This is clever. It is a website that allows you to search for music and plays it back in a seperate Flash player, allowing you to search some more. You can even embed playlists created by searches you’ve made and here’s the one I’ve done for a couple of the MP3s hosted on this site.
SeeqPod Music beta – Playable Search
Category: Diary
The really great thing about the World Wide Web is that most viewers/listeners are very generous with their praise. The ambient/looping/soundscaping stuff I do with my guitar gets a lot of good responses from surfers and this is one of the reasons I have continued with it, despite my own reservations that I’ve done all I can do with this type of music.
Now I got turned onto looping via a couple of albums/artists. The most important and often-underlooked is Terry Riley and I remember buying his “Rainbow in Curved Air” album on a whim after discovering a portion of it was used as background music for the “Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” original radio series. When I heard the CD way back in the late 1980s, it was one of those “blow the top of your head off moments” and I found this kind of music very contemplatative and ideal for my sleep problems (and I don’t mean that as an insult, this kind of music relaxes my mind to sleep). Then after that I naturally explored the Fripp & Eno looping experiments. Getting to Fripp via Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, the “Evening Star” CD is still an album that continues to entrance me. I’m not a particular fan of “No Pussyfooting”, the previous looping album the duo produced, it’s too dense and hard to digest for these ears. However, “Evening Star” has an opening suite of tracks that just work for me and are quite tuneful for a looping experiment. Since has led me onto Robert Fripp’s later audio concrete experiments “Frippertronics” and latterly the Soundscapes series of recordings.
So what is this music? Well in the case of Robert Fripp and his Frippertronics system, he used to use two tape recorders to put down loops from his guitar and then he’d solo over the top. The way the tape recorders were connected meant that the loops would degrade over time and so they’d naturally evolve and distort and disappear, being replaced by new loops recorded on the fly. Think of it as an echo but an echo that repeats for a couple of minutes before disappear: it has that quality. This two-tape system was later replaced by Eventide units which replicated the process digitally and with the addition of guitar synthesisers, his palette of sounds has been expanded somewhat.
The way I approach soundscaping is a little different as I don’t have access to the same equipment as Fripp, but I am using a Boss RC-50 Loop Station that allows me to do similar things, but it does have its limitations. The great thing about this kind of music is that there’s two basic strategies to adopt: you can either improvise or start with an existing idea and improvise over that. I tend to just make it up as I go along. The trick with this kind of music is learning how to react to it because essentially you are soloing against yourself and sometimes if you’ve three loops all bouncing off each other it can be easy to lose track of yourself. It’s the easiest kind of music and also the most difficult to produce too. Too little detail and you have a drone, too much and the it turns into dense noise. It’s a carefully prepared sound soup.
Anyway, this was just a long pre-amble to my latest spurt of soundscaping. I’ve gone back to basics and I’m just making up using a short delay and a single repeat. I like this one because it is simplistic but the deeper tones reverberate within me. Here it is:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Oooh look a new site is selling my music and here’s a little widget that gives you a 30-sec snippet of each track as a promo. Clever, innit?
Yesterday, the MediaGuardian website posted yet another sniffy dissection of popular culture of year’s gone past. This time around it was Lucy Mangan’s turn to have one of thost post-modern pops at Bergerac, the extraordinarily popular cop shows from the 80s starring perma-tanned John Nettles (a real leathery tan, none of that spray-on or sunbed orange crap you see these days). Now I have to post a defence of Bergerac because it was always a highlight of Saturday evening TV for me, not only because I once had the chance to see a fight scene being filmed in 1982 but because Jersey was a frequent holiday destination for me as a kid. While my childhood wasn’t as rosey some others, I never went without and was always lucky to be taken away on my hols by my grandparents and a fortnight away in Jersey every year was bliss for me. In fact, me and The Missus spent a week there at the beginning of June for the first time in about eight years. I like Jersey because it is quiet, the food and weather is great and I can sit on a beach and not be bothered by anyone at all. It’s a hermit’s paradise. 🙂
The Missus poses with Bergerac’s Car [6 June 2007]
Bergerac used to be a big TV advert for the island, so much so that during the 80s and up to the mid-1990s, it was John Nettles face that used to greet you in the airport as you arrived via a giant billboard. Very kitsch, but welcoming like fresh sheets or a comfortable pair of trainers that have holes in the soles and you can’t bear to throw away. Now my recollection of the TV show at the time was that it was never taken seriously. For example, Jersey isn’t a hotbed of crime – when we was away the most serious news item in the local rag was about a car being scratched by a vandal – and you could always trace the criminals back to dear old Charlie Hungerford. I remember that we used to have a laugh at it back then as it wasn’t a show that took itself too seriously – I mean, the island of Jersey is so small you couldn’t even have a proper car chase as its about 25 miles in length! It was more about escapism and comes from a more gentle era of TV viewing. I mean it was superseded by Lovejoy, Heartbeat and to some extent Stephen Fry’s Kingdom. It’s more about a good yarn with no surprises that everyone can watch, I think and I reckon that all those TV shows I mention will soon be sneered at by the Guardian word manglers. Again, it’s another easy target to take a pop at but people forget how popular these shows were. But the passage of time gives you the ability to take the piss out of just about anything. Luckily, with shows like Doctor Who and the aforementioned Kingdom pulling in the punters, it looks like a return to those halcyon days of “family viewing” might be on the cards.
