The Bathtub Thinker

Stumbling around the elevated quarters of Oxford, I was lucky...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:01:26 -0500

Stumbling around the elevated quarters of Oxford, I was lucky enough to visit the Treasures exhibit in the Bodleian Library. It is a small but incredible collection of some of the Bodleian’s - indeed the world’s - finest and rarest books.

When I see ancient bones of our once earthbound cousins, it is sometimes difficult to feel their magnificence. It is when I see the strokes of their pens; their very thoughts put to page, that I feel a real connection with their history.

Autumn berry (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:04:21 -0400

Autumn berry (Taken with instagram)

Alcohol and Behaviour - not as simple as Friday night carnage?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:31:00 -0400

Alcohol and Behaviour - not as simple as Friday night carnage?

We've got obsessions.

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:37:04 -0400

You cannot create without obsession. Obsession drives ideas or pleasures into clarity and then into action, but it is also is a burden and a watermark. Few can - or want to - make anything without leaving the dirty red smudge of an ego’s seal.

I wonder then if obsession is a curse, a blessing, or a skill?

I judge this book highly from its cover (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:13:20 -0400

I judge this book highly from its cover (Taken with instagram)

Blue Sky in Brighton (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:28:38 -0400

Blue Sky in Brighton (Taken with instagram)

Existential slow house.

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:08:53 -0400

Existential slow house.

"It’s always the same: a famous website changes and there’s an outcry. Then there’s..."

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:11:00 -0400

“It’s always the same: a famous website changes and there’s an outcry. Then there’s an outcry about the outcry. Then we get depressed about the banality of it all and think of ways to live without the website, but then we realize that we are just far too lazy to write actual letters or train carrier pigeons or even quit our browsers, so we carry on using the website. Unless it’s myspace.”

POEM: Life Lessons for Girls

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:07:06 -0400

girls look gorgeous

boys look smart

women draw pictures

men make art

a girl’s pretty in pink

a boy comes home dirty

men mean experience

women fear thirty

girls eat half

boys have what’s left

a woman feeds a family

a man is a chef

boys play rough

girls watch in awe

women need children

men need to explore

The mantra of a cat harness… (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:30:32 -0400

The mantra of a cat harness… (Taken with instagram)

The Sublime Greyness Of Sweden

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:04:49 -0400

The Sublime Greyness Of Sweden

Summer

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:10:48 -0400

Summer

5 pieces that have influenced me as a music maker.

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 08:42:44 -0400

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.

Expertise & Technology.

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:27:53 -0400

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...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:22:50 -0400

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)

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:25:06 -0400

A natural Whistler (Taken with instagram)

How To Leave Twitter by Grace Dent - a review of my free copy

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:53:00 -0400

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...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:13:31 -0400

I really really hope this happens. Go Pistorius!

(via BBC Sport - Oscar Pistorius closer to fulfilling Olympic dream)

Today you can swim (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:51:00 -0400

Today you can swim (Taken with instagram)

Choose to read this meme? Oh, no choice now...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:24:00 -0400

I will spare you the formality of sketching the well-worn philosophical and logical paths, but I can happily state that freedom does not exist in humanity - we are all bonded to something. Instead there are degrees of ‘freeness’, and most of us in western Europe attempt to attain as high a level of it as we humanly can. Personal freedom is in almost all cases the priority for us; freedom of others usually follows as an idealistic second.

With this in mind, this facebook meme caught my eye a few days ago:

Don’t like gay marriages? Don’t get one.. Don’t like cigarettes? Don’t smoke them.. Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.. Don’t like sex? Don’t do it.. Don’t like drugs? Don’t take them.. Don’t like porn? Don’t watch it.. Don’t like alcohol? Don’t drink it.. Don’t like guns? Don’t buy one.. Don’t like your rights taken away??? Don’t take away someone else’s. Repost if you agree

On the whole this meme has a pleasant liberal taste but its sugars are a little synthetic and it has some hidden ingredients, like a cheap Easter egg. Here’s my thoughts:

Don’t like gay marriages? Don’t get one

Perfectly fine. What you do behind bedroom doors or in registry offices doesn’t concern me. Maybe some people feel a bit ‘uurgh’ if they see same-sex hand-holding, but the same people tend to be unmoved by pets cleaning their genitals in public.

Don’t like cigarettes? Don’t smoke them

Yeah… not so watertight as smoke has been proved to be illness dressed as pleasure. When you get ill, someone or some entity has to look after you and people are sad when you die young for the sake of some very expensive, highly taxed dried herbs. Plus, this assumes that you smoke alone, in a closed room, because as soon as smoke travels to someone else, the game rules change.

Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one

‘Don’t like abortions’ is not a phrase that plays well in my head - no one LIKES abortions surely - but I concur on this one. It’s a very individual, difficult choice and one I will never have to personally make, so why would I deny it to a woman?

Don’t like sex? Don’t do it

Leave it to the pro’s.

Don’t like drugs? Don’t take them

I’ve tackled this before. To summarize: Homegrown herbs, fine; heroin and crack, not so much. You find crack addicts rarely keep themselves to themselves when they are ‘clucking off their tits’ (desiring teh drugz pleaz).

Don’t like porn? Don’t watch it

Yeah, make some room by the screen for the rest of us… god daaaam…. and don’t you dare say the word ‘objectify’ in any context, it spoils my magic feeling.

Don’t like alcohol? Don’t drink it

I love alcohol sometimes, so it pains me to admit that in a wider context it’s a devilish concoction. Come to Brighton at 1am on a Friday night for the primary evidence.

Don’t like guns? Don’t buy one

The idea that guns only affect those that own them is a little flawed. By little I of course mean ‘bloody massively hugely’.

Don’t like your rights taken away??? Don’t take away someone else’s

As a general rule, this is a good starting point. As a hard-and-fast rule; highly unrealistic.