FoI

It had been a few years.
There had always been mixed messages,
But, helpfully, she'd sorted them in advance,
Placed along a spectrum, from extreme to extreme.

But what now? What did she think?
And what of then? What does she see?
Can I send her a Freedom of Information request?
Would the modest fee cover the emotional cost?

I brace myself as the brown envelope sits on the table.
I twitch as the phone rings.

I stare at the noise.
It demands.
It begs.
It withholds secrets I cannot know,
Though were I to comply, it may tell me everything.

But my table is bare. My phone dormant.
Her information is free, and that freedom includes the denial of my request.
With my intrigue rests a contentment.
The past, long gone, remains with me forever.

Incognito

I met Sandra Bullock the other night.

It was in a dream (of course), but it was she nonetheless.

It was mid afternoon on the Underground, a sparcely populated carriage. I forget which line. She was sat alone, just sitting, with shades on to mask identity. I was curious, so sat next to her. After a short time I enquired if she knew the time. The turn of head, catching eyes, tone of voice confirmed my suspicions that is was indeed her. After a minute or two I mentioned, sotto voce, that I was a big fan of her work. She allowed me to make conversation, and we chatted for a while.

I had little else to do during the afternoon before a train home, so I silently elected to get off at her stop. We continued to talk, how she found England to be, weather, books, history. I asked if she had time for a coffee, which she needed some persuading to accept. I said I would ensure she got to her appointment in some offices not too far away.

We had just over half an hour.

I found a caff on a back street, with few customers. We shared a large slice of lemon drizzle cake over a latte and pot of tea, and continued to talk about life, love, hopes and failures. It was all very easy and pleasant, no pretensions and no awe.

Leaving the caff, I walked her, as promised, to the offices. Just as we parted company I gave her a copy of my CD remarking "I'm not a doctor, but I think you ought to take one of these." Our warm valedictions included no talk of meeting again, or even being in touch.

I wonder if I'll see her again.

A Taste Of..

well.. it turns out my eldest is a fan of contemporary Icelandic folk.. Today she introduced me to the music of Of Monsters And Men - very nice too.

I have paused to reflect a little on musical introductions.

In our youth, my brother and I perused the record collexion of our father, elements of which helped inform our musical tastes. It worked out quite well - in the very late 70s to mid 80s when we were finding our way, Dad's LPs stretched from the earlyish 60s, through the 70s to a few then contemporary discs; acknowledging some overlap, Simon and I almost divided the collection in two, excepting a few stragglers. The music we discovered from then has remained with us since. My brother finds himself a lifelong fan of the more 60s based music, such as The Beatles, the blues, and rhythm and blues (hit, as they say, it..); I took more from the second half of the collexion, with such diverse elements as The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, ELO, Supertramp, 10cc - basically the building blocks of a life spent in the environs of progressive rock.


I have three children, and (sadly) do not live in the same house as them. For one reason and another it is highly unlikely that they will give much thought to looking through my LPs. Even were we to share accommodation it would still be an improbable proposition. From what I see there may be a few reasons.


My favoured format is not so common these days, my children are growing up in a culture where their jukebox is based around YouTube and other related phenomena. Whilst they know what to do with a CD, mostly, it seems that they would rather not.
My LPs are at least two formats old. They are not an instant medium. Whilst they offer a degree of random access, it is less than their successors. As we choose to label each successive generation with having shorter attention spans than their forebears there seems to be the expectation that the labels will be correct, and so allow technology to close the gap on desire and gratification. To my children, such ancient tech as the vinyl disc now seems a more than slightly alien concept, and less attractive as a route to music than the click of a mouse.


As an aside, I do question some of the short attention span claims; many youths over the last 15 years seem to be able to handle long films and lengthy series such as LOTR, Harry Potter and Twilight..


A second reason is that my favoured music is further removed from the present than where my adventure began. In the 80s when we were plundering Dads LPs, his collexion was taken from the culture and time he lived through, which was a still a recent memory. A fair swathe of the music was still played on the mainstream radio, maybe not on the hippest shows, but since it was, at the time, between 5 and 20 years old it wasn't so far out of reach. Some of the bands in Dad's collexion were even still making music.

My LPs represent a similar length of time as my father's, but offset by 5-7 years, from ~1968 to ~1983. My taste has never been immediately contemporary, and as such is less representative of 'my time' in the way that Dad's was of his. I do not have anything by Wham!, Duran Duran, Bros, Bryan Adams [errr, OK, I'm getting a little sketchy.. Since I didn't really pay any attention to what was hip after about 1983, I have little idea whom to list here!]. My children are unlikely to encounter the artists whose albums I possess anywhere other than my record collexion, so there isn't the same draw of 'Dad, do you have anything else by..'. It is not the case that there are vaguely familiar names as it was for me.

