Dave

yaHyu tooo, nfc=uk tiyuui tooo.]

long time noupdatee. i'm back in college. i've been trying to get my chess game better. read/ read house of leafves. not much chjange really.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh fucking deadlines suck donkey balls.

Basically I have to do this job on Thursday (an SQL database migration with complex data transformations and non-1:1 mappings, fact fans). If I fuck it up several high-ranking executives in the US may lose their jobs. Which means I have a sucky, hard, horrible and long day of preparatory work ahead tomorrow. And the weather is absolutely beautiful here at the moment, which helps not in the least.

I am reasonably confident it should work on the day; it's nothing whatsoever like what I would deal with in college though... PERL scripting and a big-ass spreadsheet that I wrote. The calculations page of the spreadsheet has 56 columns of transformations, and 4000 rows! Eeeek!!

Fate seems to be conspiring with me on this though - watmm is down at the moment so that's one less distraction for me. And the coffee helps.

Actually that's something I've noticed about computer-geek people... the stereotypes are true. Some folks where I work look exactly like what you would imagine low-level BIOS/OS coders (it's called 'programming to the bare metal' apparently which is a nice expression) to look like. And when we get free pizza the Friday before bank holidays, it's advisable not to get in the way of the massive herd of geeks stampeding through the cubicle farm at lunchtime.

It's kind of annoying when stereotypes turn out to be true.

I urge you all to procure the song now playing... his voice chills me to the fucking bone, in a good way. It's from the album Rejoicing in the hands, and it's not in the least bit electronic, which is odd for me.

I was just reminded that Orbital have confirmed for Oxegen(the worst fucking name for a festival ever). It'll be my second time seeing them, and this news just made the festival lineup a whole lot better for me.

Today I bought a copy of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' on a whim - it's a short book about the use and abuse of punctuation in the English language today.

And it's absolutely fucking hilarious - I have never seen such a slim volume point out the ridiculous ambiguity of the common language of half the world so well in so few words... I have to admit that I am somewhat of a spelling and grammar pedant (not on the internet though, I think I'd just end up a gibbering idiot if I spent all my time correcting the various perversions of English you see online), but in stuff like college papers or novels or whatever the sight of misplaced commas or apostrophes invoke in me a reaction that's downright fucking visceral.

On reflection, I think it's because for twenty-two years, I've had to pass a sign saying 'GUINNESS, GIVES YOU STRENGHT' on my way to the bus stop, or town, or indeed anywhere of note in Limerick every morning and evening.

This book made me cry and laugh at the same time with some of the horrible, horrible abuses of English that you come across in day-to-day life that it points out. I'm not talking about misplaced apostrophes or unnecessary punctuation or whatever; I'm on about horrors like "XMA'S TREE'S" and "apples,s" and best of all, "Nigger's out" (a sign in New York; someone had written underneath 'But he'll be back shortly' - fucking brilliant).

Something else I found pretty interesting was that one of the basic divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism (neither of which I have a whole lot to do with, incidentally), kinda comes down to how one particular sentence is open to interpretation by the printers or transcribers of Bibles way back when. It concerns Jesus having a chat to a burglar whilst being crucified... check this out;

Catholic interpretation:"Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise"
Protestant interpretation:"Verily I say, unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise"

Now that's a pretty big difference - with the Pope's boys, the burglars getting there... sooner or later. With the other lads, they're getting the express train.

Wars over punctuation? Now that's fucked up.

The other thing I want to say is that the Expert Knob Twiddlers at watmm has been a new source of damn good music for me the last while; Global Goon commented recently that the quality (of production, especially) there has improved 10000% over the last while, and I tend to agree. I'll pimp a few releases at the end of this entry - there's some really quality stuff coming out, and in a way I'm starting to see some benefits of net-only labels in their own way.

