Catching a wave

Having not been out on the board all winter, and only (I think) 3 times in 2018, I've been (more out of idle curiosity) keeping a watching brief on surf forecasts every week or so through the winter.  In case an opportunity came up with a nice looking day where I might be able to drop everything for one day, and go get a few waves in nice conditions.

In general, bigger swell comes to Ireland not much separated from the Atlantic swell that generated it - so big waves with a load of chop and wind-blown chaos and whitewater.  Then around mid last week, the long-range forecasts started showing for this week coming.  Straight away it was pretty obvious that there was going to be a ton of swell... but more unusually, the winds didn't look like they were going to be too crazy.  But forecasts are notoriously unreliable at range (generally ~48 hours out gives you a relatively honest picture), so... marked it down and carried on with work.

Over the weekend, the size didn't go away - but the wind forecast continued to improve, and then some.  During Friday, I find myself looking at the forecast 4 times.  Monday through Wednesday are going to be *solid* - but the winds are up one minute, down the next.  By late Friday night, Tuesday looks incredibly promising, with moderate offshores and *big* surf - most unusually, big long-period  swell.  (In my experience surfing the West Coast of Ireland, 10 seconds is decent - 12 seconds is a really solid long-period swell.  If you can get 12s with a few feet of swell and amenable local winds, you've scored).

I go to sleep on Friday with the forecast showing Tuesday afternoon as something like 10 feet @ 15 seconds (FIFTEEN!), and medium onshores.  I wake up Saturday, and the forecast now says this:



Topping out at 11.5 feet at 17 seconds.  And 5mph offshore.

I spend most of Saturday with a blank face.  I am not a heavily practised surfer - but I have been going out for 12 odd years.  I don't have a huge knowledge of spots, but my favourite spot in the North-West, Rossnowlagh - is more sheltered, and strips some of the volume from larger swells.


Sunday morning, the forecast has gone to this:



I've never been grateful to see the size of a forecast fall, but I am this morning.  9 ft @ 15/16 seconds with 5mph offshores (a breath of wind), is the most extraordinarily unlikely combination of parameters for Ireland ever - especially in February.  I cannot think of another time I've seen this.



I have never had one of those cornball surf movie moments - "all he knew was, it looked like the day of days, and he might never get the chance again"

I've having that cornball moment now.

Scotland and the referendum

I have wondered all my life about Scotland.

What it means, and what it does not mean.

Who we are, and who we are not.

Growing up close to the border (for there is only one) focuses the mind.  27 miles was all that separated my childhood house from England.  One day far back in my youth (and I mean significantly before I was 10), I declared my intention to use one of my cycle rides with my late, great father, to ride to England.  In my vague memory, it was both a grand statement of intent (a different country no less!) – and eminently achievable.  It was just past Jedburgh, wasn’t it?

Luckily (and not entirely unpredictably) for my Dad, the reality of the task hit long before the border was in sight – in fact, I suspect the wind on the long, open bridge high over the river Tweed was probably the snapping point.  In the end, I satisfied myself with a return trip to Melrose – an awe-inspiring odyssey of about 3 miles in each direction.

Since I can remember, thoughts of Scotland are not separated by much from thoughts of England.  I don’t know if the same is true in Cardiff, but it seems to me that as Scots, we know who we are, because we know very clearly who we are not.  This is not to condone anti-English sentiment – quite the opposite.  It is however important to realise how fundamental the sense of being on the wrong end of an unequal power equation has been, and how unhealthy it seems to me to define yourself in negative, exclusive terms.

Identity of any sort is an often confusing and deceptive construction – a pointless quantising of an endlessly variable reality, and at the same time an essential categorisation system to enable us to deal with the  vastly variable world through which we move.  This is a discussion you could spend forever exploring - time for that later.

Having watched the referendum debate unfold from across the water in Ireland, it has made me proud in a positive way once again to be Scottish.  A famous businessman from Edinburgh – from an immigrant family – once described the “democracy of the people” as one of his favourite things in Scotland, and it has again become raucously, glaringly apparent these last few months, as the debate within Scottish society has left for dead the soundbite digging from the politicians on both sides of the argument.  There’s an old saying if you leave a Scotsman alone on a desert island, he’ll either start a church or an argument – and whilst I haven’t detected any new religious factions (yet – there are still 3 weeks to go) – the noise of the rolling argument is both deafening and invigorating.