I believe there may be other factors of perception at play, along with standard generational differences, but they're probably not worth investigating at this point.


This is not to say that I cannot make small suggestions here and there to maybe help my offspring along the way in their journey of music. They may find my record collection irrelevant, perhaps artefacts of an increasingly lost time; but I hope I might be a relevant signpost here and there.

Having listened to 5 tracks from Of Monsters And Men, I was able to suggest some items from Laura Viers 'July Flame' album which were not poorly received. Perhaps in time I might be able to drop in some Fleet Foxes, then maybe a hint of CSNY, Joni Mitchell and Creedence ClearWater Revival.. Well, might as well try make the best of it - I know she'll never go for Genesis or Gentle Giant!

It's been a while

Well.. It's now over two years since my last post; some thing have changed, others remained the same. A time goes on will may fill in the gap - I may not. Still, a friend liked what had gone before, and with some things upcoming I thought I might write again. So, here I am. Hello.

Tomorrow still doesn't know

This was asked on the TC-Helicon facebook page by Joey Elkins (a fabulous singer, e.g. I really like this):
Music - where do you think it's headed in the future both vocally and instrumentally? How has it changed over the time you've been alive?

I kinda went to town a bit for a FB post, and it's a bit off the cuff, so not terribly well thought through - however, I thought it was worth posteritising it.. so here is my reply!

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Interesting question. From the point of view of a chap who grew up in the south of England in the 70s & 80s, and went to an all boys school (as an opening disclaimer!)..

It feels like the changes I've seen through the years are from diversity in style to diversity in distribution.

From the mid 50s to the mid(ish) 80s saw bands and individuals be more willing to borrow from other genres, cultures, etc. Rock and pop drew inspiration from India, from the Andes; lifting sections of 'classical' music; high art would borrow from jazz, and emulate rock & disco; the boundaries of what can be done, and rules about what is allowed to be juxtaposed and superimposed on what were broken down. We got progressive rock, we got minimalism pervading popular culture, we got world music. Probably the last innovation was rap, which had already debuted by the 80s.
I love that time, my central love is the progressive rock of the early to mid 70s. You have Gentle Giant, Yes, King Crimson, Family, Stackridge, Penguin Café Orchestra, etc all sipping from a melting pot of music. Today it would probably be given that frightful badge of 'mashup'..

Time moves on.. whilst other musics have developed, they haven't seemed as embracing as previous periods. House music and its derivatives are largely just dirty disco; Techno and it's sub genres has its roots in the electronica of years ago; grunge was arguably just folk with louder guitars, in the same way that punk was rockerbilly played more aggressively. Even prog now has been reduced to rehashing what others did before, rather than forging their own path.

The diversity that was present within albums appears to have given way to more narrowly defined musics, but there is more of it in each bucket, and more ways of getting it out. Maybe its a natural extension of how to get heard - be really good at one thing, refine its essence, and push it through particular channels. 30 years ago the distribution channels were quite fixed, and companies were more prepared to invest in the development and creativity of their 'roster'; time has made the distribution more fluid and the very idea of a roster seems like fairy talk.

Where is is going to..? For the moment, I can only see things getting more segmented, with individuals focussing on niches where they feel happy to create, without reaching beyond too many boundaries. Artist development will be a personal thing, funded individually. I believe that greater diversity per artist will re-emerge, but it'll take some time. Even tho' we have reduced the world to a small café with the internet, the crossover and cross-pollination of styles has barely started - I think there will be a renaissance of the spirit of musical adventure that was seen 30-50 years ago, but it won't happen overnight.

We'll still be playing the same instruments (things like the Chapman Stick, and Eigenlabs wonderful Eigenharp will remain on the margins), we'll still be singing the same notes (microtonal stuff still hasn't caught on, despite various efforts); it's just, perhaps, our method for choosing those notes and the spaces between them needs to relax again.

Feel free to shoot me down.

Tomorrow never knows

I've been reflecting on a bit of code I've had to write recently, and it's got me thinking about how far ahead one should think in designing things - whether it be software (as with me) or anything else..

