The account of a fledgling Glasgow band and their adventures in the kitchen and the studio. Usually updated weekly. All mp3s are released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license.
So as we all once again attempt the delicate balancing act of not freezing to death whilst also trying to avoid a repeat of the enormous gas bill we built up last year (or maybe that's just me?), here's some stuff I made. Hopefully it'll warm you more than it did me. I'd hug you too if I could, if only because the heat from your body might thaw my icicle bones...
The Ice Maiden Because Craig was talking about sculpture before I headed home for Christmas, and then my brother asked me if I was going to build a snowman. That's all it took...
Tile Massacre SHMUP So the assemblee competition is currently taking place over at TIGSource, and I'm taking part. For the first part I made a bunch of sound effects, and for the second part I'm making this shoot em up thing where you first have to create the level you're going to play through. You can follow my progress here. Here's hoping I actually get it finished before the deadline...
Cold Edit A seasonal edit of a track we did (before we started the blog?) which I called Music Box and Craig probably called something else. The ending's maybe a bit familiar.
Finally, I apologise for the blog's missing background. It's hosted on my own site (if anyone knows a better solution I'm all ears), which just got knocked down from too much traffic (I'll have to wait to see the logs before I can work out why). It'll be back up come the new year.
While I was writing my 2009 albums post, I realised that a lot of the music that really stuck with me wasn't on any album at all (well, these obviously are, but barring Fever Ray I wasn't remotely interested in getting the respective albums). Since my PhD I've been fascinated by music video (for those interested Carol Vernallis' Experiencing Music Video is an incredible book btw - it goes into all sorts detail on how music videos work, and is incredibly inspiring). For me music has always been as much a visual medium as an aural one, and I tend to see music video as the highest form of the medium. I can't stand it when bands/artists don't understand this, and hearing 'it's all about the music'(subtext: it's all about sounding and looking like some shit band who split up before you were born, conforming to some bizarre notion of authenticity. Authenticity kills art) makes me want to torch your house - I hear that as a statement of total artistic and intellectual cowardice.
Anyway, here's a wee list of the videos that moved me this year, together with an attempt to try and explain why.
Beyonce: Single Ladies
As per usual, Beyonce marries some pretty nasty lyrics to some stunning music (see also Ring the Alarm - Bomb Squad gone R&B with whiny lyrics about how her man doesn't want her. It should have been so much more...). The sheer minimalism of the music is fantastic - it's literally a beat and her voice, with the odd splash of synth - and it's the kind of thing you only seem to ever hear in R&B.
There's something deeply strange (and new?) about the video - it feels to me like the point where music video abandons any interest in manufacturing sex appeal and instead pushes through to something else. Beyonce's movements don't really have any relation to the usual motions you'd see in a video like this (all exaggerated strutting (look how independent I am) and pouting come ons). Instead they're more like visual music, an entirely abstract visual language, separated from all the usual signifiers.
I'm not sure I've really explained myself here, but there is clearly something happening in this video. Here's hoping someone follows it up.
Lady GaGa: Paparazzi
Her only good song (I thought Pokerface might be going somewhere until it got to that horrible chorus). Having said that, she's currently light years ahead of anyone else when it comes to pop music's (vital) visual side. This video is a perfect demonstration of that - everything is hyper hyper stylised and executed with such authority. If Beyonce's video felt like the establishment of a new visual language, this feels like a restatement of pop music's best qualities - the longing that's key to so much great pop music, coupled with a complete dedication to the visual.
Shakira: She-Wolf
I think this came after Single Ladies, but it kind of feels like Single Ladies was the logical successor to it. There's a similar focus on distinctly odd movements and body shapes, but Shakira definitely plays up the sex. It's also nowhere near as assured as Beyonce's video - the bit at the end where she's dancing on a rooftop feels awkward and clumsy, like the real world's intruding into pop's fantasy, like Shakira's an actual person as opposed to a Pop Star (okay, so this sounds kind of cool...). Anyway, when I rewrite the world's history according to my own whim, there's going to be a line from She-Wolf to Single Ladies to... something incredible, that marries Lady GaGa's visual flair with the language glimpsed in Single Ladies, with a serious critical understanding of the world we live in (because let's face it, we haven't had that in years and years in the charts, and we desperately need it).
Also, any song that gets to number 1 with lyrics that include a word like lycanthropy is an instant win.
