Ahh yes, lovely soft beaches . . . . made of pebbles.
Cue Mark E Smith singing “British people in hot weather“.
I’m nearly at my last stop on this global circumnavigation on this ‘cultural technology consultant world tour 2007’. Currently I’m in Brighton then on to London before spending 24 hours in a small seat in a long metal tube.
I’ve been in Cuba running some Web Dos workshops. One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to Santa Maria beach about 30 minutes outside Havana. We were working hard even at the beach making a sitemap in the sand. The actual site itself will be up here very soon.
I’ve decided to (finally) hang up my pen for 3D World.
Here is my last column which should be in next week’s issue.
A very incomplete archive of older columns exists on the web. I will, one day, make it complete and add the last few years’ worth of writing (2004-2007). Sadly some of the oldest columns (1992-94) are lost forever as the result of a hard disk failure many years ago.
The Final Perilous
Folks, this is the final ever Perilous. I have decided that the time has come to free up these column inches for some new writers.
It has been 15 years since I started writing this column, first called ‘Subterranea’, for 3D World and in that time a lot has changed – and not just the music. When this column started the Internet was just used by nerds at university and the Web in its graphical and visual form didn’t exist, let alone file sharing and CD burners. In order to find out about music in other parts of the world you had to rely on specialist record shops importing the right stuff, and print magazines. And as a DJ you had to form close relationships with your local record store owner to make sure you got first access to the weekly shipments. This column, unsurprisingly started as advertorial for Disco City, a specialist dance music importer that had recently relocated to Crown St in Surry Hills. I would get to choose a bunch of new music to write about, 3D World would get good content, and they would get publicity. My column was initially fortnightly, shared with DJ HiShock who I had initially inherited the off-weeks from. Within a year the column was independent and the coverage had spread to the nascent free party scene (Vibe Tribe) and the emerging production underground – Clan Analogue and the like.
A large number of Perilous columns are archived, going back a decade, on the web. I hope that they provide a useful resource for people wanting to look back to the fertile period of the 90s through my rather biased eyes (and ears). I’ve had the privilege of writing about things as they happened – early Warp and ambient electronica, jungle, drum & bass, trip hop, glitch, and much more – the development of local scenes, documentation of parties, important releases – it has been great. One of the highlights of my time here was in the mid 90s, after the violent shutdown of the free party scene, when I had the opportunity to share column readers between Perilous and the the writing of Miguel d’Souza and later Mark Pollard who were writing about the local hip hop scene. At that time there was a great deal of cross mingling of scenes and sounds between hip hop and electronica – crowds crossed over, parties mixed, it was a wild time helped also by the ‘audio’ versions of our written columns running back to back on 2SER (where I still host a regular weekly show – Monday nights 830pm, 107.3fm). Miguel and Mark exposed me to a whole new set of sounds and people, and this set in motion a chain of events that resonated across sounds and styles through to the early 2000s.
By the late 90s, it had become clear that the future of music was going to be digital. CD burners had become affordable, and later with the exponential spread of broadband and the development of P2P technologies, the barriers to access music that had existed previously began to disappear. Now in 2007 the filters of music are much more globally spread – they aren’t your local record shop owner anymore, or probably just one or two magazines. You probably consult many different information sources – I get about 50 RSS feeds daily to my laptop which then provide me with current news about music and culture – and obtain your music from global sources, both legitimate and illegitimate. As a result individual tastes are more eclectic and even shitty pop music is more diverse, and globally influenced than it was 15 years ago. Never before has so much music been so accessible to so many people. Does that make it better? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
Thank you to all my regular readers, people whose taste I have influenced, people who have been irritated or inspired by these columns. Thank you also to the independent artists and record labels who sent me music to comment on, and to the staff and many different editors of 3D during my time writing for the magazine. I’ve had a lot of fun. If you want to keep pace with my new projects then check out www.cyclicdefrost.com.
Yellow Peril/Sub Bass Snarl/Seb Chan (www.snarl.org)
Two weeks ago to the day I was in New York departing to come home.
New York is a great large city. It has a wonderfully diverse population, crazy characters, and a fine balance between high density living and urban amenity. Central Park offers an oasis away from the urban jungle, whilst public transport, is cheap and fantastic. The larger cities become the more I think you appreciate the difficulty in maintaining a sense of ‘live-ability’ – how to ensure populations get on with each other but reflect exponentially growing global networks and flows of immigrants, ideas and cultures; and manage the diverse infrastructure needs of these people.
In amongst a stack of work engagements I tracked down a second hand pre-release ‘review copy’ of Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You at Strand Books, this enormous second hand bookstore in the middle of midtown Manhattan. I was so excited to get a copy. Well that, a stack of Cabinet back issues in an art store in Dumbo, and the Circle album Miljard at Other Music.