Some other stuff on rotation at the moment is Fennesz - Venice (reminds me of some old Fripp/Sylvian stuff, but more digital - yet lovely and warm and really really excellent to fall asleep to), Eno's 'Here come the warm jets' (I fucking love his warped glammy poppy stuff from the 70s)... although I have no speakers of any worth attached to the puter at the moment so anything I want to listen to I tend to burn and bring upstairs ,and read a book whilst giving it a listen - maybe this is a good thing? hmm...

now to pimp some EKT muzak:

Orange Dust - Bitches & Sandwiches - glitchy hiphop stuff with top fucking notch production. I like this a lot.
Wisp - SAWv2 remixes - A pretty cool new angle on some (incidentally - of my favourite) tracks on Aphex's classic. I reckon I could get away with having some... erm colleagues of mine dropping track 4, lichen, in a midde of a proper D'n'B set and get away with it - something I couldn't really imagine of SAWv2 prior to this.
Retropublik has some pretty decent releases too, but I'm too lazy to go on typing.

Ah-haaaa!

Lying on the floor of a warm, sunny room smoking a spliff and listening to 'Hana' by Asa-Chang and Junray REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

Bliss.

soooo last Tuesday I arrived home to find my nice on-loan 20W Harmann-Kardon (that name always sounds liek a Benny Hill/Encephela joke in the making to me) speakers being repo'd by my brother (which I don't have a problem with) with no notice whatsoever (which I do have a problem with, whining motherfucker that I am). Anyway Squizzerbosher sounds like he's live with a 303 and a 909 inside a giant tin can with these piece of shit speakers, and Autechre? More like craptechre with these bargainbasementjobbies... fnar. I'm moving the computer up to the desk in my room that awaits it soon enough (I reckon my thieving bastard brother has stolen my drill THAT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A MAN incidentally... another item for the crucifixion committee) so I might just lookinto a half-decent soundcard with a digital out. Maybe an Audigy or some shit.

But first I have to drill a hole in the wall, which is harder than you may think in this household.

I've given The Streets new album a listen or two this evening too - it has the cheap-as-chips production of the first album, but it's evolved a bit too - it's a bit of a concepty geeza quadrophenia for people in fred perry shirts (oh wait hangon...) anyway I like it a lot and reckon Mikey Skinner is a pretty talented bloke. He gets a lot of shit.

But I think you should check it out.

Also Lexaunculpt, who I heard the other night for the first time falling asleep... kinda classical-influenced, really glitchy stuff. One of the nicer releases I've heard on Planet Mu... bar Snares who you either love or hate, I guess.

Ahhh so tonight I decided that I wouldn't venture outside the door, which is unusual for me on a Friday night. I also left the telly off til midnight because I had a fantastic book to read. I won't bore you with a review, but if you like good satire with a kinda sci-fi/'No Logo' style attitude (god, that crap belongs on the back of a book in an airport jeezus chee-rist!) you should check out Jennifer Government, by Max Barry. You can read the first chapter of Jennifer Government here, if you're interested or have time to kill at the moment.

Max also runs an online nation-management game (think Civilisation, but on a more macro sort of scale) which has very lively forums which I haven't really delved into yet. Here's my nation, Splurgistan. I basically leave the little fuckers off to do their own thing, make occasional decisions on the law... they seem to be doing okay.

But I digress; half the beauty of having a 'quiet one' is the fact that I sat down and listened to seven fantastic albums in a row, without any stupid telly distracting me. I don't do stuff like that often enough these days.

Wow, I've said it before but Manitoba's 'Up in flames' is a really great album. And the same goes for the new Beta Band album... they took a while, but it's great the way they've managed to condense their previous stoned goofiness into nice three or four minute pop songs.

Right now I'm listening to a Kraftwerk live bootleg, and I dunno if it was the special paper I had to eat on the night or what but they opened with this track when I saw them, and I can remember this track from the gig with crystal clarity (for me, that's a good/rare thing).

Because some manager in some cube in America fucked up, the deadline at work for the current project I'm working on has been pushed back the best part of a month.

Which is a good thing because I have done NOTHING but browse forums and look at stupid crap on the web all of this week.

Go me.

Well the last few days have been interesting in the minute section of the internet designated to experimental electronic music. I was viewing a very interesting thread developing on a popular messageboard within this microcosm (fnar) during one of my many, many, many slack moments at work lately - it concerned what equipment Autechre and the Boards of Canafnorda might use. It's fairly widely known what equipment ae have been using since the start; but some interesting stuff concerning BoC's synths was posted - and subsequently deleted by 'cob', a quasi-invisible turquoise hexagon moderator.

