Empty the Shelf

Now as a matter of pride
indulge yourself
your every mood
No feast days or fast days
or days of abstinence intrude

Consider for a minute
who you are
what you’d like to change
never mind the scars
Bury the past
Empty the shelf
Decide it’s time
to reinvent yourself
Like Liz before Betty
she after Sean
Suddenly you’re missing
then you’re reborn
And I, my lord, may I say nothing?

- Extract from DJ Culture / Pet Shop Boys

Video: Are You Recording?

Trust no one.

Podcast Feed Now Available

VJ asked if there was a proper feed for this blog with all the audio and videos in it, because the WordPress one only shows the latest 10 posts and only one video.

Well there wasn’t, but considering the software I write for a living, there really should be, so here it is:

• Or Something Podcast Feed

I don’t really think of it as a podcast. I just post random videos, mostly of absolutely nothing, from time to time – crap for friends. Surprisingly there are almost 20 video and audio clips in there, although a lot of them are very short and pointless.

Also, I’d put an iTunes one-click URL up there, but WordPress just strips it out. So if you want to subscribe in iTunes just copy the link and choose Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast in iTunes. Easy.

For this blog’s greatest hits, check out the following videos:

• Taste the Chick
• Take the Evita Challenge
• Looking for Mojo
• Mojo Outtakes
• Wasabi Burnoffs

Update: I decided to use FeedBurner for this feed to keep my .Mac account out of it. If you subscribed in iTunes it will update automatically. If not, the feed URL is now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/orsomething. If you don’t care, that’s fine too.

Video: Productivity

Beth knows how to kill mine!

Hosted free on PodShow+

Is It Safe To Come Out?

I think the big rush of the last couple of weeks as finally calmed down. On the one hand, I expected to be busy, but it was a surprise how well the MacZOT promotion worked out.

The way it came about was a little haphazard. After months of wondering what to do next with my business, I decided to revive KIT. It had been mostly neglected for over a year thanks to the success of Feeder. I felt, with the things I know now, I could make KIT the success it should have been originally. It’s a long process, but had to start somewhere.

This first step meant spending a month bringing the old version up-to-date: revamping the interface, adding some essential new features and revisiting the whole app to make it work better. I wasn’t sure how well this would be received, but after launching the revamp seemed to do the trick.

KIT starting gaining regular sales again, nothing spectacular – it is the sort of app that people like when they see it, but don’t know to look for it. My plan for step two was to feature it on MacZOT for a day after sorting out the inevitable problems with the new release, but instead MacZOT came looking for me. I told them my aim was maximum exposure for KIT.

I was asked if I would be willing to try something different and I agreed. I didn’t know what this would be until the day it was announced. MacZOT would run a week-long StoryZOT, where a developer’s story would be featured every day, while a special bundle of an unknown quantity of apps was offered for $5.95. I wrote my story, it was long and got converted into an interview. Kinda cheesy, but whatever.

This infuriated regular ZOT customers, as they didn’t know what was in the bundle, didn’t have high hopes of anything decent or new (facts such as this were dribbled out as the week progressed) but it kept them hooked. I didn’t know what was in the bundle either and, sharing similar concerns, didn’t push to find out. Other things were happening during the week – Jack died – and I didn’t have enough time to get my bug release out.

By the Friday, with all stories told, it was leaked to TUAW that one of the applications was KIT and this story made it onto the front page of Digg. I had nothing to do with this; it created an absolute frenzy on the MacZOT discussion blog and, before too long, my support inbox.

My site was hit with 20x its usual traffic (without a murmur, I should add, I have superb hosting) and on Saturday all the apps were revealed. I was really happy about the bundle – all the apps were great – I was even happier that KIT appeared to be the star of the show, but with over 1,500 copies sold in a single day I knew what was coming next.

I was absolutely buried in emails: bug reports, feature requests and sometimes just compliments. I worked pretty much around the clock trying to keep these down and get the bugs fixed. I thought it would calm down by the weekend when I released that version, but, silly me, releases just bring more exposure and triggered the second avalanche.

So: more working around the clock, literally every hour of the day, and by yesterday I think I’d shifted it all and am now back to a normal level of backlog. But boy, am I exhausted.

So there you go, KIT now has users, many of whom are really buzzed about the product. It’s ready to launch into the future the way I had always hoped and the plans I have for it are extremely cool and could benefit from any and all buzz. I just have to continue work the thing, if you know what I mean.

Lyrical Video Odyssey

People who know me well will recognise that whenever I find myself at the starting line of something new, I tend to look back, boring everyone in the process. I search for precedents, lessons. I need to understand how I got here, what went right and how I can do things better before I can move forward.

Nothing invokes a memory like some music you haven’t heard in a long time, a certain image or maybe even a smell. We don’t have a scent codec for QuickTime yet (thankfully) but we do have audio, video, images and words.

This explains, to some degree, the posts on this blog over the last week or so. I knew I would be incredibly busy and rather than leave the blog silent thought I could give a peep into my mood in a way that doesn’t require much effort on my part. Most of the posts I picked out the night before and scheduled to appear at some particular time either after I had gone to bed or while I was working so that I wouldn’t fret over them for too long.

This all started on the weekend when sifting through my iPhoto library, I saw some test shots Hans had taken on my camera before sending it to me. At the same time, Depeche Mode’s (aka “Depress Mode”) In Your Room was playing in my head. I’d started listening to them again last week because I was feeling down, burnt out and needed someone else’s misery to mask the sound of thoughts rattling around my head.

So, I was looking at these photos of Hans’s room, hearing this song and the lyrics resonated (to some degree) with our respective situations so I had to do something about that. It’s a little silly, I used to do those sorts of lyrical montages in Photoshop out of boredom years ago and the style was inspired by (read: ripping off) Tomato, the British design company connected to the progressive dance band, Underworld.

From there, the rest unfolded. If looking for inspiration and originality that remains accessible, you can’t get a much better example than Björk, and this live performance of Desired Constellation from her album Medúlla seemed like an excellent example. Long story short, Medúlla was an vocal-only album but Desired Constellation is the track that sounded like it wasn’t. Björk explains:

Olivier Alary (Ensemble) had sent me a CD with a few sketches, and said “if you ever feel like using those, please do.” A year later, I wrote this melody and was singing it in a cabin by a lake here in Iceland in January 2004. That was like the first little trips away from my little girl – I would go three hours a day to this cabin by the lake and do whatever I could and then drive back to town. I would sing several versions of this melody, and then I would say “wait a minute, this is this thing that Olivier gave me a year ago” so then I sang it to that and it fitted perfect together, it was really incredible! Then when I came back from the tour and discovered that the whole album was gonna be a vocal album, I thought “what about this song here, I really like this song and it should be on the album”. So I started doing choir arrangements for it. I did a really complicated choir arrangement, for like a sixteen piece choir, and recorded it three times doing totally different things, and it was like 50 tracks of voices, but it just wasn’t right, so I kept editing it on and spent like days and weeks editing it, and it never was right. Then I emailed Olivier and said “Listen, I’ve tried everything with this track, but I can’t just be dogmatic about this album. At the end of the day, the best music’s gotta win. So I think I’m just gonna stick to your old version, because I think that’s still the best one.” And then he just said “Guess what! I made it out of your own voice!” So he actually took a voice of mine, saying “I’m not sure what to do with it” from Hidden Place and did a song out of that! And then he sent it it to me, and didn’t tell me, just in case I didn’t .. you know, whatever… it was just a secret!
- (Mixing It, 20aug04)

Björk was adamant that when she performed Medúlla live, she would use the same methods as the studio album. So, that’s why she sings into the mic before the backing track kicks off, and it provides a convenient way of transposing the key on a whim.

From Björk to Underworld, it’s actually not much of a jump. Underworld remixed a lot of Björk tracks back in the nineties, their lyrics are sublime, with William S Burroughs-inspired cut-ups, sometimes non-linear or nonsensical, but usually work amazing well when taken as a whole. I printed a small extract from JAL to Tokyo that demonstrates this admirably, I think.

Underworld are also very impressive live and what you don’t see in that heavily edited version of Rez/Cowgirl from their Everything Everything DVD (the DVD version is 11 minutes long) are the other two band-members working across a number of Macs frantically building up the track piece by piece, while motion graphics artists from Tomato produce the visuals you see on the screen in a live jam. No two Underworld performances are the same either to see or to hear.

The final video was Protection from Massive Attack, featuring Tracy Thorn from Everything But The Girl. I absolutely love this track; its gender/role-switching metaphor touches on an aspect of loving someone that seldom gets a mention in music, that of wanting to look after them, shield life’s knocks and shelter them from harm. It also hints at a crazy, fucked-up generation that I identify with strongly. We’re all grown-up now, obviously.

The video itself is quite stunning. A camera moves around the building in one seemingly continuous shot. There are cutaway walls, windows and all sorts of different things happening around the common theme of protection.

I think that Massive Attack’s Protection album and the work they did with Tracy Thorn was really when they were at their peak until Tricky left. You may already know that Tricky and Björk were rumoured to be an item at one point (although she says they were just friends) and both collaborated on each other’s albums. Curiously, another fave of mine, Neneh Cherry, was responsible for bringing Massive Attack to the public and therefore she had a profound influence on the entire 90s despite having only put out a couple of albums herself. But I digress.

My generation, like all generations, have their own identity that is probably influenced by contemporary culture at the time. Throughout the whole of the 90s the British music scene was overwhelmingly dominated by British artists, this certainly wasn’t the case in the 80s or now. The music was fresh, innovative but seldom superficial or conceited. I’m proud of that and want the influences to live on through everything I do rather than follow the pack. I haven’t been doing that the last few years. This is a resolution.

Protection

One continuous shot.

Cowgirl

Normal service on this blog will be resumed shortly…

Shakin’ in the air

Refugee
Rain
One hand
Come down between us
I explained
How good I feel
And everything
In my imagination
You got the wrong end
Misunderstanding
Watching the sun rise
Over the water
Back in the fears
Projection
I discard
Sleepless
Ice in the apple juice
Chrome around the coffee
Loaded
You get your legs waxed
At 2:00am
“Ohh!”
That’s so lovely
Here comes
The cappuccino girl
The dark red line around your lips girl
Too many late nights
Girl
Smiling
Clutching your finger tips
She let me sit alone
Let me gather fragments
Like a bone
Stone

Let me sit with the fear
Let it slip off me
Roll past and off me
I’ve been carrying it all day
Delicate finger cup girl
Do
Do you need a ride?
Random breath
Pure siren inside
Double detrimental
Perfection
Superfood
Gather at the dark bridge
A crossing above our heads
Above us
Descending into the
Real men eat meat and chicken
Not beef crusades
Crusades for truth and justice
Home truth
Home twin
Tribulation
Turbulent and fast
Fast moving fingers
Your hiss in my ears again
“I’m just behind you girls” he says
Shakin’ in the air
Strapped in
And rockin’
Covering your eyes and lips rubbed with fingers
You make the sign of lock and key
You nod and smile

Extract of JAL to Tokyo from Lovely Broken Thing by Underworld.

Desired Constellation

It’s tricky when…