We did it. We ordered BrewDog hybrid burgers.
Not bad! Tastier than they look. The vegan cheese is impressively good. The matcha buns don’t taste much like matcha. Wouldn’t get it again, but fun once.
Photo — 2019-10-29
Archive — Culture
Crawick Multiverse
At the weekend, we visited Crawick Multiverse, a land art installation in Dumfries and Galloway designed by Charles Jencks. Read full article
CommentFrench Disko — Stereolab
For the past couple of years Stereolab have been reissuing most of their back catalogue. It’s been a great opportunity for me to fill the gaps in my collection (which, shamefully, was more gap than collection).
My first exposure to this song was in 2005, when I was watching late night Channel 4 and saw this slightly shambolic cover version by Maxïmo Park and Editors.
134 32iii — Bogdan Raczynski
RAVE ’TILL YOU CRY
BRAINDANCE
🧠🕺
COMEBACK
Photo — 2019-10-16
Having fun with big black spaghetti
Spangle (2019 expanded live version) — Seefeel
A reworking of Seefeel’s classic 1994 track Spangle, promoting the group’s upcoming tour of North America.
It’s great to have Seefeel back in action again. Their music was a little before my time, but I relished discovering it a few years later. It seems cutting-edge for the period — clearly influenced by shoegaze, but with a fizzing techno sensibility. It’s a combination that wouldn’t have been possible before, and wouldn’t have been thought of after.
Also check out Autechre’s (released in 2003, but presumably made in 1994) remix of the original, which gives it a brooding dark ambient vibe that could pass as a lost track from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Ⅱ.
Photo — 2019-09-29
Since I was a child I’ve been intrigued by what lay behind the mysteriously secretive railings of Queen Street Gardens, one of Edinburgh New Town’s many private gardens.
Normally you need to be a resident of a neighbouring street to obtain a key to the gates. But for one weekend a year, on Doors Open Day, the gates are thrown open to the wider public.
Well, one of the gates is. When we arrived at the south side of Queen Street Gardens’ eastern district, we found it locked as normal. Walking further, we found a sign informing us to enter at the opposite side, at Abercromby Place. You mustn’t make it too easy to enter, after all.
Among the interesting things to see are the Nissen hut, originally used as a bomb shelter and now used as a shed.
At the other end is the Temple of Pluto, a 1980s structure designed to disguise a gas pressure regulating station.
The central garden was also open. Most notable here is the pond and island, which is said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson (who, as a child, lived on the adjacent Heriot Row) to write Treasure Island.
I’m getting rid of 18 years’ worth of plastic CD wrappers
I'm not entirely sure why I started collecting them. Probably a mixture of liking some of them, and thinking that keeping them would make my CD collection more valuable. Read full article
1 commentRent Responsibly — VHS Head
Ten years ago today, the first VHS Head EP was released. I remember it seemed to come as a bit of a bolt from the blue. For a while it was my favourite new electronic music.
Video Club is a delightful slice of retro electronic music. Subsequent releases, though relatively scant, have explored a parallel universe consisting entirely of video nasties. VHS Head’s music is constructed from samples taken from VHS cassettes.
As is customary for releases on Skam Records, it includes a braille strip. But a novel addition was the golden Video Club membership card.
Be kind and rewind.
Note — 2019-09-20
The hotel bar just played a version of Take Five in 4/4 time, and I’m slightly horrified.
F1 responds to criticism of television broadcasts — — RaceFans
The best bit about this is the fact that they are apologising in advance for the inevitably poor quality of coverage in Singapore…
…we have to really convey what the city is like, this amazing skyline and these fantastic buildings.
How about no?
I’m sure it’s in the contract with the Singapore Grand Prix race promoters, that they must allot a certain amount of the broadcast to showing the city, and not the race. The same goes with Abu Dhabi and that ridiculous vibrator-shaped hotel.
And the Russian Grand Prix. Every year, without fail, they have cut away from the live action to broadcast footage of Vladimir Putin arriving by helicopter about a third of the way through the race. Then some laps later they show him gormlessly sitting next to Bernie Ecclestone in a near-empty grandstand, looking about as interested in the race as some lichen would. Every year. Watch it this year and take a drink when it happens.
The sooner F1 becomes less reliant on these ridiculous publicity-hungry governments, and goes back to real racing on proper circuits, the better. But then, it will be harder to excuse the bad TV coverage.
We cracked the Crystal Maze in Manchester
My expectations were already high. But they were surpassed. Let me emphasise this: The Crystal Maze Experience was way better than I expected. Which was already very good. Read full article
CommentÁgætis byrjun — Sigur Rós
Music was one of the jobs I was put in charge of for our wedding. Alex isn’t particularly interested in music. We don’t have any shared musical memories. We don’t have “our song”. So that made some aspects of the wedding planning tricky.