Mind you, when me and The Missus took our first holiday to the island back in the late 1980s, her mother earnestly said to her: “You be careful out there with all that crime. I’ve seen Bergerac, you know.” How we laughed.
And here’s the opening titles for you to get all nostalgic about. Note that the theme tune’s bass line is a rip-off of The Police song “Walking on the Moon”. 🙂
1. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.
2. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.
3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. IF YOU’RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU’RE OUT If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That’s your part
of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song “I Need A Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he’s doing it.
8. DON’T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it.
10. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow.
There’s some truth in there…
Sir Alan Ballbags
And so the finale of The Apprentice came to a shuddering halt last night like a geriatric swinger whose heart has given out during an orgy. During the final decision, I realised that Surallen of Sugar no longer resembles Nookie the Bear, but more like a man whose scrotum has crawled up onto his face for some fresh air. Of course, Sugar was never no looker but my artistes impression above gives my visual rating of the series: it was a load of old sugar-coated balls. The finale was obvious – though I had an inkling that leather face Kristina “Grimey” Grimes wouldn’t win it, she was too reliable and had no energy or chutzpah. Winner, the doe-eyed Simon Ambrose resembled an estate agent as drawn by Walt Disney at his syrupy best and I kept expecting him to break into a chorus of “Zippee-de-doo-dah” or being surrounded by tweeting bluebirds a la Snow White.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Sir Alan. His gruff demeanour and rough around the edges personality speaks to me in volumes, but the whole series was a bit of a non-starter and it wasn’t the fault of old craggy features. Firstly, the tasks. Don’t get me started on the tasks. What a pile of unimaginative dross that turned out to be. Every week the teams just had to sell stuff…you know sell cheese to the French or start a business in 24 hours or market foreign imports or sell art. Sell…sell…sell… BORING!
Where’s the creative aspect of the business world. We only got to see a little bit of creative thinking during the trainer task and in the finale, where both contestants had to design a building. In the US version of the show, the applicants have to do real tasks: market real products, deal with global corporations. In the next series of the UK show, I can see this lot selling Benders in a Bun at the Brentwood Wimpy in order to win Sir Alan’s favour. For series four, some revitalisation needs to be injected into the task and they need not to be afraid to mix things up a bit.
Then there’s the contestants. They ranged from deranged to incompetant and one felt that they were chose to fail rather than to succeed. The two finalists were obvious choices from around episode six when most of the chaff was discarded and while it was nice to have genuinely funny folks like Tre Azam (surely he should change his name to “Shazam”?) and Uber-Bitch and serial shagger Katie Hopkins on board, neither were genuine contenders as they would never get through the door at Amstrad Towers in sunny Brentwood. So again, the producers need to be a bit more choosey in their selection and get some applicants who actually have a chance of working for Amstrad. In fact, I say that the BBC should open it up to the general public next season and see how well us “non-business” people do in the tasks. That would be a laugh riot, wouldn’t it?
But yeah, despite my whinging I stayed with the show to the very end and look forward to the early months of 2008 when The Apprentice US returns which usually clashes with The Apprentice UK and I have about 26 weeks of Apprentice-related teleivisual fun.
Man, I think I’ve typed the word “apprentice” far too many times today!