Category: Music

Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.
And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.
My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…
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Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these…
into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

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Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…
…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.
Those that couldn’t make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.
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Along the way, I started foresaking these…
…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:
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The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide…
… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass some livpure:

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My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don’t own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it’s altered without consent.
Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.
The absence of atoms isn’t problematic, but my senses can’t yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…
October 6, 2011
Your Social Graph Is Autistic
Much has been made of social graphs as filters for discovering new content, to the extent that many are now challenging the view that a social filter is even remotely indicative of interest – "…who you know doesn't always translate into what you like"
I'm not convinced that there's such a thing as an "interest graph" – as suggested in the recent Social Graphs Vs. Interest Graphs – but I do believe there are useful intent or interest models, that can be extrapolated from an individual's behaviour.
Flipboard, ShowYou and others aggregate media based on your friends' articulated sharing; this can result in many false positives, with inferences drawn from a semi-autistic social model; our articualted social graphs are driven by liquid affinities and etiquettes.
What's perhaps more insightful is the notion of aggregating media, based on what you own and use… collected artefacts thoroughly riddled with your tastes, memories, aesthetic choices and emotions.
The recently launched Bandito for iOS is an useful illustration of this – Bandito examines the content of your iTunes collection and suggests news items based on your tastes. Curiously, Bandito is a collaboration between a music licensing marketplace and music data provider - suggesting some novel, emerging value chains for the music industry.

Conversley, the wonderfully serendepitous and sublime Shuffler.fm aggregates music from curated news sources into musical genres which also present the news item in its original context along with each track. "Playing" music blogs as continuous mixes implies a kind of social graph, but that's a contrivance – it's simply a collection of editorial and an act of curation. Curation is a little more deliberate than shotgun sharing.
Whether acquired though piracy, digital stores or signals rippling through your social graph, what you collect - not who you know - defines your media genome. Your social graph – as it stands today – is autistic, lacking the subtlety, nuance and fidelty to articulate what you like; indeed, it simply broadcasts what others like.
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I have a hypothesis that time and place can be as influential as a collection… but more on that another time 😉
October 4, 2011
Röyksopp: Happy Up Here
I've been (guilty) hooked on Röyksopp's Happy Up Here for a few weeks and, last night, stumbled across the awesome video at the band's Vimeo account…
It's a very clever mixed reality interpretation of Space Invaders – I wonder if director Reuben Sutherland was inspired by Futurama's Anthology of Interest II episode? But seriously, Röyksopp shoulda made a mixed-reality game for iPhone 😉
February 26, 2009
Our City, Our Music

Something interesting’s afoot in Leeds, as a group of the city’s digital artists prepare to record its first geo-located album, Our City, Our Music.
We’re all accustomed to certain ‘geo-retarded’ music only being available digitally in the US, but what Ben Dalton, Megan Smith and Ben Halsall are proposing is to shoot a couple dozen videos around the streets of the city – using HP’s Mscape – capturing the contributions of local performers, artists, residents and filmmakers in a collective production.
Mscape’s an interesting choice, retrofitting GPS-enabled devices to encode audio and video with locative data at the point of recording. Indeed, Our City, Our Music is the winning project a contest organised by Just-b, HP Labs and the Arts Council.
Throughout the coming year, the group will be shooting twelve live videos (one a month?) with the hope that local filmmakers and bands will volunteer to contribute to each segment of the project, providing a kinda locative, musical narrative to the city…and I think other cities if the project is a success.
Uploading your music video to YouTube is a cost-effective way to promote your video. It doesn’t require a huge budget, unlike other promotional methods such as TV commercials or billboards. If you want your video to have a bigger impact, you can try https://themarketingheaven.com/buy-youtube-views/ to buy youtube views and in that way you can reach a large audience and potentially generate more revenue.
Volunteers have until 4th January to apply…head on over to www.ourcityourmusic.com for more…
December 11, 2008
Brighton Port Authority: Toe Jam
Rediscovering Cliptip last night, I came across BPA’s new Toe Jam video…yeh, yeh – it’s a couple months old, but I’ve always been a huge fan of Fat Boy Slim‘s videos – from Spike Jonze’ directed Praise You and Weapon Of Choice to Bird of Prey – though not such a great fan of his music…
Norman Cook’s new collaboration with David Byrne – the Brighton Port Authority – continues this trend of so-so tunes and kick-ass, cheeky music videos…with a bunch of semi-nude performers spelling out words, games and skits with censorship bars! Look out for Norm swinging his junk at 2m:27s…
Download the full video here…
August 31, 2008
TagTunes: Personal Discovery
Eight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it’s becoming easy to forget what I do and don’t own.
I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of the soundtracks!
Technologies such as Spotlight make it easy for us to locate items we know we have and social discovery services such as Last.FM help us surface music we know we don’t have.
However, there’s perhaps an opportunity for personal rather than discovery services; those that perform analytics on our existing media, recommending items we already own, but have neglected or simply forgotten about…tools that help us poke around in the unexplored corners of our music or photo collections for example.
It’s not too difficult to envisage…
- extensions to iTunes that visualises your listening and creates recommended playlists of music you’ve not listened to yet, but that matches your other tastes; even unwatched episodes of TV shows you’ve already downloaded
- an adaptation of Flickr that reminds you of photos from a year ago today.
- an address book, IM network or email service that reminds you of close friends and family you haven’t spoken to in some time.
April 2, 2008
Steroid Maximus: Ectopia
Steroid Maximus‘ Ectopia is a soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist; maybe a kick-ass Tarantino-directed reimagining of The Man from UNCLE with its sounds planted firmly in the 60s, or a 21st century In Like Flint.
Steroid Maximus is actually J.G.Thirlwell, the composer of one of my favourite TV series, The Venture Brothers – an animated show that’s very much in the vein of 60s spy thrillers and adventures shows and, thanks to Thirlwell, is accompanied by an overheated, over-the-top soundtrack!
Check out some of the previews on iTunes and lemme know what you think 🙂
October 20, 2007
The Good Die Young: Cut From
My favorite Anthemic Indie Rock band, The Good Die Young have just put out their first video – for Cut From…actually my good buddy Paul Key is the drummer and has great hair 🙂 Enjoy both! (but watch out for the flashy-flickry effects, epilepsy people…)
October 4, 2007
Sigur Rós: Heima

‘I sometimes get this strange and sort of uncontrollable urge to want to go home…’
Sigur Rós’ forthcoming album Hvarf-Heim is gonna be accompanied by what appears to be a
magical DVD movie entitled Heima…Icelandic for ‘at home’.
I first heard Sigur in Vanilla Sky…and ever since imagined their work to be ‘widescreen music’…Heima‘s breathtaking vistas look like they’ll give form to Sigur’s fictions…actually it looks a little like Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi.
Check out the trailer at heimafilm.com…
September 3, 2007
Bingley Music Live
Woot! Along with a couple of my favourite bands, The Charlatans and The Bluetones, my mate Paul’s band – The Good Die Young – are playing the Bingley Music Live festival this weekend at Myrtle Park in Bingley.
I can’t make TGDY’s set during the day (my cousin’s wedding reception…!) but I’m gonna try catch The Charlatan’s late on Sunday 🙂
UPDATE: The gig will be streamed live online by Bradford Community Broadcasting and on the air at 106.6FM.
August 31, 2007