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Hooligan Superstar by Lairds of Scunthorpe

Sam — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:37:56 +0000

This latest from Lairds of Scunthorpe started when I was trying out my new LPD8 drum pads and wanted to see whether I could come up with anything useful using just the 8 pads and a sampler. That’s how I got all the rhythms and the bassline, but I was forced to add the melody using a keyboard. Then played around with the arrangement in Logic.

Here is the Music Player. You need to installl flash player to show this cool thing!

Stuff I Liked 2009 – Music

Sam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:00:55 +0000

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

Some Cool Things I Did This Year – Music

Sam — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:25:43 +0000

While I managed to successfully resist the lure of the Maschine, I did fall victim to a few other musical bits and pieces – enough to warrent serious practice and a bit too much late night fiddling around. The main output being the first Lairds of Scunthorpe material.

It’s a mixture of experimental keyboard/sampling/beats and guitar. Here, hopefully, are a couple of examples.

Beats v1.0

Human League (Not)

Some Cool Things I Did This Year – Videos

Sam — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:20:23 +0000

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

Long Time Coming

Sam — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:26:05 +0000

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.