Samples for your delectation

Nice new fresh content. Namely the downloads section of the website, where you will discover some 'Mobius Engine' wallpaper for your desktops plus some samples from my archives, ready to mix.

The samples have been around for a while and hardly used.

The vocals: As featured in Vocalism, and pretty much used up by me - I thought it would be good to hand the samples out for any who would like to remix them. 'Banyibopt' is my favourite, followed by 'Padadapibt'. Ah wasteful nonsense of youth. if you do find a use for them, please let me know.

The old piano: One day I came across a dying piano. It was torn and broken, with its spine open to the sun and no keys left to speak of (clearly scavenged by the ivory mice). So naturally, as you would with any once-great singer, fallen in the depths of its own despair, my traveling companions and I began hitting it. This of course, breathed new life into it and allowed it to sing once more. In order to keep this swansong forever, I recorded each note cluster in turn. This is what I offer here today for your remixing pleasure. Perhaps I should have called it "the old paino"?

Solstice

The Midsummer's Night, the Solstice, will be here on the 21st of June at 05:45 this year. It is tempting to think it would be the same every year but that's not quite right. On one hand we have the loose idea of the longest day of the year, usually attributed to the 21st. Then there is a looser definition, celebrated from midday on the day before to the noon of the following day.

Here is the Wiki view... "The name is derived from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), because at the solstices, the Sun stands still in declination; that is, the apparent movement of the Sun's path north or south comes to a stop before reversing direction." - a wonderful description. It seems almost impossible take in the magnitude of an interaction between a 5.9736 × 1024 kg mass flying through space at 29.8 kilometers per second and a 4.57 billion year old yellow dwarf star - but that is what we are talking about. A relationship betwixt the Sun and the Earth.

For some this describes an astronomical event, and therefore a colder description than would seem applicable to a long, lazy Summer day and cool evening dusk that goes on forever. Here we have an ideal concept of the Solstice as an immeasurable 'a priori' concept, where we know that the days get longer and longer up to a point, thereafter getting smaller and smaller. Astronomy fails, it seems, because we can never measure this interaction to ever really 'know' it. Yet within that knowledge we understand that there is a perfect point at which the year reaches its furthest point towards the Sun and begins its turn back towards Winter once more.

This perfect point has occurred every year in history, for as long as the Earth has orbited the Sun, which transforms it into a conceptual point of time, an event outside of time and yet connected directly to all the Solstices our ancestor have ever enjoyed. This perfect point in time occurs at the Solstices and the Equinoxes, the square corners of the circle of the year. Here I find a bridge between the two concepts of time and season; the perfect concept and the physical reality of the years passing. For this reason I celebrate in the Solstice, the movement of the universe and the perfection of the cosmos. For me there is nothing cold about the astronomic realities of a solar transitory marker, it reaffirms the wonder of life.

This celebration, for me, ties in with a vast array of pagan/heathen/animism/zen religious practice. Where the focus of celebration and mysticism lies in honouring the relationship one has with ones environment. I should also redirect the readers attention to Platonic reality and Universals, where our conceptualisation of a Solstice and the meaning imbued is outside of the Solstice itself, yet links every Solstice.

My celebration will be in time with my friends and family, inward reflection and a really nice slap up feast; which should not, in all fairness, be confused with the interpretations of neo-pagans, wiccans or quasi-Christian 'baptist' revels. The Midsummer also has it's own special resonance. It is faerie time with the ever lasting twilight, when the faerie revels were to move their homes( Secret Commonwealth by Rev. Kirk, 1691). It is the point, beyond which contraction occurs and the move to the next festival occurs.

First, we eat - next stop Lammas!

the inherent myth of social media

Our relationship with Celebrity is beginning to change, and not before time. I think we have been caught up in the nonsense of media induced insanity since the early part of the last century and only now can we begin to see the humanity behind idolisation.

My reasoning behind this train of thought comes from Twitter. Though the platform's strength comes from its social interaction, its popularity came about through the power of celebrity.

I follow all sorts of 'famous' people as long as they fall into the interesting category. There are all sorts of talented and humorous individuals who become intensely dull as soon as they try to fill 140 characters, likewise there are 'celebs', whom I have no general personal interest in, suddenly popping up with cool links or interesting tweets.

Then I have begun to notice that the boundaries are changing. I fired off a tweet to Trent Reznor the other day as a response to something he had written. I did this instinctively as part of a conversational aside and would never have done this in any other medium. I am not the kind of fan-letter sender, or autograph hunter and I wonder what makes it OK for me to engage a complete stranger in conversation? I suppose the answer to that lies in the nature of Twitter itself; a social interaction, which encourages and rewards communication across all barriers. The fact that Trent is 'celeb' is neither here nor there, if he's on - then he's open to communication.

This is not a response or reflection of the whole 'eric/fred'/insult/praise kind of scandal. As that is just grist for the mill, the kind of wonderful extra tang that celeb tweeters bring about. Trent writes "What fucking rock did you crawl out from under @Fredgarrett? Jesus Christ this place is filled with assholes." and though that bit was stripped out of context I still don't find it insulting or alarming or objectionable. He is, after all, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. If he can't pour on scorn, then what is the world coming to. Same goes for @warrenellis, @twentymajor and the rest. I revel in their unashamedly direct discourse.

However, because he IS 'celeb', he is different. He follows the tweets of 83 people that he may be interested in or know. He is followed by 617,000 or so people in turn. I don't have to deal with the cross chatter and overawed questions of thousands of people that he does but this shows that the forms of communication are also in flux. How can you possibly follow thousands of conversations, lines of thought, activities and questions? How can you receive what must amount to hundreds of questions and responses each day without altering the method of absorbing that information? We are adjusting the lines of communication from linear to non-linear; where we used to have a conversation that began, moved around and so forth - now we have discussions splintered through time and a quick absorption of multiple lines of conversation aggregated into an overview. With this synopsis based discourse comes the danger of everyone speaking their own thoughts over one another, a series of overlapping monologues connected by contextual webbing; barely held together, save by a light string of intersecting ideas.

Here is the inherent myth of social media; ultimately it is a business tool, namely the business of seeming to communicate whilst co-opting ones own agenda.

I'm sure you'll be glad to hear (and have already worked out) that this subtle, insidious nature held within the vastly successful, and therefore monetised, Business of Twitter can easily be subverted. All you need to do is make sure you have at least one person that you can follow, that you actually know, whom you wouldn't get to speak to as much as you'd like.

That justifies everything else about Twitter in one go.