I hope for a huge turnout.  It seems unthinkable to me that anyone within Scotland would not take the chance to at least voice their democratic opinion on what seems to me to be the single biggest issue in a generation – or more.  This is not a subject on which anyone can afford to let their vote pass unused.

On the issues, many of them can be argued either way, and neither camp has (for me) put forward anything solid on really any issue.  The ‘yes’ camp has failed to explicitly show how it will be funded, and the ‘no’ camp has failed to show why Scotland would be the only non-viable small European state.  How much oil is left?  You will find an expert who will tell you anything.  The pound, the EU, let no one kid you these issues would not be resolved.  Nuclear weapons, I have no time for - the kind of "protection" and jobs we do not need.  Salmond, and the SNP. I'm not be a big fan, but if they were to deliver independence, they would be free to make their case for election thereafter – and the electorate would then be free to take them or leave them.  Independence is not about the SNP.  It’s about Scotland.

I hope for a yes vote.  I have lots of small reasons, but only two very large ones.

I distrust politicians, but they are predictable.  They are susceptible to all kinds of influence.  For this reason, I’d like to have as much power as possible, as close to the people as possible.  I believe that arms can be twisted harder in Holyrood than they can be in Westminister – the critical mass is smaller, the screw can be turned harder, easier.  Let’s bring the politicians to where they are less comfortable – close to us.

Most crucially for me – what it shouldn’t mean to be Scottish.  The unhealthy dislike of “England” – often verbalised - perhaps an inferiority complex.  A built-in, taught, indoctrinated attitude.  (I blame the predominantly English media for a lot of this, but that’s another day’s work).  For too long Scotland has both been dictated to and held back from deciding matters on our own, for ourselves.  In some ways treated like a child, and as a result we’ve maintained a childlike attitude.

Perhaps, we’ve secretly liked this endless stalemate.  Devoid of responsibility, full of opinions but secretly hoping nobody ever calls our bluff.

It’s time to grow up – to leave the house, pay the bills, do our own washing.  We can be a fairer, more equal society.

The inclination - the "democracy of the people" - has always been there - now we need to deliver ourselves the power to implement that which we believe in.

Noone should think this will be easy - but there’s nothing unviable about Scotland, if we have the courage and the desire to take responsibility for making it so.

"Just Add Surf" - Easkey Britton at TEDxDublin

Some brilliance here from Donegal's Easkey Britton, well worth 15 minutes of your time.

Surf, nature, connectedness, and a brief but very sharp point on the distorting power of the media on societal perceptions of norms.

What you see is not necessarily what is happening...

Consume!

What are we supposed to make of this?

Huge multinational brand repackages corrosive chemicals as soft drink, then attempts to release us of the minimal post-tax income the system allows us, by marketing it with the notion that the best way to enjoy it is by "sharing" it with - you.

This is the ultimate in the unfettered capitalist vision of sharing - joyously, selfishly not sharing.

Magic from the Nord

The flashy red keyboard. My recollection may be hazy with the passing of time, but I remember at first the colour as much as anything.

Before I even heard a Nord, in my head it had marked itself clear of the rest of the synthesiser field: born in to a sea of black, it was red. Solid, bold red. A bit more metal, a bit less deep. Then there were the controls. Reared on Roland controls - the thin plastic pitch-bend stick of the Juno 106, the thicker plastic one on the JX series. A brief flirtation with the thin plastic stick on the Korgs. Then there was this red thing from Sweden. The pitch bend stick wasn't plastic, and it wasn't even a stick. It was a strangely shaped block, sprung in a way unlike anything before. And it was made of wood! Then there was the modulation control - it was a disk. A disk made of stone!!

When I finally got to play one, it confirmed everything the different appearance had promised. It was a digital synth - apparently - and was capable of producing some digital sounding noises alright. But it was very, very different from any digital synth I'd ever touched or heard before. Covered in one-control per function knobs like an analogue, it also felt like an analogue, and - damn it - it *sounded* like an analogue.

I'm not sure I've ever felt so at-home with a synth since, perhaps, the Juno-106. High praise indeed given how utterly instant the 106 remains to this day. So my relationship with Nord Leads started somewhere back in those early adverts and reviews, somehow managed to survive my heightened expectations in the first proper experience, and in time transformed in to a love affair with the Nords that continues to this day.

