It's summer

It's been a whole week since I posted; as I said - what was to say? I have this seriously nasty cold? Until this morning I have been dizzy and deaf from the ear infection part of it. Right now I don't feel absolutely shit for the first time in a week and a half. And it's sunny and warm and walking to work was a pleasure and I could listen to headphones and chose Johnny Cash (American IV) knowing I have part III on my computer waiting to be put onto iRob whenever my ears are up to music again.

Went out to dinner in my favourite restaurant (mentioned below) last night. And guess what? The prices are up and the quality is down. The paneer came in what seemed to be the juice of a can of alphabet spaghetti without the slug like pasta. Do cooks think we won't notice that they have resorted to pouring sugar into the food? Listen, the thing with tomato sauces is you got to cook them. Takes time. No substitute for it. For some reason indian food cannot accept passata or other prepared tomatoes in it either. You have to cook from scratch. If you've not done the experiments save your time: I have.

Oh well, it was still good and not expensive. And they have more chillies in their food now.

I normally call in on DarkTeen on a Tuesday to watch Star Trek (one of countless bad habits) but I felt another night doing nothing would kill my cold, and anyway we've bittorrented half the series (if you want spoilers...). Then my beloved rang to say she'd booked our holiday in Mexico in June (and she'd got a decent price, she's much better at this stuff than me) so we had to go out to celebrate.

"Can I groove a jump off your bake."

What? It's a phrase from a tobacco company's glossary accompanying a policy document on marketing to generation x (this was '94). That and another wonderful brainstorming session on selling candied tobacco to the kids are at www.fairenough.com. As they say themselves "it might be funnier if it wasn't true".

Excuse the delay in writing - I had a nasty head cold and I was thinking at home that I should get a phone (and therefore the net) - but then I realised what would I talk about, the incredibly detailed hallucinations I was having? Or how my lips cracked open from dehydration because I couldn't breathe properly? Whoops, I already have.

Apparantly it's #29

I popped over to the Dewaele brothers website and found out the radio soulwax sessions are up to 29. That's this month's download, I was listening to it on the way to work this morning, but I didn't hear much.

Get this mix by JD Twitch

I went over to the site of those people that did the Kill the DJ mix CD (Optimo/Twitch and Wilkes) and they have a free mix available, starts off dancehall d'n'b and goes into A forest by the Cure and Radio by Joy Division. Loses a bit of impetus towards the end but it's still fantastic and free.

Apparantly there are 1o more about in the filesharing world for those that participate in that.

I still want to talk about Daft Punk...

...but I ended up listening to Annie's debut album Anniemal instead of taking notes (it's all about the detail with Daft Punk) and loving her fizzy pop. It seems to have been released last year but I only saw 12"s in the shops in the last couple of weeks. That's what happens when they release stuff on CD only; I don't even find out about it. We've loved her stuff (what little there was) since The greatest hit which, according to all the web bios was released in 1999. Maybe, but you try buying it outside Norway before Summer 2000 when I did. Unfortunately her producer/partner Erot died and nothing else was released apart from I will go on which I got on a 2002 release on Loaded.

I always had a thing for breathy girly pop like St. Etienne or Dubstar, and the most played songs on my iPod are cheesy pop (including a couple of Richard X things and he produced the first single from Anniemal), but I can understand that others find it cloying. Nothing on this album has, for me, the sonic impact of greatest hit with it's solid house beat allied to silly disco toms and serious sonic manipulation undermining the pop melody. If you listen close you can hear lots of sounds that appear to have been recorded inside the mouth or very, very close amped up, looped, and multiechoed. The track has a sonic richness allied to glossy melodic pop that you rarely find.

That, and I listened to some of the How to kill the DJ part two, so no in depth examination of Daft Punk's attempt to bring a live rock dynamic to their programmed dance, how they dirtied their beats, and yet, how they haven't stretched beyond one of the many microgenres Arling and Cameron invented for themselves to very little success. It's hard not to feel a little jealous of Optimo, like they're stealing your thing by putting out these releases full of records that you know and love, and that a certain community know and love. But hey, they do it, and they do it better than I could!

A mixed bag of scores...

Went record shopping with a mate this Saturday. Picked up some old Yello secondhand in Abbey Disks - there's a bunch of old stuff there if you're interested- but nothing new there grabbed our attention (apart from an I monster 7"). Moved on to Carbon in Temple Bar where the range of new stuff is always going to be cool, but pricy. Bought a couple of the five or six GAMM 12"s they had there. GAMM are a bootleg label so if you like something you buy it there and then. One was old breaks, something like Tim Love Lee's 12" mix of 'Again son..', you could put it on, pop out for a whiz and still sound like you had mad skills on the breaks. Another was the SWAT cop show funk with a full on samba/batucada beat track. What's not to like? I also bought the Kill the DJ compilation, which I haven't listened to all of but it's fairly safe to say if you liked 2 many DJs (which one? I had about six at one point and I know they did several sets after that, I don't know where they are now and...) you should give this a blast. The set list is a bit more now (Gang of Four) but also more daring (they mix into the Langley School Project doing Good Vibrations into that) but the game has been raised. We then popped into CIty Discs and browsed mainly the second hand vinyl and CDs. What a great shop, best prices in Dublin for new records, great selection of new electronic vinyl, and a huge range of second hand CDs. My mate bought an old Afghan Whigs 12", a Black Strobe 12" and something else, all winners he says. We both bought the LCD Soundsystem's new single for 2.99, just as we were moaning about the price of the album on vinyl which doesn't even come with the singles which were vinyl only in the first place, yes we have them but we wanted to keep on being treated specially. I suppose going on to a big record label means you can't indulge in that kind of behaviour. And I bought a Boyd Rice/NON compilation of ambient work from '75 to 2004 for a fiver. Not bad going.

