The mantra of a cat harness… (Taken with instagram)
The Sublime Greyness Of Sweden
Every few months or so there comes the compulsion to decide on my favourite pieces of music ever.
(Ever ever? Ever ever??)
This list is impossible to create and all previous attempts have immediately felt wrong and borderline embarrassing. An easier and more important list however consists of pieces that have truly influenced me as a music maker. While these might not be my very favourites, they are tracks that either significantly changed my musical perspective, or had a lasting effect on my composition style or myself as a musician.
1. Branle de Bourgogne
After a fair bit of research and a few trips down memory lane, I believe a simplified version of this, played by 7 year olds in a school assembly when I was 6, was the catalyst for me to begin learning the recorder.
I had been asked before if I wanted to learn and I had declined as the early apeman in my genetic code thought it “girly”. However, when faced with a group of my peers playing this piece of baroque dance music, I experienced a strange mixture of jealousy and joy. It was decided then and there that I wanted to make music and I took up recorder lessons in the following term.
Today I still love the gracefulness and simplicity of these musical lines.
2. Beethoven - Pathetique Sonata
When I first heard any part of the Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata I was probably 12 or 13 and the performer was a pretty brunette girl of 15 who was both an immediate crush and fine pianist. She played the third movement as part of a music recital where I played recorder (probably Telemann but it escapes me) and I left the event, after sheepishly congratulating the girl, again in a state of jealousy and joy with a touch of heartache wedged between them.
It wasn’t just that it was impressive, but that it inspired me to immediately buy the sheet music and spend many lost hours with my delightful music teacher skirting around the edges of Beethoven’s genius, and classical music in general. She would double my lessons’ length at no extra cost as we both tried to learn Pathetique’s slow second movement; she made me cassettes of incredible interpretations of Beethoven; she made it fun when it was plain that neither of us had the talent to play the music in any recognizable way.
It was a kind of musical seduction that was essential to my development. The sonata also holds some phrases that never fail to delight me.
3. Squarepusher - Journey To Reedham
I knew and loved Aphex Twin before Squarepusher. I would stay up late night after night watching MTV in the hope Windowlicker would come on, but it was a chance listening to Journey To Reedham that made me ask ‘who is this Squarepusher and where can I buy everything he’s done?’. Nowadays I find most IDM hard work and unsatisfying, but for a while in my late teens I listened to it almost exclusively. The idea of a single person creating complete musical worlds was very attractive.
Before Squarepusher was an idol I was destined to be only interested in recording guitars or maybe notes on a stave. Now I had been tempted into the abstract world of programming where the arrangements were humanly impossible and the sounds were not of any instrument. It is a world I both love and hate but that constitutes most of my day-to-day paid work.
4. Herbie Hancock - Chameleon
I always thought busy drums were the best drums and wondered at the boredom of creating slow, simple beats. The truth is that a perfect slow break or rhythm, played or programmed, is a thing of real beauty and consequence. Consequence? A drum track of great feel is essential for almost any modern pop song or dance track: listen to the incredible rhythm work of The Funk Brothers on the Motown hits for a masterclass in this.
It was an ex-employer and friend who confirmed the importance and power of feel when it comes to drums, by simple playing me Chameleon by Herbie Hancock. The entry of the drums that cut into the synth bass is so simple, and the beat is so simple, but the funk is undeniable and captivating all because of the drummer’s feel.
Recreating a little of this magic is a daily trial, and I’ve not really managed it yet.
5. Arvo Part - Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten
Arvo Part is responsible for some of my very favourite music, and it was through him that I accepted that simplicity was as impressive as complexity, in music and perhaps elsewhere.
Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten is made up of only descending minor scales and a tolling bell, yet it is a glorious construction and very moving, producing emotional results far in excess of its parts.
With Arvo Part, every note counts.
In technology industries, there are many that call themselves experts in fields that are barely decades old; in fields that can move as fast as the speed of thought.
For the expert this is dangerous. The real skill of the technologist is not just in mastering a brief age of technology. You also must remain malleable enough to move with its irresistible motion.
Expertise should be a paddle, but it can be an anchor.
This app - the first app me and company have ever produced - is all about creating and storing song ideas. It’s designed to be both fun and useful. A seasoned songwriter will find it very handy; an amateur will be able to play hundreds of chords in a very simple fashion.
(via SongSynth for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad on the iTunes App Store)
A natural Whistler (Taken with instagram)
I was showing a relative around Brighton’s North Laines for the gizillionth time, only to see a shadowy lady leaving copies of a freshly printed book on cafe tables like a philanthropic ninja. Within 30 seconds I smelt “marketing campaign” and so picked one up. Guardian Books had correctly earmarked Brighton as a liberal, digital city and so had left copies of How To Leave Twitter by the rather lovely Grace Dent (Charlie Brooker with better breasts and bigger hair if you want a summary) all over the town.
How To Leave Twitter is barely about leaving twitter, so half a point off for that. It is instead a fun afternoon’s worth of musings on cruising the 140 character waves of twitterland and will probably require an enigma machine for the uninitiated to enjoy. If you already tweet like me ( @sessionleopard ), you immediately will recognise Grace’s love of twitter’s human ticker-tape and share with her its joys of live-tweeting TV, the hours wasted on pun-based games and giggle along with her literary smirks and smacks.
The book is a light, witty read to be enjoyed with a cup of tea and breaks for twitter updates. Occasionally a little wiff of hypocrisy enters the proverbial room, especially when Grace attends to her twitter-hates, but I was happy enough to turn a blind eye to these moments and move to the next funny. What did catch my eye was a seam in the book where Grace explores how twitter is one of the few - perhaps only - places where women can be both funny and smart without being heinously edited, and find many others doing the same. In this strand I felt a little closer to where Grace’s passion really lies, and the book moves a touch beyond the funny vacuum into a more interesting place. I’m sure Grace will write more on this subject in the future, and write about it very well.
7/10
I really really hope this happens. Go Pistorius!
(via BBC Sport - Oscar Pistorius closer to fulfilling Olympic dream)