Florence & the Machine: Dog Days
Easily the weakest video here, and compared to the others the visuals are largely uninspired and don't really take any risks. Presumably it was done on a smaller budget than the other videos, but a lack of money isn't any excuse for a lack of imagination. It's a great optimistic pop song, but you've got to wonder what she means - surely if anything, the dog days are only just beginning?
Fever Ray: When I Grow Up
See my albums post. Everything about this video is perfect - the lighting, the setting, the shaman girl, the man watching her. It all just works so well together. It's as if Tarkovsky was reborn in an American(?) suburb and took to making music videos instead of films.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Zero
Not sure this belongs here, but Karen O's dancing in the video is fantastic. It's the way it feels like she's trying to be cool, but her idea of cool is a scene from Fame. There's a wonderful sense of unselfconscious joy to it, it makes me happy...
There's maybe a trend here that they're all female artists (slightly excepting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and all my albums were made by female artists/bands with female singers. But then, women have always made the best art.
Um, I hope this doesn't come across as me just perving over female pop stars...
We're both going to do a post about our favourite music this year. Here's mine:
This year my tastes seem to have been slightly more indie and mainstream than they have been for a while. I'm not entirely sure why, but it might be (partly) down to me not reading The Wire so much (I still think it's the best music mag out there, but the writing hasn't really grabbed me for a while, not the way it used to). I did like Loops, though it could have done with a few more interesting writers - I found some of the essays (bloody Nick Cave gets everywhere...) a bit tedious.
Fever Ray: Fever Ray
Easily the album that really grabbed me by the throat this year. I'd largely missed The Knife (barring this stunning video), but the above video completely knocked me for six. The lighting, the colours, the suburban shaman girl... It's the album in miniature, the way it takes this everyday setting and turns it into something other, something far stranger and more unexpected and unpredictable. It's music that makes the ordinary strange, with lyrics about dishwasher tablets and foresters in high heels. And like the best music (/art), the more you listen to (/obsess about) it, the more it shapes your perception of the world, the more it shows the everyday banality of life in this culture to be nothing more than an illusion.
The world is far stranger than it appears.
Gang Gang Dance: Saint Dymphna Technically this was released in 2008, but I'm rarely up to date with my listening habits and only got it this year. Anyway, I'm deeply in love with this album and its giddy, ecstatic joy. That bit towards the end of First Communion where it just opens up and races to the finish was the biggest rush of the year for me.
Ideally this is the kind of band I'd like us to be - excited, ecstatic and omnivorous in terms of sound and genre. Sadly I think we tend to be too heavy handed and wed to our guitars though. The only song that comes close to the ideal is Sunshine Starlight (still needs a better name), which is fairly atypical compared to our other stuff.
Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career This is as indie as I get before I have to throw up. There's all sorts of things wrong with this album - the fact it could have been recorded 50 years ago and it would have fit in perfectly, the way it's drenched in so much reverb it sounds like it's covered in honey and syrup and treacle all at the same time, the utter lack of ambition... But French Navy is a stunning, jaw-dropping pop song, which pretty much makes up for it. I'm not exactly happy about it (really this is not the kind of music I should be listening to in 2009) but I have had this album on a lot this year, so I couldn't ignore it here.
Los Campesinos!: We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed This is Kieron Gillen's fault (serves me right for going to youtube to see what he was talking about). See my Camera Obscura comments. While indie though, Los Campesinos! definitely have some ambition and manage to create some interesting sounds despite themselves. And there's a fantastic bitterness strung through their songs - it's great to hear a band like this who recognise this world is a pretty horrible place to live. Bizarrely inconsistent lyrics (quality-wise) - "I've got a fist on fire", really? and:
"I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love is to like the other slightly less than you get in return. I keep feeling like I'm being undercut."
...in the same song. Anyway, I think it's their odd combination of bitterness and optimistic(?) music that got me. This is another one that's had a lot of plays despite myself.
Subtle: For Hero: For Fool Way behind the times with this one. Forget Camera Obscura, this (this and Gang Gang Dance) is what music should sound like in 2009 (I'm aware of how depressing it is that neither album was released this year). Doseone is really the only lyricist worth listening to these days. Here's his take on reality shows:
"winner of the only and annual "serious serious gut's competition"... (Sponsored in part by the pain reliever people and heads of music television)
Yes, you and ten other tough guys slit smiles across your then perfectly sturdy stomachs and spread your large intestines boldly out across a coated white poker table.... the starter pistol barked and each contestant commenced to carefully comb their own eager entrails from behind a one-way wall of mirrored eyewear everyone a hopeful breathing heavy sifting through their mortal coil with their finger tips, for the most intimidating lengths of well sculpted and primetime stomach links.
