Saul Bass’s Birthday Video

A very quick one today, as I’ve simply borrowed the video from Google’s search page.

I’m a huge fan of Saul Bass’s graphic style (having written about him on these pages before) and although the thought of Google appropriating his effortless style by association sits a tad uncomfortably with me, I’m a realist and know that’s how it all works…

And besides, the video is a pretty clever summation of some of his best work. I’m even quite liking Dave Brubeck’s jazz tune this morning (but don’t tell my And)

And don’t bother sending Saul your best wishes either… he died in 1996.

Delia Derbyshire & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Last Saturday (May 5th) would have been the 76th birthday of the pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire, a name that may be unfamiliar if you are not my side of 40, British or a bit of a geek.

There is however at least one of her tunes that you will recognise, as Delia was responsible for generating the futuristic bleeps, whooshes and synthetic sounds that combined to make the original Dr. Who Theme, which despite being made 50 years ago in 1963, is well worth a quick listen now, to remind yourself how good it still sounds…

Although credited to Ron Grainer, who wrote the basic melody, it was Delia who after three weeks of hard work recording noises and splicing together bits of magnetic tape, created the sounds and atmosphere that continue to make the tune as memorable today as it was then…

Delia (who sadly died in 2001 of alcoholism related problems, just as renewed interest in her work was beginning to pick up) was a key member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a name synonymous with the sonic and musical experimentation of the 1960′s and 70′s.

Formed in 1958 the Workshop’s original brief was to provide incidental sounds for radio and TV shows although this was quickly expanded and the team (which included Daphne Oram, Brian Hodgson and Paddy Kingsland) was soon creating theme tunes and other impressively futuristic sounds not only for The Doctor but also for The Goon Show, Quatermass & the Pit, Blakes 7 and The Hitchhikers Guide to name just a few.

Each of the members was also a composer in their own right and Delia wrote and recorded many original compositions, one of her most well known (and strangest) of which is Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO-OO from 1967. If you think it sounds odd today, imagine what it sounded like back when everyone looked this….

Delia was also involved in two offshoot groups in the mid 1960′s: the brilliantly named Unit Delta Plus (with Peter Zinovieff, inventor of the first British portable synthesizer the EMS VCS 3) and Kaleidophon (with David Vorhaus), neither of which had great musical success at the time, but both of which have since been the subject of much reassessment by musicians who see in their experimental electronic recordings, the beginnings of today’s digital soundscapes…

There a number of videos on YouTube about Delia & the Radiophonic Workshop, and the ones below I think are the most interesting. It’s fascinating to watch how sounds were created by speeding up and slowing down tapes, playing them backwards and then chopping everything up and making loops…. It must have taken hours and hours to do what any self respecting sampler can do in seconds today…

(I’ve no idea what the ghostly chap in the background is all about…)

There’s also an excellent 1 hour audio mix here put together by Soundhog, which through a mix of spoken word and music, gives a pretty good oversight of what they got up to over in their Maida Vale studio…

As a final aside and if you’re interested in this kind of music like me, I’ve also come across this BBC TV programme from 1979. Called The New Sound of Music and presented by Michael Rodd, it’s a wonder of optimism, science and massively complex technology. I especially enjoyed seeing David Vorhaus in the last section (Part 4) who at about 7.40 mins seemingly invents Goa Trance at least 15 years before anyone knew what to call it…

Truly Impressive…

One final excellent BBC TV programme of related interest can also be found here… (noted more for my records than anything else)

Blade Runner in 60 seconds (and some very bad news for fans…)

Every Year Empire Magazine hold a competition open to all amateur film makers. The premise is simple; remake an existing film in less than one minute…

This years very worthy winner was Philip Askins, who with this rather fine black and white, animated version of one of my very favorite films, the timeless Bladerunner, beat off 15 other competitors, to take the trophy home…

Out of interest, I’ve just looked online for an update on the Blade Runner prequel that Ridley Scott was supposed to be directing, and I am utterly shocked, disappointed and dismayed to read some of the names now connected to the project : Will Smith, Chris Tucker, Michael Bay (Directing) and the final insult, the name that ruins virtually every film he’s been in, Nicholas F**king Cage…

No, no, no… how can it be anything other than total shite, full of macho posing, pointless explosions, over the top CGI and characters with as much depth as my dining table…  What a shame, I was quite looking forward to that.

