Pax Americana, badly mastered CDs

Posted on 11 February, 2003 by adrian

Between trying to get the ‘sfocata’ site finished, trying to record more stuff and trying to practise guitar more, I haven’t really had time for much else. So I’ll just use this entry to recommend a few interesting links…

If, like me, you have a hard time believing either the motives or justifications for a Bush/Blair war against Iraq, this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution provides a worryingly plausible explanation. If it’s true, My Little Tony isn’t only gullible, he’s also being royally screwed.

On a totally different subject… aural fatigue is difficult to explain (especially to people who don’t listen to lots of music) but basically, brutal amounts of compression are used to increase the overall average levels on a lot of modern CDs, reducing the dynamic range (the distance between loudest and softest sounds) and distorting the sound. This easy-to-understand article comes by way of the rec.audio.pro newsgroup.

One of the worst recent culprits of digital distortion and over-compression was the Rush album Vapor Trails, which is described in a prorec.com article by Rip Rowan.

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Bad day for Phil Spector

Posted on 4 February, 2003 by adrian

Well, Phil Spector didn’t exactly have the best day of his life yesterday. As well as being charged with the murder of a woman in his house, it emerged that the two remaining Beatles (with George consenting before his death) plan to re-release the album ‘Let it Be’, stripped of Spector’s production work.

There’s no doubt Spector did some fantastic work, and he’s one of a select group of people who can truly be said to have redefined pop music, but as a huge Beatles fan, I rarely ever listen to ‘Let it Be’… it just doesn’t sound like a *Beatles* album to me.

Still on the subject of the Beatles, news that a US poster company airbrushed the cigarette from Paul McCartney’s hand on their print of the classic ‘Abbey Road’ album cover proves once again that the world is full of dumbfucks.

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Censored Picasso – symbol of modern diplomacy

Posted on 4 February, 2003 by adrian

I could post at length about the Iraq situation, but I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories, but given issues such as the unproven Osama/Saddam link, the powerful oil industry positions held by numerous top-ranking US officials, the past business links between Bush and bin Laden, the fact that the US and UK armed Iraq during the 80s, the fact that *this* evil dictator is supposedly more noteworthy than all the others, the current lack of proof for weapons of mass destruction… well, how do you even start to deal with all that?

However, the bizarre concealment of Picasso’s Guernica painting outside the UN Security Council says all that needs to be said about the people ruling the “developed” world.

(Story via Boing Boing)

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New music – 18 Champs Elysées

Posted on 1 February, 2003 by adrian

Once I get going, I just can’t stop… still in my feverish froth of musical inspiration, I did another quick recording this afternoon. It’s another piece for the Recording Collective mentioned in the previous entry.

The task was to reinvent one of the other Collective members’ songs in a different style. I decided to use Rick Booth’s song 18 And Over, which created an unexpectedly elegant circle of references… the song is about me setting one of the previous Collective tasks. Rick’s original is in a heavy-ish rock style, but I decided to vandalise his creative effort with some fake gypsy swing…

’18 Champs Elysées’ (3.7MB mp3)

It’s a fairly rough, first-take sort of job (the lead guitar is actually far far from the first take, but it’s improvised, and I did most of it in one pass) and not something I’d try and earn a living from, but I do like to get those ideas down while they’re hot.

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New music – Winter Thames Sunset

Posted on 31 January, 2003 by adrian

Finally got round to doing some proper recording this year. A short solo acoustic guitar tune is my latest entry in the Guitarist Home Recording Collective, one of my favourite mini-communities on the Net.

Winter Thames Sunset (2.4MB mp3)

The title is fairly self-explanatory, althought the music came before the idea for the title. The piece was really suggested by the tuning, as often happens… experimenting with odd tunings, I somehow arrived at D Bb C G A C (low to high) and the tune just tumbled out.