I've been hearing about Boyd Rice for so many years it's amazing I haven't heard his stuff before. I suppose I listen to very little power electronics or industrial or whatever. This one passes the girlfriend test, some of them must you know, we listened to most of it last night whithout her going 'what is this shite?' I like the way that he takes the John Cage attitude to his noise art - he gets around people saying 'that's not music' by saying that it isn't. Cage said 'don't call it music if the term offends you'. You might have noticed a Cage connection in my name and the blog name BTW. So why would you listen to this if previously you listened to music? We were round visiting some friends with a nine-month old child. She had all these annoying toys that produced facile melodies (including one that kept on going do-re-mi to fa-do-re!) and my mate was saying it drove you mad and they got into your head. I was saying that there was nothing better for earworms like that than music that cannot be parsed by rhythm, melody, or harmony but simply by timbre and structure alone. I said I'd burn him a nice drone CD I have, but this Boyd Rice one will do too.

But it was getting late and we had Bad Santa to watch. I'm sure I'll mention that here again.

And I meant to write a review of Daft Punk's Human After All. I've had it for some time and not listened much to it. Next time.

Media Whoredom

I became a media whore yesterday evening. Somebody in work mentioned me to the researcher on a radio show that he was on as someone who might talk about blogs if I was rung. So they did and I talked on 2FM (a national radio station) with Dave Fanning and Karlin Lillington, a journalist and blogger who knows far more about blogs than I do, for a few minutes and felt like a phony. That said, I do stand by everything I said but I don't think a life as a rent-a-quote is for me.

On the way in this morning I listened to a compilation CD somebody made for me called 'The creative genius of William Shatner' and it ruled. This is stuff from The Transformed Man, his legendary performance of Rocket Man at the Science Fiction Awards in 1978, his priceline ads, and some stuff I'd never heard before, including collaborations with Ben Folds from a few years ago. They worked together again on his recent album Has Been. If you get a chance have a listen: there are moments of genius on it.

Goggling at Google

So what spurred my rant on the French revolution? Lara Marlowe wrote a piece in the Irish Times about a French project to digitise old newspapers in which she quoted the director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de Franc, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, suggesting that Europe do something about the hegemony of American information sources on the internet. I have for some time been worried about the near monopoly google has on student's research. Even when far more appropriate tools are available to strong students the pull of just typing in a question to google is irresistable. The example cited by M.Jeanneney was the prevailing attitudes to the French revolution in the Anglo-saxon world - that now includes us by the way - which would be quite shocking and extreme to most French people. The funny thing is that a search for 'french revolution' on google brings you to George Mason University's excellent site.

Are the French being paranoid? I don't think so. It would be them that points it out of course, but in the face of a sustained barrage of public and official racism that is truly shocking and awesome (shock and awe together are a euphemism for terror) I think they probably have more cause to worry than most not in actual imminent danger of having a president googling for a target which he will then order bombed back to the stone age. If he choses a target that isn't already living in the stone age of course.

Google has reached a monopoly just as it has become less reliable. Networks of links, farmed and managed by commercial organisations, are undermining the relevancy and purity of its beautiful ranking system. No doubt they are programming day and night to fix it. No doubt also that once you start hacking and kludging your very paradigm has been undermined. In reality of course their system was compromised from the beginning by non-automated systems ranking the importance of linking sites (you don't really think they weighted every site on the internet do you?) but we ignored that as it solved the problem of reams of useless sites making their way through the older stochastic relevence ranking systems. Those systems were undermined immediately by web programmers spamming their sites up the robots ranking. A war of attrition began with the search engines which the 'bot programmers, playing catch up with the field, was destined to lose. What google did to get around this was rank sites by how many sites linked to them and weight these sites by how many linked to them. In practise, in the early days, this meant being on the top of Yahoo! I know this from looking after a website that was on the top of google's ranking for years despite having much larger competitors that had many more sites linking to them.

You all remember, I'm sure, that typing in 'French military victories' into google and hitting 'I feel lucky' leads you to a page asking do you mean 'French military defeats' and such racist nonsense as -
'World War I
Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.'
To set the record straight, just as Germany was defeated in WWII by the Soviet Union, the Western front was an irrelvance, Germany was defeated as an attacking force in WWI by France and the appalling losses it was willing to take to defend itself from invasion. Those losses effectively finished it as a warring nation for the foreseeable future. Given its history of invading most of Europe for the previous centuries this was probably not a bad thing.
So yes, the French are right to be worried by an unreliable racist monopoly on information.