Every so often... in the name of health an executioner capped usher struts about the gut covered table misting everyone's exposed and heaving organs with a modified and fancy water pistol.
As always this years celebrity judges are only of the most incredible persuasion charles bronsons angry and gay only daughter, icecube back from when he was hard and a framed 8x10 of joe namath's kneecaps.
And because you won they stitched up your open abdomen first.
gave you a nice rambo knife, some choice cigarettes and cut you loose in the ozarks.
The question being not if, but when you will kill for your next meal..."
...and the music somehow keeps up with that, a swirling flux of sound that darts off in odd directions and never repeats except in the most unexpected fashion. Also it has the line "desperate times call for step-by-step schematics of the human dive", which to me suggests an entire world. I'm pretty sure I'm going to steal it at some point in the future.
We mostly just re-recorded a couple of Craig's guitar parts, and I softened the attack on the toms and turned the bass up a bit.
Since this was our last meet up before Christmas we made a Nut Roast (which promptly fell apart and became a Nut Mess). Other than its inability to pull itself together, this was easily the best nut roast I've ever had. It was really good.
More... Tumbling Nut Mess with Spiced Parsnip and Apple puree
Nut Mess:
1 carrot - peeled and ribboned using a potato peeler
half a white onion chopped
1 clove garlic
125g mixed chopped nuts
Some parsley and garlic - chopped
Seasoning
half a tablespoon of lemon juice
1 egg, beaten
Puree:
1 parsnip, peeled and chopped
1 granny smith (tart) apple, peeled and chopped
~100ml veg stock
half a tsp each of ground cumin, cinnamon and cayenne pepper
2 tsp runny honey
seasoning
Sweat onion and garlic in oil for a few minutes, add the carrot, cook for a further few minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, give it a good stir and place in a greased loaf tin and put in a 180C oven for 30-45 minutes.
Gently sweat parsnip in oil for a few minutes, then add the apple, cook for a few minutes more, then add the rest of the ingredients apart from the honey. Cooked for ~15 minutes till everything is soft, puree in a blender then return to the pan, place on a low heat and stir in the honey.
To serve, divide the puree between 2 plates, then pile the nut roast on top. Serve with roast tatties and green veg (brussel's sprouts!)
Finally I'll follow up my previous post with a picture of the game I made for Ludum Dare: I'm really pleased with how it turned out, the visuals especially. You can get it here.
(also, despite this being our last meeting of the year(?), there will be some more posts (from both of us!) shortly)
Re-recorded bass part (still not sure it's right).
Softened kick drum attack.
Changed 'face' to 'lips'.
The lyrics are still creepy, but they are going to change (Craig: "they're creepy, but bad creepy..." Which was kind of the point - they're meant to make you uncomfortable. The male gaze is not a positive force in the world. More importantly though, they're also pretty clunky, so; change is coming). Other than that I think this one's pretty much finished.
For food we made a parsnip sage and walnut risotto. It was nice. We followed it with a remarkable happy accident of a cake, which will be known from now on as Burnt Cake. I had done a batch of fairy cakes, but completely forgot to take them out the oven until at least an hour after I should have done. Bizarrely they actually tasted pretty good. Slightly dry, but otherwise completely un-complain-about-able, and with a nice kind of crust. I think I'm going to do it again, this time with some kind of spice(s), whenceforth they will be known as Spiced Burnt Cakes. It's going to be great...
Add the sage, walnuts and rice, together with enough stock to cover the rice. Cook for about 20 mins, adding more stock as needed.
Eat it.
Burnt Cakes
175g self-raising flour
150g caster sugar
150g margarine
3 eggs
1tsp vanilla
Put everything in a bowl, mix until blended.
Divide into 12 fairy cake cases.
Bake for at least 1 hour (probably more) at 160C. They should be brown (not black) when you take them out the oven.
Owen Hatherley recently did another tour of Glasgow, written up here. I love this kind of thing. Also, it got me to take a wander across to the People's Palace, which was most worth it (as you can kind of see from my pictures).
Honestly, do you really have to put cameras everywhere?