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IDS and the Sangatte terrorist massive

Posted on 29 January, 2003 by adrian

Okay, let’s get this straight. You’re a dastardly Al Qaida terrorist and you want to wreak havoc on the nasty Western infidels in Britain. But first you have to get into the country. So, according to Iain Duncan Smith, who (for non-British readers… actually, there’s probably fair few British readers who don’t know this…) is leader of the Conservatives, our main opposition party, what you do is pretend to be an asylum seeker. You try to sneak into the country, hoping that no one will find you, put you in a detention centre and then deport you. Yeah, right.

Now boys and girls, don’t you think Johnny Terrorist would have a better chance if he was to dress up in a smart suit and use some of Uncle Osama’s funds to buy a business class ticket into Heathrow? After all, no police officer or security guard is ever going to harass a smartly-dressed business man – corporate gangsters are given tacit permission to run our lives, after all. Sweep through customs, pick up your elegant leather baggage from the carousel, and you’re in. Now you can change into mufti, head for the inner-cities and find some disenfranchised young Muslims to convert to the cause.

If you’d chosen the former approach, you’d still be sitting in an asylum seekers’ detention centre, eating lukewarm McDogfood and being strip-searched. Think about it, Iain…

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Double Indemnity

Posted on 28 January, 2003 by adrian

King’s College (where Nicola works) has a Film Studies degree, and the students’ film showings are both free and open to outsiders. Last night was Billy Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity’. Now, I’m not a great consumer of crime fiction, but I know a good film noir, and this is one of the classics. The Raymond Chandler influence (he co-wrote the screenplay) is well in evidence, with the twisting, turning plot and razor-sharp one-liners. Fred McMurray’s sweet-talking hotshot insurance salesman, Barbara Stanwyck’s jaded femme fatale and Edward G Robinson as the all-seeing claims manager and mentor to McMurray are all on top form here.

Another Chandler trait… that black existential angst. There’s that memorable quote from Keyes (Edward G Robinson), “They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery”. Now, this is describing two people who have (he suspects) committed a murder, but it could easily sum up the whole film, or even the whole noir genre.

I watched ‘LA Confidential’ over Xmas, and while it’s a damn good film, seeing ‘Double Indemnity’ reminded me just how much of a gulf there is between an original classic and a rather glossy modern retro version. Guy Pearce is quite a traditional hero, who (we presume) lives happily ever after… in classic noir, there’s bad in everyone and life *will* be a bitch. Keyes figures out the mystery with a heavy heart (his young protegé is implicated) and a greater distaste for the world. You get the feeling that life will just carry on as the trolley car careers down the line…

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The Cuss Control Academy

Posted on 23 January, 2003 by adrian

In both the ‘Only in America’ and ‘Obvious joke response required’ categories, comes this, the Cuss Control Academy. Learn why swearing is bad and, even more importantly, how to stop doing it. No shit…

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Flaming Lips live in London

Posted on 23 January, 2003 by adrian

Last night (oh wait… it’s past midnight… the night before last) I saw the Flaming Lips at the Forum in London. They’re one of my favourite bands, this was probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen them and they just keep on getting better and better. The setlist (still deservedly heavy on songs from ‘The Soft Bulletin’) hasn’t really changed much in the last couple of years, apart from the addition of songs from ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, and the same goes for the backdrop films, but it doesn’t matter. There’s almost a feeling that the Flips are happy to perform to this perfect, audience-approved script, each time imbuing it with more and more warmth, passion and humanity. The party atmosphere increases with each tour, too… back on the Soft Bulletin tours, the films and Wayne’s mic-stand webcam were the main visual attractions. Giant mirror balls and balloons, lots of confetti and animal suits appeared for the first Yoshimi tour, and now we have the spectacle of twenty-or-so animal-suited guests flanking the band on stage, dancing as if their little furry hearts depended on it.

To be honest, the sound at the Forum never seems to be as good as comparable London venues such as the Astoria or Shepherds Bush Empire. Still, that wasn’t a huge problem… every Flaming Lips gig is like a birthday and Christmas combined, so it’d take a lot to wipe the HUGE grins off the faces of the audience.

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Elections in Venezuela

Posted on 23 January, 2003 by adrian

Hey, if I can do my little bit to make the world a nicer place, I’ll do it. There’s a campaign going on today, regarding the need for democratic elections in Venezuela.

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