Turbo Curry Noodlerama

(this week's musical accompaniment: Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed)

So we did some more to the previous song yesterday, but I should warn you - it's very clunky and disjointed:

Bumpity Clunk

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:

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• Block of Tofu, cubed
  
• 1 Chilli, chopped
  
• Some Root Ginger
• 1/2 Orange Pepper, chopped
  
• Handful Mangetout, chopped in half
  
• 1.5 Packs Noodles
• 1/2 Tin Coconut Milk
• Some Cumin
• Some Cayenne Pepper
• Some Coriander Leaf
• Some Chilli Powder(?)
• Clove Garlic
• 1 Shallot, chopped
  

1. Make the curry paste first; stick the chilli, ginger, cumin, cayenne, chilli powder, garlic and shallot in the food processor, and whizz.
2. Put the tofu and pepper in a wok with some oil, cook for a while, then add the curry paste.
3. Cook a bit longer, then add half the coconut milk, cook some more...
4. Add the mangetout, noodles, and the rest of the coconut milk, and cook until you think it's ready.
5. 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.

Finally, this made me laugh:

I think that qualifies as bruise-coloured...

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...

Happy Pumpkin Day!

(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.

Pumpkin Day

Food-wise, Craig invented a pasta thing especially for us. I'll see if I can remember what went in it:
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• 2 bags fresh (spinach-filled) pasta
• 1/2 an onion
• 1 ball of mozzarella
  
• some basil
• 1/2 a pepper
• a wee pile of cherry tomatoes
• ???

1. Cook the pasta.
2. Stick the rest in a pot (except the mozzarella), cook for a bit.
3. Once cooked, stick the sauce in a food processor, whizz.
4. Put the sauce back in the pot and add the mozzarella, cook until the cheese is melted.
5. Serve it all with some salad.

I'm going to end with links to some web comics, since that's what I've been looking at lately:
Ellerbisms
DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary
and of course Freak Angels (obviously you need to start from the beginning with that one)

Erase all Traces

"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?

After the War (v.3)

The lyrics are a clumsy attempt to articulate the utopian impulse that runs through Hatherley's book, 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.

After the war

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):

After the War 1
After the War 2

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 seen of Pathologic, a game I've never played but wish I had.

Surpass the Impossible and Kick off with Momentum!

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!

Click to see the curry recipe:
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• 1/2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 1tbsp thai red curry paste
• 250g butternut squash
• 225ml vegetable stock
• 200g coconut milk (can)
• 3 kaffir lime leaves, bruised
• 100g frozen peas
• 150g firm tofu, diced
• 1tbsp soy sauce
• juice of 1/2 a lime
• finely chopped red chilli to garnish

1. Heat the oil in a wok, add the curry paste and stir-fry over a low heat for 1 minute.
2. Add the squash, stir-fry until coated with the oil/curry paste.
3. Add the stock, coconut milk and lime leaves. Bring to the boil, and simmer gently for 15 mins until the squash is cooked.
4. Add the peas, tofu, soy sauce and lime juice, simmer for 5 mins until the peas are cooked.
5. Serve in bowls, garnish with the chilli.

Finally, the best game I've played all month:

Why are we still flying in planes?

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.

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Niall's Tomato and Honey Sauce:

• 1/2 small onion, finely chopped
  
• 1/2 tin chopped tomatoes
• a big gloop of honey
• 1tsp cayenne pepper
• 1tsp mixed herbs
• a handful of basil, torn

1. Stick everything in a pot, and simmer on a medium heat while you cook the falafel.
2. 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

1. Put the flour, caster sugar, margarine, vanilla and eggs in a bowl, and mix.
2. Spoon the mix into 12 baking cases, stick in the oven at 160C for about 20mins.
3. Leave to cool.
4. 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.
5. Now slice the bottom of the cake top off and eat it :-)
6. Put a teaspoon of jam in the hollow, and place what remains of the cake top on top of it.
7. 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.

Finally, the prettiness of Streetfighter IV: