Russell Davies

This Week - Newness and Oldness

This Week - Dispirited By BT

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.

 

This Week - a surprising amount of squash

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 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States was chillingly plausible and even chillinglier funny. I liked this little aside about Japanese firefighters:

"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.

This Week - Too Late, Too Tired

This has been a good and interesting week. But it's now too late for me to write something and I'm too tired. Next week!

In the meantime, this is worthy of your attention:

This Week - Blogging Finds A Way

Miscellaneous thoughts this week.

It occurs to me that what Ben's doing here is blogging, blogging on instagram. About techno and other stuff. It's superb. It's blogging. Blogging finds a way.

I saw this digital poster. I thought the headline was One Builds A Legacy By Standing Still. That's great, I thought, quite the change from the usual nonsense. Something about the value of stillness, of remaining fixed and static and having a solid place to stand. And a splendidly literate use of 'One' - a great way to assert a distinctive tone of voice. Nicely counter-intuitive and provoking.

Then I realised it didn't say that. Oh well.

Watched a lovely documentary about Christo and Jean Claude. It reminded me of a trip to New York when we happened upon The Gates. It was lovely.

A central part of the art is their interaction with bureaucracy - the permissions they have to get, the reports they have to commission - millions of dollars of work/value all embedded in three-ring binders. Those binders are hugely evocative of a particular kind of thought and organisation. They don't appear to be being digitised away.

I'd go and see an art show about three-ring binders. Make it happen!

This week 7

After last week's post a correspondent sent me this splendidly comprehensive piece about Crossrail. It included a fantastic observation about organisations and the 'thermocline of truth'.

"One of the questions that will need to be asked of TfL is the timeline that led up to the decision to delay. We will tackle the validity of that decision shortly, but its timing – and suddenness – suggests that they may have been some element of the ‘thermocline of truth’ in play. This is something to which large rail projects – most notably GTR’s new timetable rollout – have repeatedly shown they are susceptible to. It is the principle that bad news tends to accrue at a lower management level, because no one wants to be the person who moves a project risk marker from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ on a RAG chart. As a result, pessimism and a belief that the project will overrun ‘bubbles up’ to a certain decision-making level but never beyond, as if hitting the thermal layer that exists in the ocean. Eventually, the issues reach critical mass and force their way through, leaving senior management wonder why everything ‘suddenly’ went wrong, when in fact the signs that the project was troubled existed at a lower level for some time."

More, in IT land. In oceans. 

The YouTube algos threw this Gail Anne Dorsey interview at me. She's extraordinary. And somewhere in there she mentions Well Red, which gave me a joyous burst of nostalgia. They were great and I guess, now, pretty obscure.

This week's episode of 41256 includes a bit about deja vu. Apparently it declines as you age. I'm now well past peak deja vu. That's a shame. I used to like that.

I love the sound of sport. I used to love driving around the States listening to baseball. I didn't understand a word of it but the rhythms, textures and syntax were hypnotic. I'm the same with poker. I don't understand a word these people are saying, but I could listen to them say it all day:

And then there's the Whistle of the North. Gorgeous.

And that's all I've got.

This week 6

I've been on holiday this week and have been reading stuff, including:

This piece about how magnificent, awful and stupid the B2 bomber is. This quote seemed pertinent about many kinds of technology supplier:

"It is impressive what you can persuade yourself to think you need once a supplier like Northrop perceives that there is no limit to cost."

And this, about the interfaces technology businesses give their 'b2b' users. It applies to entering coordinates into missiles too, it seems:

"The programming-and-confirmation process took hours. Scatter told me, “It’s not like Steve Jobs designed the interface.”"

This was echoed in this, about Crossrail delays.

It's the complexity of these systems and how they work together that could be causing issues for Crossrail. "Trains are more software than hardware these days," Wolmar adds. "The hardware is pretty simple but the software is the real issue. Debugging the software is a massive task."

That seems a more useful thought than 'software is eating the world'. How many things are now more software than hardware?

I like reading about poets, though I almost never read any poetry. I thought this was a good way to get at more interesting questions:

"With this feature, I wanted to give seven poets whose work I greatly admire the opportunity to have a serious discussion about poetry, free from the usual angling of “page vs stage” or “new young star brings poetry out of the dusty library”.

I asked each poet to come up with a question for other poets, then to answer as many of the questions as they wanted to, in whichever way they saw fit. I think you get to know the poets pretty well from a feature formatted in this way and I hope it will encourage readers to reflect on their own creative practices, whatever they may be."

I loved this overview of generative art. I adore blogposts like this. Generous, opinionated, not snarky.

This Vera Molnár from 1974 was a favourite:

This profile of Wolfgang Tillmans was good too. I think I aspire to the balance of niceness and rigour exemplified by these two passages:

"Tillmans is kind and polite. He compels those around him to be punctual, efficient, and prepared not by severity, but by living at a slightly higher standard than most people. When he asks a question, one becomes aware of the difference between feigning knowledge and being knowledgeable. He can explain why the stripes of a zebra are outlined with colors when viewed with binoculars and why eighteenth-century astronomers misinterpreted the transit of Venus. He avoids automatic settings on the tools he uses and dislikes conversational imprecision. Soon after we met, he described to me how he paints the edge of some photographs so that the colors appear to have saturated the paper. He held up a photograph. “I see,” I said. “I mean, you don’t,” he replied."

