FORGERY LEAGUE

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Report on an unknown sea cucumber

Back in high school, I played around with fractals, after finding a writeup about the Mandelbrot set in a back issue of Scientific American. The article had loads of dazzling colour renderings, the likes of which would grace psychedelic CD covers a few short years later: spidery frost patterns, seahorse-like whorls, lighting licking around tiny replicas of the snowman-shaped set.

All that colour and infinite detail came from a mind-bendingly simple equation, calculated over and over: z_n+1 = z_n² + c. The article provided a snippet of pseudocode, which I compiled in C and ran for days on end on the family PC/AT, pumping the raw results through DeluxePaint to colour them. (Later on I added a pause function so my mum and dad could use the computer again.)

It was a window into a mysterious mathematical world: look at the latest image and pick out an interesting looking bit, work out its co-ordinates, and start up the calculations again, and a day or two later, enjoy the results. There was no end to its detail no matter how much you zoomed in on it, and always with those circles upon circles. Similar but never the same: a fractal.

I hadn’t thought much about the Mandelbrot set until a few days ago, when I happened on a link to the Mandelbulb, a recently-discovered 3-D analogue to the old-school set.

It’s… a little creepy.

Its knobbly symmetry gives it the look of some sort of sea creature or single-celled organism, like something Ernst Haeckel might have conjured up in a feverish daze. As you zoom in it proves to be covered in crazy textures: ridges and flowers and macrame tangles. Who could have guessed that a 3-D Mandelbrot set would look so… knitted?

I was fascinated enough by it that I chose an image or two from that web page to use as my desktop at work. And then the other day as I was shutting down for the evening, a co-worker who was stopping by stared and blurted out, “Ew! What is that hideous thing?” She was a bit sheepish about the violence of her reaction – something about the texture, she said – but she’s hardly the only one to feel this way; the comments on MetaFilter and Boing Boing seem to alternate between “hey, awesome”, “whoa, trippy” and “augh, disturbing”.

Kind of amazing, really. It’s just a handful of equations you could fit on the back of a business card. So how can it shake us up so deeply?

One is certainly that texture-phobia. The Unusual Phobias site has collected a number of variations, but clusters and holes (bunches of grapes, honeycombs, crumpets) seem to elicit loathing in a whole lot of people, and just reading their accounts makes me feel it a little bit too.* Is it some ancient fear of wasp nests? Maggot-riddled flesh? Eggs? I suspect bugs are somehow connected.

Worse, if you carry out the calculations to produce higher levels of detail, the Mandelbulb turns out to be surrounded by a “foam” of little spheres, the equivalent of the flat set’s circles-on-circles.

Two: stretchiness. There are places where the virtual fabric of the Bulb seems to be distorted in ways that just look unnatural, like an Evan Penny sculpture.

Three: scale. You can zoom in on this thing to any level and still find it covered with bewildering detail. It never ends. It is arbitrarily large. You could fall into it and never hit bottom.

And finally, there’s the fact that on an actual organism, if there are complex structures it’s because they’ve evolved to serve a function, like metabolism or defense. The Mandelbulb may be born of pure mathematics, but all its bumps and and ridges and spirals look like they’re meant to do something. But what?

Exploring the Mandelbrot set felt a little like exploring a landscape. The Bulb, by contrast, as a three-dimensional object, has a presence – a hair-raising, eldritch presence. Even its discoverers refer to it as “the creature”.

Just look at it… radiating weird malevolence as it sits there, a smug, blobby sea-cucumber. The Mandelbulb: it knows something we don’t.

* My personal horror is intersecting forks – it’s something about the leverage they can exert, thereby bending out of shape accidentally. Maybe I damaged a tooth on a fork as a kid.

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Drawing blanks

To summarize the summer:

We released the first full-length Flickershow CD, entitled Drawing A Blank. Ten songs; I played bass, sang harmony, did arrangements and other odds and ends. We’re quite proud of it, and the CD release party was a blast. There’s a link to buy it online from our website, and it’s also available through that music store Apple runs. Things have been a bit quiet since the CD release, since Julian’s just got married (check out their awesome first dance on the YouTube) but there will be gigging in the new year, and with luck some out-of-town gigs in the spring.

All other music ventures have been on hold, meanwhile. I’m starting to plot my return to action, but it’s been nice to take a break for a few months and mess around with other things like writing and drawing (including the cover art for our CD) and catching up on comics.

I haven’t been a big follower of comics, though I was dimly aware that there were amazing things going on in the medium. The whole field just seemed too big and daunting. Where do you start reading?

I heard about Scott Pilgrim from all sorts of people at once. It’s a breezy, lovably dorky romance packed with Canadian indie rock in-jokes, ’90s-style video game showdowns and Toronto landmarks including Honest Ed’s, Lee’s Palace and the Toronto Reference Library, among others.

I was through all five volumes before I knew it. Volume six is on the way next year, and so is the movie, directed by Edgar Wright of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame. And having finally watched Spaced, the Channel Four sitcom Wright directed (written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson; check out the first episode, also on the YouTube), I’m jazzed. It’s a match made in nerdy heaven.

From there, it was on to some more Canadiana – Seth’s It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy.

The most fascinating book I’ve happened on lately, though, is Alison (“Dykes To Watch Out For”) Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a memoir of her rocky childhood through to her coming-out – and the turmoil that followed soon after, first with the revelation that her father had had affairs with numerous young men over the years; and then his sudden and suspicious death. It’s twisty and intricate, full of literary allusions and dark, deadpan humour, as might be expected from someone whose parents were English teachers who also ran a funeral home. (“It was somewhere during those early years that I began confusing us with the Addams Family.”) Just wow.

I’ll have to wander up to the Beguiling soon to grab another armful of books. However, after Fun Home, I might just take a detour into classic literature.

Sunday 1 November 2009

Ubuntu on the HP Mini 110

I’ve been contemplating getting a netbook for a while - a small, cheap, rugged machine I can sling in a backpack and use for writing. This week I got an HP Mini 110 as a surprise gift. It’s certainly nice and compact, and has a lot going for it. And thanks to the wonder of Dropbox I can keep my writing files synced between my various machines with practically no fuss.

A few first impressions:

Decent sized keyboard, but weird key placement: there are in fact two backslash/pipe keys, both placed for maximum annoyance where my fingers expect the Enter and left Shift keys to be; more on this below. Included battery is a bit clunky but packs several hours’ worth of power. The camera (see right) is possibly worse than my cheapass phone, but I’m not too bothered about that.

The model I have came with Windows XP, which I have no use for on a daily basis - Windows and I simply do not get along. However, it may be of some use for, say, previewing websites, and in any case this machine has more than enough drive space to keep it around. So I’ve loaded on the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (version 9.10, codenamed “Karmic Koala”). The installer conveniently partitioned the drive and set up dual booting. It’s snappy, no-frills and wakes from suspend mode in an instant, and features a simple launcher app that provides access to your programs. However, there are numerous quirks and pitfalls, even with this most user-friendly of Linuxes. I’m no Unix expert, so it was a good day or so of Googling and gritting of teeth to get everything in order.

In particular, it took ages to get wireless networking going. The basic procedure turned out to be something like: download the drivers for the Broadcomm wireless adapter and extract to a handy directory; install ndiswrapper and ndisgtk using the Synaptic Package Manager; launch ndisgtk and tell it where the driver .inf file is, and things should work—however, your proverbial mileage may vary; I found the solution through much trial and error and online forum-digging.

Likewise a hack to make those ridiculous backslash keys behave like Shift and Enter. One solution turns out to be simply: create a file called .xmodmap in your home directory and put the following in it:

keycode 51 = Return NoSymbol Return NoSymbol Return
keycode 94 = Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L
add Shift = Shift_L

There are some hiccups with Javascript under Firefox, notably Gmail’s labeling system (rather than opening a dropdown, it just sent everything to my Drafts folder).

The standard codecs for audio and video don’t seem to work. There may be fixes down the road for this, but again, I’m not too concerned; I have an MP3 player for that.

UNR has a background app that makes sure programs launch in full-screen mode, which is great most of the time—there’s no room for multiple windows on something this size. However, it has odd effects on some programs intended for a windowed environment, and it helps to know that Alt-F10 switches the current program in and out of full-screen.

And speaking of that little screen: surfing, reading or doing pretty much anything else that requires staring at it for too long is a recipe for a stiff neck and a headache. (For similar reasons, I’ve decided my hand-me-down iPhone is a lousy game machine.) But that’s not such a handicap—all I wanted, after all, was a fancy word processor. So if you ever see me touch-typing and staring off into the distance, you’ll know why.

Tuesday 24 March 2009

Oramics

This post is in honour of Ada Lovelace Day.

A big part of my fascination with electronic music is thanks to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which I was first exposed to as a kid via Tom Baker-era Doctor Who (I’ve written here previously about Delia Derbyshire’s arrangement of the theme) and the original Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, which creator Douglas Adams conceived of in part as a radio play with the production values of a modern rock album. I learned later that they provided sound effects for The Goon Show and other BBC dramas.

But where did they come from? Who came up with the idea of a room tucked away in the Maida Vale Studios whose express purpose was to birth previously unimaginable sounds?

The answer: Daphne Oram. As a teenager she had become a studio engineer at the BBC, entering the traditionally male domain during the height of WWII. Her duties included balancing sound levels and “shadowing” broadcasts from the Albert Hall during the Blitz, keeping a disc of the same piece synchronized to allow the music to play on even if the concert was interrupted by German bombs.

Later, when audio tape recorders came to the UK, she spent nights hauling the machines together to work on projects before returning them to their various studios in the morning. Excited by the possibilities of tape and electronics as composing tools, she lobbied for a dedicated studio for such experiments, and at last in 1958 the BBC established the Radiophonic Workshop with Daphne Oram as its first studio manager.

It was her hope that the new studio would be a centre for art music, but to her disappointment, the music department regarded the Workshop merely as a source of background music and funny noises. She resigned in 1959, though her work there would be the inspiration for those who followed in her footsteps—and for generations of viewers and listeners who grew up hearing their work.

Meanwhile, Daphne Oram went freelance, setting up a studio, which she called Tower Folly, at a farm in Kent. There, she worked on soundtracks and commercial pieces as well as concert pieces, and began work devising a sound synthesis system which she called “Oramics”. It used patterns on 35mm film to generate and shape sounds—essentially an early method of creating sound graphically. (If you have RealPlayer, the BBC’s tribute has a great audio clip from 1972 of Ms Oram demonstrating her invention.)

She also wrote An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, a playful and eccentric little volume that mingles circuit diagrams, metaphysical musings, electronic music history, and design notes for the Oramics system, which she hopes is a step toward more “humanised” machine interfaces. It’s long out of print, but Dan Pope of the band Gusset has posted a scanned PDF version.

Paradigm Discs have released a two-CD set of Daphne Oram’s work called simply Oramics—the page includes a few downloadable MP3s. Her piece Four Aspects also saw release this year on the Sub Rosa compilation An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Vol. 2. It’s currently the only piece you’ll find on iTunes. Her commercial pieces are light and blippy, perhaps a little reminiscent of her contemporary Raymond Scott’s, while some of the longer, “serious” pieces are moody and introspective, foreshadowing the ambient music of later decades. Here’s hoping for more re-releases to come.

Thursday 8 January 2009

Nature, cities and brains

My copy of Christopher Alexander’s The Phenomenon of Life arrived in the mail today (I’ve written here previously about his book A Pattern Language). It’s the first of his four-part opus The Nature of Order, an attempt at a grand theory of architecture and aesthetics.

You might have read Jonah Lehrer’s Boston Globe column about the impact of urban versus “natural” environments on cognition. In a University of Michigan study, participants spent an hour walking through the streets of Ann Arbor, or through U-M’s botanical gardens, before undergoing tests to gauge the effect on their memory and attention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who walked through the gardens did better.

Chalk one up for nature, then—or at least for superficial science writing. I’d like to see a lot more exploration and research, to give us a more detailed idea of the effect of different types of urban environments (bustling or empty, immaculate or run-down, a hip, bohemian neighbourhood versus a Fifth Avenue, the financial district, the suburbs) and more natural ones (a park, a formal European or Japanese style garden, a vegetable patch, a swamp, a farm, a mountain, an old-growth forest, a riverside)? How about some brain imaging?

Alexander’s research has been an attempt to build such a picture—to draw out the elements that give one place or thing more life than another. Much of his study boils down to simply presenting a subject with two objects or photos, and asking: which of these makes you feel more alive? Which makes you feel more whole? Which more closely reflects your own inner being? He concludes that there are actual, universal principles that underlie our affinity for places, things and other beings. Erich Fromm (and later E.O. Wilson) called this affinity biophilia; Alexander offers a possible structure for understanding it.

The Phenomenon of Life describes 15 essential qualities that contribute to the integrity and life of a system or structure, largely concerned with how the parts of such a system interrelate and support one another: interlock and ambiguity, strong boundaries, local symmetries—essentially extending and generalizing his work in A Pattern Language.

I’m looking forward to examining the world through this new set of lenses, and applying it to other fields (interestingly, while many architects have understandably been cool to his ideas, a number of enthusiastic computer programmers have found ways to apply them to their practice). Alexander only discusses physical objects, so relating his principles to music, for example, is going to be a fun exercise (for instance, “interlock” has strong parallels with counterpoint, and “levels of scale” applies very naturally to rhythms) and one that may finally inspire me to get back to composing.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Pärt and process

Salon 21 is a wide-ranging series of informal talks by composers and musicians put on by new music org Soundstreams. Last night we heard an appreciation of the music of Arvo Pärt by composer, conductor and Laurier professor Glenn Buhr. Buhr’s enthusiasm made for an engaging introduction to the music, providing lots for a musicology geek like me to enjoy without getting too technical.

One particular aspect that interested me was Pärt’s use of process, following simple, deterministic procedures to generate stirring music from extremely limited material. It’s similar in some senses to Steve Reich‘s phase pieces, or Brian Eno‘s loop-based ambient works, but there are big differences.

Reich’s phase music uses short loops, whether that’s physical loops of recording tape, percussion or piano figures that are simply repeat throughout the piece. These fall in and out of phase with each other, shifting from unison to a subtle echo to cacophony to tightly interlocking patterns, and finally come back into phase again, bringing the piece back to where it began.

Eno’s ambient pieces, such as Music For Airports, were inspired by Reich’s work, but use loops of uneven length that will practically never repeat. Eno’s self-stated goal was to create pieces that were effectively infinite, something he was able to explore further once computer music technology allowed it—he coined the term “generative music” to describe it. It comes as no surprise, really, that Eno’s designing the chimes to be sounded by the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now.

But where Reich’s pieces are cyclic and Eno’s aspire to being infinite, Arvo Pärt’s music is more fatalistic. We heard a recording of his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which uses as its basic material a descending A-minor scale, with violins moving fastest and lower strings progressively more slowly, but all moving toward the tonic—their ultimate destination. The whole piece is relentless in its finality, moving inexorably downward until at last the high strings linger on their notes, waiting for the basses to catch up, and the long final chords boil with a kind of dread—fitting for a meditation on death.

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir close out their North American tour with a stop in Toronto tomorrow night, but sadly, I won’t be there. My consolation: we’ll be in the studio mixing the new Flickershow CD!

Sunday 9 November 2008

Paring down

Sean and I are moving into a new place in Leslieville in less than a week, and we’re well into the exhausting task of tossing things we no longer need (the new house is rather smaller than the old) and boxing up everything else. This time around, I finally bit the bullet and got rid of all my CDs and vinyl, except for discs by friends’ bands and the occasional rarity. Since I listen to everything on my computer or iPod these days, my collection had been sitting in boxes in the basement for a couple of years already.

I’d been avoiding the issue for a long time, but today we had a truck rented to do a Goodwill run, and I made the decision to let them all go, pretty much on the spur of the moment. It was actually the first time I’ve been in a CD store in years, and aside from the occasional gift, I don’t imagine I’ll have any cause to do so again. I felt more than a little awkward walking in there with all my boxes — while I was giving them a lot of good stuff (several hundred dollars’ worth, in fact), I was essentially renouncing their services as well.

Aside: my first musical purchase, to my memory, bought at a little shopping mall music store: a cassette of 1000 Airplanes on the Roof by Philip Glass (having been mesmerized by a clip of Koyaanisqatsi on TV).

I don’t remember what the first vinyl I bought was. My mother and I used to park at Yorkdale and ride the subway down to Osgoode to shop at the book and music shops along Queen West, and I picked up lots of Eno, Tomita and Jean-Michel Jarre at Driftwood Music.

First CDs: Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk, The Shutov Assembly by Brian Eno and a 4-track sampler from Hi-Tech/No Crime, an album of YMO remixes by contemporary (ca. 1991) UK electronic acts. The last CD I bought for myself was Komeda’s Kokomemedada.

The hardest part: letting go of all the vinyl box sets of classics Sean’s late father collected and treasured, which we’d had for ages but never played. In the truck, we agreed we’ll have to download some of his dad’s favorites — he was fond of the Russians, especially Shostakovich, and loved opera too. Perhaps something to listen to as we unpack and settle in.

Sunday 21 September 2008

The ring

Above: the ring, made by Sean, my sweetheart of nine years and given to me one week ago, on the beach at Ashbridges Bay, at midnight, while the remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped by.

The awesome Michele, who counts metalworking among her many talents, had invited him by her studio to learn some of the craft and create a piece of jewellery that day. Acting on a deep impulse he decided to make this for me - knowing that even though I never wear jewellery, I’m a big DIY nerd, and if there was one thing I’d never want to take off, it would be something made by his own hands. He made me a freaking ring. For about three days I couldn’t look down at it without starting to cry again.

It was pitch black. We had to use the light from my cel phone to see it. We sat with the hot winds buffeting us, eating pretzels and watching birds fly backwards. And then we got caught in a sudden downpour as we pedalled up Woodbine*, and ate terrible

Brekwiches at an all-night coffee shop. I spent equal time crying and laughing my head off.

The long and the short of it: we are engaged. Life just got a bit stranger and much more wonderful.

* Oh, did I mention? We got bikes a few weeks ago. It’s been great, and the wounds from our respective first accidents are almost healed!

Wednesday 27 August 2008

The Bee and the Express

I’m finally back to working on some electronic projects. First up, the Express, an analog-to-MIDI converter built around a Bare Bones Board, an inexpensive Arduino clone.

I’ve been making up some patches for my Evolver synth to use it as an effect on guitar or bass, and thought it’d be nice to have some sort of pedal to control it, along the lines of a wah or volume pedal. The desktop model of the Evolver lacks a pedal input, hence the Express (for “expression”, both of the musical and genetic kind - evolution, geddit?). Currently, it reads one analog pin and spits out continuous controller data. Nothing particularly spectacular there, but it did fit wonderfully into the sturdy steel case from a computer keyboard A/B switchbox. There’s room for lots more inputs, and eventually I figure it’ll sport an additional analog in and some footswitch inputs which will send things like note on/off messages.

I’m still new to making enclosures, and to working metal in particular - instead of grinding out a hole that was slightly too narrow, I used a drill, which grabbed hold of the edges and warped the heck out of the front panel. Panic set in for a moment, but I managed to bash the thing back into shape using a busted old hard drive(!) as an anvil.

Word to the wise: there are two incompatible standards for the wiring of expression pedals:

1/4” - tip to wiper / ring to +5V / sleeve to ground: Clavia, CME, Electrix, Emu, Kurzweil, Oberheim, Roland/Boss
1/4” - ring to wiper / tip to +5V / sleeve to ground: Kawai, Korg, Yamaha

The former arrangement allows you to use a standard normalling jack to connect the tip to ground by default, so the input doesn’t float if nothing’s plugged in. I’m using a Boss pedal now, but my other pedal is a Yamaha, so if I want to use it as a second input, I’ll have to wire up something to cross those connections.

Being easily distractible by possibilities - giant trackball! LED matrix! stepper motor-controlled time-lapse photography! - I’m desperately trying to focus on a couple of projects at a time. Arduino project number two at present is using it for ultra-cheap and dirty sound generation, with piezo disc speakers plugged directly into the digital outputs. A little hacked-together code, and voilà:

The Bee (MP3, 640k)

I call it the Bee, though “Mosquito” might have been more appropriate. Modulating the pulse width creates some nice motion, but there’s a lot more to do, like getting R/C filters to tame some of the harshness - it really is annoying after a while. Oh yes, and putting a switch on it to shut it up between tests. And, of course, buttons and knobs to play it with… maybe even some sort of acoustic treatment, like a resonating soundbox or a spring reverb.

Tuesday 15 July 2008

Running in the family

Lots of funny little coincidences today.

I’ve been working at Evergreen for a few months now. Not long after joining, I stumbled across my father’s name on one of our pages, listed as a contact for the Field Botanists of Ontario. And today, in the big list of projects we’ve helped fund over the years, I found my mother’s name, in an image credit for a hand drawn map of Willow Park Ecology Centre in Norval, near where I grew up. (There’s a better, non-coloured version on the WPEC site.)