For instance, there were no obvious candidates — or, indeed, any candidates at all — for what Alex would walk down the aisle to. And because I never imagined I would get married until I met Alex, it’s not something that I had my own ideas about either.
Just a few weeks before the big day, I knew we had to make this decision. I mined my record collection for any shared musical memories we might have.
I considered something from Concrete Antenna, a beautiful experimental record that I’d never heard of until Alex bought it as a gift. It’s one of the most perfect gifts she ever got me, because I didn’t know it existed, but I loved it. But Alex decided it sounded too dark for our wedding.
Another candidate was something from the FFS album. We saw FFS when they played as part of the Edinburgh International Festival a few years ago, and we both really enjoyed the concert. But again, it didn’t strike the right tone. (We did end up using Johnny Delusional as the ceremony closer.)
Eventually, I started to just pull out records and CDs that I thought sounded nice. I had to loosen up some of the rules I had imposed on the process. Crucially, the “no Sigur Rós” rule.
Ágætis byrjun is Sigur Rós’s best album. The title track doesn’t always get the most attention, but it is my favourite from the album. Listening to it while thinking about our upcoming wedding gave it a new emotional appeal for me.
I looked up translations of the lyrics, which I hadn’t paid much attention to before because it’s sung in Icelandic. It’s actually about the band listening to the finished mix of their first album, Von, and feeling like it was OK but could be improved. The title translates as “A good beginning”.
But the lyrics are also ambiguous. An alternative interpretation is that the song is about a fledgling relationship.
It seemed particularly apt for us, because we had two “first dates”. The first one was a good start. We did better next time (and never looked back).
I really like the brief, mild moments of dissonance in this song. It’s beautiful, but not quite perfect. Like life. Or like a relationship. The key is to recognise that it’s a good beginning, and we will do better next time.
The album has just been reissued in a 20th anniversary edition with three CDs of additional material. It’s astonishing to think this is 20 years old. At least it’s not as disturbing to me as OK Computer. I only discovered Ágætis byrjun in about 2001 when it became a sleeper cult hit outside of Iceland so I can still think of it as an 18 year old album.
I’m also fond of this live acoustic version from Heim.
The Thinnest Place — Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus with the Belbury Poly
Chanctonbury Rings combines the folk music of Sharron Kraus and retro electronics of the Belbury Poly with spoken word from Justin Hopper. It’s a perhaps unlikely combination.
This is made all the more unlikely by the fact that, despite Justin Hopper’s American accent, the music is unmistakably English. It immediately reminded me of the Seasons (a cultish, unsettling 1969 BBC LP for use by schools’ drama departments, featuring music by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop).
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this. I picked it up because I’m a Ghost Box completist. But I found myself in a truly immersive listen. Hauntology at its finest.
Note — 2019-09-03
Is a fig roll a cake or a biscuit? The Great British Bake Off has spoken, and Wikipedia has followed.
BBC not so sound
Radio broadcasters are battling each other to be the Netflix of radio. None of them seem to have asked themselves why any of their listeners would want that. Read full article
CommentAfter the Belgian Grand Prix — Days out in Spa and Brussels
After our weekend at the Belgian Grand Prix last year, Alex and I stayed on for a few more days to explore other parts of Belgium. Read full article
1 commentJogging — Richard Dawson
A song I heard on the radio this week that made my ears prick up. I wasn’t previously aware of Richard Dawson. But this is a brilliant song — dark, funny, meaningful, relatable, of our time. Once again I’m beginning to think that the most interesting music is actually coming from rock music for a change. Consider the album pre-ordered.
Photo — 2019-08-22
Jarv Is… Yes yes yes yes
Why did the UK become a failed state? — — mainly macro
This post is about how a policy (crashing out of the EU) that will do nearly everyone harm and some great harm seems to have considerable, albeit still minority, support…
You either have to assume that a third of the population has gone mad, or instead see this as a fundamental failure of information. The UK is a failed state because the producers of information have made it fail.
According to Simon Wren-Lewis, this information problem is being facilitated by the media.
In one sense, the idea that people don’t have enough information to make an informed decision is nothing new. As I’ve written in the past, ignorance is inevitable.
But there does seem to be something particular going on in Britain right now that is causing something even worse than mere ignorance.
Skye high
Straight after our wedding in February, Alex and I spent a week on the Isle of Skye for our mini moneymoon. Read full article
1 commentPhoto — 2019-08-18
Continuum — Bridget Riley — on exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery.