This weekend's Ludum Dare by the way, and I'll be taking part. You can follow my progress (or lack of it) here. I already inspired a motivational poster, which is more than I managed in the past two competitions.
Not from my people's palace trip, but this house is actually getting built! I would love to live in something like that. I don't care about all the stairs...
This building is insane. It was a carpet factory! (hmm, I do believe I have exceeded my exclamation quota for the week) It's as if it belongs to an alternate universe where factories were designed as, um, palaces (a quick google suggests most people think this is actually the People's Palace, not the building across from it. You can see why...).
This week we started tidying up the first track for the EP, and it's the first proper song we did together. We re-did one of Craig's guitar parts, lengthened the 2nd verse, and I did some vocals. Get it here:
The lyrics were pretty much the first thing that came out of my mouth and will definitely get revised. It's about the male gaze though, which is why they're kind of creepy.
Food-wise, we had some Chole using this recipe, with some couscous (accidentally made with gravy instead of stock, which is why it looks so solid). It was pretty nice, all told. The chole had a nice heat to it, so I must have used just the right amount of cayenne.
After we had some cake - a Chocolate Clementine Cake of my own invention. I'll stick the recipe below the More... link.
75g orange chocolate (I used Green & Blacks' Mayan Gold), chopped into small chunks
25g? cocoa
50g? margarine
100g? icing sugar
Finely grated rind of 1/2 a clementine
175g icing sugar
Juice of 3? clementines
Some more orange chocolate for grating
Put the margarine, caster sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, grated rind of 1 clementine and chocolate chunks into a bowl, mix until well blended.
Put half the mix into a greased 9" cake tin.
Mix the cocoa into the remaining mixture, put in another greased 9" tin.
Put both tins in the oven at 180C, bake for 25mins or until well risen and a skewer comes out clean.
After both cakes have cooled, make the butter icing for the middle. Cream the 50g(? - I think - judge the amounts yourself) of margarine, then add the 100g(?) of icing sugar and grated clementine rind, mix together.
Spread the butter icing on top of the vanilla cake, taking care to leave space at the edges for the icing to spread, then put the chocolate cake on top.
Make the water icing by mixing the 175g icing sugar with however much clementine juice you need to get the right consistency (fairly thick, not too runny). Spread across the top of the chocolate cake.
Finish by grating some of the remaining chocolate over the top of the cake.
Finally, I made a new game, here's a screenshot: It's called The Future Will Only Be Dystopian If Capitalism Remains Undefeated, and you can get it here. It's pretty clunky and confusing, but I'm at least happy with the visuals.
I'm afraid we didn't get together this week as a result of another terrible temp job (I quit in the end - first time I've ever done that), so here's a big post of photies to make up for it:
We didn't make any music this week - instead we started planning our first EP. We decided on four, possibly five tracks of the ones we've done so far. Which means it's time to start tidying things up (and doing vocals, apparently). There's one track which is already perfect as far as I'm concerned (you can probably tell which one if you've been following my posts here), but the others clearly need work.
I read Kim Dot Dammit's blog pretty regularly anyway, but there's something about watching her describe her artistic process when making collages in these videos that's really inspiring, so I did one myself. Yay for inspiration!
I'm going to leave you with another 4k demo (last one, I promise). Despite being a bit sparse, the music on this one's actually not terrible. Texas by keyboarders:
It's a ridiculous thing, only held together (barely) by sellotape and the stupid amount of reverb on that guitar part. It also very much shows up the limitations of our 'record a bit, then another bit, then stick them together' approach to songwriting. I think the reason Sunshine Starlight (needs a better name)'s my favourite thing that we've done is because the structure's far more organic - it has a flow and an internal logic that isn't forced. Anyway, I should probably do more to this one but I think I'm probably going to leave it as it is, unless Craig has other plans.
Following on from yesterday's post, I figured I should maybe post a better introduction to the demoscene, so here's the relevant paragraphs from my thesis (click 'more'):
More... Starting with the demoscene subculture - one of the original inspirations for this project - the wikipedia definition is:
“The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes itself on producing demos, non-interactive audiovisual presentations, which are run real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off better programming, artistic and musical skills than other demogroups.”