That also means both of us have done maps on our site (I did a bus route map a few weeks ago, partly as a change of pace from staring at HTML all day). A neat reminder of where I got a good deal of grounding in visual communication, not to mention my appreciation for the natural world. Thanks, Mum and Dad.

Happy birthday to me.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

Making arrangements

Over the past couple of weeks J and I have spent another few days in the studio, without playing a note. Yes, it’s session-player time. In particular, we’ve now got:

• electric guitar (a Dano 12-string jangle on “Invincible” and some sweet swell-pedal action on “Still Life”) courtesy of Dominic;
• more drums and percussion by our engineer/producer Don
• violin on “To The Nines” by Andrea and more on the way for “Aphrodite”;
• crazy undersea bowed-string noises and vocalizing on “Siren” from Rami
• organ, piano and harpsichord, courtesy of Richie; and
• a suitably over-the-top trumpet section on “Mute” all played by Stefan.

Who knew just sitting and listening could be so much work? We’ve learned a lot about listening, and coming up with musical ideas on the fly, not to mention guiding other people into realizing those ideas. It’s a fun challenge, communicating musical concepts to other people through words, singing, vocal noises, and occasionally, actually writing things down.

Julian had always had a trumpet melody in mind for the bridge on “Mute”, and wanted big, bold chords for the ending. I added a harmony to the bridge, and started fleshing out the “chords” idea with a swingy rhythmic motif… and then realized I was going to have to write the thing out. I’d composed the part in Logic, and couldn’t get the program’s “Score” view to output anything that made any sense. So I summoned up every last bit of music theory I’d ever taken, and wrote the whole thing out. Took a couple of late nights, and I worried that it was illegible, but our players approved.

Here’s the bridge from the demo version, with lovely synthesized trumpets: Mute (trumpet demo, 880k)

Not everything we did could be scored, of course, but regardless, we found it really, really helps at least to have a clear idea of what you’re after before you start. When Rami came by to play, bringing with her an Iner Souster creation called “Fat Bob”, we didn’t have parts written out - Bob, having one string and no fingerboard, isn’t particularly suited to playing melodies, anyway - but I think we had a strong idea of the texture and atmosphere we were after. J quickly joined in, offering images of a ship breaking apart at sea, the creaking of the rigging, the cracking of the timbers and the crashing of the waves. I’m really looking forward to sifting through the resulting noises and building them up into a soundscape.

Lots more to go: more drums, keyboards, backing vocals, violin and percussion - not to mention mixing and mastering. But it’s all starting to come together nicely.

Thursday 5 June 2008

A grand opening

Lots of good conversations at Open Everything today. The Toronto event took place today at the Centre for Social Innovation, a community space and incubator for social entrepreneurs, and further events around the world are scheduled for the rest of this year.

It’s all about the concept of “openness” - as in open source software, as in open models of government (check out Melbourne’s city planning wiki), as in the growing movement for open science.

Among other things:

• Dr Sara Scharf spoke about modern nomenclature in biology (you know - kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and how it came about through a process akin to open source today. I want to find out more about these parallel, failed attempts that tried to create unique names by encoding all distinguishing features of a species in the name itself, but I haven’t found anything online yet.
• Marsha Cummings is working on a documentary about Station 20 West, a community health and social services centre in Saskatoon, which includes a co-op grocery store in a neighbourhood where the last commercial grocery stores have pulled out.
• Jane Farrow spoke about Jane’s Walk, a day of self-organized neighbourhood walking tours in honour of the late Jane Jacobs. Held in May, the event has spread to other cities across Canada, and is starting to spread to the US as well.
• Mark Kuznicki told us about Metronauts, a unique experiment in civic engagement being carried out by Metrolinx, our fledgeling regional transit authority.
• Dan, one of the denizens of the Centre for Social Innovation, introduced us to the Open Salad Club. We’ve got a lunch club at my office, where several people take turns making lunch, but somehow the idea of preparing a big dish, even if it’s only every couple of weeks, seems a bit intimidating to me. But bringing in two ingredients for salad? Easy.

Perhaps most interesting of all was hearing from David Patrick about how he, a filmmaker by trade, happened to found the Linuxcaffe - to my knowledge, the world’s first “open source” coffee shop. Everything’s open - from the recipes to the software that runs the till. And naturally, there are open stage nights, not to mention DJ nights featuring Creative Commons-licensed music. But, I thought, what about a really open stage?

Some hastily scribbled notes: Collaborations of all sorts would be encouraged. Performers could share words and music, free for others to jam on, revise and rework. Recordings would be available online to listen to and remix, and on-line contributions could feed back into the open stage. There would be show and tell time for homemade musical instruments and other gear (not coincidentally, Richard Bishop has installed one of his wonderful basses in a lamppost just outside the Caffe). I’m not sure yet what structure, or how much structure, would be needed to get such an event to work well and flow. Just something to experiment with. Stay tuned…

Friday 30 May 2008

Real… Unreal.

Just finished reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker. It’s an examination of the history of ideas about musical and personal authenticity, from the dawn of blues and country to the rise of disco, punk and sampling. I’m finding the topic completely fascinating - which is perhaps amusing given the name of this site…

I first heard about the book via an interview with Taylor on a public radio show from the States called The Sound of Young America. Since the book came out Taylor and Barker have continued to explore the topic on their blog, also called Faking It.

Some questions that occur to me: how has the idea of authenticity played out in other cultures? Only one chapter really gets beyond North America and the British Isles, and it restricts itself to the intersection of Western music with world music (Buena Vista Social Club, Graceland).

How universal, for example, is the celebration of primitivism - as in punk and other “back to basics” movements in rock - as more “authentic”? I’m thinking especially of an early chapter in Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth where he writes:

[B]ossa nova’s revival of samba evolved from a refinement of musical tastes that was influenced by high-quality American songs of the thirties and by the cool jazz of the fifties; by contrast, rock in its essence was a rejection of all sophistication, and continually proves to be so whenever it seeks its own reaffirmation… While rock was simplistic, repudiating the elegance and elaboration of a Porter or a Gershwin, with their symphonic orchestrations, Miles Davis, or Bill Evans, in João Gilberto one was witnessing an almost antithetical impulse, a continuation, rather than a suppression, of musical history… [p. 23]

On the other hand, this sort of elevation of the primitive, the artless, the naïve, is present from at least the Romantics onward - you can see it in the Fauvist painters, and in Picasso’s fascination with African tribal art. All of them yearned for a connection with something primal and natural, and saw evidence of it in art from less “sophisticated” cultures.

There’s also a parallel in the development of Zen aesthetics (I’ve also been reading Andrew Juniper’s book Wabi Sabi recently - see the Wikipedia entry for Wabi sabi for a quick intro to the topic). In a similar reaction to the ultra-refined craft that accompanied the spread of Buddhism from China, Japanese monks strove to cut away all the fussy, meaningless trappings and strike directly to the essence. The arts they cultivated, from calligraphy to pottery to the tea ceremony, were pared down to their essence, and aspired to the artlessness of nature.

Where these parallel lines diverge, perhaps, is in the realm of personality and ego. Where most authenticity-seeking artists in the West seem to strive foremost for self-expression, the Zen practitioners would seek to abandon the self, to focus on nothing but the creation.

In their discussion of Kurt Cobain, Taylor and Barker suggest that the inevitable gap between ideals and real life was what killed him in the end. They don’t offer any way out of this trap, but if there is one, it’s probably close to the Zen approach of abandoning self, ego, and all expectations - both your own and those of the audience.

Lots more thoughts to organize on this topic, but that’s enough for now. I’m off to play Rock Band with my housemates.

Friday 16 May 2008

Springtime

A quick summary of an eventful season:

I’m settled into my new position as web maintainer for Evergreen, an organization focused on environmental education and community-based greening initiatives. It’s a fine bunch of people, and the work feels much more worthwhile than almost anything I did working on the “agency side”.

We’ve been dropping into Don Kerr’s studio every few weekends to record the new Flickershow album - we have ten songs in progress, with vocals, guitar, bass and drums complete on almost all of them and keyboards on about half. I’m currently working on the trumpet arrangement for a recent song called “Mute”. We’ve also played a whole pile of gigs, most notably busking in front of Pages Books on Queen St, and a swell gig for Earth Hour which included an hour-long, completely acoustic songwriters’ circle.

Sean and I spent a few days in San Francisco last month - he was there to attend a couple of different conferences, and we got to visit his sister, her partner and their two black cats (it seems to run in the family). I spent several days walking all over the downtown area, and up to Fort Mason, where I visited the Long Now Foundation’s museum and shop. Spent many hours checking out every sound-related exhibit at the Exploratorium. I came home with far too many books, and a new pair of shoes - my old pair having disintegrated completely after several dozen hills too many.

Much more to come - more musical experiences; several books to discuss; and my obsession with ruins continues.

Sunday 3 February 2008

Ruins

As cities go, Detroit is pretty much the ultimate American example of what can go wrong. From its height during the heyday of the auto industry, the Motor City fell hard, strangled by freeways, unbalanced by “white flight”, and battered by the decline of US automakers. Attempts at jump-starting the ailing downtown were mostly miserable failures, in particular the fortress-like Renaissance Center.

It took until the 1990s to see any serious signs of recovery, including major investment in renovation and new construction. Today, downtown Detroit is still full of abandoned buildings - shacks and mansions, skyscrapers and factories. (Visit DetroitYES and Forgotten Detroit for a photo tour of some of the most remarkable of these. And perhaps most poignant of all, see the photos from Sweet Juniper of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, still full of rotting books and educational materials - “a warehouse full of abandoned hope.”)

Naturally, all this has made the city a magnet for urban explorers in search of “lost” places to discover, and others drawn by the peculiar romance of urban decay. Writing in Metropolis magazine, Camilo José Vergara put forth a fanciful but entirely serious notion:

“I propose that as a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis. We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley.”

Not surprisingly, preservationists and downtown boosters were aghast. “If you allow nature to win back man-made objects you are being anti-urban,” one argued. “It’s an insult to America, to what America stands for,” another told the New York Times.

Personally, I love the idea (though I can understand why Detroiters, ever-sensitive about their city’s reputation, would be especially touchy about it). Ruins serve as a sort of memento mori on a grand scale, reminding us of our mortality. They’re not tidy or comfortable. They nudge us toward thinking about time and life, on a scale that’s bigger than our own lives.

And when ruins become overrun by the wild again, they can also be reminders of the endless abundance of nature, that power of rebirth I wrote about a while back. And, as Vergara argues, “Such buildings need to be preserved as symbols of the aspirations they represented when built.”

Thinking along the same lines, artist John McKinnon headed a project here in Toronto to preserve the concrete pillars from the eastern leg of the Gardiner Expressway. The kilometer-long elevated spur, a vestige of a plan to extend the expressway all the way through Scarborough, was torn down in 2001, but the pillars remain as a peculiar tribute to the spirit of “Big Daddy” Gardiner’s Toronto (I’m sure he would have been livid). Stripped of the dangling bits of rusted rebar, tidied up and refinished (how very Toronto), the pillars are slowly being overgrown with ivy.

Another “deliberate ruin” here in town is the Cloud Garden Parkette near Bay and Adelaide (pictured above). Architects Baird and Sampson, together with artist Margaret Priest, took inspiration from Giovanni Piranesi, whose etchings of Roman ruins had captured the imagination of 18th-century Europe. They set out to design and construct a Modernist ruin, with beams and rough bits of wall peeking through here and there. It’s a bit contrived, but the park itself is delightful, somehow creating all kinds of intimate, contemplative spaces all packed onto a relatively tiny lot - dense without feeling crowded. All that and a greenhouse with a little rainforest conservatory too. But I digress.

The parkette was built as a concession by the developers of the Bay-Adelaide Centre. However, before the office tower was completed, the 1980s office-building boom in Toronto staggered to a halt, and for years a vast concrete stump loomed over the Cloud Garden - a real ruin next to a fake one. (The story is told in more detail in Robert Fulford’s book Accidental City.)

Now, at last, a tower is being built on the site. It fills in a significant gap, but I’ll miss the Bay-Adelaide Stump. Okay, as a memento, it was more a reminder of financial folly than of impending doom, but it was like our own tiny, tidy version of Vergara’s historic ruins park.

Even ruins aren’t forever.

Sunday 13 January 2008

2007 wrap-up

The dust’s settled on 2007 at last, and does it ever feel like a new year now. Here’s a few highlights, including some stuff I didn’t write about the first time round:

January: Spinglobe moves into a brand new office in a neat building in the east end. One of the first projects is a music video for the Mahones. It’s a takeoff on that Fellini scene where la Saraghina dances the rhumba on a Mediterranean beach - except it’s January, on Ashbridge’s Bay, and the warm spell of the previous week is most definitely over. We should have called the production Minus 8½. We freeze our collective asses off, but the video ends up looking pretty darn fine.

February: Played in the band for a musical revue put on as a fundraiser by some friends - my first time playing Broadway style is a fun challenge; I stress way about it more than I have to. Reconceived long-running audio drama idea as a podcast; later in the year would reconceive it again as a comic. Expect it to morph into a novel, a musical extravaganza and finally a series of haiku in 2008.

March: In the studio with Ellen Carol to record bass tracks for her new CD, produced by Don Kerr. Restarted work on Flickershow CD; we get some solid demos done and some cool results on a trip-hoppy new song called “Hold Up Donny”. It doesn’t last, however; I end up firing myself as producer later in the year. If all goes well we’ll be recording with Don in 2008.

May: Played with Flickershow at the Sammy Sugar Day Festival, the kickoff for Ellen’s fundraising bike tour of Eastern Canada. Finally launched a site for Presonance, a collaboration with Rezo Largul.

June: Attended OpenCities, an “unconference” about the convergence of civic engagement and the open source movement. Among the topics are the waterfront revitalization, public space, DIY electronics and public art, dancing in the streets. Coincidentally, the next day, Flickershow played at Pedestrian Sundays, a monthly car-free event in Kensington Market (other events occur in Mirvish Village and on Baldwin Street); our first outing with keyboard player Rich.

Later in the month, Sean’s mom comes up from Pennsylvania for a visit. Tuesday we’re at work while she takes it easy; she’s out having a smoke on the front porch when lightning strikes a tree two doors down, and a gale-force gust of wind tears off branches for several blocks. We return home to find our street a maze of police tape, tree limbs and downed power lines. Neighbouring streets are almost unaffected. “I didn’t do it,” she pleads.

July: Played Newmarket and Brampton - our only out-of-town gig prior to this was our TVO appearance taped in Parry Sound. First steps toward developing an analog-to-MIDI interface using that splendid new toy, the Arduino.

August: Cottage outing with co-workers. Lots of laughs, plenty of good food and drink, and some cool photographic exploration of natural forms and painting with light.

October: A week from hell. Two or three clients go through reorganizations, and a number of key projects go on indefinite hold. Contractors removing a cellular tower break a sprinkler pipe and flood part of our office. None of this registers, however, because our co-worker’s 21-year-old brother has just died in his sleep. Things are very quiet for several days.

November: Two good friends of ours invited us to play a song at their crazy cabaret-style lesbian wedding. The only question was what to wear. (As MC for the evening, Sean had no such dilemma, since they’d put him in a rather lovely kilt and feather boa.)

At the end of the month, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mad trip to Marrakech with Sean, his mom and stepdad, and a new friend, the irrepressible and energizing Katie. We stayed in the heart of the medina, a maze of winding alleyways full of people, tiny shops, mopeds and stray cats. A handful of local kids kept asking for money; Sean juggled for them instead (years ago he did it for a living in Dallas) and became an instant hit. Later, we drove through the Atlas Mountains to ride camels into the desert and sleep in a tent. Beautiful country, lots of wonderful people. And occasional strange family moments.

December: The partners make the tough decision to sell the company to a bigger firm. Some of us move over, the video business splits off (taking on the name Robotnik Films), and I start looking for work. I’ll miss the place, and I’ll miss working with the Spinglobe crew. But it’s a huge opportunity, both to find work in a field that’s important to me and to have some actual free time again. Here’s to the new year!

Friday 11 January 2008

Glimpses of the past

(It’s been a whole month since I last posted, and what a month. Lots of things are up in the air, but in general it’s been going well. There are promising job leads, I’ve had time to reorganize the studio at last, and resume work on some projects, both musical and electronic - more about those soon. Meanwhile…)

The other day, while Sean and I were out for a bite to eat, we noticed a store sign across the street proudly announcing “Claremont Confectionery - Smoke and Gifts - Complete Line of Guns & Fishing Tackle” in handsome hand-painted lettering… might have been forty or fifty years old, by the look of it. The building is now a restaurant, but the owners had apparently liked the sign enough to keep it around. It’s not the only such “historic” sign on Queen Street, either.

I like this sort of nod to the past. I’ve heard it criticized as pretentious and empty - like “façadism” in architecture, where the front of a historic building is kept, and attached to a brand new, usually much larger building. You’re appropriating a cultural artifact that has its own layered history, the argument goes, presumably hoping that some of its essence carries over into your new enterprise.

But nah… it’s pretty neat that elements like this are being kept, however superficial they might be. If it’s done with a bit of reverence and respect, they can help connect us with our surroundings, and remind us that we’re all part of this vast stretch of history.

I once designed a logo for a friend, which was eventually made into a sign that hung over her storefront on Queen West. I’d designed logos before, and web sites and business cards, but this felt different - the first time seeing something I’d created become such a visible part of her shop’s public face, physical and permanent.

Well, not that permanent, of course. It’s been gone for years now. Dozens of signs appear on and vanish from that block alone every year, only slightly more permanent than the cards, posters and other ephemera that flutter through it. It’s cool that every once in a while one survives.

(Next: decay, ruins, and aesthetics.)

Monday 10 December 2007

Lessons

I may have spoken too soon, in that little outburst the other day. Wrapping up final projects for work has been taking up a huge amount of time. Having most of a weekend to mull things over helped, but I still have a lot of thinking to think. More about this soon.

In the meantime, some things I have learned over the past few weeks.

• The Arabic alphabet actually isn’t that hard. I’d always wanted to learn it, because I like alphabets and lettering - not to mention the fabulousness of Islamic calligraphy... but for some reason I’d expected it to be tough, probably because it’s joined up and reminded me of Gregg shorthand. During our trip I started to decode some place names and brand names.
• On the other hand, the Arabic language? Oh man. I just found out that numbers not only have gender, but for the numbers 3 through 10, they have polarity - if the noun they refer to is masculine, the number is feminine and vice versa. Perhaps I’ll work on mastering French first and move on when I’m feeling brave enough.
• Peel-top cartons of yoghurt do not travel well in a backpack.
• Do not watch the video for the Shins’ “Phantom Limb” moments before a meeting. Crying in front of a client can be awkward.
• “The Weight” by The Band is more complicated than I remembered, especially after half a pint.

Tuesday 4 December 2007

On returning

I just spent a week in Morocco. Not somewhere I would have gone of my own accord, but for my partner it was something akin to a spiritual mission. And what an incredible, overwhelming, intense, emotional week it was - Sean likened it to gestalt therapy. (Some day I may even write about what we actually saw and did there!)

We’d planned the trip for quite a while, and as it turned out, it came at a moment of big change for us. About a week previously, Sean had made the decision to fold the little company where we’ve been working for the past few years. It’s been a tough time, getting everything in order, helping one another find new work, and finishing up a few last projects.

The biggest question: what next? For me, at least, the journey provided some time to think, and opportunity to contemplate our place in the grand scheme of things, from our vantage point on the edge of the Sahara.

The desert is a powerful symbol for me: it represents Death; the end of all things. It’s what happens to ecosystems when they go belly-up, when the soil dries up and blows away. And as we consume more, as the climate shifts, as more water is drawn up from the water table for irrigation, for the cities, as less snow falls every year on the Atlas Mountains to melt and feed the valleys below - our deserts grow.

It didn’t help matters that we’d flown across the Atlantic to get there, leaving high-altitude jet exhaust in our wake. I hate thinking about these things, but I can’t turn away. The coming decades are going to be hard ones for humanity. What we’ve got ahead of us is nothing short of a war effort - a war against chaos and collapse. I would rather not live to see half the species on the planet disappear. I would rather not live to see modern civilisation break down. I would rather not see haves and have-nots pitted against one another in a struggle over dwindling resources. But these are the possibilities we face, and I’d rather be doing something constructive than sitting in a hole pretending everything’s fine.

Far too much of our way of life has come at the cost of misery for other people and other creatures, and the destruction of ecosystems around the world. But at the same time, we’ve accomplished a lot that is great and meaningful, and I don’t believe the solution is to roll back the clock. I don’t believe that life in the past was better - merely less precarious on a grand scale.  We have to move forward, not back. We have to innovate like mad - not just mere technical innovations but ways to connect with each other and with the world around us, to find our place, to recognize the part we are playing, to find opportunities to make the world better.