When my sometimes recording partner and I embarked on a random jam session that turned in to a recording experiment that within 8 hours had nearly completely spawned "Zusammen" and birthed the Otomi project (subsequently released on vinyl by Emoticon), the sound and the feel of the Nord Lead (together with a 909) were effectively the bedrock on which the entire track stood. In fact, they practically *were* the entire track. Subsequent Otomi tracks, and my tracks down the line for Ferox were similarly forged within the circuits of the Nord.

I've tried many other digital synths since - in fact I like some, and even love some. Having worked for E-mu for 15 years, I know a digital sound, an analogue sound, and when it's a digital sound that sounds like an analogue sound. But nothing, since digital synths started, has really come close to the Nord.

For the special red synths from Sweden have a sound, a feel, that is unlike any other digital synth. They might as well not be digital, for the control and the flexibility belies what you hear.

And what you hear is the thing: it's the sound, the sound, the sound. Not just warm - there is something else. Something unique, magical - an organic quality, an emotiveness that emerges from the keys, the electronics, the speakers.  Listening to you, talking to you.

These special, beautiful instruments will forever be classics, and I expect that they will continue to be, as they have been, both catalysts, conduits and carriers for the emotion in my music.

Levon Vincent - "Double Jointed Sex Freak Part II"

Occasionally I love to grab a CD to stick in the car for long work trips.  A recent aquisition was the Fabric Mix CD by Levon Vincent.

I've a couple of Vincent's 12's, and they're typically very good underplayed dubbed out post-basic-channel house.  The mix CD is taking some getting used to - it is (as I suppose I should have expected) very dubbed out and sometimes seems like it's a bit lacking direction, but there are some good tunes on it.

This particularly track however always gets me turning up the volume.  It's one of Levon's own, and it's got some strange, indescribable magic about it.

It reeks of the old nights at The Arches that I keep on banging on about.

It's something in the rythym - that dead, boxy kick drum, and the brushes - it's all in the brushes.  Missing half the beat, pushing against the kick and 2-4 all the time.  Never quite fully settled, it results in a funky, insistent, claustrophobic groove that just gets better and better the louder you crank it.

Bleak Beauty in the Rebel County

I've been travelling around Ireland a lot with the new job.  It's good - I love travel, all the strange unexpected moments that flip your thoughts totally back-to-front when you're in the middle of thinking about something else.

Yesterday was a doozy - Dublin, to Mallow, down to Blarney and Cork, on to Clonakilty, and then up through Dunmanyway to Bantry.  The plan *had* been to get back from Bantry up to Clare, and stay there for an evening or daybreak surf before heading back through Ennis to Dublin.  But, in my naivety I completely misjudged the Bantry to Limerick section, and ended up having to halt in Limerick for the night.

While Bantry to Limerick wasn't fast, it was (the first part particularly), awe-inspiring.  The section near Bantry is kind of what I'd imagine the isle of Harris would look like if it just kept raining so hard for so long that eventually stuff just started growing on the rocks.  A strange, lush bleakness.  Or a bleak lushness.

Anyway, my route from Bantry (I've latterly discovered) took me within a mile or two of the legendary Gougane Barra.  Gutted now that I didn't take the turn when it was signposted, but I had no idea how close I was.  Which sort of explains why it was so spectacular, *and* why I wasn't getting anywhere fast.

In any case, there was one moment of quick halting the car on the trip - coming in to Macroom, I glance out of the drivers window, and there's a vast area of lake studded with dead tree trunks.  Or a massive field of dead tree trunks flooded with water.

Strange, alien, surreal, amazing.

50 People, One Question - Galway

And so, in the shadow of another day-surf-trip, and with a new job starting in just under two weeks - here is one of my favourite ever videos on the web.  50 people, one question, in Galway, Ireland.

One question, but an amazing sequence of answers.  My favourite answer?  6:00.

Thanks to Anna Oliwa for uncovering it.

Irish surf and nighttime revelations

Wednesday 28th Sept. looks like the next chance.  What I'd give for an accurate forecast for 2 or three weeks in advance right now.  But Thursday 18th August was going to be this chance.

I had flicked open Magic Seaweed, and checked Bundoran.  The forecast (which like any other forecast tends to become more accurate the closer you are to the time) says there will a very small swell - borderline, and the winds are going to be onshore - not favourable, as they will collapse the waves from behind, destroying their perfect shape and spreading turbulent whitewater everywhere. 

I check again a couple days before.  The swell is still borderline, but... the wind forecast is dropping.  Wednesday 17th, I look again.  The forecast winds for the very early morning are 2mph - almost nothing.  High tide at 09:30.  The board is brought down from it's ceiling abode, the wetsuit is dug out of the attic, everything is laid out, and the alarm is set for 03:40.

 

03:59.  The yawning silence of the city in the dead of night.  The board is strapped on the car, everything is packed.  Gates are quietly opened, the car is rolled back out of gear with no engine, the gate is closed again.  A quick turn of the key, and we are trundling out of the estate and across the West side of Dublin.  The only other road users are taxis.  Somewhere in the Atlantic, a low pressure system has been rotating, driving energy into the ocean.

There's a diversion on the edge of Dublin, so shortly after 4 I'm sent down a sideroad past a suburban shopping centre.  20 or 30 kids are milling about in the car park.  Yesterday was leaving cert day in Ireland, and these kids have been letting loose all evening and night.  Everywhere is closed now, but they aren't ready to go home quite yet.  Who passed, and who failed?  Who has the marks they need, for what they want to do?

Gone 5, I'm whistling down the motorway towards Kells.  The home of bestsellers.  The radio is on, the pressure of the sound helping the windows to hold back the immense weight of the blackness outside.  Every few minutes a lone car flies the opposite way, towards the big city.

Past Kells, I pass through Virginia.  In the middle of town the road forks, and on the apex sits a massive church.  I've glimpsed it before, on one of these night raids West - set back, deep in the fork, brooding in the dark.  One day I'm going to come back and check it out.  I wonder if the baby is still asleep back at home.  Did I wake him, sneaking the board out of the house at 4?  Leaving Virginia, I pick up the first sign for Eniskillen, 70km.  The other side of the border.  Northern Ireland.

Twenty past five, and I hit Cavan - home to problematic insurance company Quinn.  The whole story of what the Quinn family have been up to with the money is going to come out one of these days.  Still black, everything is closed - but looking straight upwards, there's the very first hint that the sky might be starting to turn.  It looks a bit more dark blue than black up there.

Half past five, and I'm in Belturbet.  The sky is definitely lightening.  It's amazing how quickly that happens, isn't it?  All the shops are locked and dark, and the town is dead.  I ghost on for Eniskillen, another 35 kilometres on.  2 or 3 minutes further on, I'm suddenly across the border, in Northern Ireland.  The road surface changes, alien after 8 years living in the Republic, and familiar from my youth.  The first village speed limits seem bigger than is sensible.  Is this just the first town speed limits, or were the ones in the UK always this size?  UK Radio 1 is on now, and a lightbulb moment suddenly strikes me: nighttime radio is so much better than daytime fare.  The variation!  There's some grinding driving hip hop track clattering out of the radio - raw in a way that wouldn't make daytime radio.  The journey is getting good - revelations are starting to flow.  There's something very interesting in the fact that this takes 90 minutes of driving to start happening - it harks back to the idea that I stumbled upon back here - that with repetition, the analytical portion of your brain that drives it while awake is slowly decommissioned, and something much more interesting starts taking place.  Maybe this really is the revelation that the whole trip offers - but for the moment, the important thing seems to be that suddenly I'm fearing the return of daytime radio, with the tyranny of the playlists and mass appeal.

Enniskillen is reached at ten to six.  A tiny bit of traffic, but not much.  I was out of Dublin so early that everything is still closed so no breakfast roll here, which may complicate my eating an hour before water rule.  How can you surf without a breakfast roll?  I'm thinking of bacon (this is very distracting) hesitate for a millisecond, and get owned by a Micra at stoplights.  I'm supposed to be in relaxed surf mode, so I let them go, mentally wishing them well on the way.  I'm hungry.  It's very light now, I could almost switch off the headlights.  There are still some Union Jack flags flying defiantly, a reminder of how strange things have been in the past in the North.  Left for Belleek.

Reaching Eniskillen escape velocity.  By five past six I'm racing down the side of Lough Erne.  I've raced down the side of Lough Erne before, but this time, it's very different.  The sun is coming up behind it, making the whole body of water seemingly glow with early-morning radiance.  There isn't a single ripple on the water, dead calm, a hugely promising portent.  Jaw dropping beauty that I couldn't quite capture with the camera.

By six twenty-five I'm back in the Republic, and 13 miles to run to Bundoran.  I'm a huge fan of the beach at Rossnowlagh, so I go there first.  Unfortunately, the swell is too small to be causing anything more than a shoreline ripple there, so after hanging about for five minutes, it's back in the car, and down to Bundoran to have a look at Tullan Strand.

Tullan is reached around seven, and it's beyond perfect for me.  A really small swell running, not a single person there, and amazingly, not even the tiniest puff of wind. Dead calm.

The swell is so well behaved, I spend four hours in the water.  Some amazing waves (for me) caught, I even manage to weave my way through some people at a beginners surf school on a couple of waves later on, and due to the small size I'm able to manoeuvre myself all the way outside the breaking waves (still something of a novelty for me).  This means I end up sitting, bobbing in the sea, watching in amazement as 3 dolphins appear a few hundred yards out to sea, leaping completely clear of the water, arching, stretching and diving back in, slowly leaping across Donegal Bay in the sun as I sit on the board and bob up and down on top of the water.

Now, if that's not worth getting up at half three for, I have no idea what is.

Music, Waves, and Jack Russell terriers

Having not written anything for some time, there was a bundle of small stuff circulating trying to find a weak point in my brain and escape.  Normally I'd separate them into some sort of structure and blog separately about each, but seeing as they were all in there mixed up together, they can all come out mixed up together.  It's a more accurate representation, and it's been that kind of fortnight.

Frankfurt.  Musikmesse.  It's hard to believe that it's my 15th consecutive Musikmesse, but that appears to be the case.  Juggling a huge list of companies to go visit with a sudden-onset migraine on Thursday morning was no mean feat, especially given the cloud of pulsating colours occluding part of my vision - but luckily some guy in a tiny tradeshow-shop-cum-barber outlet hidden in the Starwars-like Torhaus was able to help me out by fetching from some hidden (no doubt gimp-holding) cupboard a packet of horse choking paracetamol.  They were of a mg size that I didn't previously know existed, let alone legal, and the packet and instructions were strangely all in Spanish.  The barber assured me that 1 tablet twice a day would be unlikely to kill me, so I risked swallowing one and got on with business.

There were some cool things at the show - like Club of the Knobs (an impressive beast for sure, but where might sales come from for such a monster?), and Elektron, who are now bringing out a knob upgrade kit for the Machinedrum.  This is particularly good news, as I find the knobs a bit hard and untactile - the new rubberised ones they were showing are a vast improvement.  On the downside, us existing hardware owners have to pay to get the new knobs - bah!  It should have been right in the first place, guys.  Anyway.  Nord have the Stage Piano 2 out which is rocking, and the Electro 3 HP (which stands for 'hammer action portable', obviously).  Both units look absolutely stunning, play brilliantly and sound amazing, as is typical for Nord.  I also found Innerclock Systems, who make a range of boxes for pushing and pulling MIDI Clock, MTC and Din Sync around the place.  It's for lining up old hardware with new sequencers, but it's also solved (possibly) one of my longstanding problems with how I want to play out live... more on that in the long distant future.

 A new company called Smithson Martin have a system out for DJing on a huge transparent touchscreen.  It's called "Emulator", and is basically a MIDI controller software that sits on top of Traktor.  It's as expensive as you'd expect a transparent multi-touch touchscreen to be though, and I can't see it getting bought by many normal DJs - it'll probably find a home in huge clubs full of questionable clientele, who will appreciate the DJ show.  Less lights, deeper bass cabs if you ask me.
 

 SPL (always the home of high-quality hardware) have a new desk out, the Neos.  This thing is an analogue summing mixer, so no EQs, no aux busses, no bells and whistles - just straight line in and mixing on to a stereo bus.  The difference - it runs internally on 120 Volts, which means it can generate astonishing amounts of headroom.  I tried it, and it's really amazing - even with all the faders maxed and everything at Spinal Tap settings, you just cannot get the desk to overload.  Even more important, with everything set to stun and nothing playing through it, you can't hear anything from the outputs - no hum, no hiss, no noise whatsoever.  Incredible quality stuff, and highly recommended for anyone looking for an external analogue summing solution.

