trumpet Bloopers page - which will bring smiles and tears to anyone who ever played in a school or amateur orchestra. (Especially 'Messiah Organist On Crack') but he also reminded me of the Portsmouth Sinfonia's version of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Genius.

musicovery

The iPod shuffle, pandora and the artful exercises Bill Drummond talked about on No Music Day all show that there are all sorts of interesting ways to find and listen to music. Some involve humans and physical music stuff (like familymusic and the album club) some involve watching behaviour and clever algorithms. One of these is this musicovery which I'm rather enjoying. There's too much to explain so go and have a look for yourselves, it's worth it.

amusement

This is just a bunch of audio stuff I've been listening to. No waffling about brands. Some spoken word and some er, sungen word. It's about 50 minutes long.

MP3 File