The day after we got back, I spied a copy of GreenTOpia at Grassroots (very much awesome) and bought it on the spot. In the opening pages Pasha Malla writes:

What can you do? You can do what you can do. Can you type? Type something. Can you walk and talk? Walk around and talk to people. Can you use your Ph.D. in environmental science to test for and uncover the alarming release of polyvinyl chlorides from shoreline industry into the Great Lakes, then publish a report, coordinate a media campaign and pursue legal action based on your findings? Then by all means please do that, too. Ride a bike, write a letter, save a plant. We are not powerless against the They we’re up against.

It echoed perfectly what I’d been feeling (if in slightly more combative terms). I’ve decided, now that it’s transition time, that I want my next job to be in the sustainability sector, something involving permaculture, or appropriate technology. I need to be working with people who are thinking along the same lines.

I’m also hoping to have a lot more time to write and devote to creative projects, and to post more here. There’s already a section on this site called The Big Here which I intend to write for much more in the coming months. Ecology, both human and non-; architecture and design; how people relate to each other and how they adapt to different situations… it’s all part of a greater whole.

I feel like I’ve just awakened from a long sleep. I’ve got a lot of tangled underbrush to get through now, finishing up the last few projects before we close up shop, not to mention two gigs coming up. But already my head feels clearer.

Friday 23 November 2007

Intergalactic battle of the bands

It’s been a hell of a week at work - hell of a month, really, which is partly why updates here have been so scarce. There’s been no time for music, electronics, or much of anything else. And so I finally snapped and had to find something new to add to my usual music playlist. Out of curiosity I started catching up on more grime from the UK (favourite track so far: Dizzee Rascal’s “Everywhere”) and eventually happened on Lady Sovereign.

I’d first heard her months ago in a remix of “Fit But You Know It” by the Streets and wondered who she was. A tiny white girl from London, it turns out; named for the ring she wears prominently in many of her performances.

A brief digression: I’ve always been intrigued by the sounds of Jamaican dancehall (quite apart from the lyrics and culture, which are pretty notorious for being shallow, oversexed and sometimes violently homophobic - I won’t get into that here). There’s something gripping about the texture of it all: relentless, dissonant, ominous, with vocals delivered in a kind of bellowed sing-song. Often the vocals are double-tracked too, adding an even more unsettling edge.

Sovereign borrows some of these elements and adds her own spin: these, along with her winningly bratty persona, are very much in evidence on “Random” and “A Little Bit Of Shhh” (links are to YouTube).

Her best video so far, though, is “9 to 5”, which I won’t ruin by describing. I’ll just mention that I alarmed my co-workers with my giggling. (Of course, that could also be a sign of a nervous breakdown due to stress.)

Speaking of giggling, as well as cute and irrepressible female vocalists, not to mention music in comics - Sugarshock!

Dark Horse Comics are publishing a series of free webcomics on MySpace, and this one’s written by Joss Whedon, of Buffy fame. Sugarshock is a band consisting of three peculiar young women and a robot, who get the chance to play in the ultimate “battle of the bands”.

The comic lives up to its name, too - without the need to carry on a bigger story or ground his characters in the everyday world, Joss serves up 24 pages of concentrated, hyperactive silly with an extra helping of Whedonisms. That’s all there is for now, but there’s been talk of bringing the characters back somewhere down the line. AUSPICIOUS!

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (Flash interface)

Tuesday 13 November 2007

oo vuf welcome

From the What I Been Listening To department:

For unfathomable reasons, I’ve been hooked on a show called Blue Jam. Aired in the late ‘90s, it was the brainchild of Radio 1 enfant terrible Chris Morris, whose earlier pranks had included a discussion of ludicrous methods to obtain a legal high, and most famously, the “non-announcement” of the death of a still-living cabinet minister. After the latter incident, BBC censors clamped down hard; why they ever let him back through their doors is a mystery.

Blue Jam is a deeply disturbing show, but utterly hilarious. Sketches and monologues drift in and out amid music of all sorts, starting with an always-different introduction delivered by Morris in a sinister monotone (“When thrapping door-knock brings not chums with cakes, but friends of Sweaty Fred, full madding because you failed to sell… welcome in Blue Jam…”) and quickly descending into a nightmarish world of misfits and psychopaths.

Almost every character we meet is unhinged: the doctor who amuses himself by humiliating his patients and prescribing useless treatments; the parents who belong to a baby-fighting ring; the avant-garde artists who disembowel a man and put him in a display case (much in the fashion of the art-murders on David Bowie’s album Outside). Some favorites: Maria, the four-year-old hardened criminal, Rothko the doberman, and the inexplicable club-scene and style roundups from Michael Alexander St John.

Some of the best sketches were spun into a six-episode series on Channel 4 called simply Jam, and lots - probably most - are up on YouTube. I’m almost afraid to link to any, but here’s a typical opening, and a sketch about a television repairman. Browse the Related Videos at your own peril. Expect mayhem, blasphemy, dead babies, dead dogs, sexual deviance and bad language.

UK radio comedy review site radiohaha offers this appreciation of Blue Jam. Torrents of it and other Chris Morris shows are available at the fan site Cook’d and Bomb’d.

Wednesday 24 October 2007

Fractal music

I’ve been listening to a podcast from last year featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno, talking about generative art, and it gave me an interesting idea.

There have been a lot of attempts at so-called “fractal music” (here’s a bunch of links to several such projects), but all the ones I’ve heard just take a chunk of data from, say, the Mandelbrot set, and map it to one musical scale or another. It’s hard to really hear any self-similarity happening.

Which seems a lost opportunity. Think about it: sound waveforms themselves have fractal properties, because phenomena like vibration, resonance and oscillation happen on all physical scales. Speed up a thumping rhythm far enough and eventually it turns into a tone. And any waveform can theoretically be expressed as a mix of sine waves of different pitches. Fractal generation software lets you zoom in and out to see different fractals in near-infinite detail. What if we could do the same by speeding up or slowing down a piece of audio?

A big challenge, of course, would the problem of resolution. Whether you’re working with analog or digital audio, as you slow it down you’ll eventually start to lose detail in the high frequencies, until it all goes muddy. It’s akin to blowing up a photograph, until all you can see is the grain, or a bunch of great big pixels - or conversely, shrinking it until you run out of photograph. You could always pack in more data to describe a chunk of sound, but you’d end up with a gigantic file, and you’d always hit a wall somewhere. For best results the sound from our hypothetical audio-fractal would have to be computed on the fly.

Not a new idea, but as far as I know no one’s done it yet. There’s an entry for something called “All-Music-Set Player” at Halfbakery (a “communal database of original, fictitious inventions”) which is pretty close to the mark. I’m not interested in generating all music, just creating interesting sounds to explore.

Controls: speed, perhaps other parameters like density or default shape. It’d be interesting to work in some sort of “scrub” control too.

Issues: what language to write such a thing in? How do you describe the waveform? (some sort of generative grammar that sums wavelets?) How do you set up such a generator so that you can calculate a value for a sample at an arbitrary point on the time axis? Is it even possible? The fact that I can’t find any examples of fractal audio generators makes me wonder if the obstacle is simply one of processing power…

(The podcast that sparked all this, by the way, is from a seminar series put on by the Long Now Foundation: Ogg | MP3 | text summary I’m afraid of Spore. I think it might eat me.)

Monday 22 October 2007

Music comics

One of the comics I’ve been keeping up with online is Sordid City Blues. It stands out among the throngs of webcomics out there, with a cast of smartly written and charmingly drawn characters wrestling with issues of love, faith and art. The author, Charles Schneeflock Snow, is taking a few weeks off to work on other projects, and recently put out a call for guest artists to fill in for him on the web site. So I chipped in with a page, and went for the most obvious subject: Luther and his bandmates. (Luther’s the one in the blue hat - the central characters in SCB are colour-coded.) Here it is!

There are some references to earlier stories - particularly Chapter 43, which deals with the origin of the mural. The conversation about the bass is one I’ve had several times (the Fury LS-4 I play has an unusual headstock which tends to attract the attention of gear nerds) but also, Barkey does play a rather odd-looking bass.

(Like SCB? The first collection of stories is available in book form… help support independent artists!)

I’ve played around with comics before but never in a big way. And I’ve used Adobe Illustrator for years, but this is one of the few times I’ve actually been using it for hand-drawn illustration. Lessons learned: use layers. Lettering using a tablet is a pain in the ass. Background detail really helps a panel to spring to life (as was the case with the graffiti and cinder-block wall in the second panel). Also, it’s really freeing to write in a different voice for a while, and play with someone else’s characters. I did my best to capture a little of SCB’s look and its rhythms.

For quite some time I’ve been tossing around some story ideas, but I’ve never settled on a satisfying way of telling them. The format and characters keep shifting around on me - first it was a series of radio plays, then it was going to be podcasts, or maybe just short stories, and now I’m thinking of doing it in comic form. It may end up being a combination of all of the above. This has been a good chance to test the comics waters, and see if I’m really up to the task.

Some of the characters I’m developing are musicians as well, which means that at some point there will be music played. Which brings up the fascinating question of how to represent music in a silent, static medium. Usually comic artists just resort to a sprinkling of eighth-notes and some lyrics. But what about taking a crazy graphical approach, one that breaks out of the usual rhythm of panels, the way a big number in a musical jumps out of the “real world” of theatrical/cinematic structure?

The example that springs to my mind at the moment is Hot Jazz by the ever-wacky Hunt Emerson. I don’t know a whole lot about comics history, so I’m sure there are others… Any suggestions? I should probably look into some Matt Howarth, for instance.

In the meantime I’ve been hunting through The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (see here for images, mostly the ones by Alan Aldridge). I’ll have to have a look for What The Songs Look Like too, which does the same for Talking Heads… and I wish I had a copy of More Dark Than Shark, a collection of artworks created by Russell Mills inspired by Brian Eno’s early “rock” albums, now out of print and hard to find.

My next comic-related project, then, is going to be this: pick a few songs that really inspire some visuals, and do one or two pages for each one. Strong contenders for the first couple: Stereolab and the Pixies.

Thursday 18 October 2007

Brain shuffle

Every once in a while, one of those music memes sweep through the blogs I read: put your music-player software on shuffle mode and list the first 20 tracks that come up, that sort of thing. Here’s a twist: keep track of the songs that are in your head at the moment you wake up, and post a list. Here’s mine over the past few weeks. Make of them what you will.

• Dexys Midnight Runners - “Come On Eileen”
• Franz Ferdinand - “What You Meant”
• Massive Attack - “Risingson”
• Peter Gabriel - “Steam”
• XTC - “Limelight”
• Little Eva - “The Loco-Motion”
• Bruce Springsteen - “Dancing In The Dark”
• Steelye Span - “Bachelor’s Hall”
• King Crimson - “Dinosaur”
• Rowlf the Dog - “Cottleston Pie”
• Komeda - “Elvira Madigan”
• The Shins - “Phantom Limb”
• David Bowie - “Life On Mars?”
• Mashup: Depeche Mode - “Get The Balance Right” vs Franz Ferdinand - “Jacqueline”
• Jazzanova - “Mwela”

About half of these are things I was listening a day or a few days previous… but the more interesting ones are the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere, like “Dancing in the Dark”, or “Cottleston Pie”, which I hadn’t heard since I was a kid. (And by the way, here it is on YouTube. A lot faster than I remember - my mental recording seemed to be more wistful.) “Loco-Motion” and “Bachelor’s Hall” are in there too, certainly.

Try it! It’s a cross between “what you’ve been listening to” and “where’s your head at”.

Friday 5 October 2007

Dorkbot

Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.

Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.

Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.

Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.

It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.

The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.

Sunday 30 September 2007

Nuit Blanche 2007

Once again, Nuit Blanche was a smash. I’ve never seen another event bring the city to life in the same way - nothing like the sensory overload of Pride or Caribana, though those are great in their own ways. The streets all over downtown were packed with people of all ages, wandering from one site to the next, bumping into friends and excitedly trading recommendations. And there was such a sense of curiosity and discovery in the air - what’s that weird light in the distance? What’s waiting around the next corner?

Wonderful things:

Swintak’s ThunderEgg Alley: A Dumpster Diver’s Paradise, wherein a dingy alleyway near Spadina and College was turned into a tiny hotel using found furnishings, complete with spa, boutique and a front desk clerk who asked if we’d like to book the room (a rather cozy-looking dumpster) for a ten-minute stay. The earliest slot available wasn’t until 5:45am, sadly - it would have been great to hold a room party.

Brian Cort’s It’s A Cloud: in the north atrium of the Eaton Centre, people lay on their backs in a meadow of artificial grass and shrubbery, watching the sky projected on a screen high above while oddly-shaped clouds drifted by. The clouds, in fact, were painted by visitors to the exhibit using black paint, then scanned and cunningly rendered by a Java app.

I still maintain that the best “interactive art” is usually the simplest. In front of the Italian Consulate, there was a giant sheet of phosphorescent paper on one wall, and a dude with a great big strobe light. Strike a pose and flash! - your shadow remained frozen on the wall. A circle had formed around the screen, and people stepped in and out: oddballs with flags who’d apparently drifted in from another performance, couples kissing (to general murmurs of “Awwww…”), dancers showing off their uncanny flexibility, half a dozen people hastily lining up to form a single multi-armed silhouette.

King’s College Circle, in the heart of the U of T campus, was a scene straight out of War of the Worlds or Quatermass - an apparent UFO crash site, surrounded by emergency personnel and people in hazmat suits. I understand there was more to the piece (Marman and Borins’ Event Horizon, pictured above) but we didn’t get to see that.

The park beneath Will Alsop’s famous “tabletop” at OCAD makes a natural and comfy hub for the central exhibit zone, and a nice spot to sit for a while and catch a few artsy short films (we saw one that was an adaptation of a piece by the wonderful troupe Corpus - organizers of the Dusk Dances festival every summer).

We didn’t check out The Ghost Station, a sound installation at the abandoned subway platform Lower Bay, because the lineup literally extended around the block, and by then I was starting to fade. Which meant that, sadly, we missed out on all the fun in the far west: the giant inflated locust at Lamport Stadium, the freaky looking animations at Massey Harris Park, the video projection-graffiti bike (based on that Graffiti Research Lab project), and Misha Glouberman’s Terrible Noises For Beautiful People: Music for a participatory noise choir.

It was barely 1am by the time I crashed. I’m determined to stay up later next year, and maybe bring a bike to get from one site to another. And more than that - to participate. To create an exhibit, or help out with one, or even just grab a guitar and busk somewhere. Dear city and sponsors: let there be a next year.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Municipal Mind: Manifestoes for the Creative City, an inspiring collection of short essays and manifestoes from Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio di Cicco. Nuit Blanche is just the sort of thing he prescribes: a celebration that brings out the “elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity ... the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

It takes a poet to say what planners and politicians almost never dare. It’s easy, especially given the City of Toronto’s precarious financial situation, to get lost in talk of dollars and cents. Art, creativity, love: these things are what make us - and our cities - human.

Photos at the Flickr pool.

Tuesday 4 September 2007

Tobermory

I’m lucky enough to work at a small company full of cool people. All friends, all the sort of people you can have a good conversation with about aesthetics or theatre or philosophy, and hang out comfortably with for a week. So this past week we all packed up and headed to a cottage near the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.

There was some shop talk, like how to get more “good” clients - the kind of organizations that are trying to make the world better - and plotting strategy for our video department. We did a bit of improv and other creative exercises, too, and there was a lot of good food, light reading, ping-pong and beach-going, as well as some hiking along the northernmost part of the Bruce Trail, which runs all the way down the Escarpment to Niagara Falls.

I did a lot of poking around in the woods and along the lake. Funny thing - while everyone else is admiring the grand, sweeping vistas, I’m usually crouched with a magnifier studying the tiniest things I can find. So I spent a lot of time this trip puttering around with our camera, exploring the possibilities of macro photography.

Of the places we visited, I think my favorite was along the rocky shore at the end of the road. The ancient, glacier-carved sedimentary rock is like a garden of miniatures - every few inches you’ll find a little crevasse or a tiny pothole that’s become home to an even tinier plant or two, comprising a startling variety of species. And of course, there were lichens and mosses and ferns, whose primitive forms hold a strange fascination for me.

In the evenings we watched Rome on DVD (ah, what a horrible, lecherous, bloodthirsty lot) and played with the camera some more. After a few light-painting experiments using exposures of several seconds, we hitched the camera to Sean’s laptop, using a piece of software called iStopMotion to create our own animations, in the style of Pika Pika.

Sean’s gone and created a Flickr set of our experiments, and uploaded a video (click the “Read more” link). A few of my photos are up on Flickr as well.

In all, a wonderful week.

Friday 10 August 2007

Road forks ahead

With the focus of this blog veering wildly about from electronics to urban design to music, I think it’s time to divide things up a bit. Over the next little while I’ll be shifting the DIY project talk (“mad scientisting”, as my SO likes to put it) to a new section called The Lab - better to have a home for it so people can find such posts without having to sort through my ramblings on pop culture and cats. And likewise, friends who want to keep up with those ramblings won’t have to go crosseyed at sudden dumps of Arduino or Flash code.

Likewise, I’m thinking of having a separate section for discussing urban design, public spaces and so forth. (A while back, in a giddy moment near the close of the Open Cities unconference, I promised to start a site or blog devoted to DIY projects in the public realm, and this would be the logical place to put it.) Music and art will probably be the “main” blog.

Friday 3 August 2007

Many hands make light (art)work

Three pieces. The first two were passed along by a fellow DIYer who’s working on interactive electronic public art (thanks Gabe!):

First up, the Graffiti Research Lab and their collaborators have produced a laptop / camera / projector setup that lets you paint on the side of a building.

Their software lets you define the contours of the wall you’re projecting onto, then tracks the position of a laser pointer beam using video fed from the camera, and draws the resulting lines - with some simulated paint dripping, for added effect. Naturally, it’s open source, complete with instructions.

Next, Body Movies by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Portraits are projected on a huge scale on walls surrounding a public square, revealed in the shadows thrown by passers-by. If people in the square arrange themselves in a matching pose, the projections switch. But much more interesting is the ways that people spontaneously interact, given the possibility of casting gigantic shadows of radically different sizes. It turns into instant mimed improv.

And finally, PIKA PIKA, a “lightning doodle project”. Doodler Takeshi explains:

We took a photo of each image using long exposures and put them together to make them look like one animation.

To work on this project,we went out to various places in Japan:parks,under the train track,the Tokyo Bay,school hallways,and so on.

We got all sorts of friends in different fields together to work on this project.
During the process,they got to know each other and discover new things. This is also about “communication”.
People can meet new friends as they create a piece art very easy which brings every one happiness.
We spend a very enjoyable evening at the workshop and the party through this animation.

The results are delightful to watch, too - it’s like a live performance of a Norman McLaren scratch-animation film, with luminous creatures and designs running riot through real physical spaces. I love how the “performers” are often faintly visible, but obscured, like bunraku puppeteers.

The beauty of these projects is how intuitive they are to use. Casting shadows, drawing with light… even if they’re a little tricky to get the hang of, the concept is utterly simple and inviting. And they let people think and interact with their whole bodies.

Now we need to make “computers for the rest of you.” GUI technology allows you to drag and drop, but it won’t notice if you twist and shout.
— Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing

The body is the large brain.
— Brian Eno

Tuesday 31 July 2007

Musical interfaces 2

Behold the two-digit display for the Box-O-Knobs (also seen here with its breadboarded ancestor). Each digit is run by one 74HC595 IC. Resistors everywhere. The reverse of the board is a bit hideous, I’m afraid, thanks to my still-amateurish soldering skills.

The vacated breadboard now sports five knobs (50k rotary pots), a MIDI socket and a photocell, which I’ve got controlling the sixth analog pin on the Arduino. A change on any input sends a MIDI controller message. The Evolver already has provision for reading in mod wheel, channel pressure (aftertouch), breath controller and foot pedal information, so I’ve got those wired in along with pitch bend and volume.

Next steps:

• figure out how to cut the appropriate slots in the top of a case
• wire up six slide pots as controls
• external input jacks that override the faders
• buttons!
• calibration and MIDI settings editable by the user, without having to recompile and upload new firmware.

Sunday 22 July 2007

Arduino 7-segment output

I hit the electronics store the other day - sadly, they didn’t have any opto-isolators, so no MIDI input experiments this time round. But I scored some 74HC595 ICs, for the driving of LED displays and other digital outputs.

Here’s some code to run a common-cathode 7-segment display using the 595 (the Arduino site has a tutorial on how to hook up the 595, send data to it, and daisy-chain multiple ICs). I’ve included a list of which pins to connect to which anodes on the display in the character set file, below. Displays differ in their pinouts, so if you’ll likely need to do some testing to figure out how the pins are arranged.

charset_7seg.h - I spent a few minutes scribbling out a character set, and here it is as an #includeable file. (I put it in lib/targets/libraries/LED7Segment for the compiler to find.)

