2009 was about getting back into music in a pretty big way. Not only in listening to a whole lot more, but actually buying and even making some. I’ve pretty much dumped the idea of buying CDs from old skool shop type places and moved to buying it online or simply downloading it. I suspect this is because my music playing system(s) are all now digital. I haven’t had a CD player that works (aside from the laptop) for well over a year and my 30 year-old amp is fast becoming an anacronistic desktop weight rather than a well-used piece of music equipment. So I’ve started downloading stuff, which goes straight to the iTunes library and there to the numerous iPods/Phones that I have. And while purists might diss the quality of the mp3s and even the lossless compression versions, I really can’t tell the difference.

I even went back and saw some live events! And not just bullshit cello/turntable catastrophies. Seasick Steve in Manchester was great, the most superbly refrained standup audience I’ve ever been in with the exception of the devastatingly drunk lurching Chav Family, who found the experience so horrifying they had to stumble to freedom halfway through. But Daedelus at the ICA in July was awesome. Superb ninja shape cutting dancing and excellent music.

My own music is still in a very basic shape, but it’s slowly coming along.

Downpipe single cover

So what was I listening to and what did I like in 2009. One useful side effect of digitising my entire music listening experience is that it can all be measured. Unfortunately, none of the various measuring elements link to all my devices, which is a pain. Anyway, of all of them, the iTunes list is probably the most comprehensive. According to this, my top tracks for 2009 are:

• Blue Skies (Rabbit In The Moon) – BT feat Tori Amos
• Downpipe – Mark Knight & D Ramirez vs Underworld
• Theme From Long Good Friday – Francis Monkman
• Surf Solar – Fuck Buttons
• Gaia (Kaiser Souzai Remix) – Kaiser Souzai
• Come Into My World (Fischerspooner Mix) – Kylie
• Behind The Wheel – Susperia
• Hazy/Crazy – Da Hool
• Heaven Up Here – Echo & The Bunnymen
• Shattered In Aspect – Faith & The Muse

All of which gives a somewhat skewed view of 2009. However, if you look at just the music that was released in 2009 (or was new to me in 2009), a slightly different picture emerges.

• Downpipe – Mark Knight and D Ramirez vs Underworld
• Tarot Sport (album) – Fuck Buttons
• Temporary Pleasure (album) – Simian Mobile Disco
• The Resistance (album) – Muse
• Moon Soundtrack (album) – Clint Mansell
• My Way (album) – Ian Brown
• Tonight (album) – Franz Ferdinand
• It’s Not Me, It’s Doctor Rosen Rosen (album) – Lily Allen
• Runaway – Ladytron
• Hands (album) – Little Boots

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Just spent some time at the Dieter Rams exhibition at the Design Museum and I can now see not only why there were so many ‘Apple is the new Braun’ articles around the time they decided to get all perforated aluminium with their machines, but where the thinking behind the design comes from.

Rams led the Braun design team for 40 years and developed a powerful philosophical approach to design which is summed up in his ten principles of design.

Early portable tape machine (requires several strong people to carry)

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design makes a product understandable.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is long-lasting.
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally friendly.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

The range of items the Braun team applied these principles to was enormous, from toasters and cigarette lighters to tape machines, home film cameras, music systems and shavers. And the exhibition shows off many of them and you can see the realisation of the principles in the spartan design as well as the design vocabulary of the buttons and shapes that have become utterly iconic. It’s impressive how few of today’s products even begin to meet Rams’ principles.

And you can also see the effect Rams’ principles have had on modern industrial designers, not least Apple’s Johnathan Ive, whose commentaries on his designs echo Rams’ early experiences as a carpenter and artisan. In particular, how the design for the iPod epitomises much of what Rams was doing and thinking, much more so than the perforated aluminium Mac towers. It’s just a shame that, while they’ve got a new MacBook and iPod, they haven’t actually got any kind of quote from Ive himself.

Once we all dreamt of having hi-fi systems like this (with a record player and tape machine)

Overall, it’s a nice exhibition and the exposure to Rams’ principles is inspiring, but I would have liked to have more commentary on the development of the principles and when and how Rams came up with them. I’d also like to have had more of a direct link to current products that echo these principles, the one case of stuff they have is hardly enough to suggest a long-term legacy. Otherwise you’re left with a bit of a feeling that this is an exhibition about the past (and the past of Braun in particular), rather than one about a powerful design philosophy that is as relevant today as it ever was.

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OK – after what seems like an age, it’s time to recall some of the best things I found over the last year.

Movies and TV

Last year’s best movie was French (the awesome OSS117), so there was no chance of that happening again. Instead we went off on a sci-fi vibe, I guess some kind of instinctive reaction to the economic implosion and the apparent death of vision and dreaming made flesh in the doom and gloom of the real world. It seems to me that sci-fi is doing what it always did best, providing clear visions of the future based on the prevailing philosophies and moods of the present. As a result we’re seeing futures that, if not echoing the total dystopia seen in the 1970s, at least mirror some of the concerns of today. And at a time when no one, politicians, broadcasters, entertainers, media etc seem capable of presenting us with an even palatable vision of life in the next decade, it’s no surprise that sci-fi is coming back in a big way. What is surprising is that it’s coming at us from so many different angles – not just movies, but books, TV series, comics etc – and that this is the most comprehensive channel for discussion or thought about where we’re heading.