The demoscene has its roots in the software piracy of the 1980s, and is based in particular on the exploits of the programmers - known as crackers - who would work to defeat the copy protection implemented in commercial software so it could be freely copied, and distributed to a wide network of people unwilling to pay for the software. Initially the ‘cracked’ software would be distributed with a simple text screen with the name of the programmer who cracked it, displayed on startup. Eventually, however, crackers started to display their programming prowess with more complicated intro screens with animation and sound. With the limited amount of disk space available, and the limited computing power of the machines used, such intros required the programmer to push at the limits of what was possible on the system, and an in-depth understanding of the computers used was essential. As increasing numbers of these more complex intros were released, different cracking groups started to actively compete with each other, and attempt to squeeze the most out of the limited resources at their disposal. Eventually, the programmers responsible for these intros broke away from the illegal cracking scene, and started releasing their productions independently. These productions became known as demos (short for demonstrations), which led to the term demoscene being used to describe the subculture in general.
As alluded to in the previous paragraph, demos are generally the product of demo groups. A group will typically consist of (at least) a graphic artist, a composer, and a programmer. Those involved in the demoscene tend to meet up at large events known as demoparties, where there are competitions for different types of demos, and which provide a chance to meet other people involved in the scene. The competitions maintain the competitive element of the artform, with the party-goers voting for their favourite productions, and some kind of prize awarded to the winners. As a subculture, the demoscene is relatively closed off, in that the intended audience for a demo is other members of the demoscene. As such, the scene has developed its own aesthetic rules, and works which appeal to a wider audience while disregarding those rules tend to be looked down upon by those within the scene. Before the (originally IBM) PC became the dominant general purpose computer worldwide, demos were produced for systems with fixed, standardised hardware (such as the Commodore 64, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga etc.). As a result, programmers all essentially started from the same position, and the demoscene’s competitive aspect was focused on how much performance they could squeeze out of their machines, with specific records being set and subsequently broken (for example, how many moving sprites could be displayed on screen at any one time). As the PC gained marketshare, however, its open-ended, expandable hardware (where the owner can easily upgrade their graphics and sound cards, etc.) meant that demo makers found themselves producing demos for an audience with widely-varying hardware. In order to produce the most impressive graphical effects, some programmers would tend to buy expensive, high-end graphics cards, with the result that their productions would only run on this high-end hardware. As such, recent demos tend to be distributed as videos, in addition to the executable (which will usually not run on an average PC). This shift has meant that such demos tend to be judged now more for their artistic merit (still according to the demoscene’s particular aesthetic rules) than their technical achievements. It has also resulted in the establishment of particular types of demos (termed ‘intros’ within the scene), which, for example, seek to squeeze the most content into a 64kB executable (you can also find 4kB, and even 256-byte intros), and which therefore retain the aspect of technical competition. A relatively famous example of this kind of programming prowess is ‘.kkreiger’, an entire FPS (First Person Shooter) game contained within an executable of 96kB, quite a feat when compared to similar games which may require entire DVDs full of data.
There are perhaps two main criticisms to be made of the demoscene. Firstly, the emphasis on technical prowess could be seen as being to the detriment of any artistic merit. Through their focus on displaying the most flashy, spectacular graphics, it could be argued that demos are the equivalent of big-budget, hollywood blockbusters; all style and no substance. Secondly, though demos are an audiovisual medium, the connection between sound and visuals rarely appears to have had much thought applied to it. For the most part, demos tend to display fairly simplistic audiovisual connections, with, for example, the camera jumping to a new position on every beat, or basic audio amplitude to visual parameter mappings. And while visually, demos encompass a wide range of styles and aesthetics, the music used tends to be almost exclusively nondescript dance music.
I'm less sure about that last paragraph now. I've been trawling through demoscene.tv the past couple of days, and I've definitely seen things which contradict it, though I've still yet to hear any music that I would ever choose to listen to in a demo.
Here's some more videos I liked:
Muon Baryon: Youth Uprising/Umlaut Design/outracks. This is a 4k demo. To get an idea of how impressive that is, the text alone for this post comes to about 8k of data. It's not just the equations needed to create those 3d objects, you're looking at all sorts of complicated lighting and reflection calculations to get it to look that good. And it fits into an executable smaller than all but the most minimalist of webpages. Serious business...
Rupture: Andromeda. The more I see of Andromeda's work, the more I like them. This is just gorgeous. And it's got a train! Trains are great...
I may do a follow-up post once I've had a think about how to polish it up properly.