And here’s a test sketch. It lets you flip through the characters using a potentiometer on analog pin 0, but if you don’t have one handy you could easily adapt it to display the characters one by one.

Thursday 12 July 2007

Musical interfaces

After a good deal of poking and prodding, I got my Arduino board to speak MIDI! The current program reads a potentiometer and sends pitch bend messages down the pipe.

Had a bit of worry when it just sat there doing nothing, but it turned out that I just had the signal and +5V leads reversed. Bonus: if your computer isn’t talking to it via USB, it’s just fine with being plugged into USB and MIDI at the same time. Makes for much, much easier programming.

Invaluable resources in this effort: circuits and code from Tom Igoe, of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and Sebastian Tomczak’s blog little-scale, which includes news of his Arduino / MIDI projects.

The more I think over that guitar string ribbon controller idea, the less it strikes me as a permanent solution. I like that it’s quick and cheap, but it’s going to rub the oxide off the tape (or whatever I use as a resistance). So the design will have to take replacement of the tape into consideration. The guitar string method may be useful for building multiple controls - I’d love to have something you could play like the fingerboard of a bass. No rush there, though.

A capacitive position sensor would be a better alternative - that’s what computer touchpads / trackpads use, and among other advantages, they can be placed inside a case so you never have to touch the actual sensor element. Durable is good, especially where musical instruments are concerned. And they generally feature serial output, which I can feed to the Arduino.

Cirque make some promising-looking devices, including some standalone models. Of course, most of the ones I’m interested in are OEM and hard to come by for someone who’s not designing laptops for a manufacturer.

But why buy new when they’re going for scrap all over? A quick search on eBay turns up masses of laptop frames - just the panel that goes around the keyboard, and including the touchpad. I’ll have to hit some local surplus and computer stores too.

Code and sounds to come.

Wednesday 13 June 2007

Two new toys

Two new toys, and no time to play with them…

One is that Evolver I mentioned. It’s the desktop version, a monosynth with no keyboard. First impressions:

Sturdy metal case. Knobs are rotary encoders, i.e. the clicky digital kind, and are a little dodgy - maybe this will improve with time? Cleverly designed interface cuts down costs and space by packing dozens of parameters into a matrix so you can adjust them all using eight knobs: hit a button to select a row, then turn the corresponding knob. It takes a little getting used to, especially since half of the parameters also require you to hit the Shift button to get at them.

It can make pretty analogue sounds, and glittering digital sounds, and frightening noise. It has two audio inputs for use as a signal processor, and it can do some wonderful spacy things to a fretless bass. Here’s one minute of me goofing around, using it as a bass synth, a ghostly lead, a crunchy bit-hacked rhythm, and some other effects. A bit of echo, reverb and compression added in Logic.

2007_0612_Evolved.mp3

The other toy: an Arduino USB board.

Essentially, it’s a little computer processor on its own board. You can program it from a Mac, Windows or Linux box using a simple language based on C. It has a whole bunch of digital input/output lines, and six analog inputs that can double as pseudo-analog outputs (pulse-width modulated and not suitable for audio, but they work fine for dimming LEDs, for example). If you don’t need the USB interface, there’s a tinier, even cuter version.

More sounds and updates to come.

Friday 1 June 2007

theology cobra

Ahh, I needed that. New song-a-day track.

Bassline first: Fury thru POD, then software auto-filter; various loops processed to death; drums (Roland); FM pad; guitar thru POD; Alesis lead; rattling metal, treated, in place of a fill.

2007_0531_theology_cobra.mp3 (1′29)

I’ve been thinking: next time I get paid, it’s really time I got that Evolver I’ve had my eye on. But then I thought: wouldn’t it be more interesting to get a kit to build my own Paia 9700 system, for about the same amount of money?

Evolver: cute, tiny, patch editor allows “evolutionary” programming, can be used as a processor for external sound sources, doesn’t have to be assembled by hand

9700: insanely customizable, immediate and hands-on, has MIDI-to-CV outputs, can be used as a processor, external devices could be used to generate or modify control voltages

Something to think about.

Thursday 17 May 2007

Forged forgery

It seems some piece of spamming software out there has started pretending to send its email from fake forgeryleague.com addresses. At last count I’d received some 650 “could not deliver” messages - and those are just the ones that bounced. Heaven knows how many actually got sent. Time to retire the catchall address, I suppose.

I hope I didn’t delete anyone else’s email when I purged the junk replies. If I did, my apologies.

Sunday 13 May 2007

Fettuccine Adobe

When Adobe unveiled their newly designed array of “two letter” application icons, I was among the skeptics. All programs are now represented by a coloured box reminiscent of an element in the periodic table. Many argue that this makes them indistinguishable from one another - even more so for anyone with a degree of colour-blindness (doubtless this is less common among the design pros that make up Adobe’s core audience, but still).

After some consideration, though, I don’t think it’ll be any worse than before. I mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve confused the two on occasion because, no matter how different the imagery, they’ve been designed to look like they’re part of an integrated brand identity, which means they feel similar. I think part of my brain saw the “PS7 eye” and “AI10 Venus” and lumped them together under the heading “face”; ditto the “pretty pastel nature imagery” from CS2 (actually tinted x-ray photos). Maybe “Ai” and “Ps” will be a better compromise.

Of course, I’ll have to get used to the colours. I’m not much of a kinaesthete, but “Ai” is clearly bright red as far as I’m concerned… unfortunately, red is the traditional brand colour for Flash. And by rights “ID” (InDesign) ought to be gold or brown. At least they were sensible enough to make “Ps” blue!

But we’ll see, won’t we… It may well be that CS3-style icons work well for some people, and pictorial icons for others. I’d like to see some hard evidence one way or another.

Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was shopping and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a display of colour-coded two-letter packages for, of all things, organic pasta. Red/K for kamut, green/S for spelt, beige/G for durum (grano duro), brown/I for whole wheat (integrale). I can’t find any other images of their new packaging on the web - not even on Felicetti’s site - and I presume it’s a very recent redesign. Was idea-stealin’ involved, or is it just coincidence?

Saturday 12 May 2007

Presonance at last

I’ve been messing about with Flash and Actionscript lately, and one of my big motivations was was wanting to finish the Presonance site.

Some months ago, I started trading files with Rezo Largul, and we decided to use the name “Presonance” for our collaboration, and “Mycestene” as a name for an eventual CD. So far we’ve completed four tracks and have a couple of others in the works. The finished ones are now up, along with some pretty little visualizations (yup, there’s the Flash programming coming into play). Spacy analogue waltzes, mysterious orchestral arrangements colliding with mad electronic rhythms, a dose of Casseiopean free jazz…

Have a listen! You can download the tracks there too.

And in the acoustic world, another Toronto lamppost has been graced with its own built-in bass. Now that I’ve got a new digital audio recorder I’ll have to pay the new “Garrison Creek” bass a visit. All hail RGB for bringing more music to our parks and sidewalks!

Wednesday 2 May 2007

Art and music

Tonight, Sean’s out of town and M. is performing in a musical uptown, so the house will be free for Flickershow recording, hooray!

Only yesterday I was reading Muffy’s reports from the Open Ears festival and wishing I’d made it back to KW to catch it. I don’t generally get to see many shows, and the reason mostly boils down to Too Damn Busy. Either I’m working late (Sean and I seem to be home at 10pm as often as not), recording or playing with Flickershow, or recovering from the above.

I’m determined to change things around now. Coming home at a more reasonable time, for one thing; for another, working Saturday and staying home to work on music in the middle of the week, when the house is empty.

And I think I’ll have to check out some of the events at Deep Wireless: A Festival Of Radio Art. (Thanks, Torontoist.)

Here’s the latest version of the particle sim - the particles attract this time around, and have random values for mass.

I’ve cleaned up the source and commented the hell out of it, and collected most of the major parameters so they’re easy to adjust before compiling.

Source plus the containing FLA file:
Particles1_8.zip

Monday 30 April 2007

Particles

Particle simulation in Actionscript. Up to 10 particles in a simulated "container". Occasionally explodes if particles get too close (due to dividing by zero or almost zero) - common with higher number.

With one particle interacting with the container the path is regular and uniform. But add one more particle and things get crazy and chaotic. Essentially it's the three-body problem, with the container (a bowl, described by an equation something like z=kd⁶ where d is the distance from the origin) as the third "body".

[Update: Using SWFObject to embed Flash now. Fingers crossed.]

Wednesday 18 April 2007

Bringing back the Don

Monday night I caught the presentations by the four design teams chosen as finalists in the TWRC competition to create a plan for the Lower Don Lands - the area west of the Don Roadway, between the railway yard north of the Gardiner and the shipping channel. All four presentations had some great elements, and some were downright inspiring. (It was a stark contrast to the city’s street-furniture tender, a shabby excercise that seems to get worse the more we hear about it.)

The mouth of the Don River was once the largest wetland on the Great Lakes, according to one of last night’s presentations. 19th-century development and industry reduced it to a cesspit, and engineers finally confined it to a narrow concrete-lined ditch to prevent floods and channel sewage straight into the lake. Goal one of the competition, therefore, was to renaturalize the river mouth - a task that most of them handled well.

Here’s a rundown of the four proposals:

Of the four, I was least impressed with the one from Atelier Girot (Switzerland). Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, designers of the tiny but delightfully layered Cloud Gardens Park and Conservatory at Bay and Adelaide, were somehow involved, but it’s hard to tell exactly who did what in these proposals. Starting from a rather vague visual motif of intersecting L-shapes, they interlace parallel “fingers” of land and water to produce “a new water based city”. I’m skeptical, though, of the way the arrangement draws out the “urban” parts of the district into long, narrow strips. It’s a little too Le Corbusier - just with water instead of grass, pretty on paper with little regard for walkability. The urban fabric is too loose and disjointed to be healthy.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism (USA; along with Toronto’s Brown + Storey, designers of Dundas Square, among other firms) do a bit better, and I like their approach to the wetlands portion of the site. The Essroc silos along Cherry St become a little island unto themselves, connected to the “mainland” on either side by a spidery bridge. But despite their invocation of “classic” Toronto neighbourhoods like Little Italy and St Lawrence, the arrangement of the buildings seems a little haphazard. Their presentation talked quite a bit about public spaces, but I’m not convinced the spaces they describe will come to life. (Hypothesis: public areas on the edges of the urban fabric will be used less than those in the midst of neighbourhoods. I’m going to have to keep an eye on some already existing spaces to see if it’s borne out in practice.)

Back to St Lawrence - one of the great legacies of 1970s urbanism in Toronto, the classic example of a vibrant neighbourhood built practically from scratch. It succeeds in large part because it’s within walking distance of downtown, and extends the urban fabric seamlessly. There is no sharp dividing line, and hopefully development around the reborn Distillery District to the east will weave itself in just as neatly.

Contrast this with the area along Queen’s Quay, which has seen plenty of development but hasn’t quite come to life yet. One problem is that the streetscape is full of gaps, and is too coarse-grained - it’s just not comfortable. Furthermore, it’s squeezed into a narrow sliver between the lake and the Gardiner, disconnected from the rest of the city. And it’s not on the way between anywhere and anywhere else. Likewise, a neighbourhood in the Lower Don Lands will be cut off by the river, and I suspect it’ll always feel a little removed from the rest of town, no matter what. So we’d better make the neighbourhood as strong as possible, and that won’t be helped by spreading the buildings apart. Better to keep the “urban” parts dense and clumped together, so that it’s all walkable.

The team led by Weiss/Manfredi (USA; and including Toronto’s du Toit Alsopp Hillier, architects of the Evergreen project, further up the river at the old Brick Works) goes the furthest in this regard, clustering all the buildings into a tidy grid. Their scheme - perhaps unrealistically - changes the alignment of the Gardiner without actually getting rid of it, so that it curves above a renaturalized wetland laced with boardwalks for walking and biking. Some might find it a bit of a stretch, but the juxtaposition of the natural world with the monumental concrete beast overhead has a certain poetry to it. (It’s worth noting that all the proposals assume the Gardiner will stay, at least for now.) On the opposite shore, a peninsula sweeps out and up to a lookout point jutting out over the harbour.

One puzzling aspect of this scheme is the way that roads in and out of the site meander. Inspired, they claim, by the art of Norval Morriseau, the team have filled their plan with sweeping lines, and this entails disconnecting Cherry St and having it zoom off to the east, while Parliament curves in from the west to join the “lower” section of Cherry St. Thankfully, the proposed bike and pedestrian system seems to make up for this, with trails branching off from the main routes to reach most parts of the site fairly easily. I’m not so sure about the huge, arching bridge, though - looks like it could get windy up there.

The scheme from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (USA) and company offers an interesting alternative: keep the despised Keating Channel and turn it into a canal promenade, bringing a bit of Venice or Paris to the waterfront, as so many planners dream of. With Lake Shore Boulevard shifted to the north, the Gardiner would become a “monumentally scaled urban colonnade” above the north side of the promenade. This gives the built areas on opposite sides of the canal a stronger connection to one another, and helps them feel like part of a larger whole. Furthermore, the neighbourhood on the north shore would be better connected to the rest of the city by opening up more routes under the railway lands. The only problem: the renaturalized river mouth then ends up running through the center of the site, severing the urbanized area into clumps once again.

Maybe I’m being too cynical here. Perhaps if the place is designed right, people will find these little pocket-neighbourhoods cozy and pleasantly sheltered from the bustle of the city. But at the very least they’ll have to be better planned than the developments along Queen’s Quay, or the condos west of the Humber River. All the proposals wisely allow mixed-use - that is, business, residential and institutional uses are all mingled together, often within the same building - and promise housing in a range of sizes and prices to allow a healthy diversity in the neighbourhood’s population. Hopefully there will be a good mix of spaces built to allow for diversity of businesses as well.

We shall see. The announcement of the winner is expected early next month. The displays from the four teams (including pretty models) will remain up until next Monday at BCE Place, where you can also comment on the proposals. You can also see selected visuals from all of them at the official site. It’s also well worth checking out the competition brief which lays out the requirements and constraints for the designs. Note that the proposals all extended the scope of the redesign to include the entire ‘peninsula’ north of the shipping channel, and that most of the land under consideration is currently in the hands of several private owners. Whichever design is selected, realizing it will involve a lot of tricky negotiating.

It’s not often I venture into the port lands, myself - who ever does, unless they work in film or TV? But by coincidence, the next morning I found myself riding the 72A bus through the heart of the neighbourhood-to-be (to pick up a digital recorder from Trew Audio on Villiers St; more about this soon). On a whim I walked from there to work, from Cherry St to the Don Roadway and up under the Gardiner. It was exciting to picture it lined with dense housing, backed up against a restored wetland. I think I’ll miss the railway spurs though - it’s always kind of cool to see train tracks curve almost casually through an intersection…

Our new office looks out on the river from the east side of the Don Valley Parkway, and since we moved there in January I’ve felt more connected than ever to the neighbourhood and its natural environment. As it gets warmer I’m planning to check out some events presented by the Task Force to Bring Back the Don, a city-sponsored citizen’s group. For Don-related news, John Routh’s blog is a good source.

In closing, some words from the Task Force’s web site: “It took a century to get the Don River to a degraded state… We are ready to spend another century, if necessary, to bring it back.”

Saturday 14 April 2007

Track of the Fortnight

New feature on the Flickershow site: a new unreleased track every two weeks!

I’ve coaxed ExpressionEngine into making it a podcast too, so visitors can subscribe to it in their favorite player software.

After a long winter spent way too busy with work and other things, we’re finally getting back to recording, and it sure feels good. Hopefully this will be a bit of encouragement to keep our momentum up.

Sunday 1 April 2007

Lodged

The other day carlos_G at the Immersion Composition Society announced the Lime Gecko Virtual Lodge - an all-day music composing marathon. The goal is to record as many pieces of music as humanly possible in one day. I started a bit late in the day, but managed seven:

2007_0331_01_habanerique.mp3 (1’57”)

11:30 am. Oh crap. I’ve started doing a pseudo-Cuban piano number. What am I doing? I don’t play piano. I do my best to fumble my way through a drum part as well.  conga (only one conga today; the head on the other one suffered water damage thanks to a leaky roof up here) - piano - J-bass - drums - guitar (added later).

2007_0331_02_ShootForTheMoon.mp3 (3’07”)

Better start this one in more familiar territory, namely on the guitar. Then clumsy Roland drums - J-bass - lyrics - experimental 1+3+4 harmonies on chorus - keyboard. Me and the celestial imagery again.

2007_0331_03_Lander_beeswax.mp3 (2’10”)

Kept the keyboard on that same patch and did a lazy, introspective instrumental. Then I decided to change it up with a big stompy beat. Rolannd thru FilterQueen - Apple Loop processed heavily - re-recorded keyboard part - 2x electric through POD’s volume-swell.

2007_0331_04_Processional.mp3 (1’22)

My eyes settled on a recorder lying on the shelf. And the tin whistle. Which to play? Why not both? Doofy pseudo-folk. For the record, it is a pain in the ass playing a bag of marbles in 5 without a click. Both the conga and the warped head off its twin make an appearance.

2007_0331_05_Uh_oh.mp3 (0’53”)

Uh, there really isn’t any excuse for this one.

Perhaps I was subliminally affected by the message board, where lodge dude Nick Dobson had suggested, “why not squeeze off a speed-filler song when you’re done with this one?” and carlos_G had added something about “glad to hear that things are moving…” Oh dear.

2007_0331_06_Beyondah.mp3 (2’19”)

Spy show theme. Needs a breakdown. Fury bass through POD.

2007_0331_07_Sunday.mp3 (0’57”)

Starting to wrap up. Wasn’t sure what to do with this so I wrote some stream-of-consciousness “lyrics” and said them.

Edit: here’s the ICS forum thread where today’s Lodge was organized - you can find commentary and other people’s music there.

Tuesday 27 March 2007

Spring music

This winter I seem to have been in a sort of musical hibernation. No gigs, no writing, hardly any jamming, no listening to any new music.

My main musical effort was playing bass in the band in show-tune revue some friends were putting together. Good experience, and while I still can’t sight-read well, it certainly gave me the chance to improve at it. (My favorite tunes to play: “Nobody’s Side” from Chess, “Life Of The Party” from The Wild Party, both full of syncopations and time changes; “Take Me Or Leave Me” from Rent, where I got to rock out a bit; and “I Could Be Happy With You” from The Boy Friend, just because it was so damned cute in that faux-‘20s, so-very-English sort of way.)

But other than that - perhaps in part because of it - I’ve just been burned out. Frankly, I was getting worried how little interest I had.

I managed to rouse myself enough to familiarize myself with Yes and Peter Gabriel, having borrowed some of their albums… and suddenly, much was explained to me about ‘70s rock.

A while ago J and I laid down some scratch versions of a whole pile of songs, both new and old, to use as the basis for a new CD. They sat untouched until a few days ago, when I stuck bass parts on some of the newest ones to send to our drummer. Here’s one:

Hold_Up_Donny.mp3 (3’43”)

I was afraid I was getting into a rut with my parts, so on these new songs there’s all kinds of pushed rhythms and other oddness. For the first time I’m making use of the Jazz bass, and taking advantage of its punch and sustain with a much more legato line. I’m attempting to play chords on the “choruses”, also for the first time, and the whole thing has a sort of Fender Rhodes feel to it. Starting to sound pretty trip-hoppy. Fleshing this one out is going to be a lot of fun!

New music discoveries this week too. Currently on the playlist:

Flook (borrowed from my Go-playing friend downstairs, also a Celtic music aficionado) an Anglo-Irish band who specialize in wonderful hyperactive flute-and-bohdrán grooves.

The Golden Dogs. Ran across two of their videos while browsing idly, and immediately went and got their album Big Eye Little Eye. Chock full of my kind of hooks (my favorite is “Runouttaluck” - if you cranked Stereolab up to double speed and mashed it up with the B-52’s it might sound like this) plus the same sort of dueling boy/girl vocals that make the New Pornographers and other bands so addictive. And they exude such joy in the video for “Construction Worker” that I think I have a crush on the whole band.

Sunday 25 March 2007

Throwing the switch.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve become a fan of Expression Engine. Serendipity’s been good to me, but for various reasons I’m switching over this site. Among other things, I use EE for most of the dynamic sites I build, and I’d just like one less technology to think about for a while.

I’ve been porting over my entries little by little, and the site’s finally ready to go. It’ll be a mess for the time being, but I’ll get to tidying that up eventually.

Things I’ll miss: entry tagging (surely someone is working on a plugin?), threaded comments, the nicer interface when uploading images.

Things I like better: you can set up different upload areas so that EE inserts the appropriate code for an image (for example)... I’ll see if I can make a little Flash player hook to allow audio files to play on the page, in the same way you can share YouTube videos. Much easier to set up additional blogs with custom fields. I’ll probably start an “Upcoming Events” roll.

