Dinosaur Thing

Moon Ritual

This podcast is actually 2 tracks joined at the hip called Moon Ritual/Zhongqiu Jie and is from 1999's album "In the wake of Apollo". I'm not sure why in the creative process that I joined these up. Perhaps I was a little less confident of these pieces on their own. Anyway "Moon Ritual" came about really as a result of buying a new Yamaha 5 string bass guitar a few months earlier. I was looking to use it on an atmospheric piece having been hypnotised by pieces like "No fear, no hate, no pain" by the Eurythmics and Joe Jackson's "Tuzla". I found a nice simple hypnotic bass line but then ironically in recording decided to loop a midi keyboard equivalent and then use the bass and my Fender Stratocaster guitar with an effects box to produce the atmospherics. It was kind of weird recording it in my basement. I had the base track playing on midi on the computer with the bass and guitar on racks hooked up to effects with me playing, tapping and hitting frets live. The latter part has a completely different history. Back in January 1998 I had a rather odd holiday in Beijing, China where I spent most of my time dodging the local Chinese travel agency to venture out on my own and every morning rather than be ripped off by the hotel breakfast I went to the local Dunkin' Donuts across the street where I read my China Daily and listened to the local music. A really hypnotic piece used to come on every morning and when I got back I tried to replicate it somehow and completely failed to remember all of it but created "Zhongqiu Jie" or moon festival instead.

Download 02_moon_ritual_zhongqiu_jie.mp3

Kurt's Reposte

Download 16_kurts_reposte.mp3 Time has come around again for a podcast. This week's cast is from "Difficult Listening Hour" and the closing track "Kurt's Reposte". So the story behind this track again goes back to my early experiments with samples. I really did want to create a sound very different from anything I'd ever heard before for that album and mixing genre's produced some of the better sounding ideas. 3 of the tracks on the album were clear mixes of traditional classical sounds with other genres (world, dance, techno or ambient). On this track I specifically wanted to mix classical with techno using both percussive mixes of the two genres and also melodic mixes of the two sounds. It felt with the percussive side that there was almost a parry and reposte of the 2 drummers and the words parry and reposte were clearly in my mind when the title came into my head. "Kurt's Reposte" was perfect in 2 ways. Clearly its pretty damn close to "Kurt's Rejoinder" a track by one of my musical heroes Brian Eno but also clearly the excellent classical timpanist Kurt-Hans Goedicke formerly of the LSO and now at Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Kurt-Hans is pretty impressive to watch as a timpanist and his performances very pure in their professionalism.

Just call me Papa Bear

Burn's wrote a cracking line once in "To a Louse". "Oh what a wonderul gift tae gi us, tae see ourselves as other's see us" and I got one of those gifts this morning over my Wheetie bangs that will keep me smiling today no matter what. My son and I had a rare breakfast together and decided to watch the new version of "The Jungle Book". Just before his favourite bit which is Baloo the Bear coming into shot singing "Do ba de do and its a do ba de day" he started shouting "Baloo Bear, Baloo bear" then when he came into shot he pointed at the screen and said "its dadeeee".

Tips for when you get your 160GB iPOD classic

I'm getting getting close to the end of a somewhat consuming project consolidation iPODs and ripping my entire CD collection (over 2000 I think) onto one device. This was prompted by me having my 40GB iPOD stolen last year and replacing it with the 160GB model. The possibility of having my entire collection on one device was too tempting. An added complication was that I also had a 30GB video iPOD that I'd also been using with my newer CDs on. The journey thereafter is worthy of a blog post as I'm sure a few of you would be tempted to do the same sort of consolidation and you can waste a lot of time and effort (as I did) if you make some mistakes.

So anyway here are my top tips:-

1. Always back-up your iTunes library. This was a saving grace for me as all my purchases and hours of CD ripping were already there.

2. I used iPOd util from Kennetnet to suck the tunes off my 30GB video iPOD onto the home PC. You may need to click onto your purchased songs and reset the number of machines playing the song first though as most itunes songs only allow copies to 5 machines. Easily done by right clicking on the songs.

3. You then need to import the songs from your library. This is a little painful selecting directory by directory but trust me take the time to select the newly copied albums or you might as I did end up with duplicates that take you weeks to delete.