I also stopped by the Apogee stand, where they have two pretty well judged new pieces - the Duet 2 soundcard, which is a gorgeous piece of 2-in, 2-out industrial design, and the Jam, which is a brilliantly thought out Hi-Z input for iPad etc, so you can jack your guitar in with really good quality for only $99.  Very nice stuff.  This is where the Frankfurt show got really interesting, as I met by chance Sophie Kipner from Apogee, who was able to wax lyrical about the new stuff.  I'm always a fan of finding out who is who when I get home, so running through doing the job on all the business cards from the show, I find that Sophie not only works for Apogee, she runs her own blog publishing strange and interesting illustrations and verse.  Well that's more interesting than the geek dead ends that most of the business cards lead to.  Following the rabbit through the net leads to Forth Magazine, some extended reading of which leads me to the most disturbing conclusion:  there is interesting, kooky art in LA.  To think that until now all I thought of LA was a great airport, NAMM, and some character-forming experiences at Sunset.  When randomness leads you somewhere, follow it - there might be something interesting at the end.

So back from Frankfurt and just the dog in the house for a few days plus a promising swell forecast, means a one-day return dash to the West coast chasing waves.  I've tried Tullan and never really got on with it - last time I was across, it was Rossnowlagh for the first time.

 I loved the waves, although the water quality wasn't the best.  I've tasted worse - the aforementioned Sunset being a prime example.  This time there looks like a good bit of swell, 14 feet @ 12 seconds straight out of the North West, which in my amateur judgment may be a bit beefy for Rossnowlagh, and will certainly render Tullan a train wreck.  Combined with a wind which is starting onshore, but likely to swing around from the South later, the die is cast - the South wind will be crossshore in Tullan and Rossnowlagh, but close to offshore at Streedagh, which will also be a bit more sheltered from the guts of the swell.  3 hours chase across Ireland later, I walk over the dunes at Streedagh to find that I've been spot on interpreting the forecast - there are waves heaving on to the beach, and spray ripping off the top of them in a near-offshore - beautiful!  The only thing is that instead of peeling neatly one way or another, they are closing out and slamming shut in huge sections - one of the hazards of Streedagh.

Still, first surf of the year, so into the gloriously cold water of an Irish spring, followed by 50 minutes of battling with the elements.  It would have been longer, but I started to get a strange sensation after a while - dog guilt.  I didn't know that such a thing existed.  With the rest of the family humans in Cork, and the dog home alone in Dublin, it started to feel wrong to be out there.  I'm not sure if the dog needed me home, or if I needed to be home with the dog - but it suddenly felt very far away.  Something karmic was not right, and I couldn't fight the feeling - so five minutes later I was heading back up the beach, packing up and roasting off in the car.  When I made it back to Dublin, the dog, of course, was fine (if slightly desperate to get out to the toilet) - but things were definitely better just being there.  Nearly 6 hours driving and 300 miles for only 50 minutes surfing might be considered a poor return - that's how I felt at the time - but in retrospect, it was worth it.  I even attempted (just for my own personal amusement) to pop up on the board the wrong way around on one wave - right foot forward - and didn't fall in.  Not for the first second anyway.  Something I might pursue, as being able to pop up either way around would be a huge bonus if I ever get even half good.

Being prepared to be bad at stuff seems to be a skill that we lose as we get older, which is a shame, as it's so often a prerequisite for becoming good at stuff.

Iness Mezel - "Amazone"

I heard Amazone by Iness Mezel on the unpredictable and fascinating RTE Lyric FM show, Reels to Ragas.with Gerry Godley.  It's on 7-8pm on Tuesdays, and I was putting our 7-month old to sleep upstairs, as one does.  Not with reels to ragas I might add, not exactly sleeping music good though it is.  So anyway as luck would have it I was descending the stairs tentatively baby-monitor in hand, listening for the telltale rustle-clunk-pause-scream that denotes the loss of the soother during the critical going-to-sleep phase - and for some reason this night, sleep happened before the loss-of-soother incident.  The point being, I was in the kitchen a few minutes short of 8pm, while Reels to Ragas was still on, and Mr Godley played "Amazone" as his final track.