It’s Bridget Riley’s only ever 3D work. Entering inside it, I perhaps understood why. It wasn’t quite tall enough to fully immerse me.
I highly recommend you visit this if you can. It is a very comprehensive exhibition of her career, spanning more than 70 years, including paintings from this year.
The room containing her black-and-white works of the 1960s are of course a highlight. I am constantly in awe of how these static paintings can appear to be moving at great speed.
But I was also fascinated by the room containing her studies, where you can see her working out how to create these incredible mind-bending paintings.
Appraising W Series
In just six short races, W Series has silenced its critics and made the motorsport world revise its approach towards increasing women’s participation. Read full article
CommentPhoto — 2019-08-13
White chocolate Coco Pops are the greatest/worst invention because it looks just like you’re eating Rice Krispies.
Atmospheres and soundtracks
When I was a child, 25 years ago, landing on the moon not only seemed cool --- it seemed like a totally normal expectation. 25 years on, my feelings are more mixed. One thing I haven't changed my mind about is the brilliant Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Read full article
CommentNote — 2019-08-02
My Omnichord normally gathers dust in the corner of a room. So when someone retweeted into my timeline Karine Polwart asking if anyone in Edinburgh had an Omnichord she could borrow for some filming, I was happy to help, and to see the Omnichord out of its case for a change!
Dear @DuncanBSS thanks for the borrow of your Brand New Omnichord! It’s having its own wee moment in the spotlight this morning via @AdmiralFallow Louis for my Scottish Songbook. pic.twitter.com/Y4WUYfUexP
— Karine Polwart (@IAMKP) February 26, 2019
It makes its little appearance in this video for her cover of Chance by the Big Country.
This is part of her new album of Scottish covers, Scottish Songbook. It’s out today on lovely red vinyl.
I had always wondered what it would take to get a ‘thank you’ on the back of an album. Now I know. 🙂
Hopefully one day I’ll get round to playing the Omnichord more often myself…
Rainbow — Battles
Their single Atlas may have got the most attention, but for me it was Rainbow that was the centrepiece of Battles’ extraordinary 2007 album Mirrored. It mixed cartoonish melodies with prog rock hardness.
I first came across Battles on the release of EP C/B EP, a compilation of their early EPs. Hearing SZ2 for the first time was hugely exciting. It felt like exactly the music I was looking for all along, without ever knowing it.
So even though Mirrored was their first album, it already represented a surprising change in direction. The chin-stroking post-rock had been superseded by Pinky and Perky vocals.
It was confusing. But listening to it for a second time, it felt as vital as their early material. In time, more so.
Their live performances were genuinely mind-boggling. They did things with live loops and sampling in ways that no-one else dared.
At the height of their powers, Battles made music in a way no-one else was making it. Watching them live was like watching four people walking a tightrope simultaneously. It could go wrong at any moment, and watching them push themselves and cope with it or recover from going wrong was a marvel.
Brian Eno counted himself as a fan:
When you see a band you really like, the reason you really like them is because you wish you’d had that idea. And I saw them and thought, “dammit, why didn’t I think of that?”
Have a spare ten minutes? Treat yourself to the slowed down version someone’s uploaded to YouTube.
Photo — 2019-07-19
I do enjoy the Ikea-style assembly instructions included when you buy a fancy Radiohead / Thom Yorke record.
33 adventures in The Designers Republic
“On July 14th 1986 The Designers Republic was declared.” Celebrating 33 years of Brain Aided Design. Read full article
2 commentsVexations — Erik Satie
Erik Satie’s Vexations is shrouded in mystery. It was not published during Satie’s lifetime. It’s thought it was composed in 1893. But it went undiscovered until 1963, when John Cage first performed it publicly.
It is just three lines long, but is accompanied by this ambiguous instruction (translated from French):
In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities
While this is usually interpreted as an instruction to repeat the music 840 times to complete a performance, it’s not clear if this was actually Satie’s intention.
The tempo instruction is “Très lent” — very slow. In the words of Wikipedia, this “could mean anything”.
Cage’s first performance lasted over 18 hours — longer than he had estimated. The CD recording I own lasts only 23 minutes — a tiny fraction of the full experience. The liner notes to that CD flags up the following:
A 70 minute performance (40 repetitions) of Vexations by Alan Marks is available on the CD Vexations (LTMCD 2389)…
Despite the repetitive nature of the music, it never seems to get boring. There is something disturbing yet irresistible about it. I always imagine falling very slowly towards an uncertain destination. It feels like being trapped in an Escher painting.
This piece predates muzak and ambient music by at least 50 years. The CD liner notes say it “provided minimalism with an important historical precedent.” It even predates Dada.
This YouTube video contains a full performance, albeit one performed seemingly too fast.
You don’t hear this on adverts quite as often as Gymnopédie 1…
Photo — 2019-07-04
Graffiti aubergines. More expensive than aubergines. Taste exactly like aubergines. 5/5 would hipster again. 🍆
The Rapanthem — Modeselektor
In retrospect, this tune (from 2005) sounds a little dated. A little bit too heavy on the post-Boards of Canada glitchy hip-hop influence. Bbbbutttt… it’s still pretty good.
I remember listening to this album a lot when I was studying at the University of Edinburgh, taking lunchtime walks round the Meadows. 14 years on I find myself taking the same lunchtime walks, working for the university. Crazy days.
The Great 78 Project
An awesome project to preserve 78rpm records by recording and publishing the audio of hundreds of thousands of discs in the Internet Archive.
Check out the Preservation page, which explains the process in detail. I love the cool four tonearm turntable!
Photo — 2019-06-16
Watching the 24 Hours of Le Mans = having the big cafetiere to myself.
I’m 49 — Prefab Sprout
I’ve been aware of Paddy McAloon’s 2003 album I Trawl the Megahertz for a while. While I’d always meant to pick it up, I never got round to it. In a sense it’s just as well, as this year it was re-released, remastered, and repackaged as a Prefab Sprout album.
Suffering with health problems, Paddy McAloon spent his time at home, listening to radio phone-ins. This formed the basis of the material on the album. The stunning 22 minute long title track features a splicing together of fragments of these broadcasts to tell a story in spoken word.
Most of the rest of the album is instrumental, but I’m 49 returns to the radio broadcasts, this time sampling them directly.
As pointed out by Paddy McAloon in this reissue’s liner notes, it’s not the first time the musicality of found voices has been exploited by a musician. He namechecks Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Steve Reich’s Different Trains also springs to mind. Musically, the albums seems to take a clear cue from American minimalist composers.
The story of the making of the album — centred around Paddy McAloon’s ill health — also reminds me of how Brian Eno is said to have pursued ambient music. It is said that Brian Eno was in bed, unable to get up to adjust the volume of his radio, and ended up being inspired by the sparseness of the resulting sound.
I Trawl the Megahertz has a melancholic vibe. “I’m 49, divorced.” What makes ordinary people bare their souls to radio hosts? This seems to be the question asked by the album. But the album also provides an answer — to adversity. Faced with illness, like Brian Eno, Paddy McAloon created some wonderful music.
Now I only wonder why it took me until now to discover it properly.
Note — 2019-05-29
Does anyone I know fancy coming with me to see the Rabbit Hole with Iain Lee and Katherine Boyle in Glasgow this Saturday? I unexpectedly have a spare ticket.
Brewing Alex & Duncan Black IPA — our wedding beer
We went to Stewart Brewing’s Craft Beer Kitchen to brew our own beer for our wedding. Read full article
CommentDivine — Sébastien Tellier
I woke up this morning to BBC Radio 6 Music playing a remix of Kilometer by Sébastien Tellier. It is quite some way to be introduced to the day.
But with the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend, it put me in mind of the fact that Sébastien Tellier is in fact responsible for my favourite Eurovision performance, Divine.
France’s 2008 entry was controversial, because Divine was sung in English, which France’s powers-that-be don’t like. So Sébastien Tellier had to re-write part of it in French.
As you can see, that was only the start of the weirdness. The bearded women, the golf cart, the weird locked-off camera angles. And who else would have the audacity to consume helium in the middle of what would probably be the biggest performance of their life?
There was no doubt where my vote was going in 2008. It came 19th. That result was at least better than their previous three entries.
Scapegoating user experience design — — Subtraction
An article published yesterday in The Washington Post demonstrates the danger of design’s failure to broaden popular understanding of our craft.
The article pinpoints Nest’s focus on reducing friction as the reason for their cameras’ weak security.
Khoi Vinh points out that…
…the concept of user experience writ large is not to blame here; what’s actually at fault is bad user experience practice.
The point being that good security is fundamental to good user experience. As any good designer would know, they are not in conflict. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It strikes me that Nest are using ‘reducing friction’ as a poor excuse for not implementing better security. I’m sure they’re not the only ones guilty of this.
On another point, this article got me thinking about journalism. Khoi Vinh refuses to blame the Washington Post’s perspective on “lazy journalism”, perhaps correctly.
But any time I read a mainstream/non-specialist journalist write about a topic I know a little about (motorsport, the web, whatever), I’m always astonished at how many basic errors are made. It’s a challenge if designers want the help of journalism when “explaining what it is that we do to the world at large.”
