Russell Davies

Bright bands of rhythm in space

There was an excellent interview with Beatrice Dillon a few issues of The Wire ago:

People say you embrace empty space in your music, where other producers might fill it with lots of stuff like effects and whatnot, that sound pleasant. Were you consciously giving yourself barriers for "Workaround"?

"Well, I've never really been into synth pads, for example, which might sound like, "So what, why are you mentioning that?" But actually that's such a massive part of electronic music is this layer of synth pads. I don't mean like chords guiding songs, necessarily.

I mean this kind of middle ground thing in the mix. it's often filled with synth pads of one type or another. And I've never really liked that. l'd either like to be listening to a song that's led by a keyboard part or a rhythm - Talking Heads is a really good example actually. I mean, if you think of, you know, the kind of "Remain in Light" era, there are some synth pads, but generally it's all very percussive and like rhythm section-kind of music with melodies and vocals on top, but there's not this middle ground thing of these synth pads. And because I don't use that, people say, "Oh, it's so empty, your music." [Laughs] And I'm like, well, it's just no synth pads.

And, you know, that's not necessarily negative, it's just that I find that when you really start to listen to contemporary music, there's this massive amount of the mix that's being filled by these synth pads. And if you take that away, then suddenly there's all this air for everything to breathe and rhythms, you hear them in a much more skeletal way because there's nothing almost pacifying the rhythms, they're just like bright bands of rhythm in space, you know?

I just wanted to make music where I was fully conscious of all the elements going into it and l wasn't just filling in layers just because, "Oh, that's what you do." You put like a reverb on something just to make it glued together. I just wanted to make music that was really bare bones and really focusing on what's happening and taking things out. And I mean, to me it's the dub approach. Things have got space around them to breathe. lt probably comes from that really~ Space for the groove and space for sound, really."

I love things like that. Where some apparently significant artistic statement just springs from arbitrary preference. From just not liking something.

It reminded me of Peter Gabriel not wanting any cymbals on his album from 1980. He told his drummers Phil Collins and Jerry Marotta they couldn't use them.

From wikipedia: "Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death...So, when you tell them what they can't do, they get creative and say, 'Oh yes I can,' which is why I banned cymbals. Phil was cool about it. [Marotta] did object and it took him a while to settle in. It's like being right-handed and having to learn to write with your left."

To make up for the missing sizzling on the record they invented "gated reverb" which became one of the most influential drum sounds ever.

I do not yet have the confidence to do that. I find it very hard not to fill everything up with sound.

 

Less electric objects

 

I first saw an Electric Objects screen in Kevin Slavin's apartment in Brooklyn at some point at the turn of the century. It was a prototype, discretely leaning against a wall. My memory is that it was showing something like Murakami flowers, but Kevin might well be outraged by that suggestion.

That apartment was a wonderful place. Kevin was kind enough to host us a few times and it was always an adventure. I explored New York from there, made friends, panic-bought board games, stole street signs. But seeing the EO1 was also part of the mystique. It was very New York. Tasteful, discrete, black-framed, exclusive, more expensive than you could imagine. It was like a Supreme drop but technology.

It was of course, also just a tiny Android computer inside a screen. But what isn't? It was packaged imaginatively. Someone had thought hard about creating an art experience around a screen.

So, eventually, they went on sale and I bought one at great expense and it was shipped to the UK.

It's sat on our shelves at home for many years. I would add images to it every now and then. The rest of the family regarded it with the same amused tolerance they keep for everything else I do. Pointlessly connected technology is a hobby for me. I collect things that eventually, inevitably won't work in the same way other people collect pottery owls.

But the EO1 just kept going. Nabaztags failed. Little Printers failed. The EO1 ploughed on. Partly because, what could go wrong? It was a tiny computer, a screen, an internet connection.

Turned out what could go wrong was the business model. There weren't enough people like me out there. Electric Objects got bought by Giphy with promises to keep it alive. And yes, it lived. Though 'keeping it alive' felt more like 'not killing it'.

But still, I could add images and display them. That's all I really wanted. It came a little into its own during Lockdown One. It was amusing to create ever-changing backdrops for Zoom calls.

And then it died. The screen just puttered for a while and then wouldn't come back on. There is no easily-googlable source for getting an EO1 repaired. For time being I've chucked it into storage. It felt too wasteful to throw it away.

What to do? I liked the thing. Being an idiot I set up an ebay alert to see if people were selling off their old ones. And, the other week an EO2 showed up. Exciting! All still in the original packaging. Not too much money.

