I managed two bits of music this week. Sitting and playing with a new little box, well, an old little box. A Yamaha QY70 from the mid-90s. It looks quite a lot like one of those Brother label printers but it's full of lovely sounds. I plugged it in, started noodling and made this track. Then, I plugged it in again, along with some Radio Music Music Things and made the thing below.
All these tracks have long periods where not much happens, that's because I don't know what I'm doing. I just plug stuff in and start playing. There's no editing here, so if it's just chugging along with not many changes you can imagine me panicking behind the keyboard, wondering why the thing I'm trying to do isn't happening. There's the odd interesting moment though.
I was full of good intentions this week. I would actually write things here. I would explain how useful I'd been finding the Kantor 4-player model. Or some of it anyway. But, when I sat down to write that I nudged the mouse on my desk, my music stuff lit up and I thought I'd try and make a track instead. So here it is, featuring some Buckminster Fuller. Most of this is boring, but I think the slower moments are quite nice.
After a few days of mucking around with gear I have finally managed to get some music stuff plugged in again. I'm trying to get it so I can just sit down, switch everything on and make something. No installing anything, no looking for ideas, no mental or actual editing. Just switch on and press record. I think I'm getting there by having a bunch of stuff I can improvise with at one end of a 3.5mm cable - an aux cable, as the young people call it. And then I just plug it into something and make some sounds. In the case above I plugged it into four Music Thing Radio Musics. It starts off a bit messy but there are some good bits.
Most weeks I run a little accumulator in my head - will all 'our teams' win? I'm can't remember the last time it happened. I look forward to international breaks because Arsenal, Liverpool and Forest don't play and the chances of 100% victory go up.
The remaining teams are Dulwich Hamlet (our London non-league favourites) and Holbrook (East Midland non-leaguers). Sadly, this weekend, Dulwich went a man down and then a goal down to the visitors from Oxford City and Holbrook lost 1-2 to Hilton Harriers. I went to watch them this Saturday, it was sunny and cold and the team looked completely different to last season. They seemed useful last season, did pretty well in the East Midlands Counties League but at the end of the season they took voluntary relegation to the Central Midlands League South.
I think it's because (if I read between the lines of the programme correctly) they couldn't get enough club officials to do the necessary stuff at home games. The committee was fairly long serving, they probably needed to get on with their lives. But a new committee is coming together and new club facilities are getting built. I love this stuff about non-league football. The big society is ploughing on like it always did.
I'm in a busy busy work phase which is very satisfying. It's made me more determined to enjoy the things I'm doing when I'm not working. To read and listen harder when doing leisure - not just to have things wash over me but to suck the value out of them.
To that end I'm enormously grateful to whoever recommended Chinese Electronics Volume One (I think it was Alex). It's fantastic.
They have both kept me hugely entertained on the tube.
I even found time to do a 1r3c. This time playing along with some Music Thing Modular Radio Musics. It's not the best, but it's a horse I've gotten back on.
I was about to sit and write this when BT called. It was the latest in a series of depressing calls about how they've probably overcharged me for something (various bits of BT can't agree whether they have or not). I won't bore you with the details, but it was so enervating that I haven't really got any energy left to blog at you much. Sorry.
Two small things:
I've just published the latest episode of 41256. Quite a good one. Only two bits, but quality.
My experiments in improvisation are puttering along as well. Basically, I plug my aux cable into something, feed it into Ableton and improvise based on what comes in live. It lasts as long as the original lasts.
This time what came in the Aux was Side One of:
Which is a lovely record.
What I ended up making was this:
Which is a bit messy, but I'm secretly quite proud of some of it.
Amazon did a thing that felt hugely familiar and then I remembered - Ranking RanQueen! Everything old is new again.
I polished off a couple of books this week - some highlights:
Game Changers was great. A magazine piece that actually merited being stretched into a book. Lots of great stories from the invention of sports analytics - especially as it built from London 2012 to Rio. The best bits were the stories of how Lizzy Yarnold turned herself into the most decorated British Winter Olympian with determination and sports science. And I never imagined I'd read so much about squash.
Like this bit about squash and the power of the highlights montage - the most significant artform of the 21st century:
"The evening before a match, Murray and Pearson would sit down to debate tactics with the players. Murray would talk them through a video of the opponent, highlighting just three of their strengths and three of their weaknesses. ‘David was adamant that we had to keep it simple,’ Murray explains. ‘Not because the players were stupid, but because when you go on court, you can’t have too much information in your head.’ Making these motivational videos was a blend of art and science, intended to galvanise the players. Murray could spend as much as a quarter of his working hours just compiling these bespoke videos. ‘It was very detailed,’ he recalls. ‘I’d make sure that the drumbeat of the song would coincide with the racket hitting the ball. Athletes spent their life either training or watching TV, so if it wasn’t Sky Sports quality, they would switch off.’ "
And I liked this bit about the power of weakness:
"‘I was a skinny player,’ Cruyff once said. ‘The weak have to develop a special intelligence, an ability to find alternatives.’ A capacity to learn not just with their brains, but with their bodies."
"The cultural difference between firefighters in other parts of the world and the tobi (firefighters) of Edo can be explained by the simple fact that the latter did not fight fires with water; they had no water trucks or water pumps, just a few buckets and ladders. The primary method of controlling fires at the time was to knock down houses to make a firebreak, which allowed the fire to burn itself out without spreading. Thus, the fire brigades weren’t there to fight the fire but to fight any homeowner who might—understandably—resist seeing his home demolished. A sort of protection racket arose around the firefighters. After all, it was far better if the tobi sacrificed a neighbor’s house to the firebreak rather than your own. Naturally, the Edo firemen became a tough lot—drinking, brawling, and covered in tattoos. Indeed, the distinctive tattoos that mark the Yakuza, today’s Japanese gangsters, are a relic of the Edo fire brigades."
In other news, this is magnificent:
(via @misterunderwood)
And I'm trying to think of something to say that will live up to how brilliant Killing Eve was, but, as yet, I can't.
