1981.766* (HNY!)

Last year, in September, i was contacted by the calendar with some ‘news’. I had turned 30.

Responding in a typically British fashion, i decided to bolster my collection of 70’s + 80’s funk-disco records and make a 30 track mix (it has been pointed out to me that technically i am in my 31st year. thanks, douche bag)

Anyway, slightly belatedly, Happy New Year!

* 1981.766 is what you get if you’re on a long and boring train ride, and decide to look up the year of each song add them together and divide by 30, resulting in the mean. occurred to me afterwards that the median might have been more appropriate, but i decided i was sad enough already.

Super Scratch Sunday 11

 

so heres what i was doing in rye this weekend while you were all being really cool in london

Se Fire – In Every

Here’s my mate’s new video
i lit some of the candles!

and here is the also-very-sick remix by Kahn
double badness

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Extreme crate-digging

This is really something. Patrick Feaster from the Media Preservation Initiative at the University of Indiana, has recreated the sound of one of the earliest known vinyl records, from a picture of the record. Here’s how it works:

“First, I take a high-resolution scan of the print and convert it from a spiral into a set of parallel lines through a polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transform. Next, I “cut” the individual lines and “paste” them end-to-end to create several long, narrow strips. After repairing any breaks in the line, I use a “paintbucket” tool to create two separate bands of varying width—one with the area below the line filled in white, the other with the area above the line filled in white.  Next, I run these images through ImageToSound, a program that converts them into WAV files as though they were variable-area optical film sound tracks.  Finally, I combine the paired WAV into stereo files, stitch the successive pieces together, sum to mono, and voilà—we have sound!”

As I Write My S-A: The Morality of Free Music

Now for something a bit different. Because someone is wrong on the internet.

This article about the ethics of not paying for music has been doing the rounds on The Internets for a few days, and I thought it was pretty interesting but pretty wrong. I ended up having an interesting conversation (okay, argument) with a friend from uni over on facebook, and I thought I’d bring the argument over here and see what people think. Even if, as I suspect, you just think “I don’t really give a shit”.

Basically the whole business started when Emily White, a 21 year-old intern at a national radio station in the US, wrote a piece on their blog about how she has 11,000 songs in her iTunes but she’s only ever bought 15 CDs. On the whole it’s pretty impressive; she’s frank about the way her generation look at this stuff (“I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums”) and as a music lover she’s obviously struggling with the idea that she’s never really ‘given anything back’ to the artists.

But then David Lowery, who apparently was in a few alt-rock bands in the 80s and now teaches in a university (as well as owning a studio, a record label and a publishing company) decided to go to town and challenge her on the ethical implications of her actions, asking her to take responsibility for screwing the artists that she claims to be a fan of.

So what exactly is wrong with it, I hear you ask? Good question, my friend:

digital vertigo scratch battle 6

not my greatest effort but hey…

 join in here

 

Keys Cut Here

New mix of beats i’ve picked up on travels through soundcloud this year. Most of these guys aren’t well known, so I posted links to their soundcloud pages in the tracklist (after the jump), case you wanna find out more….

A Thousand Words

Trying out a bit of a new thing here. Instead of putting together a mixtape and then slinging some poorly-photoshopped artwork on as an afterthought, this one started with yonder photograph by our own Sam Daniels, and I put together the sounds to kind of fit the mood of the picture. Or at least, fit the mood of what I made of the picture.

It’s not even really a “mix” to be honest, it’s more like a mixtape in the old fashioned put-some-stuff-on-a-cassette kind of way. But I think it turned out alright anyway.

Hoping to try some more of these as well, and get some more collaborations going too. So if you want to come and play, either by scratching some artwork or sketching a mixtape, holler @ me.