And then I discovered that the app you need to get the thing onto your wifi is no longer in the App Store. And there's, apparently, no other way to connect it. Various reddit users have found various workarounds but none of them worked for me. So I bought a cheap Android phone because, also apparently, the old android app is still in the store. And it was! But then that didn't work because the way that Android phones connect to bluetooth devices is now different than it was.

So now I have two EO screens that don't work.

Ah well.

Now I just have to wait until an artisanal repair culture for connected devices emerges. I imagine the first clue will be someone showing up at The Repair Shop with a Nabaztag.

(Is that a YouTube channel yet? The Gen X Repair Shop? It will be soon. Lots of old Nokias and Minidisc players.)

 

February 2021

Same same

The Dictionary of Visual Language

People of the Twenty-First Century

Same Energy

Coffee morning on Friday

This Friday. The 12th of Feb. 10am.

This zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09

Blog all dog-eared pages: The Ministry for the Future

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future back in November. Still thinking about it now. These are the bits I highlighted:

"Do you know Fourier, Charles Fourier, the French utopian? No, Mary said. Tell me. He was a utopian, he had followers in France and America, they started communes based on his ideas, and in his books he went into great detail about everything. Verne loved his work, he’s a kind of secret influence on Verne. And for him the animals were very important—they were going to join us, he said, and become a big part of civilization. So at one point he says, The mail will be delivered by lions. By lions! Mary exclaimed. That’s right. The mail will be delivered by lions!"

Not a lot of significance to that. I just like the idea of the mail being delivered by lions.

"State-owned enterprises using a lot of big data and Red Plenty algorithms became less lumbering than they had been, avoiding the old bad inefficiencies, while keeping the good inefficiencies in ways that were important for resilience and justice."

'Good inefficiencies for resilience and justice' is a good thought.

"Over all of it, in the most literal sense because of the banner, and the air itself, the immense flux of information was often summed up well by what was being called the Big Index or the Big Number, meaning the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This had now dropped 27 parts per million in the previous five years. It was down to 451 now, same as in the year 2032, and it was on a clear path to drop further, maybe even all the way to 350, the pre-industrial high point on the 280–350 ppm sine wave that had existed for the previous million years, marking shifts in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun."

I don't think we have this yet; the Big Number. It's hard to know what to promote or grasp. Temperature? Temperature change? Rate of temperature change? Parts per million. Something else.

"The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene."

I love this thought. The importance of Paris and the fact that it's already happened.

"...blooming buzzing confusion..."

I've come across this a lot in the last few months, for some reason. It's William James apparently.

"Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed."

Had never thought about the lack of justice in the William Gibson original.

"The Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones."

That's going to be a film. If it's not already.

These bits aren't especially representative of the book. Just things that struck me. I thought it was great. Both terrifying and optimistic. Is very plausible about how geo-engineering will happen, and terrorism. And encouraging about central banking. Not a phrase I thought I'd ever type.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other places

Over on instagram I continue to pointlessly amass #drumsonsunday...

And am now featuring #economistpoems...

And #minidiscmondays...

And on bandcamp the Pete Rugolo record shows up again as part of the source material for Bottlenecks.

And I've started playing with Roam as a way of collecting notes. There are links and bits collected by tags. It's folksonomy all over again.

January 2021

Music from Elite Panic.

I take full responsibility

Bogdana's got a meeting and I've got to work so Coffee Morning's going to be 11am not 10. This Friday. The 29th.

Sorry. Hope that's OK.

The zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09

 

This is what they would buy

I've always been obsessed with how the super rich live different lives than everyone else. And the extent to which they can't.

I once wrote something for Wired about how the rich can't get a better OS than the rest of us (the wayback machine has it) but if they could it would just be people. That's apparently how Larry King has a better twitter than the rest of us.

https://t.co/eBXB0kUiHI pic.twitter.com/Baplo0aeFi

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) January 23, 2021

And on Friday at Coffee Morning Flora told me of Yellowstone which we started watching yesterday and this seemed related:

“Leverage is knowing if someone had all the money in the world… this is what they’d buy.” - John Dutton (Kevin Costner) #Yellowstone pic.twitter.com/PR4Y8mo4ip

— Yellowstone (@Yellowstone) June 21, 2018

And then I was reading Garner's Quotations and came across: 

"Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes" - John Waters

and

"The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive" - Coco Channel 

Incidentally Coffee Morning this week will be at 10am on Friday. Same link as below. It will be free. Or it will be very, very expensive.