Which is a bunch of bullshit. There has been moments in the past where intervention may have been necessary for potential legal blablah, but this sort of paranoia is a load of crap.

On the other hand - it's only a stupid messageboard, and also it's hard to stay mad at these guys listening to the np.

But that was still a load of boooo-shit.

Sooo it looks like the pusher of the Squares, Mr. Thomas Jenkinson, may be playing Cork (likely) and Dublin (less likely) on his forthcoming tour. Another blow struck for the not-Dublin cities of our Isle! Huzzah!

Rather than give you vague theories on what a live pusher show might be like, I'll instead give you the worlds most enthusiastic review, by my good buddy Skytree - man, I'm champing at the bit for this gig... and it might help Tom regain the vital points to oVERTAKE cLOUDDEAD in my best albums of the year sOFAR. Anyway, this is a class review:

Well well...I'm sitting in my cube after getting only one night of sleep on an Easter morning because whenever I would close my eyes, I'd hear and feel Squarepusher invading my brain and smashing it to sonic fragmentations. I did finally manage to shut my eyes and fall into a relative level of sleep for a few moments...but I dreamt of Tetra-Sync. Now I shall rely upon coffee and holiday cheer to get me through the day, until about 7 PM, at which time I fully plan on allowing my bed to absorb me again in sleep.

The show itself was...astounding. I brought a friend of mine who happens to be severely ADHD...I'd never seen him so focused, so intent on devoting his attention to one thing for two hours. The explanation as to why is obvious...Squarepusher live is the most intense head-fuck I have ever experienced under any circumstances at any time in any way. After assaulting the audience with heavily DSPed/chopped/buffer-overridden breaks deeply layered and accentuated by freneticly astounding basswork for a period of fifteen minutes, Tom paused the audio assault for a moment...washing into breif waves of ambience. Just as the audience seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief, the breaks bombastically blasted themselves back into our sore-yet-anxious eardrums, this time accompanied by synchopated strobes that seemed to blind us with every flash. The strobes were rediculously and disgustingly bright, seemingly a joke of Tom's intending to cause audience members to simultaneously close their eyes and plug their ears in fear and admiration.

Watching Tom himself...you get the distinct impression that his brainwaves move at a speed that puts to shame the average human intellect. When listening to his basswork, your ears eventually lose the cohesiveness of it...you can no longer keep track of the speed of the notes, discern the individual tones, or understand the movements of his fingers upon the fret-board. Watching him wholly in his element, his bass in hand, his dual laptops and machines lying in front of him, I (and, I believe, everyone else in the audience) developed an intense admiration and understanding for the man. He is, without a doubt, a genius...and the fact assails you like an atom bomb, shattering everything else to pieces and bathing your ears in intense sonic radiation.

After nearly an hour of bass improvisations alternated between unimaginably franticly destroyed beat structures, it seemed as if every individual in the audience had just experienced something they had very seldom seen. Many of us, I'm sure, believed that it simply could not be topped...that no faster and more intricate sound could be accurately presented by today's speaker technology. However, we were soon proved quiet wrong, when Tom bent into the mic and quietly admitted, "Alright, enough of this shit. Let's really fuck it up now...I don't care, just fucking smash it up, yeh?!" Most of us thought, "Shit...this wasn't it?" Soon he afforded us the opportunity to discover that, no, what we had been listening to previously apparently was not "fucking smashed up" in comparison to the latter half of the show.

To top it all off, he ended with two encore preformances of Come on My Selector and Journey to Reedham, respectively...uttering the words at the final encore of "Your wish is my command", after the audience chanted his name for a solid five minutes.

In summation: Tickets were $15 US. I would have paid $100. While I am not a reglular listener of SqP, the skills and intellectual prowess he demonstrated here have gained him an avid follower among the undeniable thousands more to come before this tour is over.