4. So you've now consolidated and you want to start ripping the rest of your collection. In my case my 40GB iPOD had my favourite albums and selected tracks from albums I wasn't entirely a fan of. When it comes to the later its better to just rip the entire CD again as the gracenote database of track names and info will almost certainly have changed in between times and any minor characteristic changes will make it look like you have 2 different CDs and stuff the running order if you just elect to rip the tracks you missed. Its a pain then to find the changed characteristic and get the album running smoothly. Better to just rip the whole thing again and hope the CD wasn't damaged in the interim.

5. Have a back-up plan for those CDs that just don't seem to rip or read. For some reason damaged CDs will not be read by some CD-ROM drives yet no problem with others so borrow an external CD-ROM drive as a back-up for those. I had just 4 of these in my collection and all of them worked a treat with the back-up drive. But sadly some CDs will be beyond this and that's where just giving up and buying the individual tracks on iTunes would be better. No sense in wasting more time trying to fix it.

6. Artwork is still a pain so when you want to download artwork for the CD so it looks nice in all the iPOD windows select ALL of the tracks on the CD before clicking the "download artwork" button. If you don't it will only download for the first track. Sadly iTunes isn't very good at resolving artwork conflicts if there are many versions of the same CD and not all artists have submitted artwork yet. For this a simple copy and paste from Amazon, All CD covers, Flickr or just plain Google images. But again make sure you select all of the tracks rather than just the first one.

7. Finally before starting all of this get agreement from friends and family and especially your other half that you will annoy the hell out of them by ducking into your study 4 times an hour for the next 3 months.

Now I've done all of this the pleasures of listening to anything I've bought over the last 22 years anywhere is a joy... so now onto my tape collection. Any thoughts on whether its worth the bother of using a USB tape drive before I spend the next 3 months ripping those?

You know your getting old when...

...friends reunited send you a profile update with a class mate who's just become a grand parent !!!

Upgrading my memory

At the weekend I was finally faced with giving up on my Vista inflicted home PC. I decided to go through the pain of a memory upgrade and headed off in dred to my local Maplin's where I was tipped off to a new site called www.crucial.com. My memory worries went pretty quicly as it diagnosed my PC, type of memory needed, performance improvement and a click to buy option. One week later I have life restored to my PC. As to whether it will increase my blog rate or not.....

Defector

Time for a podcast. I've been remastering one of my very old CDs "Deep" of late. It was originally mastered with a short cassette run at a studio over in Shepherd's Bush in 1996 but I ran out of time and left it with them to finish and it was botched after that with no decent indexing. So it was rather nice to make a new version at home and free some of the shorter tracks for podcasting. This is one of them although it really sounds very basic and dated (some of those FM sounds really were naff but sounded cool at the time). This started as a wee challenge to me to write something to order and the thought in mind here was something that evoked those old black and white cold war movies set somewhere in say Prague with a prisoner exchange on a cold wet bridge. A chance to use the old Mexican rain stick and fairly mixed bunch of FM percussion sounds. The eastern European voice is actually a treated recording of "Igor" the MS Windows personal assistant. Download 02_track_02_1.mp3

This is a launch I can't wait for

In wading through the bottom of my inbox today in my hotel room I came across this link from a colleague that has just blown me away. Its a preview of the MS Worldwide telescope and I know that might sound incredibly geeky but I defy you to take a look and not find this beautiful and awe inspiring. I also like this because its just another example of the geeks making a comeback in the world. For far too long the Ark B people (as Douglas Adam's calls them) have had the upper hand in the media stakes so anything like this that fights back I love.

Is Virgin Atlantic the iPhone of the airline industry?

I finally got to experience the new check-in at Terminal 3 with Virgin Atlantic. What a fabulous experience. No queueing even to just check my bag in with a miserable desk person, no queues with a hundred odd whinging yanks to get through security. Instead a lovely walk through with a very pleasant lady who apologised for not being ready last time I was there. No queue at the personal security. A nice velvet seat to sit on whilst I got my shoes back on (no rickety chair there) and a short walk to the lounge. And the relative cost of all of this luxury....well actually half the price. So why do I value my gold card with the worlds most miserable airline? Why indeed.

World's worst hide and seek player

World's worst hide and seek player
Originally uploaded by Joe Little

I really must teach my son Callum to play hide and seek more effectively ;o)