There’s a new RSS feed, but I’m maintaining one at the old address too, and if all goes well, subscriptions to the old one will continue to work for the new site without a blip. (Fingers crossed.) And there’s now an Atom feed too. I’m finally learning the ins and outs of web-syndication, and it’s not as scary as I feared.

Thursday 22 March 2007

Radio with personality

I realized the other day why I don’t listen to web-radio, at least for music. I miss the personalities.

Wall-to-wall music with no interruptions is all very good if you want texture, some colour for your mental environment, but if I want texture I usually resort to music that’s already familiar to me. If I’m listening to something new, I want to be able to give it the attention it’s due. I want to know about the music and who created it. (Now, some channels do give you ways of checking what it is you’re listening to, but they involve flipping between listening and reading.) As well, most specialty stations stick to a particular genre or era, and I like to be surprised.

You know who I miss? John Peel. And David Wisdom’s Nightlines. Both of them played a crazy range of music - in an hour of Peel’s show you might hear punk, happy hardcore, indie rock, grime, ‘60s psychedelia… all intermingled with tracks from his trademark Peel Sessions, recorded by some up-and-coming (or established) band. Nightlines had a gentler flow to it: Canadian indie early on, ranging into electronica, jazz, comedy, and more far-out stuff after midnight. In either case, you never knew quite what you were in for.

But what held it all together was the personalities of the hosts. Peel, who usually hosted the broadcasts from his home, was hilariously witty, self-deprecating, often slightly befuddled by technology - especially when he had to work out of the BBC studios. He was legendary for accidentally playing vinyl at the wrong speed and correcting the matter a minute or two into a song. Bemused by a record label’s championing of “intelligent drum and bass”, he remarked, “Personally I think I should prefer stupid drum and bass.”

David Wisdom was warm, knowledgeable, a keen supporter of Canadian music, prone to giving out CBC Vancouver’s mailing address using a different spelling alphabet every time (“V as in vehement - six - B as in barnacle…”) Over the course of Nightlines’ run he worked his way through his collection of 45s playing one single by each artist, ten per weekend, in alphabetical order (it took nearly a decade).

And he involved the audience: he regularly played theme tunes for the show recorded and sent in by fans. He took requests via an answering machine, but always asked an offbeat “skill-testing question”. Over time, he built up a contingent of regular listeners, until it felt like you were part of a community just by listening. Some even made the leap to programming an “Hour of Power”, an hour of music and words selected by a listener - and sometimes co-hosted by that listener, if they were in the area. “Co-creation”? “User-generated content”? David was there twenty years ago.

Interesting to compare Brave New Waves, the other late-night Radio 2 music show - which has now been cancelled as well, sadly. Patti Schmidt, and Brent Bambury before her, were cool… maybe a little too cool. They wouldn’t go two songs without coming on and telling you all about the band and the label - which I loved, especially in the pre-Internet era. But BNW always felt like such a serious show, a newsmagazine more than a comfy night in someone’s living room listening to tunes.

Peel died in 2004, leaving behind a great musical legacy. David Wisdom is very much alive and currently hosts something called Pearls of Wisdom, which is fun but far too short, with much more of a light Radio Two format…

Every once in a while I stumble across a radio show with a DJ who shows the same sort of love for the music, who gets into it and tells you all about this artist or that album… but usually they’re genre shows: the best blues, the best jazz, world music, classic rock. I want something that will expose me to crazy new music, unclassifiable music, music that time has forgotten. And I want the warmth of real human voices, connecting me to a community of listeners, reminding me that I’m not just listening to a playlist cooked up by a machine… that these songs matter.

In this crazy cross-connected Internet age, I’m sure there’s something out there. Know any good ones?

Saturday 17 March 2007

Transit City gets on the rails

As reported by pretty much everybody, the city has finally launched a plan for the future of light rail transit in Toronto. About time, too. They’ve even set up a web site (TransitCity.ca) with various maps and documents. More coverage from the Globe and Mail, Star, and Spacing Wire.

About time too, says Steve Munro, one of the activists who fought to keep the streetcar network here back in the early ‘70s. Lots more analysis of the proposal on his blog.

It’s not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, and there are some important questions still to answer. But it’s a crucial step, because it puts a city-endorsed plan on the table for discussion. And a network of fast, reliable surface transit, though less sexy than a subway extension to Vaughan, serves many more people per dollar spent. (If only federal funding was based on such practical criteria!)

There’s a growing sense that things are finally happening at the TTC. I don’t know how much of it can be credited to new commission chair Adam Giambrone, but there’s something symbolic about his presence, a youthful energy that’s refreshing after years of Howard Moscoe’s bluster.

The TTC has a reputation for shutting out the public, even those who should be their strongest allies. They forced the creator of an amusing anagrammed subway map to stop using the look-and-feel of their own official maps (though I note he’s put it back up in its original form now). They treated the TTC Rider Efficiency Guide with glaring suspicion. They completely ignored the popular subway station buttons sold by Spacing Magazine. (What on earth is that stupid little shop in Union station for then?)

But these days it seems they’re opening up. Giambrone and a handful of real live high-up TTC staff came to TransitCamp, a day-long ad-hoc ideas conference held by local webheads and transit activists… and by all accounts they actually listened. And if the Transit City buttons seem suspiciously familiar, it’s because Giambrone’s people commissioned Spacing dude Matt Blackett to design them.

Exciting times - but as always the proof will be in the funding. Fingers crossed. And let’s let the Feds know we want One Cent Now.

Yeah. So about that web site. It’s in Joomla, an open-source content management system - you can tell, too, by the bits of default template still hanging around. In my experience, you can coax the thing into looking tidy, but it involves a lot of banging away at templates and CSS, and the thing always seems to run slow and clunky. I used to run the Flickershow site on Joomla, but finally I couldn’t stand it any more and switched to Expression Engine, which I like much, much better. (I’m thinking of migrating this site to it, too, but with dozens and dozens of entries and comments, it’ll be a while!)

Friday 9 March 2007

End of week brain sweepings

There’s nothing like looking down at the last bite of your lunch and noticing that part of it is blue.

This morning.

Sean: [rummaging through our room] Where’s my Blackberry?

Me: [spying the empty belt clip for it, and unaccountably reminded of Flanders and Swann] “There was the case, but the horn itself was missing.” [belatedly realizing the play on the word horn] Ha! Now I’ll think of that song every time you lose that thing.

Sean: Great. Are you sitting on it? Yes you are, you bastard.

Me: Oh. Oops.

My extended Shakespearean mondegreen:

OSWALD:
The leopards have wunched the poor boy
For every dollar he’s got. Feast your eyes upon him
[Mumble bumble] O! Unto her death!

Dies

EDGAR:
A serviceable villain;
As like to the right forth of the [mumble, radio static].

GLOUCESTER AND/OR EDGAR:
Is he dead? Sit you down, father; rescue him!

Wednesday 7 March 2007

Mbox2 addendum

I thought I’d peek at my server statistics for Forgery League, and see how people found their way to the site. One person apparently Googled “mbox high pitched buzz”, so I figure it’s a good time to mention:

I figured out what was causing the quiet whining noise on the Mbox’s monitor outputs. It was happening every time there was audio, which gave the impression that it was the data stream coming in through its own USB port. However, it turns out it was actually the video output. I’d attached a monitor to my PowerBook (an “Aluminum” series G4 with DVI video connection), and when I disconnected it, away went the screech.

Strange: the signal to the Mbox is digital, so you’d think it wouldn’t be susceptible to interference. Does the monitor signal introduce so much noise that it can travel down a USB cable and get picked up by the analog circuitry in the Mbox?

Sadly, this means having to use Logic on one small laptop screen some of the time, but I’m certainly glad I don’t have to get another outboard audio interface.

I haven’t yet tested whether it only appears on the monitor outs, or whether it gets recorded too, and whether it helps to use a different/better USB cable. I’ll do some more playing around when I get a chance. Stay tuned.

Go

Spent an awesome lunch hour today playing Go for the first time. I’d never really gotten into any sort of strategy board game before, but I’ve wanted to learn the game for a while, ever since I took home the folding wooden travelling board that used to belong to my grandfather. So I brought it to the office for the heck of it, in case anyone else wanted to learn, but nothing came of it.

When we moved to our new office, in the back of a former factory, we and our landlord built the space pretty much from scratch, along with a kind gentleman who’s setting up a metal and wood shop downstairs. Turns out he enjoys Go, and he pointed me to some good resources on the web (see below).

It’s so very abstract, so uniform. There aren’t any special pieces with special moves. The rules take all of five minutes to learn, maybe ten if you count scoring. And I think part of the appeal for me is the astonishing complexity that arises from the implications of such pure, simple rules. I’m still getting the hang of it, of course, but I love it already.

I tried my hand at a few games against Goban, a Mac OS X Go engine that includes GNU Go and network play. Not bad for learning, but of course nothing beats an actual game with an actual human being.

So today we sat in the cozy café area out front with the noonday sun slanting in through the windows. We used a 13x13 board (using the full 19x19 board might have taken all day), and my friend pointed out strategies and taught me scoring, while our neigbours from the coffee trade wandered past on errands, occasionally carrying cockatoos and plumbing fixtures.

A couple of other friends have expressed interest, too, and there’s been talk of chess-playing too. Perhaps it’ll be the start of a new tradition around here.

The links:

• The Interactive Way To Go by Hiroki Mori - a primer with interactive Java examples.
• IGS Pandanet - Internet Go Server. Play and watch matches.
• More online play at the KGS Go Server.
• goproblems.com - an online database.
• GoBase.org - tons of articles, news, games.
• Sensei’s Library - a Go wiki.
• Influence Simulator - generates a pretty graphical representation of “influence” throughout a game, courtesy a club in Lyon.

Monday 5 March 2007

Cooking with beats

This here video rocks on so many levels. (There’s a better quality version on The Fame Game site, but I’ve embedded the YouTube version here because it politely waits for you to click on it before starting to download the whole damn thing.)

Without further ado, star beatboxer Beardyman shows you how to prepare the Electro Funk Daddy Superstar break:

(Thanks to my SO at Craphammer for pointing this one out to me.)

Why is this kind of thing so damn satisfying? My guess is that it takes electronic music - virtual and abstracted, but the product of a long process of stylistic and technological evolution in its own right - and adds another layer of depth by grounding it back in the physical world again, using honest-to-goodness real-time physical virtuosity. And to top it off, it’s funny and spontaneous. In a word, it’s masterful.

Really, it’s the human equivalent of the song of the Australian lyrebird (as introduced here by Sir David Attenborough):

On the Make

15 minutes to a ribbon controller. Oh, rock on. I’d all but given up looking for an anti-static plastic bag with the right resistance (as suggested by the article from PAiA). Sadly I don’t have an SVHS tape to sacrifice at the moment, but I’m wondering if the tape in a DAT cassette will work.

[Edit: I tried the DAT. No dice. But graphite works! I scribbled a big black line on a piece of paper using a soft pencil, put a clip on either end, and used a bare wire as a wiper. Down side: it does get on your fingers. Go for the SVHS tape.]

Found the link on the companion blog to Make, O’Reilly’s wondrous gonzo DIY-tech magazine. Recent links include knitted fruit, the latest add-ons for your favorite microcontrollers, a gorgeous “steampunk” keyboard and a photo-gallery of some of the freakiest basses ever.

I did have a subscription to ReadyMade, the other big magazine on the DIY scene, but I won’t be renewing. Make gets a bit technical, but I like its philosophy better. It’s much more about hacking - finding out how everything works, and adapting it to your own purposes. ReadyMade is much more about household stuff, and so much of it is about cute-looking furniture that you can buy, er, ready-made. There are quite a few neat articles, and I certainly don’t mind the household angle, but I wish they’d go deeper: what sort of materials to use, designing for longevity, the philosophy behind everyday objects, that sort of thing.

Tuesday 27 February 2007

Messages

Seen recently:

Who roundup

I’ve been paying a good deal of attention to the revival of Doctor Who and its various spinoffs. It hasn’t all been brilliant - some has been downright terrible, in fact - but I keep on watching just to see how it develops. I guess I look at it as kind of a controlled study: seeing what happens to the show under different production teams (it’s been through lots, over its almost thirty seasons), what happens when they go for a completely different tone and audience (as with Torchwood, its supposedly more “adult” spinoff), and how they face other challenges along their way. So here are some of my impressions so far, drawn from the big jumbled stack in my brain.

Part one: the TV series proper. Spoilers ahoy!

Christopher Eccleston had wonderful grit and depth, and showed us the Doctor in a new light: haunted, defensive, wounded. So many things set him apart from his predecessors, in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to see him as the same character. Of course, a lot has happened to him prior to his first appearance in Rose. And we only have one other incarnation in the new series to compare him to, so perhaps when we see the Eleventh Doctor, the Ninth will suddenly fit in that much better…

Because the Tenth Doctor seems in a lot of ways to be a return to the spirit of the Doctors of old. David Tennant’s been a fan since he was a kid, so perhaps that’s no surprise. He doesn’t have quite the same power that Eccleston had, but I do like him. Best entrance ever, too. (New teeth!) And Billie Piper’s proven a good choice as companion. However, I didn’t much like the direction their characters took in the 2006 series - too much the Ugly Time Tourists - to the point that I didn’t mind seeing the last of Rose. That’s pretty much all down to the writers, of course, and hardly the fault of the actors.

(Aside: the writers at Androzani.com have some neat commentary on the character of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors.)

Triumphs of the first two series:

Dalek managed to make the old “space dustbin” scary again - making it clever, manipulative, and a match for an entire secret base full of gun-totin’ guards. Of course, that potency was watered down a bit when eight gazillion of them showed up in Bad Wolf...

Father’s Day took the show’s time-travel premise and wrung some great drama out of it (even if it did require both the Doctor and Rose to do something almost impossibly dumb to kick it all off), aided by some fine performances. Of course, the poignancy was watered down a bit when Alternative-Universe Dad showed up in Rise Of The Cybermen...

The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances scared our household better than any other episodes, and had the best repartee in the show, bar none. “You say you’ve got the moves… show me your moves!” “Rose, I’m trying to resonate concrete…”

School Reunion: the decision to bring back Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 was by all accounts a tricky one, and well handled.

Hit and miss:

The majority of episodes by head honcho Russell T. Davies, whom I’ve made fun of on a previous occasion. I think he’s made some smart choices in the direction of the series, and he comes up with plenty of wonderful little details too. But too often he goes for big wankety spectacle with little regard for sense: One Dalek is scary, so let’s have millions of them descending on the earth! And what do you do for an encore? Well, Daleks are wonderful and Cybermen are wonderful, so obviously having both will be twice as exciting!

The pop-culture shock of Bad Wolf was just too tacky for me. So the already-crummy media monopoly from The Long Game slides further into ruin, fine - but why does today’s reality TV have to survive in perfectly recognizable form a hundred thousand years from now?

On the other hand, I loved the National Trust holding back the sun and continental drift to preserve the “classic” Earth in The End Of The World. A planet with unrecognizable continents evaporating over millions of years wouldn’t have the same impact as the Earth we know exploding in a huge fireball, so this was a cute way of hanging a lampshade on it. (And okay, if you want to get picky about that anachronism, who’s to say the Doctor isn’t just using “National Trust” metaphorically?)

The Aliens Of London two-parter had its pluses, like showing the consequences of Rose’s sudden departure - something that had rarely been addressed in the original run of the show. They were the first episodes filmed in a wildly ambitious series, and the production team was still finding its feet, so I’ll cut them some slack for wobbly aliens and awkward pacing, but oh dear, Russell, the farting. Really.

New Earth had its funny moments but was a big mess plotwise. Like Aliens of London, it fell victim to tight schedules in the wake of the all-out Christmas special, and too many script changes late in the game (Davies decided, justifiably, that having all the human guinea-pigs die was too grim). Still, it’s hard to excuse Cassandra’s sudden change of heart at the end. And the Face of Boe buzzing off before passing along his message? That’s not “textbook enigmatic”, that’s the writer going “on second thoughts, I don’t want to reveal that secret just yet, but darn it, I can’t write him out without rewriting the setup for the episode”.

A special mention must go to Love and Monsters... which might have been my favorite episode of the whole damn season if it weren’t for that frankly ghoulish ending. Davies and company excuse it with some dribble about wanting a “dark fairy tale feel”, but I don’t buy it. In large part I object because it’s the Doctor himself that “rescues” Ursula - I know the theme of the episode is that he’s a dangerous creature to be around, but what the hell are we to make of him when he leaves a likeable character as a talking slab of concrete? If only they’d ended it on that old home movie, with Elton’s mother walking off into the distance… but no.

The Cybermen looked awfully good (unlike the Daleks, they’ve changed a lot over the years, having started as guys in balaclavas with pipes stuck on), but I didn’t get much out of them. All those decades ago, they were inspired by the invention of artificial human organs, and lurking fears about humans turning into machines, and I think a more imaginative take on them might have made them less of the stompy robots and more of the creepy medical machines - something a little more subtle than Gigantic Robot Arms With Saws. So they stomp around like noisy Daleks, basically - they even have their own battle cry now too, and a ranty creator in a wheelchair!

The starting point for the episodes was apparently an audio play called Spare Parts. It explored the origins of the Cybermen, as a last-ditch survival effort by the inhabitants of a dying planet, and it was downright harrowing. But after the long, bloody conversion process, so little remained of the original personality or purpose that…

Oh dear. This is turning into a mashup of Doctor Who and Adaptation. I’d better call it a night.

Next: the spinoffs.

Friday 23 February 2007

Naturellement c’est un concert

Spacing Wire points out this lovely “concert sauvage” by NYC a capella group Naturally 7, favouring bemused Parisian commuters with a rendition of “In The Air Tonight”. I’m reminded of my first visit to Manhattan a few years ago, when three guys wandered onto our train and started singing a couple of gospel numbers (“It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna rain. Or maybe snow…”) - I’m guessing there’s much more of a tradition of singing on the subway in New York?

Makes me want to do some busking this summer. It struck me, for example, strolling around during last year’s wonderful Nuit Blanche, that it’d be even cooler with street music…

I almost missed this one: Zunior recently released the Our Power Solar Music Compilation as an exclusive download album. It’s a fundraiser for solar power initiatives in Ontario, and has tracks by Sexsmith & Kerr, Steven Page, Snailhouse, Gord Downie and others.

Monday 19 February 2007

Farewell to Ryan Larkin

Via Torontoist - Ryan Larkin, who went from breaking ground in the National Film Board’s animation studios, to panhandling on the streets of Montreal, to an all-too-brief comeback in his final days, has passed away.

Cartoon Brew’s obit includes the early short Syrinx (wherein the young Larkin takes Norman McLaren’s drawing-and-redrawing techniques into poetic new territory) and the 2004 documentary Ryan (wherein animator Chris Landreth’s conversations with Larkin and friends are spun into surreal computer animations that underscore the man’s tragic story).

Ryan was at work on a new film based on his experiences, called “Spare Change”. His collaborator, Laurie Gordon of the band Chiwawa, is continuing work on the piece - see the official site for further details.

Toronto notes

TTC oddities: Bay station will be closed for three upcoming weekends due to nearby construction, and Bloor-Danforth trains will divert via Museum station. The upshot: you’ll get to see the fabled Lower Bay station. It was closed to the public only months after it was built, but it shows up from time to time in films and on TV, often dressed up to look like New York or elsewhere. Transit Toronto has the lowdown; further details from Steve Munro.

Elsewhere, Steve ponders the challenges if the TTC were to run the Toronto Island Ferry (as it did, once upon a time): “If the Sam McBride is half way across to Centre Island, and is short turned, do the passengers have to get off?” Ouch. :D

In other news, the front of the Revue Cinema fell off yesterday morning. Ouch also.

Also, Matt Blackett is retiring his weekly comic m@b. I’ll miss it, but I’m sure he’ll have lots of other projects to keep him busy - and with a new issue of Spacing (the magazine he founded) in my mailbox today, I can’t complain too much.

Friday 16 February 2007

A new start

Last night we had one of our coffee chats, for the first time in months. There are about half a dozen of us, including everyone in the house, and we get together to talk about life and issues and philosophize a bit. And since the office where most of us work now shares a building with a coffee place, we’ve got a great place to do it. The talk last night centered mostly on “truth” and “letting go of things”, and it really was refreshing.

Among other things, I think it jarred something loose in my brain, something that had been blocking my writing on this on-again, off-again audio play podcast. It’s been percolating for months now, if not longer, and I think I’d grown very attached to a certain arrangement of the characters, a certain approach to the story and the world… and I think I’d set it up to be too big a deal, way more work than it had to be. As usual, I was trying to run before I’d even got the hang of the crawling thing.

The main viewpoint character, for example, was originally an amalgam of several cool, funny people I know. But I wanted to get her right, to make her believable / cool / funny / worthy / whatever. I couldn’t get into her head, into her life. I couldn’t get her or any of the other characters to sing.