So, yesterday, I purchased a copy of cLOUDDEAD's (yeah, the arty capitalization kinda annoys me too) new album, Ten. And I can honestly say that it's the first album since the leak of Ultravisitor hit my PC about, oooh, eight weeks ago or so now (wow, has it been that long?) which has been on more or less constant rotation. It's hip-hop, I suppose (a quick look on google shows that this has been a point of some contention among some people), but not as we know it, Jim.

The only points of reference I have for it with what music I know are kinda instrumental hip-hop á la DJ Shadow, and the genii that are Boards of Canada(Odd Nosdam's backing tracks draw from the same esoteric background material, and have the same sorta crackly, lo-fi quality as a lot of the things that Mike and Marcus produce; the remix BoC have done makes perfect sense). But that only describes about half the picture, really.

Actually when I think about it, the fragmentary lyrics and stuff remind me of 'I am the walrus'-era Lennon lyrics in a strange sort of way too. Anyway, getting back to my main point; if you have an interest in the more out there music out there, you ought to get this album now.

I'm listening to their first album (a collection of 10" singles) now, and it is just as good. Been sitting on my harddrive for about a year now, and I hadn't listened to it properly til today. Goddammit.

And there's a whole lot of other stuff out there produced by the Anticon collective too. This demands further investigation!

In other news, I managed to put together one of those self-assembly desk thingys last night (in a fucking haze) so I'll probably be moving my puter up to the bedroom soon. It's a good thing, at least in the respect that I might be able to assemble some of the many fragments of tunes on my HD into an actual song. I can also connect my PC to my stereo for BASS GOODNESS. I might just buy a HD, rip all my stuff to it, and retire my CDs hehehe.

Speaking of BASS GOODNESS, I found out today that Squarepusher's playing in Cork soon, which brightened the SHIT out of my day (spent writing a guide to migrating an SQL database grrrnnhhhhjgjhhghhh), and Plaid are playing this weekend (Plaid are great live, they're lovely and melodic and happy and danceable. I really don't understand the Plaid-hating that goes on on certain internet messageboards).

Damn, I use a lot of brackets. I might look into a layout for this page that accomodates tangential thoughts in some other way, cos I have a lot of them. Also, this entire post is about music, and nothing else. That kinda worries me.

(slightly later)

Wow, I wrote a thing for Buzz that sounds like a confield-era ae tribute band. Making glitchy shit is fun. Now all I have to do is extend it beyond sixteen bars.

about pronouncing the word bullshit as boo-shit, and elongating the 'oo'. Boooooo-shit. Try it. Feels good, doesn't it?

I'm gonna do a proper post about how good cLOUDDEAD's new album is soon.

I feel like enlightening your life with a whole load of random crap today, so:

firstly: this is fucking cool. really cool. But I love that sort of thing
secondly: if you're easily offended or are easily disturbed, don't, for the love of god, read this.. It's pretty long. Paluahinik (or however you spell it) is a marvellous author in my opinion.

Hot damn the new Neptunes/NERD album is sooooo good. Pharrell Williams' ridiculous falsetto is brilliant.

As is The Grey Album (previously mentioned in this irregular missive). Look it up, goddam, it's all over the fucking place.

In fact, looking like a good few months for music. Live gigs coming up: DMX Krew (maybe), Plaid (definitely), Jamie Lidell (definitely), Oxegene (AAARGHHH WORST FESTIVAL TITLE EVER, but great lineup - including NERD).

Finally, go read Fermat's Last Theorem. It's about the history of an equation (no, come back!) but it's the most gripping book about maths I've ever read. It would make a good movie!

Intel is turning me into a fucking nerd, I can't deny it.

what the fuck.... exanimate. opposite of inanimate?

Jamie Lidell rocks my fucking world. I am so most definitely going to see him.

Sooooo last night I went to see Kraftwerk live in Dublin.

And I can honestly say that it was maybe the best gig I've ever been to (I insert the qualifier 'maybe' because my good mate Niamh B pointed out today that to date I've described five gigs to her as 'the best gig ever'). And she's correct, but this was really really really good.