"Tillmans hangs chromogenic prints with Scotch Magic tape, inkjet prints using binder clips hung on nails, and magazine pages using stainless-steel pins. He specifies lengths of tape to the millimetre, the exact number of binder clips for each print, the angles at which nails are to be hammered into the wall, the kind of nail to use. Tape doesn’t touch a photo’s emulsion, only other pieces of tape stuck to the back. He uses tape dispensers of a specific make (Tesa), which don’t cut with serrated edges, and he signs his work with Cretacolor 7B pencils. Unusually, the gallery lights are installed before he hangs the work. He has standard heights at which the largest photographs are hung from the floor. Such instructions, along with many others, are compiled in a binder for each exhibition that contains international voltage and plug charts, instruction manuals for audiovisual equipment, detailed lists and photographs of the contents of each shipping crate, and illustrated diagrams for how to unpack a photograph from a shipping tube."

This week 5 (incorporating previous weeks)

I'm sitting here uploading audio from a minidisc to Bandcamp. You have to do that in real time. (What have I done to myself that I'm doing that?) So I've got nothing to do but write some weeknotes. Which, includes a few other weeks since we've been on holiday.

Things that have happened.

We went to Ireland and, coincidentally, saw a Pope.

We also saw lovely beaches, a model village and some nice art. We ate a lot of seafood.

We came across a classic Things That Have Happened:

People bought some of my music. One of them is someone I don't know! It does feel very much like people are being subjected to my rehearsals, but I guess that's the thing with improvising, it's never finished. I also think I'm getting a little better. Finding different, more stimulating sources and getting more fluent at making them interesting more quickly.

My latest experiment is with typing words into YouTube and making tracks out of the video that plays. This, for instance, is Deep State. It works quite well. There's a few moments in the middle where the bass disappears for no good reason, but most of it is almost like music.

This could be an interesting way to do this live. Ask people for keywords and produce music out of the resulting videos. Or maybe ones YouTube search history (and the resultant recommended videos) could be a musical/acoustic resource like Philip Jeck's dusty old records or Kate Carr's field recordings. I'm also starting to wonder if somehow some visuals could be created in the same way, at the same time.

Speaking of music, I went to Cafe Oto last night to see Sarah Angliss et al performing (as?) Air Loom. It was excellent. She balances digital and analogue sounds, techniques and attitudes in a magical way.

I was supposed to be going to Sheffield yesterday for the Livecoding Festival but the logistics proved impossible and, well, frankly, I'm a bit too shy, so instead I spent the rest of the day making a new batch of 41256s. It's labour intensive but fun. And it's good for me, it makes me listen outside my usual range of stuff.

I've done one a week for two thirds of the year now, so it seems likely I'll get to the end of 2018. Who knows whether I'll then keep going or stop? It seems there's no good reason to do either.

I have no sense that anyone's listening to it, but, equally, if it suddenly got popular it would have to end, because, like Speechification, it's built out of other people's stuff. Anyway. You can listen on Soundcloud.

This Week 4

I finished Convenience Store Woman this week. I really enjoyed it. It captured the satisfactions of surrendering to routine and the ways the sounds and atmospheres of a place can seep into you. It's short too. A good thing.

I also managed to finally put some musical stuff out into the world, in a tentative way.

I've long been fascinated with the improvisation of electronic music, especially as it moves beyond ambience and towards being danceable. I used to love The Bays and I remember a performance by Tim Exile at MusicTechFest in 2014 which got me thinking.

I like 'improvising' because it gets me past my habit of getting lost in the detail. Every time I try and make some music I get sucked into irrelevant fiddling spending hours moving a hi-hat around in undetectable increments. I can't do that when I'm making stuff up on the fly. I also can't worry about 'mastering' and all that, which I'm terrible at.

So I've invented a method to render myself unable to tweak. I take an audio source (often the radio, sometimes a spoken word record) I feed that into Ableton Live and I have to use that as the basis for any music I make. No additional elements. Just the rhythms of the original source (and some basic drums). I've called it 1R3C.

So I'm not inclined to fiddle after the event I don't keep any kind of 'in computer' recording. I just record to minidisc and that's the only copy.

So far there are two types of thing - 74 minute improvisations which you can literally only hear if you buy the minidisc. There's just one copy. And 30 minute things which are based on the playing of some spoken word records. You can listen to extracts of those on bandcamp. Or even buy one! Bear in mind that basically you're just buying a recording of me practising.

I think minidisc is almost the perfect way to guarantee no one will ever listen to these things, but I don't really mind, it's mostly just to make me do something. And I love minidiscs. They're the most perfectly sci-fi artefact.

I see the music stuff as a bit like blogging. I'm doing it for me, but there is some qualitative difference if there's at least a possibility that someone else might pay attention to it. 

Symmetrical names policy

I like this little detail about Nicolas Bentley. He changed the spelling of his name so it would look better.