So I tossed out all my notes for the characters, along with Aborted Episode One Draft, Version Eight. The characters and their roles have shifted several times along the way, but this was the biggest shift yet.

The premise still holds: it pretends to be a real podcast about life in Toronto, but it’s a fictionalized, slightly fantastic Toronto. And podcasts tend to be personal things, so I’m making it a lot more personal. I’ll host the thing (in character), and there’ll be more room for music and commentary on local issues.

I realize part of me was worried about seeming egotistical, since I’m already filling so many roles (writer, lead, engineer, composer, producer, director?)... but deargod, why? This isn’t a big show on stage or radio. If I think of it instead as just a fun little project, a way of learning all those different roles, a seed that can grow into something bigger, involving more people, everything snaps into place. I get to play with new voices, new aspects of characters. I don’t have to worry so much about it being “good enough” to drag other people into helping.

It’s fun again.

Wednesday 31 January 2007

“Nobody knows what it’s made from”

It’s been weeks. You’d think I might be posting about our new office, or some cool projects we’ve been doing, but no.

I just ran across this video and immediately thought “Gosh, it’s like a Japanese version of Look Around You!” (Add to list: parallels between Japan and the UK.) Learn here about sushi, courtesy of the Rahmens:

And now to bed. There will be photos and things soon.

Tuesday 9 January 2007

And in with 2007

It’s January, and this year, that means a new office for Spinglobe. We’ve spent a lot of the past month building a new space at the Merchants of Green Coffee building (you can see it from the Don Valley Parkway; it’s midway between Dundas and Queen), with the help of our new neighbours: putting in studs and drywall, mudding and painting, and generally turning a raw space at the back of an old warehouse building into a new home for our crew of oddballs.

Above: the old Spadina office (left) and the new office on Matilda. Toni, the more gregarious of the building’s two cats, comes to pay Sean a visit.

We’re still moving in, but we love it already. For one thing, we can actually walk around the place without tripping over one another. We have a meeting room, and space for all kinds of plants, and some wonderful neighbours in the building, including two cats and two cockatoos.

Lots more to tell. I have a few book reviews to do, for one thing, and possibly some television as well.

Wednesday 6 December 2006

Rerun: Five things

That “five things you might not have known about me” meme is going around the blogs lately, so what the heck - here are my answers, previously published elsewhere (except for #4).

1. When I was a kid, I drew quite a bit. My dad had a box of old, unused forms for tracking lab samples of plant material, which were my standard drawing paper for years. There were two sorts: white, legal-sized ones and heavy, green-tinted ones with a perforated section at the bottom (there was a serial number that you could stick in the bag with the smelly bits of collected leaves).

To me, the functional side of the paper was the blank side. And it seemed really weird to me that anyone would draw on anything else. I drew pictures of the house, the cats, and some incomprehensible comics - the detachable section at the bottom was roughly Sunday-comic sized - about talking mugs and bunnies that spent all their time falling into water and yelling at each other.

2. A couple of years ago, I was Purple for Buddies in Bad Times’ Pride promo photos.

3. I talk to cats in made-up languages in addition to English. I sometimes use something like the peculiar dialect of “cat talk” spoken by everyone in my SO’s family, particularly when talking to Gomiya (her name is actually a form of address used when speaking to a cat; a more formal version is “Gohdemiya”). I think my personal cat dialect is also influenced by an old George Booth cartoon in the New Yorker called “Ip Gissa Gul” (“Ip Gets A Girl”) which was written in a made-up caveman language (I also find myself addressing dogs as “Huppy dod!” sometimes). Tarquin I talk to in something reminiscent of Inuktitut. I have no idea why.

4. My nickname in middle school was “Fish”, for reasons known only to the maybe three or four vaguely in-crowd kids who started calling me that. The only thing I can think of is that my last name has a similar rhythm to the word “mackerel”.

5. I owe a lot of my understanding of musical chords and chord progressions to a program I had for the Commodore 64 when I was in high school called Instant Music. The flip side of the disk had a whole bunch of example songs in different styles from rock history, all rendered in binky three-voice synthesis, and the book that came with it had a helpful rundown of chord types. The interface was horrible without a mouse, but I soldiered on anyway, even after my joystick died (I jammed its wires into an old calculator and used that as a controller instead).

Tuesday 5 December 2006

Le week-end

After a few weeks of non-stop construction at the new office, and every other kind of work at the old office, Sean and I took a sanity-mending holiday-in-town this weekend. I realized not long ago that these days we mostly see each other at work these days - I mean, at least we do get to see one another during the day, which I’m grateful for, but we’re seldom at our best.

Among other things, we caught up on some movie watching. Highlights: part one of a PBS series from the ‘80s about Joseph Campbell, which Sean’s mom sent him as a birthday present. Also Triplets of Belleville, which was loopy fun. I could have done without the, uh, frog scenes, but I’ll forgive those for the scenes of crazy old ladies (the Kickass Granny is one of my personal favorite archetypes) playing music on very do-it-yourself instruments…

Saturday dinner was at the Pomegranate, a lovely Persian restaurant on College St, and the food was beyond wonderful. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. Really.

Sunday afternoon we trooped back to our office-to-be to do more drywalling and mudding. It’s turned out to be one hell of a project, this. But it’s going to rock.

And this evening J and I did some more planning for our upcoming CD, and tried out some new arrangement ideas. And I got back on the Song-a-day wagon:

Signals (1’13”)

I had iTunes pick out some tracks at random for inspiration. One was basically a bunch of random beeping by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, similar to what ended up in today’s song, and also echoed in the “signals” theme in the lyrics. The other was a folky tune by a friend of mine. The resulting song is rather similar to “Margins”, another Song-a-day from this past summer… they’d graft very neatly together.

Tuesday 28 November 2006

Lodge training

As mentioned previously, I’ve been all excited about setting up an Immersion Composition lodge. Enough so that last night, I did a mini-session on my own. It lasted about four and a half hours, during which I recorded these three pieces:

Not In Nine (1’19”)

As I was walking home to start the session, I had an odd-meter groove going in my head, but by the time I started recording, I’d forgotten it. I thought it was in nine, but this turned out to be in seven and four and extremely Phleg Camp-y, particularly the 6+6+4 section at the end. I seem to end up aping them whenever I bring out the Fender Jazz bass. This one earned me the “trying very hard to say something positive” look from my SO.

How’s About You (0’35”)

Drums -> title -> lyrics -> chords -> done. Self-explanatory I think.

Frost (1’55”)

My keyboard-written songs tend to either be in a particular vein I’ve followed since high school, or these more lyrical things that wander from one melody to another. I’ve just realized that this is more or less a restatement of a piece I did a while back called “Dawn River”, right down to the clicky percussion. I can’t escape myself!

All in all, a fun exercise and most worthwhile.

One and a half hours per song. Too much futzing and trying to get parts “right” (especially the slap bass on #1) and take down some of the hiss that crept in somewhere. I’m still very much getting used to my new setup: Logic on a laptop, equipped with a very finicky Mbox. Before I try another one of these, I have to get a few specific cables, figure out the ideal signal path into my computer, and set up some new Logic templates so I don’t have to mess with setting things up on every song.

Edit: more discussion of this mini-session on the ICS discussion forum.

Wednesday 22 November 2006

Song for a bored cat

Muffy and I once recorded a wacky little number called “Song For A Sad Cat”. It was to be a dirge inspired by the sound of Ms Sukie Binbay Purr (I hope I’m remembering her name) meowing plaintively at the door… but it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Well, here’s the Song-a-day sequel:

Song for a bored cat (0’50”)

It started out with a recording off my phone - it has a “Voice Memo” function that I’ve used in desperation when inspired and without any other recording device, and the memory was full, so tonight I snagged it all onto my hard drive. The slightly out-of-time lead guitar is the first snippet to get used in a piece.

Now. There is no door on the upstairs studio, just a baby gate to keep out M’s cat Cobweb so he won’t pee on things. It doesn’t keep out the more athletic cats in the house, and our two cats usually try to take over my lap whenever I’m working up here, at least during the colder months.

After recording the basic tracks, I was setting up the microphone to possible record a very quiet vocal part when Tarquin sauntered in and started chattering at me. So I recorded him instead. He then proceeded to get real friendly with my lap before I got fed up and ejected him. That took about three tries, and he was replaced in short order by Gomiya. My primary function in life is to serve as furniture for pushy black cats.

Tuesday 21 November 2006

The latest

Snagged a copy of The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook, which so far is a more colourful and detailed retelling of all the Immersion Composition Society’s super-sekrit learnings about creativity.

ICS co-founder Nicholas Dobson on the first ever “composer duel”, wherein he and his friend Michael Mellender locked themselves away in their home studios to record 20 songs in 12 hours:

By the end of the day there were cords and gear tangling and zig-zagging all over my room, and the floor was littered with empty, destroyed junk-food packages. My left eye was twitching, and my session had devolved into a quest to find out what is the most annoying noise a person can make with their mouth.

Then Michael was knocking on the door. He had a cassette tape with his session on it, a six-pack, and more junk food. He stomped around my living room, said a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and then collapsed on my couch. He said something along the lines of, “I want to do this every day, and never leave my house.”

I said, “Me, too.”

It’s very similar to Scott (Understanding Comics) McCloud’s original 24-Hour Comic duel, some ten years previous - and many other “speed creation” challenges (plays, films, novels, and so on). There’s great fun - granted, in a slightly mad, masochistic way - in setting yourself such a lunatic goal, setting aside all else for the sake of creation. I like to call it “the romance of the all-nighter”.

I suspect that the ICS’s songwriting version may be more fruitful, for a few simple reasons:

• Granularity. Songs are short (usually), and you can keep churning them out. If you really do hit a dead end with one, you can always work on another instead. Conversely, in a comic challenge, every page commits you further to the story you’re working on. Churning out a 24-page book in a day is a great badge of honour - if you succeed. If you don’t, you fail big. With songs, failures aren’t as devastating, and successes, while smaller, are still delightful, and they’re cumulative.
• Regularity. The “lodge system” encourages you to create lots, and often, where as a comic is such a Herculean effort that you’re not likely to attempt it very often.
• The creation of a circle of friends committed to making music regularly and supporting one another’s creative efforts. The ritual is important to this - ordeal and hard work, followed by a rewarding night sharing food and drink and art.

Of course, nothing in this is inherent to music - you could do it with comic strips, or one-pagers, that sort of thing. I expect some creative writing circles have done this sort of thing since forever, but I can’t say for sure.

So it’s time to put all this theory to the test. I’m going to start the Forgery Lodge up again, this time “for real”. Maybe even two sub-Lodges, on an alternating schedule - a face-to-face Lodge here in the music room, and a virtual, long-distance Lodge for further-flung people I know. It probably won’t happen until the new year, but I’m already planning it. One Saturday a month, let’s say…

And in the meantime, tonight’s Song-a-day.

Roller (1’18”)

Started with the organ patch, now that I have the cables to bring in external audio, and added real live bass and guitar too. Didn’t want to wake the roommates, so sadly there are no vocals. I definitely had “Higher Ground” in the back of my head from earlier in the day, and that other piece that sounds like it that I can’t remember now that I could swear has something to do with a vegetable or the word “electric”. God I need to sleep.

Monday 20 November 2006

Greener computing

I’ve been pondering getting a big second monitor - in particular for the studio, where old CRT monitors create heaps of magnetic interference and AC buzz. But which manufacturers are the best, in terms of environmental impact? I’m talking cutting down on the hazardous chemicals, design for easy disassembly and recycling, take-back policies and so forth.

A bit of web-searching turned up EPEAT, the United States EPA’s Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool. I note that no one in any of the categories yet meets EPEAT’s Gold standard.

Also, Greenpeace recently published their own Green Electronics Guide, and they’ve been pushing hard to get Apple to green its computers. (To me, they make sense as a target, since Mac devotees are something of a captive market, and may be a tad more likely to pay more for a greener computer.)

So the verdict? NEC’s MultiSync series and Apple’s Cinema Displays top EPEAT’s present list, but they’re ass-kickingly expensive for a monitor I’m not going to be using for high-end design. Dell’s more affordable, and as a company they’ve got one of the better environmental track records out there, so that’s how I’m leaning at present. Not that I’ll be dropping that much on anything for a while yet, but it’s good to know.

Speed composition

I tidied up the studio today, hung a couple of pictures and found a new spot for the bodhran, put all the guitars in a corner where they won’t get toasted by the sun, and tended to the plants (the landlady’s money tree, which had been quietly dying on a dark landing since long before we moved in, is making a comeback).

I was also delighted to discover that the Immersion Composition Society web site is back up - when it vanished a while back I was worried that they’d packed it in - but they’re back, they’ve added a MySpace page, and they have a book, which I’m hoping to pick up or order at my local independent bookseller tomorrow.

The ICS consists of several autonomous “lodges”, each essentially a group of musicians who hold songwriting days on a somewhat regular basis. Each member gets up in the morning and independently composes as many pieces of music as humanly possible, records them, and brings them all to a listening party in the evening. It’s a crazy task that’s yielded some brilliant results.

We actually held such a songwriting day, almost two years back now, and I picked the preliminary name “Forgery Lodge”, which I went on to steal and change for the name of this site. It was all pretty cool, and though we haven’t done it again since then, it did inspire me to start the Song-a-day project - the less frenzied, solitaire version, if you will.

introspect (1’38”)

Speaking of which, here’s tonight’s endeavour. It’s very 1980, all analoguey synths and such, all of them Logic instruments again. The strings here use the ES1 plugin, which has pulse width modulation on it - a sound that takes me right back to the Commodore 64 days. And the whistly melody harkens back to a certain sort of pastoral synth wispiness that I think I imprinted on big time as a kid. There was one Shadowfax piece in particular that I’ll have to track down some day…

I always like to figure out my own built-in rules and prejudices and subvert them, and this week it was my “no pads” rule - hence those strings. I think partly it’s because I’m becoming a bit more comfortable playing keyboards (I got to play an actual Hammond organ last night, and it was a blast).

Friday 17 November 2006

Noises

Two recent song-a-day pieces, the latest in celebration of my new monitors. Of course, it was recorded at one in the morning when civility required I keep the volume down, so I haven’t yet heard it through the new monitors, but hey.

(And of course, now that I’ve got everything assembled, I’ve discovered that the Mbox2 emits a soft, high-pitched whine on its monitor outputs whenever it’s getting a digital audio signal from the computer - the data stream, presumably. Grr. I’ll have to see if a better-shielded USB cable helps.)

mobile (3’51”)

This one got me some dubious looks from my SO. Investigating the possibilities of Logic’s bundled FM synth - run through delay, reverb, EQ, filter, compression, trem and distortion, not necessarily in that order. Partway through it started to remind me of a bass clarinet piece by Evan Ziporyn, which plays with intervals and distortion in a similar sort of way… but in a purely acoustic way, by playing and humming simultaneously, so it’s much richer and more organic. (It’s called “Tsmindao Ghmerto”, if I recall correctly, and it’s on an album by the Bang On A Can crew.)

It felt good doing something that’s all textural, without any beat to it. When your recording software is always thinking in terms of bars and beats it’s sometimes hard to get out of that mode of thought yourself. I find it’s usually hard to combine the two methods of working - especially so since piling on all those effects eats up practically all the processor time.

If I do more like this I’ll try different tunings too.

awning (1’32”)

I still don’t totally get the Environment screen in Logic, but I’ve figured out enough to run my external MIDI devices (gosh, that was a fun day, let me tell you). Unfortunately, I don’t have the right cables to run their audio back into my computer yet, so I had to use all softsynths again.

The drums are picked out of Apple Loops (shhh, don’t tell), then distorted, compressed and gated all to hell, as seems to be my thing lately. Mostly it’s a quick and easy way to unrecognizableize a beat. And similarly, I like sounds with really short release times, that you can play like you’re sending Morse code. Ended up sounding a bit like a ‘90s remake of an ‘80s song, really…

Tuesday 14 November 2006

A week

Monday - worked like mad on a new blog-based web site for Spinglobe, and several other projects.

Tuesday - more of the same; nearly burned myself out. Largely self-inflicted. Must remember to take breaks. At least I didn’t spend ten hours straight at a desk again. Blog is looking good though.

Wednesday - jammed and hung out with the gang out High Park way, which made everything all better again. I didn’t have my bass with me, so among other things I tried to get as many different sounds as I could out of one cymbal and one gong suspended from a radio-style mic stand.

Thursday - recorded bass tracks for Ellen Carol’s upcoming CD, at Don Kerr’s brand new basement studio. I’ve recorded myself a lot, of course, and been in lots of studios, but it was my first Actual Recording Session. And it went quite smoothly, too. Afterward, went bowling as part of a fundraiser for Gallery 44‘s youth programs. I am a terrible bowler.

Friday - All a blur. I think I worked on the company blog some more.

Saturday - much sleeping in. Also headed in to the new office-to-be to help install some receptacles for the network. In the evening, some very adventurous jamming with Roulette and friends (I played mostly bass and drums).

Sunday - sore as hell. Must have been playing like a maniac last night.

Monday - met up with office mates at the new space again. It’s gonna be pretty cool. And as a sort of reward, I finally snagged those monitors I’ve had my eye on for months. Lots of work to do on the studio now to get it into shape. But: progress!

Tuesday 7 November 2006

treadle treadle treadle

This recent thread on Treehugger reminded me of a longterm project I have in mind, namely to build a muscle-powered multi-appliance built into a countertop. If we can run pottery wheels off a foot treadle, why not use the same principle to power an interchangeable set of blades and mixers? Imagine a countertop with a little socket set into it, maybe a little cover to keep food-gunk out, and a treadle tucked away in the cabinet below. A gearing system might be a good thing to have too, but I’m not sure yet. Might have to investigate how much torque and how many RPMs it takes to blend soup or make hummus.

I really have no way to build any such thing at the moment, but that may soon change. Our new office will likely be upstairs from a cooperative metal and wood shop. I’ve always wanted to learn more of that sort of stuff, and there are tons of projects I could finally bring out of the “nice idea” stage and start making into reality. Including musical instruments, of course! And of course, it’ll be some time before I have enough know-how to build anything more complicated than a set of shelves, but give me time, and a long enough lever and a place to stand…

Meanwhile, a little web browsing turns up an e-book called Make Your Own Treadle Lathe, an FAQ on treadle lathes, and a page on Leach Treadle Wheels, apparently a classic among potters. I gots lots to learn.

(Sidebar, on human powered appliances: I find electric can openers a dumb idea for anyone who doesn’t seriously need one, and worse yet, the ones I’ve used have been crap. That said, most manual can openers I’ve encountered are crap too, with blades that don’t cut and grips that do cut - into the user’s hands. We’ve finally found a couple of good ones, however. I know one of them is from Ikea; I’m not sure about the other. But my favorite is the one my mum has, handed down from her mum, I think. It’s wall mounted, with a big lever to lock the can in place, a long, easy-to-turn crank, and a magnet to snag the lid, and it swings out of the way when you’re done.)

Wednesday 1 November 2006

Human spaces: Hallowe’en, a new office, and a book or two

This summer we moved to a house just north of the Danforth, near Chester station. It’s a cozy neighbourhood, an old “streetcar suburb” from the early years of the 20th century, fairly well off, mostly single-family homes on snug little lots. And holy geez do they do Hallowe’en. It was a lovely mild night last night, and the sidewalks were absolutely crammed with parents and kids. Every other house seemed to have elaborate decorations. It really felt like a celebration, a time for neighbours to mingle, chat, try to outdo one another, and generally have fun. As a non-parent, I was very much an outsider, but it was still cool to see.

I really love it when the sound of people drowns out the sound of traffic, especially on a warm night. I strolled down Baldwin early this past summer, on the first “patio” weekend, as the sound of clinking glasses and cutlery and soft conversation drifted across the road. Between that and the lights on the trees (for some reason I love the sight of artificial light filtering through tree branches at night) it was really magical.

In other news, we looked at a great new potential office space today, near Queen and Broadview. Many cool possibilities. The hot water’s already partly solar heated, and there’s talk of a green roof, solar and wind power, and other initiatives; we’d have a lot of freedom to shape the space; they’re planning to rent out other parts of the building to other like-minded initiatives (architects, artists, and ‘green’ companies). It would be really cool to work on building a community of little workplaces there, both socially and physically, in the built/landscaped environment.

So I’ve been raving about Christopher Alexander‘s A Pattern Language, which talks about the sort of ‘building’ I mean. It’s an approach quite at odds with modern development practices, one that seeks to create spaces that have a real, genuine life, that instill a sense of wholeness, wellness, humanness, and do so at all scales, from regions to streets to rooms to windowsills. We can only do this, Alexander has argued, by allowing people to shape their own spaces in a real and direct way. I can barely do it justice in a short entry. Go read his books - they completely deserve the term “classic”.