It's been a long time since I've actually stood jaw-open at a track, but this one did it for sure.  It's tempting to describe it as a car-crash collage of styles (which implies that it's a bad thing - which it most definitely is not).  What is is, is a quite astonishing collage that (to my mind) draws the links between styles across thousands of years and thousands of miles.

It's the sound of Berber Africa looked at through a French lens, and (most compelling of all), is driven by the most African of all modern musics, pure Chicago house.  The verses are the thing - that spinning loopy 1-bar feel, and the stomp of the kick and the claps together, the echoes of ancient Africa as only Chicago made them sound, with that North African vocal floating and imploring over the top as the beat grinds away.

Thank you Iness Mezel, thank you Gerry Godley.  Cracking!

Larry Heard - "Alien"

I always forget about Larry Heard.  I'll forget for ages, and then hit on one of his old records, put it on, and I'm always blown away by how good they are.  Flirting a bit with the 'proper' musicianship side of things (I like the dislocated emotion you get from stripped machines, alright?) - he still made just jaw-dropping soundscapes.  From a production point of view, his tracks were always flawless as well - the mixes are so good, and he always chose the perfect noise for every part.  Lush.

I came across Alien by him earlier this week, and knew immediately that this was the track for Friday.  I think it's one of his greatest tracks of all time - the easy warm bassline, the open spacey pads, the clicking drum pattern, a mix that feels like there's so much space you could walk in and between all the sounds inspecting them from every angle, and piano and lead sounds draped over the top like a satin sheet.

Happy Friday!

Blowing Bubbles

From time to time, I've had some small share stuff going on.  Nothing that's going to buy me as much as a spare tube for my bike, which I seem to need on almost an every-two-days basis at the moment (thanks everyone breaking glass in and around Dublin!) - but as a result of having shares here and there, I preferred to have them through a company that knows what they are doing.

Anyway, said company (Edward D Jones fact fans) occasionally send out letters explaining the state of the world, the markets, etc.  They don't offer to make you rich, which is one of the attractions (most people offering to make you rich actually intend to take your money and make them rich).  But I digress.  I've been trying to dig out one of the letters from Edward D Jones for ages, and I finally found it.

For context... the dot-com bubble in all stock prices Internet-related was exploding from about 1995 until 2000.  The massive collapse of this bubble in prices occurred in spring of 2000, with the NASDAQ peaking on Friday March 10th.  In the following three business days - Monday 13th - Wednesday 15th March, 9% of this peak value was erased.

In April 1999, one year before the cataclysm, I received one of the occasional missives from EDJ.  It still stands today as a spectacular example of someone keeping their heads when everyone else was losing theirs.

Future lessons from the past...

 

 

Dawn Landes - "Young Folks"

© Alex Solmssen

I came across Dawn Landes in an article about music production..... in..... Tape Op.  The name may come as no relief to you, but I've spent the last *month* trying to remember after losing the magazine!  Anyway, I digress and I've hardly even started.  Landes has done a great deal of production and engineering herself, and really knows her stuff.

She's also got a great voice, writes great tunes, and radiates unaffected believable love of music.  Here in honour of her brilliantness, are three Dawn Landes tunes for Friday.  Well, actually two of them are the same tune, Young Folks.  One version sung with young folks, and the other version sang with old folks.  Pretty cool huh?  And in fact Young Folks isn't even her tune.

Alright already, here's 1 Dawn Landes tune for Friday, and 2 different versions of Dawn Landes singing someone else's tune for Friday.  Pedants.

Black Dub - "The Birth of Bellavista Nights"

I came across the Black Dub project following a feature in the latest Sound on Sound.  Black Dub is the latest project from Daniel Lanois, who produced The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby and a stack of other U2 and non-U2 stuff.

From Sound on Sound:

One very noticeable feature that unites both Le Noise and Black Dub is that they appear to be painted with fairly broad brush-strokes, using raw, free performances. In the past, Lanois has been responsible for his fair share of layered, very detailed, almost perfectionist records, works that seem to embody his one‑time adage that an image of beauty is greatly enhanced by the introduction of a piece of grit. On Le Noise and Black Dub Lanois appears to have reversed his maxim: they sound more like grit greatly enhanced by pieces of beauty.