Oh well, I’ll just have to make do with watching Philip’s excellent interpretation a couple of times more, knowing full well that it will be infinitely better than anything the bunch of tossers above will ever come up with…

#EddieMairforMayor…

Don’t know if you saw it yesterday morning, but in case you didn’t (and so that I can watch it as often as I like) I’m posting the rather excellent Boris Johnson interview from the Andrew Marr Show in which a masterful and controlled Eddie Mair teases out from under the foppish hair and Public School grin, the bumbling and shambolic buffoon that we all know our esteemed Burgermeister really is…

I’m thinking of starting my very first hashtag on Twitter…  #EddieMairforMayor.

The original on the BBC pages can be found here…

Startrails, Observatories & Carbon Based Lifeforms

I found these three wonderful things recently…

Firstly this magical video of stairtrails, by Christoph Malin.

As I understand it all the original still shots are from cameras aboard the International Space station (ISS) which have then been “stacked” via a computer programme. The process of stacking is very similar to creating a timelapse image, however as each new image is added, the previous one is retained, hence the continuous trails, lines and general wonderousness that is revealed as the image builds up…

I’m no scientist, but aren’t they the Northern Lights/ Aurora Borealis at about 1 minute in, and isn’t that lighting at about 2.05? I like the heightened sense of movement that these images generate. The ISS is traveling at just short of 28,000km/h – orbiting the planet  about 16 times a day, and the quality of these images is made even more impressive when you consider the very high ISO levels that the cameras have to achieve in order to take account of this phenomenal speed.

Also on the Vimeo site, I also came across this stunning video by Babak Tafreshi

We had the very good fortune to spend an evening in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile watching the stars at the Mamalluca Public Observatory a couple of years ago. The memory of seeing whole constellations of stars and neighbouring galaxies climb up into the night sky, as our planet moved through its bit of space, will stay with me for ever. A truly amazing experience that this video captures pretty much as I remember, although as always through the restricted medium of a monitor/ TV screen, the mind numbing sense of scale will always elude the casual watcher…

And finally the music on the Atacama Starry Nights film. A track called Arecibo by the Swedish producers Carbon Based Lifeforms. No idea how I’ve missed this wonderful, epic space noise, as it’s right up my strasse…. Huge washes of static and infinitely deep chords and pulses that gradually build and mutate into.. well nothing really, just more of the same. Which is seriously what I like…

Their most recent album Twenty Three can be linked below via Spotify, but for now sit back, turn off your phone, click away your email, put your headphones on and pilot your own psyche through the Cosmos for 10 minutes… Nice…

Tarik Barri & Atoms for Peace.

I saw this Atoms For Peace video for Judge Jury and Executioner for the first time earlier this week, and I was so completely awestruck at it’s rhythmic layering and beauty, I watched it three times. See what you think…

 

This amazing piece of work was made by the audiovisual composer Tarik Barri. Can’t find much biog about him online but his own site here offers some philosophy and insight as to who he is and what he does.

Suffice to say that his main interest appears to be in the interplay of the audio and the visual. He tells us “I try to discover new forms of beauty through the influences that seeing and hearing have on each other. In my work they’ve become inseparable: the viewer hears images and sees sounds”

A bold statement indeed, but I think he’s on to something. If you watch this film with headphones on as I was last night, the experience is intensified and it’s difficult to imagine one without the other.

It’s also difficult to get my aging brain around how this kind of rich visual experience is created. Barri refers to software that he writes himself but whether this coordinates models made in other software or some such is way beyond my knowledge to comment on I’m afraid…

But however it’s made, it looks fantastic. Look for the bit when at about 20 seconds in, what seems to be a figure appears from the background synching perfectly with Flea’s bass noise. But there’s nothing figurative here and we are soon in a Man Ray/ Moholgy-Nagy type sepia Constructivist landscape of shifting layers, shapes and lights. This all subliminally slows down to reflect Thom Yorke’s almost mournful humming, until the bass kicks in again around 1.30 and the choreographed random spinning starts again.. Very nice. I could watch it for hours..

The song’s pretty excellent as well to my ears. Not quite as instant as the previous single Default I thought initially, but its growing on me and I’m certainly looking forward to the album being on Spotify so I can listen to the whole thing…

I’ll write about Stanley Donwood’s ever excellent artwork another time…

Amon Tobin – ISAM

As a follow up to my Post on Amon Tobin @ Bloc , I’ve just found the whole ISAM show on YouTube….

Wonderment and joy… I don’t know how long Ninja Tune will allow it to stay up, but it’s really excellent to see it all again and in such amazing quality.