Speaking of books, I ordered a copy of Worldchanging, the book for the office, and it arrived today. It’s a hefty little compendium of ideas and resources for making human civilization more sustainable, filed under Stuff, Shelter, Cities, Community, Business, Politics and Planet. I’ve heard it compared to the venerable Whole Earth Catalog series, and it’s not a bad comparison - page after page of useful and inspiring stuff from all over, aimed at bettering the world. Go buy it now.

(And it just so happened that when I opened it at random, the first page I came upon was the one about “Place-Making” - complete with a discussion of A Pattern Language...)

Wednesday 25 October 2006

Be afraid…

Monday 23 October 2006

music etc

Last week was music crazy - two gigs, three rehearsals and one free-form improv jam in the space of six days. And as of this week, the improvising trio has a gig in December. Yay some more!

One of those gigs last week was a CD release party and send-off for our good friend David Hein. He’s just put out a rockin’ disc called North of Nowhere and he’s now on his way across the continent - a man, a guitar, and a yellow VW bug. I’ve just launched his new web site too, and set up a blog, which he’s been filling with lots of fun touring stories and photos. And just wait until I get the music player finished…

In the meantime, if he comes to your town, go see him!

Words of the week:

• gosh
• “phwoaar”
• faffing
• explodey
• fraught
• Christ on a bike

• “moving forward”

Tuesday 17 October 2006

Secret songs

I can’t post the latest Song-a-day pieces, because (1) the sound quality on one of them is terrible, not to mention the playing, (2) the second one’s not done, and (3) they’re part of secret Hallowe’en show plans. Not that it’s that big a secret, I suppose. Regardless, I’m quite proud of them both.

We don’t have time to pull it off for this year, but the secret plan is this: for Hallowe’en - or perhaps some other show, just for the heck of it - we come on dressed as a completely different band, and play our own material in a different style. Of course, knowing the two of us, New Wave seems the most logical and fun choice. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to sing like Neil Tennant.

I mentioned the premise to a friend, who had a related idea: musical improv. Not just improvised music, not just an improvised musical, but improvised drama featuring the players in a band. The audience could throw out suggestions for what style they should perform and the soap opera dynamics that are going on between all the musicians. It’d take a good deal of skill and chutzpah, and no small amount of preparations. But it could be really cool.

On another related tangent, I’ve been tossing around ideas for a while about doing a story-with-songs - not quite a musical, but a narrated story with songs performed by a band, or more than one band (they could change during the story breaks). My chief inspiration was Harry Nilsson’s The Point, which is fun, but it’s by someone else, and it’s not really his best work.

As I type all this, Tarquin is on my lap, pawing at it in a way that’s frankly rude. He’s been really pushy lately about wanting to own my lap and/or chair, and if not, to climb up on my desk. I may have to employ him in my music making (inspired also by this YouTube video, which was passed along to me by Ms Urnash; warning, contains adorable kitten).

I guess you’d call that ailurotoric composition?

Tuesday 10 October 2006

Logical song-a-day

When we moved into this place a couple months back, the idea was that by now we’d have the music studio all set up and be in the midst of recording our next CD. But just before we made the move, I discovered that my Windows machine had been doused with cat wee, right through the back grille, and its hard drive controller was getting flaky in a scary sort of way. So I commandeered my SO’s old PowerBook G4, and got me a copy of Logic Express (a belated birthday present). It’s taking a while to get everything back in gear - not for nothing does Ronan Chris Murphy write that “Home Studios are Killing Music”.

It’s a complicated piece of machinery, is Logic, so as a way of getting my bearings while also getting a few creative ya-yas out, I’ve decided to start up the Song-a-Day project again. One track every day, or at least a few a week. Length doesn’t matter, but they usually average about a minute and a half. Sound quality isn’t as important as the ideas in the piece, and most important is learning from the experience.

So here’s the first: 2006_1009_Scales.mp3 (1.2 megs)

Still very much getting the hang of the way Logic handles regions and quantization and such. At some point I’ll read a manual.

I was excited (read “squealed like a girl”) to discover that alternative tunings are available just by picking them out of a menu - I’ve wanted to do pieces using just intonation (or some other non-even tempered scale) for a long time. There are literally dozens of them included, and you can define your own as well. Right on! So this one’s in a 7-limit JI, since I’ve always loved those rich, flat-flat sevenths. Other than that, there’s nothing so remarkable about this one, except maybe that I used a pair of scissors for percussion somewhere in there. Synths are the subtractive and FM ones bundled with Logic.

Friday 6 October 2006

First notes

File under Things You Really Need To Know: My office mate’s computer makes a little ‘bing’ noise every now and then. It happens that it’s the same pitch as the opening guitar note of “There She Goes” by the La’s, which runs through my head every time his computer does that.

A few years back, I noticed that the elevators at the Ryerson library make a ‘bing’ of their own that’s the first guitar note from “No Surprises” by Radiohead. And then there was the snack vending machine at UW that made a beep near-identical to the first note of “Librae Solidi Denari” by the Shamen.

Other songs that have been running through my head lately: “The List” by Metric - Sean just bought Emily Haines’s latest, which I haven’t yet heard, but every mention of her makes me think of Metric songs; and that same office mate’s a cappella rendition of the Andy Griffith Show theme (used in a recent project).

And now, since it’s apparently Catsmas, I give you Gomiya in loaf form, and Tarquin demolishing a big bag of catnip he stole out of an upper kitchen cupboard.

Tuesday 3 October 2006

Ward 29 news

Municipal elections are on 13 November. I suppose it goes without saying who I’m voting for mayor - he ain’t perfect, but I trust him to do right, a hell of a lot more than Jane Pitfield… But what about locally?

A couple more candidates added to the register in our ward (29: Toronto-Danforth, North), according to the big candidates list at Who Runs This Town?

Case Ootes, of course, is the incumbent - an able enough deputy during Mel’s tenure as mayor, but among other things, he’s Mister No Bike Lanes In My Ward (he’s continuing to press for the removal of the new lanes on Cosburn). “People won’t get out of their cars,” he told the Town Crier. “It doesn’t happen. This isn’t that kind of city.”

Tammy Thorne of Spacing Votes asks: “What kind of city is it then? Perhaps the better question is: What kind of city will it become if we continue to let people who think this way run it?”

At the other end of the spectrum, stalwart cycling advocate Hamish Wilson is now on the ballot as well. But the challenger with the best chance would seem to be Diane Alexopoulos - at least, she’s got the nod from Jack Layton and Peter Tabuns (MP and MPP respectively), and is positioning herself as a supporter of David Miller’s. This is one to watch, as they say.

Which leaves us with a dilemma. As new arrivals on our street, do we dare get a sign and risk alienating our possibly Ootes-lovin’ neighbours? Hmmm…

Monday 2 October 2006

Technorati

I continue my advance into the murky world of Web 2.0 or whatever. Now, in addition to my Ma.gnolia page, where you can browse through a list of cool sites and articles I’ve bookmarked, I’ve gone and got a Technorati page.

For this you may blame my partner.

Friday 29 September 2006

Five musical moments

Sitting in a darkened theatre watching Bring On The Night, which follows Sting and collaborators through the recording of and tour for Dream of the Blue Turtles. (I’m not a huge fan, especially when it comes to his lyrics, but I like a lot of his tunes.) Something about that outlandish key change at the top of the chorus, with one of his trademark melodies swooping over it just sent chills down my spine. It’s like the whole song’s just sailed over a cliff and soared up into a pitch-black sky.

La Mer by Debussy, I don’t remember the conductor or orchestra - I think it was a Time/Life box set we got at a library sale. There’s a moment when the horns rise up, lifting a single violin note with them like a wave cresting. No vibrato on this version, just a pure, sweet little zing! - perfect.

The Pixies, “Vamos”. The Surfer Rosa version. While the rest of the band chugs along frantically, Joey Santiago’s guitar, possessed by the insane ghost of a police siren, suddenly sits bolt upright and goes: vipvipvupvipvupvipvipBOAINNNNGGGgggg. (New list: favorite weird guitar noises.)

XTC, “New Town Animal In A Furnished Cage”. Near the end, Andy Partridge just lets out this scream. Not a long, drawn out holler, but a pinched, neurotic, can’t-keep-it-in-can’t-let-it-out scream that’s cut off about two microseconds after it starts. “AA!” And then he goes into the chorus. (Compare to Björk’s longer, trumpet-dive scream on “I Miss You”.)

Monday 25 September 2006

Perfect albums

Muffy recently posted a list of “perfect album” picks, and it got me pondering what my own list would look like. I’ll stick to various sorts of pop music - it’s much easier that way. And it’s in chronological order, according to when I discovered the album, earliest first.

Camper Van Beethoven: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988) - My first exposure to Camper, back in high school. Every song’s great, and when guitarist Greg and violinist Jonathan get to playing off one another, it’s just brilliant.

Thomas Dolby: The Golden Age Of Wireless (1982) - I must agree with Muffy on this one. And make sure it’s the vinyl version, with the “rock” version of “Radio Silence”. Always made me think of those British “boys’ own” annuals full of adventure stories, and from what I’ve read of the songs’ origins, there’s a grain of truth to that.

The Pixies: Doolittle (1989) - Spiky and sweet and grinning like a dog that might be about to rip your arm off but you can’t quite tell but she probably is so you’d better start backing away slowly. And I credit Frank Black for making me realize the wonder of uneven rhythmic cycles - like the 4+2 bars on “Dead” or the mesmerizing coda to “No. 13 Baby”... Actually, come to think of it, Surfer Rosa belongs here too.

Talking Heads: Remain In Light (1980) - Best album ever. It just is. I’m careful not to listen to this one too often for fear of overdoing it. Lyrically, I think David Byrne reached greater heights later on, but it’s the music on this one that gets me right there. Drop the needle on track one, side one and it’s like you’ve tripped in the dark and fallen into a pit that turns out to be the inside of some crazy clockwork machine that’s full of funk-crazed jungle creatures who do frightening and unnatural things to guitars. I have to stop gushing now, because it’s all been said before, and I might never stop.

Orbital: In Sides (1996) - lush interplay of melodies, and their trademark wonderful, oddball chord changes. (I got into this at the same time as Remain In Light, while I was deejaying at CKMS at the University of Waterloo.)

The La’s: The La’s (1990) - Their one and only album, thanks to frontman Lee Mavers’ legendary perfectionism. Good thing it’s brilliant. CD bonus tracks are hit and miss, but they don’t count.

XTC: Drums and Wires (1979) - Why didn’t I find out about this one sooner? It took me until a year or two ago. Strikes just the right balance between their even spazzier early stuff and the gentler pop tunes they ended up doing later. The bonus tracks are all swell. My favorite line is from “Helicopter”: “She’s landing on the town - look out, town!”

A.C. Newman: The Slow Wonder (2004) - There are a lot of bands that I adore but I can’t put on this list because there’s always that one song, on every album. Even my beloved New Pornos aren’t here - mostly because, while I want to love Dan Bejar and everything he stands for, his songs just don’t do it for me. Except “Jackie Dressed In Cobras”. But I digress. A.C.‘s solo album is a whole pile of little pop gems.

I’m sure there are other albums that I’m forgetting. I’ll add them as I think of them.

Of course, I’m usually the type to get lost in the details rather than the big picture, so perhaps I’ll post a “Favorite Music Moments” list next.

ma.gnolia jam

At Sean’s suggestion I’ve gone and signed up at Ma.gnolia. God, and I thought “dot” anything was tiresome - now they’re putting them in the middle of words, like “del.icio.us”. But it’s a cool service - a nice complement to a blog, since it can keep the “oooh, look at this cool thing” separate from the more in-depth writing.

Played a fun gig Friday with Flickershow, and jammed last night with the nutty living-room experimentalists I mentioned in passing a while ago. That’s been absolutely great for me - a chance to play some very different music in loads of different styles, on several instruments. I’m most comfy on bass, but it’s also been challenging me to experiment more with drums. My melodies are getting really weird, too. I think they’ve been that way all along, but I’ve never been able to actually play what’s been lurking in my head.

Friday 8 September 2006

Street furniture

(Expanded from a comment I left on the Spacing Wire - it helped crystallize some thoughts I’d been meaning to write about here.)

The City of Toronto has been working on a Coordinated Street Furniture Program for a few months now. They write:

Over the past decade, a number of new street furniture elements have been added onto Toronto’s streetscape. Some items such as the Post and Ring Bike Stand, have been individual successes. However all of these pieces, including transit shelters, waste/recycling bins, benches and phone booths have been designed as separate elements. Publication vending boxes have also grown in number and vie for space and prominence with other street furniture on the public sidewalk.

A coordinated street furniture program will harmonize the design and placement of these street amenities in an aesthetically appealing, functional and accessible manner.

While this may mean a better unified streetscape - a “signature look” for our newspaper boxes and lampposts and whatnot - I’m not big on the thought of the whole city having the same look from end to end.

Having standards for our street furniture, that’s hardly a bad thing. But standardizing it is a different matter. I’d much rather see pieces designed by local artists, like the Style In Progress utility box project, or Intersection Repair in Portland.

I’d love to see a provision in the program to let neighbourhoods decide on their own furniture… or even a bit of money toward helping people (artists, neighbourhood associations, anyone!) to create/improve street furniture. What if there was someone you could go to for advice on bench standards, or on how to make sure your awesome-looking bike loops are theft-proof?

Hmm. A new how-to column for Spacing?

In my fevered imagination I’m seeing a cross between Make magazine and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language… perhaps I should look around for a blog to contribute to, or start one.

Saturday 2 September 2006

New house news

The studio is indeed going to rock, but it’s going to take longer than I’d anticipated. My computer, the 4-year-old Windows XP box on which we recorded the Stars for Searchlights EP, started to act flaky a few weeks ago: it stopped recognizing the DVD drive and the big recording drive, then found them again… and now it’s completely lost ‘em. Something wrong with the motherboard’s built-in drive controllers.

This may have something to do with the cat wee liberally spritzed through the inside of the machine near the back ventilation grille. Thank you ever so much, Cobweb. (To be fair, he’s been in distress lately - he’s got bad gums and slowly lost one of his canine teeth during the week following the move. For a while he had a sort of walrus-tusk that he wouldn’t let anyone touch.)

I’m not about to buy a new computer, though - good monitors are taking priority over that. The new studio machine will most likely be my SO’s old PowerBook G4, with my old drives moved to FireWire enclosures, and an MBox for sound I/O. And when I get a new machine, I don’t think I’m going to go the Windows route again.

So the fancy new quiet case I just got for the Windows box will most likely go to J. (If you’re setting up a studio and prefer Windows, or you just can’t stand screeching fans and rattling hard drives, check out Antec cases - my other roommate’s got the same model, the Sonata II, and I’m quite impressed. Thoughtfully designed and easy to install, too.)

Meanwhile, the house is still a bit chaotic, but we’re starting to settle in. The weirdest part is having three floors plus basement. The studio, on the top floor, is going to have to be kind of self-sufficient, since it’s separated from the kitchen by two slippery, narrow staircases.

I’m hoping that at some point I’ll be able to go up there and actually make some music…

Friday 25 August 2006

MOVING

Quick summary: the new house looks awesome. The move begins tomorrow morning.

We also have a gig in the evening, thanks to a terrible coincidence of scheduling.

The new studio will rock, especially compared to where I’ve been working up til now, in the sunroom (which is, funnily enough, neither sunny nor roomy).

Appliances. Lots of windows to put plants in. Lots of windows that need curtains or blinds.

Best song from the ‘80s that I never knew about until now: Nik Kershaw’s “Shame On You”.

Monday 14 August 2006

Just like homemade

Neat project: Freqtric, a system that senses body contact and uses it to trigger MIDI drums (and presumably other instruments).

I don’t know if this is part of the device, or future plans for it, but I’d love to see a version that senses which two people have made contact - imagine a dance piece choreographed around a system like that! Ideally it’d be wireless, but that would kind of defeat the skin-resistance effect the Freqtric project uses. Maybe something using conductive gloves…

Taste of the Danforth was this weekend. Utter madness. One mile of Danforth closed while hundreds of thousands of people mill about lining up for cheap food and free samples. We caught a few minutes of music from a Cuban band, which caught my ear because I’ve been working on a new arrangement for “Catch-22”, our ostensibly Latin number. Sat up into the wee hours last night hammering out a bassline for it. It’s gonna groove.

Also, this week has been awesome for jamming. Found a very cool bunch of folks who are into free-form living room music-making. Very excited!

Also, my latest score from Active: DPDT switches, for the making of stomp boxes.

Also, I salvaged the caster “tree” from a dead swivel chair and a busted coat rack from the office, for the making of percussion stands.

I’ve rediscovered my true packrat nature. I’d been denying it for some years - partly I was paring things down, partly I was influenced by my SO’s firm belief in chucking things that don’t get used, partly it was because we move house every year or two. But now my packratting has purpose. I actually am building things with the junk I collect. Castoff things are an opportunity.

Building things from materials at hand - it’s a trait I inherited from my parents, and I think the whole attitude is one of their greatest gifts to me. Almost every piece of furniture we had was either a hand-me-down, bought used, or home-made. We just didn’t buy new things unless we really needed them.

• For much of my childhood, our couch in the living room consisted of sleeping bags laid on top of foam on a bed of old wooden microscope boxes (which were all filled with old books, or tools, or five-pound chunks of rock with embedded fossils).
• We had a little tractor/riding mower - that was bought new. But my dad built the trailer for it by sticking a box made of pegboard on top of an old lawn mower frame.
• Mum sewed stuffed toys, including a whole basket of vegetables and a completely awesome dragon. Most of my toys were homemade too.

Of course, this filtered through to me - I’ve mentioned the surplus walkman before. On the music-making front, I made use of: kitchen utensils; cassette tape loops; weird instruments my parents had collected, like a psaltery, a manjolin, an ocarina; an early PC speech synthesizer fed through a disembowelled toy spring reverb; sound effects records spun slow, fast, and backwards; an electric guitar with its signal crammed through a Commodore monitor and my mum’s walkman speakers (I toasted them, along with many other devices); and a practice chanter for learning the bagpipes. These all showed up in the recordings of the Spastic Attack Dogs (a grand high school band name if ever there was one) - who reunited after university, learned to actually play, and became Flickershow.

After I moved out, I snagged an old wooden door from Mum and Dad’s place, propped it up on a pair of cabinets, and used it as a desk. It worked well except for the layers of peeling paint on it, which got worse due to me spilling water on it and frequently using it for drum practice. When my BF and I moved into our first apartment together in Toronto, I decided it was time to strip the paint off it. It turned out there was a layer of milk paint on it that wouldn’t budge, so we gave up, sanded the bugger to a splotchy, hideous, but smooth finish, and got new legs for it at Ikea. I still get ribbed about the “Eli and his *&#$ door” incident, but it’s big enough for two monitors, a synthesizer keyboard, a printer and a mixer, and I never see the surface of it anyway.

So of course I was delighted to discover ReadyMade, which is a magazine aimed square at people like me. Looks very cool - I even tried to subscribe, but their online subscription system broke in several ways and I got fed up. Will have to let them know.

So here’s my ongoing list of electronics projects, in rough order of difficulty:

• An expression pedal (based around a fader rather than a rotary pot) - the electronics are bonehead simple; it’s the woodworking to make the rocker that’s the tricky bit. Starting with locating our hand saw.
• A box with a simple photocell circuit for use an an expression-pedal input. Controlling something like the FilterQueen will require a more complex thing with a transistor or two, but I ain’t ready for that yet.
• A ribbon controller. (All praise the late John Simonton.)
• A simple fuzzbox circuit or two, snagged off the web (there’s loads of DIY stompbox circuits out there).
• And way down the road: a “fretless” electronic instrument that feeds a signal from a piezo pickup through an analog-delay comb filter with the feedback turned way up, creating a ringing tone. The delay rate, and thus the pitch, is determined by a ribbon controller. I’m picturing two or three of these stacked together to resemble a very nerdy guitar. Left hand fingers notes on the ribbon-controller strings; right hand thumps and taps and scrapes a set of pads in which the piezo pickups are embedded. There’s another control for damping/feedback, but I don’t know how that’s handled yet. Lots of learning to go before I tackle that… but it’s one I’ve had in mind for a long while.

Wednesday 2 August 2006

Controller controller

It’s one of those nights. The only thing the cats are out prowling for is a spot with a decent breeze. Last night was the hottest night on record - 27 degrees.

So what the heck am I doing, sitting in the sweltering living room with a soldering iron?

It’s my first actually useful electronics project! (Well, unless you include the headphones I kept resurrecting back in high school - when the connector died, I put on a new one; when the cord itself died, I replaced it with a truly nerdy-looking one made out of black and red speaker wire, braided together. It went well with my walkman, which was ten dollars, as-is, at Active Surplus.)