“Thank you for noticing the qualities of grit and freedom in these new albums,” replies Lanois. “I like the broad brush-stroke analogy. It’s a very painterly way of looking at things, and I love for music to have pictures. That part of my work has never changed: I like things to be cinematic. I also think that the detail is always there in my work."

Lanois has always had interesting idea about music and art, and how to get there, and this is no different.  There was lots of talk in the interview, both from Lanois and from his co-producer Mark Howard about the importance of capturing the actual performance of the instrument, and how the technology was really secondary to the music that you were recording.  I hadn't heard of Black Dub before, but it was enough for me to go searching.

It's interesting stuff, and here's one great example - three and a half minutes of perfectly captured guitar nestled in those Lanois delays.  Just an amazingly perfect guitar sound, a great rolling riff, and a story all in one noise.  It's the sort of thing you want to have on vinyl, with an immensely expensive hifi to play it through.

Signature SP1200 project

I've been quite lucky in salvaging a couple of things that were getting thrown out at work. Deemed surplus to requirements - one of them was an original SP1200 sampling drum machine. Killer 12-bit angry sampling, drum noises go in weedy and come out like a lump hammer. It's not hard to see why it's popular.

Then, in the course of an office clearout, I discovered that I'd also come in to possession of the full service manual for said SP1200...

Which was even more interesting. Component lists, circuit diagrams, engineering troubleshooting - everything that went into making this machine the legend that it is.

But then at the end, it got even more interesting - the credits page, not present in the end-user manual (not the end-user manual I have anyway).

I pondered over that list of people responsible for this most legendary of machines. Then I realised that I had buried in the house at home (another thing I got in trouble for bringing home!) - an unused overlay for the SP1200.

Never before stuck on a machine. Virginal. Still with the sticky back ready to go.

So this has me thinking. What if I could rustle up everyone on the list of original SP1200 credits? I know where to find four of them right now, another guy I'm sure I can track down through the first four - and I think I've located another four, which would leave only four heads to find.

What if I could get the overlay to them all individually?

What if they all signed it, and got it back to me, and I pulled off the overlay on my SP1200, and stuck the signed overlay on it?

Would I then have an SP1200, signed by the entire original team that put the machine together?

Is it just me, or would that be not only unique, but a physical piece of music and sampling history?

Lykke Li - "I'm Good, I'm Gone"

It's Portuguese Government Bond auction time! But more about that later.

I've liked Lykke Li for a long time. Really, really good tunes, good singing, and catchy without being infuriatingly annoying. Music that (hopefully, probably) will still sound good in 10 years - and that's the trick.

It's also great to see someone who can *really* actually do it - who has real musical talent. You can tell the difference - the people who are trying less, and still producing more. The people who can do it without any technology fixing their mistakes and polishing out the human element. The ones who can just sing, with no amplification, and convince you.

Here's Lykke Li, in a toilet, no amplification, and again the song just shines through. I'm not sure about the need for the spoons, taps, etc, but when you're a kooky Scandi, you can get away with anything.

Happy New Year!

Pipeline Masters

The most perfect wave in the world?

Starting probably today swell-dependent - the 2010 Pipe Masters. Here's the 2008 trailer...

The debt and the defacit

I've got to admit, I don't get the IMF/EU bailout of Ireland. I mean, I understand it from the IMF/EU point of view - Ireland was about to take down the Euro due to systematic risk, sovereign default, bond jitters, etc.

What I don't understand, is why Ireland is taking the so-called "bailout". If the state needs to borrow in order to keep funding services, logic might suggest that there are too many services going on and that they need to be cut. To borrow in order to pay for them surely just means paying interest on the loans, as well as for services that we can't afford anyway.

So never mind the defacit (which I take to be the gap between annual revenue and expenditure) - if the overhanging total debt is not payable, would it not be better to default now, face all the consequences early and get it done with, rather than kicking the can down the road on a debt that will ultimately require default anyway - while we all make the money-lenders a bit richer via interest in the meantime?

Huge surf in Ireland

From earlier this week - the remnants of a Hurricane finding an offshore reef somewhere off NW Ireland.

Mentioned on Andrew Cotton's blog here - he was out surfing it - and if you didn't see it in the Irish Times front page today, an incredible photograph from photographer Aaron Pierce's site is here.