So … Best movies and TV

1. Star Trek Never thought I’d be so impressed by a movie that didn’t feature the Gone or those crazy starfish things that flew at Kirk before sucking his brain out, but this was brilliant. The Fleet isn’t quite the Peace Corps in space it used to be, but it’s not the fascist theocracy of Starship Troopers either and in a year when movies like 2012 just showed how vacuous ‘effects event’ movies can be, it was great to see something that was really about story and plot. The best thing about it was that when it was over, you just wanted to get back on and go for another adventure with those guys.
2. Moon Almost the exact opposite, a smallish budget movie with tiny cast centered round a clone on the moon, but really all about identity, dreams and freedom. Moon was like Alien, but with less budget and no scary monsters (unless you count Kevin Spacey in ‘HAL’ mode). Killer soundtrack too.
3. Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles Series 1 starts off in that sketchy space that exists between Terminator 2 and 3, then catapults the Connors into an alternate timestream. By Series 2 it has its own mythology and features so many people zapping back and forth in time that it’s amazing that no one here has noticed. And yet again, while being superficially a sci-fi series it is actually about family relationships and multiple quests for identity, not least from the various Terminators at large in and around the LA area.
4. Misfits I pretty much loathed Heroes. It seemed as plastic as it could be, the equivalent of those comic books like The Avengers, which exist solely to allow those fanboy fights that shouldn’t happen in a regular book (like Ironman’s dirty dozen v all the bad mutants in the world). Misfits, on the other hand, was genius. In keeping with the comic legend, a bunch of people are given superpowers. Only they’re young urban adolescent chav scum. And they don’t immediately set out to save the world. Fucktastic.
5. GI Joe OK, so if we are going to go all CGI and spastic special effects on ourselves, then it might as well be in the hands of Junior Michael Bey Boy, Stephen Sommers. Sure it’s stupid, stupid, stupid and it does feature the usual Sommers plots of mad professor type doing bad things and having to be restrained, but it’s waaaaay funnier than Transformers.
6. Spooks While I was initially blown away (in every sense) with Spooks dedication to incinerating almost all of its key cast members, I’m not sure Season 8 was up to snuff as it were. Sure we lose pretty much the whole team over the course of the series, and there was a vaguely satisfying overall plot (not as good as the Russian plot of series 7), but there was still the sense of one too many ‘terrorist of the week’ episodes. Also because everything moves so fast in spookworld, we really don’t see the effect of individual’s actions on them in much detail. Still glad to have got rid of Ross Myers. She sucked.
7. Crank Fully in the Misfits camp, Crank is about turning everything up to about 15 (out of 10). It’s about The Stath with no inhibitions and the mind of a muckraker driven to doing anything to keep himself alive. At once both snot-snortingly hilarious and wince-inducingly cringeworthy, this is a movie that really affects you.  And at 88 minutes, it just flies by.

Meanwhile in the shit pit …

1. Watchmen Was it really only this year that this was released? It seems like so long ago. Bum-numbingly terrible and another example of how comics are not simply storyboards for movies. Maybe, like Lord of the Rings, it works better for people who’ve never actually read the books. Although it  wasn’t as bad as Wolverine The Backstory.
2. 2012 Yawn. Another day, another disaster movie from Roland Emmerich. And like all his other movies, all the best bits are in the trailer, with the added benefit of having the tedious exposition and dreary ‘human interest’ storyline removed. How far can this guy fall after Independence Day?

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Minimal effort video using a toy camera, iMovie and Logic for the music.

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So yeah, I had the birthday, which was very enjoyable thanks for asking.

The Roundhouse playing piana

We went off to see the David Byrne ‘Playing The Building’ installation at the Roundhouse during one of its ‘bring your own tambourine’ evenings, which had the potential for both awesome spectacle and truly painful knitted raffia music. The reality was a bit half and half. I felt a little let down by the installation. While it’s a great idea – a kind of artistic Einsteurzende Neubauten (go google them) without the full on destruction – I thought it veered too far in the direction of installation rather than an actual functional experience. You can see that the single piano-cadavered instrument sitting in the middle of the Roundhouse makes a fantastic image, stark, empty and a fusion of ancient and modern, but it would have been far more interesting to have more instruments controlling the sounds made by the building. Certainly more people would have been able to interact with it than were allowed for by the single piano and you’d have had a much more exciting, cacophonic experience.

It was, however, a genius idea to allow people to come in on certain evenings with their own instruments. Again, this could have been a recipe for disaster. Instead it was somehow incredibly touching and polite as bunches of people with guitars, tubas, those mouthy blow organ things that the guy in Gang of Four had, toy instruments and a variety of other wind and percussive things strolled around the space playing their own things, while trying not to overwhelm anyone else. And while it could have gone all Glastonbury porridge field, it somehow didn’t. Not my usual thing, but really good.

View from Arundel Castle

Meanwhile in my search for the perfect iPhone app, I’ve discovered two really sweet ones. The first is the carefully hidden tilt-shift filter in Photo FX (find it in Lens fx /depth of field). Tilt-shift being the effect that makes everything look like it’s a teeny weeny little model as exemplified by my favourite Monster Truck videos (see this post). While hardly perfect, it’s pretty good as you can see from these images. I would like to be able to alter the blur areas but that’s just being picky.

The other great app is iDrum Underworld. A bunch of Underworld tunes, including Cowgirl, Born Slippy and King of Snake, which you can mix up and use to create your own stuff. Really compelling and pretty addictive. As one review said, ‘This steals your life’.

I’ve also started to get back into running using my favourite social media site (or at least the one I’ve been most active on), Nike+. I’m using their now-working-pretty-well Coach facility, which has me doing very simple daily runs, although that will ramp up as the weeks progress. You can follow my attempts to get one leg in front of the other on Twitter.

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