Basically it’s proof-of-concept for some alternate controllers I’m thinking of making. The prototype: one 25k potentiometer soldered straight to one 1/4” tip-ring-sleeve plug. Tip goes to the wiper; ring and sleeve go to the fixed connections. (All parts came from Active Surplus - the day they close up shop is the last day I have any need to set foot on old Queen West.)

Plugged it into the volume pedal input on my Alesis keyboard, and tested it out in Cubase: worked the first time. The range is a bit broad - only about the middle 50% of the knob’s travel is useful, and it goes off the scale at either end.

But then came the test: plugging it into the expression pedal jack on my FilterQueen. And it worked like a charm. No range problems - just sweet, sweet, filter sweepin’ goodness. (Say, is the name FilterQueen a very roundabout “sweeping” -> “vacuuming” joke?)

For my next trick: two photocells wired back-to-back, also attached to a TRS plug. Tip goes to the junction between the photocells, ring and sleeve to opposite ends. My hope is that it’ll act as a resistor ladder with variable resistances on either side, and thus provide a slightly weird, wobbly and responsive controller. Onward!

Edit, 2:48am: YES. Works great on the Alesis. No go on the FilterQueen though - design tweaks are in order. But for now, I think it’s bedtime.

Thursday 27 July 2006

Time off

On the way home, we decided to take a detour back to the turnpike, and found ourselves zig-zagging back and forth along the country roads north of Philadelphia while I tried to tell from my hastily-printed Google map whether this or that road ever hooked up.

“This way. No, whoops, not this way.” We pulled a U-turn, and I studied the map some more. “Trouble is, at this scale, none of the roads on this map have names.”

I looked up. The road to which we were now returning was called “Street Rd”.

We’d spent Sunday in midtown Manhattan, and ended up wandering idly through Central Park. There was a sort of roller rink set up near the southern end of the park, and we watched for a while before continuing on. In the distance, from the top of a hill, we could hear more music. “Oh, this sounds more like Eli’s kind of thing,” said Sean. A few steps later I realized who it was: Konono No. 1.

I’d been kicking myself for missing their show at Harbourfront a couple of weeks earlier. And now, here they were, playing for free, in Central Park. My companions found it a little monotonous, but I danced like a goof.

A few hours later, I realized that in all my bouncing I’d really done some damage to joints in the balls of my feet. Again. It’s Thursday now, and I can still barely walk. No more dancing until this gets fixed. Waah.

But that was probably about the only bad thing about the weekend. We saw family, we relaxed, we bought books, we ate good food, we learned stuff.

Sunday 9 July 2006

Half and half

Article in today’s Star about mixed-race people in Toronto. The headline bugs me (“latte”, indeed - genetics is more complicated than that) but it’s interesting to hear about other people’s experiences. We do definitely tend to spot each other - a Chinese/Brit-descended friend refers to us as “What the hell are you?” people. Or perhaps we’re just more likely to bring up the subject?

The only person who pegged my background right away was my optometrist. “Are you half Japanese, by any chance? And half British, or European?” she asked, as she flipped little lenses back and forth in front of my eyes.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “How did you guess?” Were there little flags embossed on my retinas? Was there a particular pattern to my irises?

“Oh, my husband is half Japanese, half French.”

I guess I’ve been lucky - in the very white schools I went to, I never really thought of myself as different from anyone else. Neither side of my family made me out as something “different”, at least that I can remember. Something I should ask my parents: did they ever get the ages-old routine about “why couldn’t you marry a nice [whichever-ethnic] boy/girl?”

The bit about Japanese Canadians and “cultural dilution” is true to a point. In the post-war years, the Japanese just sort of vanished into the woodwork. My mum didn’t grow up speaking the language, and she and my uncle married non-Japanese people.

On the other hand, I’ve been seeing more and more young Japanese people around - it seems like there’s been a new wave of immigration going on, enough so that there’s even a stylish little all-Japanese paper called Bits which covers life in the GTA.

Interestingly, on the other side of the family, we’ve recently confirmed that we’re not entirely Scottish, but probably half Scot, half Irish. Hurrah for more mixiness!

I’ve got a sort of birth mark that makes one side of my face look darker and freckled, with the dividing line going down the bridge of my nose. A few years ago I went to the trouble of masking it off and applying sunblock only to the lighter side, to accentuate the effect. I didn’t have the patience to keep it up for very long, but…

Hmm. Half and half. Maybe I should try it again.

Thursday 6 July 2006

the chart

The fever’s broken at last, musically speaking. Not quite burnt out on the New Pornographers, but they’ve finally been ousted from their stranglehold on my day-to-day playlist. By whom? Well, by the time I finally finish writing this, I’m sure it’ll have changed, but…

First, Neko Case. (Er… does that count?) Her latest, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, is lovely - I’m especially fond of the closer, “The Needle Has Landed”. (By an odd coincidence, my dad found a little button promoting the album in the parking lot of a restaurant where we’d happened to grab takeout. It’s now adorning the strap on my bass, along with a few of Spacing’s subway buttons.)

Second, dj BC’s Glassbreaks - an online-only album of mashups pitting Philip Glass against a diverse assortment of hip-hop and rap. It’s been taken down at the request of Glass’s publisher, but I think it’s still floating round the peer-to-peer networks. Faves: “Einstein On The Beast”, “For The Glasty” and “Stand Up Dance”, partly because of the choice of Glass bits, partly because of the texture of the voices. I think that’s what I like most about rap in all its myriad forms: low-key Q-Tip and growly Busta Rhymes, the speedy, way-glottal Dizzee Rascal. (Black East London accents sound marvelously exotic to my insulated, middle-class Canadian ears. Would I still find grime so interesting if that weren’t the case? I’m not sure. Man, I feel like such a tourist.)

Finally, Señor Coconut’s latest, Yellow Fever! Following up on his cha-cha tribute to Kraftwerk, Coco sets his sights on the next logical target, Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, and it seems to me to work better. There’s more here musically to dig into, especially on their early electro-lounge (“Tong Poo”, “Simoon”)... but oddly I think it’s the spare, difficult stuff on their middle albums (“Pure Jam” and “Music Plans”) that comes off best. And of course there’s Martin Denny’s old exotica chestnut “Firecracker” which, after what seems like a dozen different remakes by YMO and their remixers, finally comes full circle. Neato.

(Speaking of Kraftwerk covers, “Europe Endless” is a bluegrass tune just waiting to get out and sing. Listen to it. Is that not a banjo arpeggio? And a fiddle line? And aren’t those vocoded vocals a natural for a big soaring tenor harmony?)

Tuesday 4 July 2006

Along the streets

Took a couple cool walks through the west end, down the hill north of Davenport that marks the ancient Lake Iroquois shoreline, past the old Wychwood streetcar barns and the Tollkeeper’s Cottage, a couple of souvenirs of Toronto’s transportation history. The former site is slated for conversion to artists’ studios, greenhouses and parkland, the latter for restoration as a national heritage site.

And there were other neat things along the way - parks and neighbourhoods and friendly cats, and other stuff that may provide inspiration for the radio scripts I’ve been working on.

Down on Bloor Street, we passed by the trio of construction sites at Varsity Stadium, the Royal Conservatory and the ROM, and wandered down Philosopher’s Walk past the Conservatory and the U of T music building, there to check out the second lamppost bass installed by Richard Bishop (who ran across my post about his earlier installation, the Kensington Bass, and was kind enough to alert me to the arrival of its new sibling). A bit tough to play, but fun! I’ll have to come by with my contact microphone and an amp or recorder sometime.

Speaking of the urban landscape, city council is now seeking proposals to provide street furniture citywide. One side effect of this is that the Eucan “monster bin” project (see left) is dead. Good thing too - but we’d better keep an eye on the proceedings and let councillors know we want ads kept under control.

There’s also one really maddening bit: those three-sided “ad pillars” that AstralMedia have installed in parks are exempt from all this. They’re just off the sidewalk, and therefore within the jurisdiction of Parks and Rec, not Urban Planning.

More about this via Spacing Wire. Also, a Star article by Christopher Hume.

Also, on Friday, Newmindspace (instigators of Bubble Battles, subway and streetcar parties, and other revelry) are having a big mobile party they’re calling Flight Of Fancy, somewhere close to downtown. Route to be annouced via email. I’m gonna be there, hopefully playing some music!

Friday 30 June 2006

“Piltdown”

The song-a-day revival continues! (It’s an occasional project / working method I started a couple years ago - here’s the little manifesto-to-myself that I wrote back then.)

Feels good to be back in the saddle. Here’s the latest piece, working title “Piltdown”. Curious little one minute boogie.

2006_0629_piltdown.mp3 (1.1 megs)

Working order: drum loop - guitar - bass - lyrics/vocals - new drums. The guitar playing is definitely very David Byrne.

I haven’t been letting myself get away with just sketching in “la la la” melodies instead of lyrics. And I notice my subject matter (if you can call it that) is shifting a little bit too… though some themes continue to run through almost all my songs.

Also, from earlier in the week, a little snippet of me messing with the Filter Queen, using it on everything in sight:

2006_0626_glimmers.mp3 (700 k)

Today’s bon mot — “Like a fish in the headlights.”

Thursday 29 June 2006

“margins”

Yeah, it’s holy crap in the morning. But I finished a little songlet!

2006_0628_margins.mp3 (1.4 megs)

Apparent musical inspirations: listening to Nomeansno earlier today. Trying not to be straightforward with drums or bassline (playing the hihat stops was a pain in the ass). Recently I was chatting about bass playing with someone who’s been a producer for ages. “Never on the one!” he said. Guess I took that to heart tonight. Broke out the Fender for this too - it felt pretty neat to play something with that bright, fuzzed punky bass sound for once.

Wednesday 28 June 2006

Bows, bungosity and romantic traffic

Dream: I was working on a long-running TV show - for some reason I ended up minding two black horses that kept wandering in and out of the house set. Later, in the same building, I came upon a folk triio from Quebec who were busking and preparing for a stage performance. Several of their pieces consisted in large part of animal noises, especially frogs, produced with their fiddles and the leader’s double bass. I chatted with the leader about her playing and why her bow had a truss structure instead of a traditional light wooden shaft. The truss was heavier but gave her more oomph when playing, and was unusually bouncy if she used it the right way, which produced impressive frog-trills. (Compare earlier dreams about bass playing.)

New word, coined by Sean: bungus. First used to describe a book on marketing. A cross between “bogus”, “bung” and “fungus” - I like its connotation of something false and loathsome.

Moving immanent… We’ve given our notice at our current house. Time to start the purge of Stuff so there’s less to move on the day. We did manage to gather about three boxes’ worth of books last night to give away, and I’ve got a stack of CDs that need selling.

I’m much, much less particular about my CDs these days - before our last move a couple of years back, I had them all alphabetized, but that fell by the wayside once I got everything I listen to onto the computer. I like having the “hard copies” of some rare or important stuff, but mostly it just gathers dust on the shelf. Heck, aside from concerts and buskers, I haven’t bought an actual CD in ages.

Speaking of music… Really, I haven’t listened to much new music lately. For the past month, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the music of the New Pornographers and their songwriter-in-chief AC Newman. Some of their stuff I’m not so big on (I confess Dan Bejar’s stuff has never clicked with me) but probably two dozen of my Favorite Songs Ever are theirs.

But today, thanks to shuffle mode, I have a new favorite song, and - heh! whaddya know, it’s from BC as well: Nomeansno’s “Hello / Goodbye”. The little riff over just those chords, plus the lovely soaring round of “you will not follow me”... yes, yes, yes.

Ooh! And, via the ever-awesome Spacing Wire, here’s the video for the Spoons’ 1984 hit Romantic Traffic. Ah, the Can-con memories! The old red subway cars! The crimped and fluffy hair!

Tuesday 20 June 2006

Back from the woods

Midsummer’s closed Saturday - a great show, and cast and crew were wonderful. Glad I had the chance to be involved.

No time to rest, though… I was at the office until 11 last night doing a Flash piece at the last minute (a trivia kiosk for the grand opening of a new TV channel headquarters).

So tonight I’ve been taking a bit of a breather and, uh, reorganizing the studio completely. The turntable is now no longer above eye level, and no longer requires me to stand on a chair and put my head in the path of the ceiling fan to find a track. (I’m also happy to report that the bruises and swelling have gone down.) The Electrix units are now stowed in a small rack along with my other dusty effects units. (Yes, I bought the EQ Killer - it looked so lonely there by itself at the shop, and this way I have a dedicated preamp for the turntable rather than madly swapping cables all the time.) And drums and effects are all plugged into a little sub-mixer of their own. Finally, a use for that little Behringer that’s been sitting power-supplyless for months!

So of course, I’ve had random vinyl records playing through the FilterQueen while I work. And when I realized iTunes was still on, in Shuffle mode, I brought up my computer on the mixer to see what was playing. Well, this was it:

Night.mp3

I’ve always loved it when two completely unrelated things happen to be in the same key, or otherwise complement each other musically. The other day, sitting at a restaurant, I was totally spellbound by the sound of a baby squealing with laughter a couple of tables away, overtop of the jazz tune on the sound system.

“What’s up?” asked Sean.

“That kid. Just did the most awesome solo,” I said.

Perhaps I am easily amused.

Saturday 10 June 2006

Filters!

The other day, I stumbled across a used Electrix FilterQueen in a store, and snapped it up - a bit of a treat for myself. Instant musical fun!

I spent a couple of hours today playing my basses and guitar through it (using my POD as a preamp), and playing with long delays on the POD. So liberating to play with sound in realtime like that, instead of recording things and poking at them using software. Haven’t been able to use my Roland hihat pedal as a foot controller, though - not sure why not, since it seems to work fine as an expression pedal with my Alesis QS synth. Got to experiment.

And if that weren’t enough, the FilterQueen also takes a phono input! So I’ve finally got my turntable working again, and am currently listening to some traditional Japanese music from my grandparents’ collection. I have no idea what it is - I think it’s a Noh play, but I can’t enter Japanese text on this computer to look it up. In any case, it’s quite interesting and sounds hilarious when I filter the bejesus out of it. ^.^

[Addendum, some minutes later: wow… this thing can turn anything - especially weepy Japanese enka ballads - into early Yellow Magic Orchestra. This thing has totally paid for itself already.]

If I weren’t running sound for the play tonight I’d totally be here all night making weird noises.

Saaaay…

Wednesday 7 June 2006

‘squee’, I believe is the expression

Hadn’t seen this yet: the gender-bendy video for “Sing Me Spanish Techno” by the New Pornographers. Yet another reason to love them (cooler still ‘cause I’d just worked out the chords to the song the other day and have been playing it ever since). I like the little moment where Carl wakes up. :D

There’s a higher-quality QT version at director Michael Palmieri’s site, along with a lot of other cool stuff - check out his stop-motion work!

Thursday 25 May 2006

beep

Rediscovering a bit of my electronic/ambient side lately. We caught part of the night’s set at the Ambient Ping the other night and snagged a copy of their latest comp.

Also, there is new I Am Robot And Proud. Yay!

All this, and the work I’ve done so far for the play has reminded me I really want to do more Geometerish music. Gotta get over this whole “I’ll get to it as soon as I finish this project for somebody else” thing. Make time for the music!

Monday 22 May 2006

“now it’s over / yes it’s over”

Had another of those annoying dreams where you think of a great song, and write out lyrics for a whole verse and chorus… and then wake up and can only remember tiny bits of it. I scribbled down what I could, which was mostly the chorus.

I’m pretty damn sure I had words for a lot of it… though my sleeping mind may have exaggerated its utter brilliance. After all, “Molly In A Diner” came to me in a dream too.

Sunday 14 May 2006

RTD Drinking Game

Russell T. Davies is the man the BBC turned to to kick-start and produce the new Doctor Who series. From the start, everyone involved in the program showered him with praise, calling him “brilliant” and “a genius” and “the best TV writer in Britain today”. But his Who episodes have been generally the weaker ones. I think of him as a bit like (former Who script editor) Douglas Adams - bursting with neat ideas but seemingly unable to string them together into a coherent, satisfying plot.

So, here’s the first edition of the Oh No Not Another Russell T. Davies Episode Drinking Game. Contains spoilers, of course. Suggestions welcome.

* It’s set on another space station. Sip.
* Or we’re inside a famous British landmark. Sip.
* A PA voice says, “Visitors are reminded that…” Sip.
* We’re in a lift. Sip.
* ...and there’s that same damn lift shaft footage. Sip.
* Hugely anachronistic contemporary pop culture reference. Sip.
* Kids’ show/movie reference. Sip.
* Music or music reference from Davies’ youth (say, 1975-85). Sip.
* Bodily function joke. Drink. (It really helps get through the Aliens Of London two-parter.)
* A character appears who is essentially a face with no body. Sip.
* Joke about the Doctor’s accent. Sip.
* Another recurrence of a running gag. (“It’s not amusing, is it?” No, not really.) Sip.
* Someone says the word “naked”. Sip.
* Jackie mentions a new beau or makes a pass at someone. Sip.
* “Roxicoricofallapatorius.” Sip.
* The Doctor kisses someone or vice versa. Drink.
* Great big Bad Wolf or Torchwood speech. Bottle.
* The villain explodes all over everybody. Bottle.

We all repeat ourselves now and then, of course. Even Stephen Moffatt (“The Empty Child”, “The Girl In The Fireplace”) isn’t immune:

* “Dancing” as euphemism for sex.
* The Doctor complains to an animal about his companions.
* “Bananas are good.”

More general to the whole series:

* Sonic screwdriver used. Sip.
* ...to hack a computer. Another sip.
* ...or as something unscrewdrivery, like a medical scanner. Sip.
* Psychic paper used. Sip.
* “Everything has its time and everything dies.” Sip.
* The Doctor says “I’m sorry” to someone dead, dying or bereaved. Sip.
* Rose flirts with yet another guy. Sip.
* And yet Mickey comes back to her. Sip.
* Jack flirts with anyone. Sip.
* The Doctor has a gun, but doesn’t use it. Sip.
* Jack has a gun, and uses it. Sip.
* “Fantastic.” Sip.
* The Ninth Doctor calls humans “stupid”. Sip.
* The Tenth Doctor calls humans “brilliant”. Sip.
* Bad Wolf or Torchwood reference. Drink.
* “Doctor who?” Drink. And maybe cry a bit.

Saturday 13 May 2006

Tunes

Last night was a blast - great sets from Dave and Rich DeJonge and the David Hein Band. Each act did two sets, and for our second set we played as a quintet. Great three-part harmonies on “Gold Thieves”, and “Searchlights” finally came together live like it did on the CD. And we covered “Lucky” by Radiohead and “A Day In The Life”, which both benefitted enormously from having Lance and Ellen there. Hope we got a good recording.

Halfway through our breakneck rendition of “Idiot Grin”, I felt something sharp hit me in the back of the leg. I realized after a moment that it was part of one of Clark’s “hot rod” drumsticks. Hot Rods are essentially a slim bundle of narrow wooden sticks that are a little quieter than solid sticks, while still having a comfortable weight for playing, and Clark’s were disintegrating on the spot. Another piece of wood pinged off the back of my head during the bridge. After the show, Clark told me he’d bought them just when he joined Flickershow about a year and a half ago, and was curious to see how long they’d last. As it turned out… it was exactly long enough.

We’ll miss ya, Clark. Happy dadhood. :D

Clark lent me his DVDs of The Beatles Anthology, which are fascinating viewing (though how the band ever put up with the screaming fans I will never know). I wasn’t as familiar with their early stuff, so I’ve just heard “I’ll Follow The Sun” for the first time. What a nifty melody, with that augmented fourth!

Dreams: lots of people I didn’t recognize, all living together in a big (sometimes small) house for a few days. Middle-aged… but were we on some kind of sports team? Looked briefly like my Grandma’s house (the setting of many of my dreams when I was young). There was a thunderstorm, and lightning struck an old dead tree out the back, about three times. I could see the electricity snaking across the yard and into the foundation of the house to ground itself.

I woke up speaking in the voice of a mysterious new character for my radio plays.

Friday 12 May 2006

*grr*

Incensed enough at the headline in today’s Globe (about Stephen Harper’s government seeking easements to the Kyoto accord, because, you know, it’s just so dang tough!) that I wrote a letter. Took far too long, mostly because I kept second-guessing myself every step of the way - I think I have to do this more often so it comes more naturally. And I dunno that it’ll do anything, not with Harper in and an Ayn Rand fan as federal environment minister (Christ, she’s chairing the UN Convention on Climate Change meeting next week), but I said my piece, and got it out of my system for a bit.

Meanwhile, here’s a worthy climate-aware project: The Eat Local Challenge. I do my best to buy food from Ontario, but it’s not always easy, especially in winter. When it comes to vegetables, there’s not a whole lot of choice in our supermarkets, it seems - sometimes it’s Mexican imports or nothin’. Hmm… maybe I should be writing to Loblaws and IGA next. And going to farmers’ markets too.

• Contact the Prime Minister
• List of MPs
• find your MP by postal code