They opened with 'The Man Machine'... coupla introductory noises and vocodey bits (if youlike vocoders, this was your fucking bag, I'm tellinya) and the curtain opened to reveal the four lads, exactly like they were in the 70s, statuelike in front of laptops instead of analogue synths. Karl on the far left, and Florian on the far right, with their two minions in between. Followed by a stomping version of Expo 2000 (I think!), followed by a bunch of the hits - Tour de France, initially:

More hits after that (maaaan, the crowd went wild at the first car-door-slam of Autobahn - they were preaching to the converted here) - Trans-Europe Express was just... as well.

One encore later, the curtain closed and re-opened to find the robot Kraftwerk where the real ones stood moments earlier. I know this is a very crude visual ploy blah blah blah, but hot damn, it really hit home. Wow.

We had a couple of encores too... the new single, Aerodynamik is also just... . And Boing Boom Tshack was as good as it ought to have been live.

Nevermind the fact they look like a bunch of statues of economics teachers, these guys deliver the goods live. If they're playing near you, beg, borrow, or steal a ticket.

I feel obligated to say you should get a copy of DJ Dangermouse's 'The Grey Album' while I'm at it. If you don't know what that is, check out the full story here.

As Mike and Marcus put it through the voice of some anonymous chick, if you can be told what you can see or hear, you can be told what you can say or think. Defend your constitutional rights. BBQ.

Today is the 14th of March aka the Ides of March aka pi day. Pi is an irrational constant which means it goes on and on and on and never stops and never repeats. Pi is everywhere. Pi is life and nature and music. Thanks pi, nice one for being there for us - for an irrational number, there's a lot of rationality attached to you.

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69998 92256 95968 81592 05600 10165 52563 7568 ...

[a shout out to Feigenbaum's number too. You're underappreciated, mang (I have no idea why Feigenbaum's number is hispanic, as an editorial note, but it is.)]

Well, maybe I'm being assimilated into Intel or something, but I'm reading Linus Torvalds' autobiography at the moment, and he is a very interesting bloke. Linus invented Linux, and if you don't know what Linux is go away, do some some Googling, and come back. The guy kinda wears his geekiness like some sort of badge of honour - he's proud of it.

But anyway there's piles of strangeness going on here under the surface, because when I started using the net in the early nineties (getting the bus out to UL cos unimaginably these days the college I was attending at the time didn't actually have a net connection).

And the WWW wasn't so big then - a lot of stuff was done by telnet or ftp.
And an ftp site I got an awful lot of stuff off back then was ftp.funet.fi.
And amazingly, around that time, a proto-Linux was available to download from that same site.
Not much to you maybe, but to me stuff like this blows my mind - life is full of weird-ass synchronicities.

Oh, and here's a map of the internet. Strange.

I have an excuse - my computer was the broken, and what with the looking at a computer 9 to 5 Monday to Friday and all that, I was rather lackadaisical in my fixing it. I'm doing some well interesting shit in intel though; all poking around on circuit boards and building linux kernels and crap (yawn); thus far I haven't succumbed to the corporovirus of talking in three-letter acronyms yet, although they're big on that shit, let me tell you.

Having a few quid is nice too! I'm definitely going up to Kraftwerk in Dublin, almost definitely going to Plaid, and I reckon I might go see Jamie Lidell too, cos I've heard really good things about his live shit.

The good news is that my computer has a new hard disk, a new gfx card, and more ram now; I'm not expecting another crash. I got new trainers today too. New trainers and µ-Ziq (and nice skunk) always make me feel better, y'know.

Y'know I'm trying to think of stuff that's happened since I updated this thing last, and the crap thing is the answer is 'not a lot'. I've learnt loads of computer stuff... oh fuckinell wait a minute, the nerds!

I have never seen such as culturally diverse group of people with similar awfulness in dress sense and haircuts and the like in my life than the resident genius coders in NPD (as the TLA for our IPD goes.... oh noes) - it's so concentrated it's eerie. I'm not sure if I want to end up like that y'know.

Heeeeyyyyyyyy livejournal how you doin?

I've been slack lately, it's my fault, and I can feel your gaze burning into the back of my head everytime I launch winamp. Hell, I even removed your client (the less said about that the better) from my startup script. So I promise I'll do a good one tomorrow, much has happened and alll that stuff. Rilly.

I'm just a lazy bollocks.

Current Mood: mischievous