Food-wise we invented a noodley curry dish - the Turbo Curry Noodlerama: To be honest it was more creamy and less liquid-y than I was expecting, and I think the tofu could have done with maybe being cooked longer (or maybe soaking up some more of the curry paste flavour). It wasn't bad, but I think it could have done with a stronger flavour all round... Recipe below the 'more' link:
Make the curry paste first; stick the chilli, ginger, cumin, cayenne, chilli powder, garlic and shallot in the food processor, and whizz.
Put the tofu and pepper in a wok with some oil, cook for a while, then add the curry paste.
Cook a bit longer, then add half the coconut milk, cook some more...
Add the mangetout, noodles, and the rest of the coconut milk, and cook until you think it's ready.
Eat!
I'm going to finish with a couple of videos. First, a fantastic production from the demoscene. The demoscene, assuming you're not familiar with it, is a computer subculture oriented around the creation of demos; audiovisual artworks generated on computers in realtime. i.e. the following video was not created in something like After Effects - it's entirely hand-coded. Demos are pretty much the ultimate expression of a programmer's prowess, and tend to use all sorts of graphical wizardry and black magic to showcase the coder's skills. This is Lifeforce, by Andromeda:
If you've got a relatively powerful Windows PC, you can download the demo and run it yourself, from here.
So there was no get-together last week due to me being completely flattened by a crappy temp job at the SECC (promptly followed by a particularly nasty bout of the flu on Sunday - it's fun being me). To keep you going (till Friday?), here's some photos. I'm deeply in love with the light in this city...
(yeah, the knife slipped - I'm clearly rubbish at pumpkining)
Sorry for no post last week. We spent so much time on the meal we didn't have any left over to make music, and then I couldn't think of anything to write here as a result of a severe imagination deficit. Which made me guilty and worried about you, our imaginary readership. What would you think? How would you cope? Were you hunched over the keyboard, jabbing the F5 key every 10 seconds? Was your thought process "Where's the post? Where's the post? Did something happen? Is someone dead? Did the band split up? OH GOD NO TELL ME THE BAND DIDN'T SPLIT UP!!!"? Did you start an online petition to try and convince us to put aside our petty squabbles and get back together for the sake of the fans, for the sake of the music? Did you collect thousands of pounds to try and cover the crippling debt built up by Craig's shoe addiction, and my horrifying Irn Bru habit? Did you resort to drastic measures to try and scrape the money together, including doing something you swore you'd never do again? I'm sure all of the above are true and we'll be receiving a cheque just as soon as the postal strikes are over, but don't worry, we're here now. With pictures! And sound!
And along those lines, here's a slightly shoegazy (Craig's influence - that's what happens when you put ideas in my head, even in passing) sketch. The different bits don't really hang together yet, but you can see where we're going, I think.
"Erase the Traces. Destroy, in order to create. Build a new world on the ruins of the old. This, it is often thought, is the Modernist imperative, but what of it if the new society never emerged? We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future's ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting. So what would it mean, then, to look for the future's remnants? To uncover clues about those who wanted, as Walter Benjamin put it, to 'live without traces'? Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?
To do so might be a final, bitter betrayal if Modernism itself. Although there have always been several strains in Modernism, one of the most dominant has always been based on the demand, made by Bertolt Brecht in his 1926 Handbook for City Dwellers to 'erase the traces!'."
- Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism.
We did some more to the previous song (we went with the 2nd version) this week. I think it's probably finished now, though it's maybe a bit short?
The lyrics are a clumsy attempt to articulate the utopian impulse that runs through Hatherley'sbook, the modernist desire to erase the traces. The idea that if we could free ourselves of all the weight, the baggage of the past, a better world could be possible. So they're (meant to be) kind of melancholy (for the future that never materialised) and euphoric (for the thought of being genuinely free).
Foodwise, this week we did a Ratatouille Crumble: Craig got the recipe from here. And very nice it was too. You can also see some salad in that picture; the dressing (also Craig's) was: 3 parts olive oil, 1 part wine vinegar, 1 part mustard, 1 part honey and some seasoning.
Craig was in Berlin this week, so I had a go at making our last sketch less... sketchy. I couldn't settle on one particular way to go though, so I did two versions (warning: both with singing):
I prefer the second one, though it doesn't particularly fit with the rest of the stuff we recorded the previous week. Well, neither of them do, really...
Incidentally, these images (via,and) by Roksana Mical are gorgeous: I've only had brief glimpses of plague doctors before, and I always just assumed they were the invention of an imaginative costume designer/author. Turns out they were real. Discoveries like this always make the past seem far stranger and more interesting (to me, anyway) than the version we get fed on TV documentaries/period dramas etc. I desperately wish the BBC would make something with even half the atmosphere these photos have. Sadly they seem to be completely paralysed right now, unable to do anything remotely ambitious or brave.