Sybil´s Dream — Beautify Junkyards
A recent slice of hauntology from the collectable Ghost Box Records. I have to admit this album, The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards, has taken a while to grow on me. But my, has it grown.
As much as I love it, some Ghost Box material can get a bit samey. Perhaps it’s inevitable (or intentional?) given that it showcases a type of dark nostalgia; mal-remembered pasts. (Or, in the label’s own words, “the misremembered musical history of a parallel world.”)
Beautify Junkyards breathes new life into the ghostly universe of hauntology. They are Portuguese, but seemingly take cues from British acid folk music. Unashamedly inspired by an imagined past, but adding adding new dimensions to create something uncannily new. And with a songwriterly quality that isn’t always at the forefront of a Ghost Box project.
It almost takes us full circle to the early material of Broadcast, in many ways the genesis of Ghost Box.
If Sybil´s Dream didn’t do it for you, try Ghost Dance.
Photo — 2019-05-10
In this week’s post, Alex got a Brexit Party leaflet. I got lifetime membership of Iain Lee and Katherine Boyle’s Late Night Losers club. This week I won at post.
Want to see what one digital future for newspapers looks like? Look at The Guardian, which isn’t losing money anymore — — Nieman Journalism Lab
How the Guardian finally started making a profit, in three steps.
With a functionally infinite supply of free news available, the relationship your reader has to you has to be a lot more like the one public radio listeners have with their favorite station. They’re not buying access; they’re supporting a cause.
I’d also add that the Guardian has one major advantage over almost every other publisher in the world. They uniquely decided not to go down the rabbit hole of autoplaying videos, pop-up adverts, and other infuriating ways of getting in the way of what the readers actually came for.
This week I visited the Scotsman website, and one of the ads inserted a nasty redirect that my browser told me was taking me to an untrustworthy site. There are lots of news sites that I simply can’t trust for this reason. The Guardian is one I can still trust.
Recall — Plaid
A surprising* new dimension to Plaid’s sound — glitchy and hard-hitting.
The publicity surrounding their forthcoming album, Polymer, says:
The problems and benefits of Polymers felt like good themes for this album, their repetitious strength, endurance and troubling persistence, the natural versus the synthetic, silk and silicone, the significant effect they have on our lives.
Plaid make good music, but rarely have they seemed quite so vital as this.
* I say surprising, although it had previously been revealed in this little-seen video collaboration with Laura Buckley called Repel Darker:
The cave paintings of Brexit — — The Law and Policy Blog
David Allen Green explains how the usual sources of information on British politics have been useless at explaining Brexit.
A Brexit historian with access only to the front parts of UK newspapers and to government publications would be like the classical historian convinced that the Romans were pre-occupied with crockery.
He notes that Brussels correspondents have been more informative than their Westminster counterparts. His point about Irish journalism providing better insights resonates with me as well. They’ve seemed much more switched on about certain aspects of the Brexit shitshow.
British politics is in a huge a mess at the moment. Is part of that down to the fact that British journalism has got stuck in a rut?
15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook — — Wired
I enjoy Wired’s periodic long articles about Facebook. They avoid the shrillness that most media outlets exhibit when writing or talking about Facebook. This article is all the more powerful for it. And unlike many self-publicists who spend a lot of time writing basic stuff about Facebook and acting as though they’ve discovered the story of the decade, this contains genuine insights and new information.
People in the City — Air
A great song, really effectively set to footage from Koyaanisqatsi by someone on YouTube.
10 000 Hz Legend is not as well-regarded as Air’s first album, Moon Safari. But I personally prefer it. Moon Safari opened the floodgates to a host of cliched chillout albums by sub-par artists. 10 000 Hz Legend shook it all off, and carved a new path. I think it stands the test of time better as a result.
This one appears to be the official video, but for some reason using a rather weak live version of the song.
Photo — 2019-04-14
When did you last sharpen your pencil in public?
The weird machine that measured radio audiences in the 1930s and 1940s — — Paleofuture
If you think the way they measure radio audiences is primitive now (and, by the way, it is), then wait until you read about the Audimeter. A great look at the history of radio ratings, and the early days of trying to measure the impact of advertising.
Close to the Edge — Yes
Prog rock has a bad name. Prog rock by Yes perhaps has a particularly bad name. But sometimes, a 19 minute long wig out is what you need. It accompanied a lunchtime for me last week, and my afternoon felt better than my morning. What a song.
Scott Walker
Every so often I hear a piece of music that turns my understanding of music upside down. Scott Walker made one of those tracks. I knew I had to investigate further. Read full article
Comment