February 2013
2 posts
Story's End - Written on behalf of The Dead Man's...
Here is what Francis Bacon had to say on death:
Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other … Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it...
Desperados - written originally for Youth Music...
The New Yorker ran a great cartoon this week. The scene is a classic wild west saloon, scattered with bandits and deperados. A particularly mean looking character, who has just walked in through the swinging double doors, announces, “I’m looking for a couple of fast guns who ain’t afraid to lay down their life. There’s no pay, but it’ll be a great way to get your name out there.”
While this...
June 2012
2 posts
7 tags
Don't Shoot The Messenger Neil
So before Steve Jobs died, Neil Young had been spearheading a behind the scenes campaign aiming to get him to work on technologies that would allow us to stop listening to mp3s and start listening to “high quality” audio.
This article in Wired magazine discusses his position and goes on to outline the “better” alternatives to mp3s: “Lossless” compression formats, CD quality audio and “high...
May 2012
7 posts
findlaynapier asked: If you played the lute would you ever get up late at night and lick the strings?
The Cosy Blow Mk 1 - Vintage Warmth - CLICK HERE →
I decided a couple of weeks ago that I was going to have a go at learning to make sample based software intruments in NI Kontakt: I appreciate this is a bad start to a blog entry, for most people. Anyway, there being no great shortage of badly made patches based on real musical instruments I went in search of some other source of oscillation and eventually settled on the little heating fan in my...
A simple way to travel over water that does not...
Not very often, but sometimes, you come across somebody who argues that Skye is no longer an island, now that there is a bridge connecting it to the mainland. Like I say, it’s pretty rare, but I was reminded of it by flicking through Hamish Haswell-Smith’s enormous compendium of all the islands in Scotland, which pointedly excludes Skye on account of the bridge, before going on to include it...
November 2011
5 posts
Scotland's Greatest Hits album, as voted for by... →
If I came across this in the compilations section of Fopp, I’d be like this:
“What the Fuck?”
5 tags
Never Explain, Never Apologise
Last week, I read online an “Open Letter To Songwriters”, imploring them to be more willing to explain their lyrics. It would, the critic argues, make their music “more likeable”. The first time I read the article, even the second time, I warmly cheered this. There is something undeniably un-likeable about the wilful obfuscation and scattergun metaphor-ing of...