The pictures also remind me a bit of what I've seenofPathologic, a game I've never played but wish I had.
Sorry for there being no post last week - Craig said he was going to do one and then didn't. Boo Craig :(
Anyway, I just started re-watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagan, and made myself a motivational poster: I love Kamina's ridiculous self-belief (and the way its basically just a series of constantly escalating battles, ending with one where they fight the universe itself - because once you've beaten up a planet, where else can you go?). I also love how the buildings all have faces - imagine a city where all the buildings were anthropomorphised, each with it's own personality, and choosing where to live was more like choosing a pet(?) than weighing up the location, amenities etc. That's something Calvino never considered (I think?).
One day I intend to write a book (or a film, or a game, or something...) that mythologises Glasgow - the city coming to life as an enormous sentient creature; buildings growing limbs and consuming their occupants; feral children racing along the tenement rooftops, more fox than child; red Clydeside roaring back to (un)life, the ghosts of all the workers betrayed by Churchill, Thatcher (etc.) streaming onto the streets to reclaim their city. And it would have to be set in winter, when the sun hangs so low and casts that incredible yellow-gold light across the city. The point is, you walk in New York or London, even Edinburgh, and you're walking through all sorts of myths and stories - these are places that get used in films, books, music all the time. But to my mind, Glasgow only really has a few such stories (No Mean City, maybe Lanark, the sickly sweet stories in Belle and Sebastian songs...), despite its incredible potential. That's what the council should be spending its money on - a mythology - not the commonwealth games, or all those horrifically ugly buildings down by the river.
So, um, took a bit of a detour there. What I meant to write about was what we did on Wednesday. Which was: A butternut squash, tofu and pea curry. Also; Where's My Cake? As usual for the first sketch of a song of ours, it's very sketchy. I don't like the sound of Craig's buzzy guitar in the second part, or the way my bassline and his buzzy part there are so repetitive. I also think we've used that initial chord as our initial chord in quite a few songs now. Time for a new chord!
No music this week, since we only got together to work out how to attract new band members (and play Streetfighter IV), but I don't like going a week without a post, so...
Following a chance mention in a Rock Paper Shotgun podcast (this one, I think), I came across this fantastic post at bldgblog, and in the comments, this post about actual airship prototypes. I now desperately want to fly in an airship. They seem so much more civilised than planes, with all the noise, all that costly fuel, the pressurised cabins (which pretty much always make me feel ill - I'm a tender flower). They're far safer too - with modern helium airships, any punctures would just result in the airship floating gently to ground. And helium's inert, and actually acts as a fire extinguisher. Clearly everything about airships is better than planes, and our continued development of be-winged vehicles has been one long evolutionary dead-end :-)
Anyway, we did make some food this week: Falafel and Fairy Cakes. Most of the stuff for the main course we just bought, rather than messing around with deep frying the falafel etc. but click the Read More link for the recipes of what we did make.
Stick everything in a pot, and simmer on a medium heat while you cook the falafel.
That's all.
Fairy Cakes:
175g self-raising flour
150g caster sugar
150g margarine
1tsp vanilla
3 eggs
some strawberry jam
150g icing sugar
2tsp lemon juice
some water
Put the flour, caster sugar, margarine, vanilla and eggs in a bowl, and mix.
Spoon the mix into 12 baking cases, stick in the oven at 160C for about 20mins.
Leave to cool.
Once cool, take a small knife and slice the tops off the cakes in a kind of conical shape (so there's a hollow in what's left of the cake.
Now slice the bottom of the cake top off and eat it :-)
Put a teaspoon of jam in the hollow, and place what remains of the cake top on top of it.
To make the icing, add the lemon juice to the icing sugar, then add water till you get the right consistency (quite thick, not runny). Spoon on to the top of the cakes.
Because Craig was talking about sculpture before I headed home for Christmas, and then my brother asked me if I was going to build a snowman. That's all it took...
So the assemblee competition is currently taking place over at TIGSource, and I'm taking part. For the first part I made a bunch of sound effects, and for the second part I'm making this shoot em up thing where you first have to create the level you're going to play through. You can follow my progress here. Here's hoping I actually get it finished before the deadline...