For a current piece of work, I have inherited a code base which is well suited for its intended use. It doesn't appear to have much fat/ bloat/ unneeded features. It has structure, it has an apparent internal parsimony which holds it together as one would hope. The user interface of the software is primarily mouse driven, and as such the controls are well set up for the various interactions that the modern computers tend to offer when it comes to pointing devices - move over, clicking with any of three buttons, mouse wheel support, etc.

A new feature was added just before I got the code, something that required accepting keyboard as well as mouse input. This is cross platform code, supporting Apple Mac & Windows. The Apple code was working as hoped, but the Windows code wasn't. So I went to have a look.

It was very clear that the keyboard-based enhancement given to the Mac side of the code was very much an afterthought - something bolted on to the fairly tight code that was already there. It stuck out, not in an ugly fashion, but like a new extension on a house where the bricks haven't been matched to the original structure. The corresponding Windows code had not been written at all, and so my task was to write it. The nature of the framework/library presented certain challenges, based on how the original code had been designed. It had been designed with just the purpose of getting the job in hand done (that is, mouse based input), and so weaving new functionality was not as simple as it could have been if there had been an eye kept open to the future.

My observations are not a criticism of the original developer (be they one or many), but more about the nature of what should be included during the design phase of a project.

The term 'Agile' has been a buzzword in many circles for a number of years, and software development has not been shielded from it. In software it frequently manifests itself as a strategy for getting done only what needs to be done at a given time, and if needs change in the future, then you just adapt what you did previously. There is some sense to this - why prepare for something that may never be needed?

I must confess, I've never been totally sold on the whole 'Agile Development' thing (with a capital 'A'). Being 'agile' (lowercase 'a') seems a good idea to me - being able to respond quickly to change, and building the tools & libraries with which one can meet those challenges looks like reasonable sense. But an ethos of 'do today what you need today' often comes across as a little shallow. Does it work, or does it just commoditise development in an unhelpful way? Many places seem to swear by it, but it's largely the developers who blow that trumpet: might I suggest that there's a hint of MRDA about this - they are the ones who benefit the most, since (perhaps) it is a way of ensuring longievity of employment, as "built-in obsolescence" doesn't really factor with software in the same way that it does with physical products..

hmmm.. Getting a little sidetracked here, I might return to that topic another day (I might not).. However, the question remains - to what extent should one have an eye on the future when making something today?

When a carpenter designs a standard rectangular table, should they make allowance for a possible fifth leg to be added? Would experience suggest that this may be rather pointless excercise?

When purchasing land to build a road, should allowance be made in advance for potential escalation of traffic numbers and the possible need for future widening? Would experience suggest that this may be a prudent thing to at least explore.

My guess is that it's the 'experience' which would dictate these things. Carpenters will generally have some idea how many legs will be needed to support the weight of wood they have before them. Transportation Planners have access to all kinds of statistics of traffic flows & growth rates for more types of road than any of us could be interested to know existed. Based on my time sat writing software I know that, had I been one of the original designers of the library I have been working on, I would have put in some provision for keyboard input. However, I may have well been very wrong to do so, since experience of this type of product would suggest that it was an unnecessary design feature (given that it's a totally mouse driven environment in over 99% of this niche market), and I would be putting fat where it wasn't needed.

It would have made today's job a lot easier though.

The past comes calling

One of my favourite corners of the internet, known as KvR, runs various competitions.

There is a monthly writing comp in which a piece must be written & recorded within certain defined boundaries (mostly a limit to the length, must stick to a given theme, but occasionally others). The first three weeks of a month are devoted to the writing and recording, then the last week all the entrants (and other forum members) vote on the pieces to decide a winner. I've never won, but have entered many times through the years; generally there are 50-70 entries. Worst I did was last, best was 4th, generally I'm in the first quarter. I do it more for fun than chart position. Some of my entries can be found here.

KvR also runs 'Developer Challenges,' where independent developers get the chance to enter a new creation each, and the community gets a ton of new free stuff! There have been three (DC06, DC07 & DC09); I (both uniquely and cheekily) have entered 4 times.. I have faired averagely, which I don't mind; the things I have written have been devised & created during snatched moments and so their ranking is probably a fair assessment. However, they have garnered attention away from the arena of competition, being recommended by folk at varying intervals. This has been very pleasant. From checking server logs (in the way that one does), I have found a new reference to my DC09 entry 'SynecDC.' It's from the myvst website and can be found here.



I enjoyed making SynecDC, and there is an idea for a big brother to it which will add further modulators; but it's not coming any time soon! My favourite patch is "DragonCity" which can be heard at 1:29.