As I suggested before, you really don’t get anything of the sense of the scale and the all encompassing grandeur of the show, which is based on 3D digital mapping projected onto a set made of cubes which you occasionally get a glimpses of as the lights and colours change and mutate. The larger, darker cube in the center is where Mr. Tobin stands, creating his music and doing what he does….

A timely reminder of something I’ll never forget….

When the Day Didn’t Arrive…

I enjoyed my walk into work this morning.

The Island was surrounded in a thick fog, giving everything an eery and ghostly appearance. Shapes looming in the grey almost beyond recognition. It reminded me of an episode of Roobarb and Custard called When the Day Didn’t Arrive… a day when the birds couldn’t fly because the sky hadn’t been coloured in…

This is a photo I took of Pepper Street bridge over Millwall Dock, looking towards a very watery sun (which oddly is not visible in the sky, but is clearly reflected in the water) and it does indeed look like nothing has been coloured in…

And this is the episode of Roobarb and Custard, an animated cartoon that used to be on every day after I got home from school. It was drawn in a scratchy, almost unfinished way so that all the outlines and colours of the characters were constantly moving around… Generally Roobarb (a green dog) was full of enthusiasm for the days adventures, whereas Custard (a pink cat) was more cynical and usually tried to spoil the fun…

This is also one of those lattice of coincidence things that I’ve touched on before, as Richard Briers the actor who sadly died yesterday, and who was such an intrinsic aspect of my childhood (i.e. 1970′s) TV, narrated all these Roobarb stories, using a variety of silly voices to describe the events of these even sillier stories…

Arnaldur Indriðason & Icelandic Crime Fiction..

These last few months I’ve been mostly reading The Reykjavik Murder Mysteries by the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason…

The key figure in these stories is Detective Erlendur who on the face of it is fairly stereotypical cop; he’s a loner, he’s divorced and his grown up children don’t really like him, although unlike most of the other literary sleuth’s I’ve read, he does usually do things by the book and is not prone to over the top outbursts of rage or anger.

What I really enjoy about these Reykjavik Murder mysteries and the stories that Arnaldur writes his chief protagonist into, is that they are absolutely credible, possibly even to the point where they border on the mundane. There is rarely more than one body in each novel, and they are almost always discovered within the first few pages. The rest of the story revolves around the Icelandic landscape, the Icelandic weather, relationships with other police officers and lots of basic detection work, visiting people, asking questions and trying to piece together what happened…

Detective Erlendur lost a brother on the mountains when he was young. The body was never found and this sense of loss and lack of closure permeates the missing persons cases to which Erlendur is always drawn. Iceland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and the temptation is for the police to assume that many of the missing people have headed off into the wilderness to take their own lives. Erlendur however sees things as more complicated than this and picks away at the evidence in the hope of finding answers.

It’s all very low key, but it’s undoubtedly the strangeness and lure of Iceland and the Icelanders themselves that attracts me; the cold, the dark, the constant smoking, the eating of sheep heads… and the seemingly unrelenting drabness of it all, conjour up, along with Arnaldur’s wonderful prose, a world very different from my own…

Check out this trailer for the excellent film verison of Jar City from a few years back… If this appeals, then Detective Erlendur is the man for you…

Stop Overfishing Now…

I seem to be continuing in a bit of an eco-political mood at the moment, with a brilliant example of animated graphic art catching my eye…

This very stylish video, made by the German Design studio UHS (where you’ll find lots of other very cool stuff) explains in a beautifully simple and clear way how overfishing will potentially empty our oceans within the next 50 years and was made as part of last years Ocean 2012 campaign to raise awareness of the issue, reform EU Fishing Policy and bring about an end to destructive fishing practices.

Having been a vegetarian for the last 25 years or so, and having not eaten any fish at all since I was about 8, this of course doesn’t apply to me, which means I can appreciate the stunning graphics and inventive storyline without guilt or worry…

If only it were that simple, some of the numbers in this presentation are very, very scary…

• estimated 90% drop in fish stocks over the last 60 years
• fishing nets with openings greater than 23,000 sqm
• 9kg of fish are thrown back for every 1kg of shrimp caught (i.e. 90% of the catch is thrown away)
• 5kg of captured wild fish are needed to feed every 1kg of farmed salmon
• 10,000 tonnes/ year (recommended scientific limit for catches of blue fin tuna to allow sustainable stocks) 29,500 t/y (EU Fisheries agreed limit)  61,000 t/y (the actual amount caught)

To my mind it comes down to thinking about what you eat and asking yourself where it came from and how it got to be on your plate…