Over the last fortnight I’ve been dipping in and out of the book – a collection of short stories. It is wonderful. July’s stories are surreal vignettes of everyday life, tinged with a sadness and self-concious sense of self. Much like her feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know there is a great attention to little everyday details – smells, sounds, thoughts, emotions. Details. Details that nervous and shy people (the characters that July is interested in) obsess about. The first thing that struck me about the stories was the lack of quotation marks. Characters don’t ‘say’ anything in quotes – every interaction, every story is, itself conversational. Character’s thoughts and spoken words blend into one.
I haven’t read fiction for quite a while. I don’t get the time to really. But this is a fantastic and compelling quirky read.
The promotional website – http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/ – is a lovely touch too.
Gutterbreakz guesting on Loki’s fabulous blog An Idiot’s Guide To Dreaming recalls his early obsession with Jean-Michel Jarre. Gutter writes,
Appropriately enough, I discovered Jarre whilst on holiday in France around the turn of the eighties. One of my Dad’s friends allowed me to have a listen to his new gadget – a clunky item about the same size and weight as a house brick called a ‘Sony Walkman’. The cassette was Jarre’s “Equinox”, and I can honestly say that my young mind was utterly blown and my senses completely ravished by the electronic sounds emanating from those daft little orange spongy earphones. What I heard during the twenty minutes I was allowed to use the Walkman probably coloured my future tastes more than anything else. The swooping filtery analogue melodies, the pitter-pattering electronic percussion, the sense of floating through entire new galaxies of sound…an audio rush that I’ve been trying to reach again and again ever since.
My own interest in Jarre covers a similar period – Rendezvous, Zoolook – all on cassette. Perhaps not surprisingly Jarre was often ‘covered’ by programmers making music as soundtracks for their video games. It was the classic platform-style game Bomb Jack in its Commodore 64 port that made me track down Jarre – his tune Oxygene forms the relentlessly catchy background music to the action. Of course, like all video games of the time, it was uncredited . . . I’m pretty sure the few Jarre tapes I bought for my Walkman are long gone.
The Amazing Rolo demonstrates a very nifty bit of Max/MSP programming connected to a Nintendo Wii controller to screw with and ‘perform’ his sample-driven beats.
(via Make)
Over at Fabchannel there is a recent-ish live show from Junior Boys. I rated their debut album Last Exit much more than their follow up So This Is Goodbye and here on this live show the skitter-y Timberland-inspired rhythms of the older tracks don’t really translate so well with the live drums. If you liked Violator-era Depeche Mode then you’ll love this stuff – I was more into New Order.
Probably what excites me more about this is the whole Fabchannel thing which gives you an entire live show with sound quality suitable for computer speakers and decent video. The Flash interface is nice with easy skipping tracks and fast forwarding. These are all recorded in Amsterdam’s Melkweg and Paradiso and stay online for however long they have been able to negotiate rights for. There is a list of ‘expired’ shows as well which is a really nice touch giving a transparency to the whole rights issue which for me almost highlights a ‘blacklist’ of artists.
If you check their archive of cleared stuff you’ll find some fun stuff including all sorts of indie pop and post rock like Wire, Stars, Do Make Say Think, The Wedding Present, and Najah Attabou (which first got me onto this site via Jace’s Mudd Up) buried amongst plenty of other things not so aligned to my taste.
From one of my favourite blogs, History is made at night –
A black box emitting a high pitched pulsing sound designed to deter loitering teenagers is being used in thousands of sites around Britain just a year after its launch, prompting warnings from civil liberties campaigners that it is a “sonic weapon” that could be illegal. The Mosquito device, whose high-frequency shriek is audible only to those under around 25, has been bought by police, local councils, shops, and even private home owners, to tackle concerns over groups of young people congregating and causing disruption.
Apparently from the Guardian initially.
Crazy stuff. I wonder how long it will be before they are widely deployed in shopping malls.
Even more crazy is that this is from the SAME company that developed the ‘secret teen-only mobile phone ringtone’ – the mosquito ringtone?
I’m sitting at the dinner table writing up some reviews with headphones on. My wife is sitting on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Up wafts TV On The Radio’s ‘Playhouses’ which is obviously providing the backing to a particular scene. Except it goes for more than the usual 5 seconds. I get up to see what is going on – “why is this song keeping on going?” I think to myself. It has been 30 seconds now. And still it goes on. And the scenes change.
Then I realise my mistake.
No, music isn’t being used to underscore a ‘point’ in the narrative in the way has been used for decades. No, music isn’t being used to tweak emotions. It is simply being included to ‘shift more units’ and to ‘break bands to core audiences’ in the era of downloads.
Silly me. How naive of me.
I’m pretty sure the viewer is not supposed to realise that they are being ‘marketed’ to.
I have (almost) promised myself that this won’t become a parenting blog. (My excuse is we are busy at work building a portal and series of interactive media for children at the moment.)
But here is another great article from the New York Magazine – The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids – New York Magazine.