Piecespeak #17 - 03-08-09

This week, Pieces rediscovered the virtues of cakes, and the perils of coming down from a dizzying sugar-induced high.

We’re firmly into August now, which still immediately makes me think I’m on holiday even though I haven’t been in education for quite a while now. There’s something about this time of year that, whether through programming from an early age or something in the weather, just rings with the feeling of wanting to do nothing but sit on grass in sun with drink. Every year there are new calls for the long summer holiday to be revised, to break school and university terms into shorter semesters and have more extended breaks throughout the year. And every year pretty much everyone cries out against those calls. Here are my three reasons for wanting to keep things as they are, and as I’ve always known them:

1) 6 weeks doing nothing teaches you the value of…doing nothing. Which is important, and too many adults forget just how important. It’s a peculiarly 21st-Century malady that most of us constantly feel as if we have to be doing something, even when we give ourselves a chance to do ‘nothing’ for a little while. I know that there are so many times when I get home, and tell myself I’ll have a rest and a cup of tea, thinking it’ll refresh me and get me ready for the next thing I have to do, and the following will inevitably happen: sure, enough, I’ll sit down with a cup of tea, and I’ll put the TV on. And I’ll pick up the newspaper and read the letters page. And the cricket’s on, so I’ll put the radio on and listen to some commentary. And I’ll have a notebook next to me and start writing little notes about what’s in the paper. And by the time I’ve drunk my tea I have a mind that’s more overloaded than it was before because I’ve done so many things at once and tried to absorb all of them equally. How much do I wish I’d learned properly to just sit and do nothing just for a little while when I was a kid? Quite a lot.

2) 6 weeks of no school, just after you’ve finished a year’s worth of learning, gives you a chance to start your education from scratch. Who can honestly say they did any kind of homework while on summer holiday? Even if the intention was there, there’d be precious little point because all your teachers would change anyway, so there’d be noone to mark the precious work you’d slaved over while all your friends were at the park kicking a ball around. And, more importantly, if you had a dud year at school (which, let’s face it, most of us did. At least one), the 6 week gap meant that you had a chance to regroup, figure out where you’d gone wrong, or if it was actually you’re your fault at all but down to crappy teachers or something else beyond your control. I know so many people who had epiphanies in summer holidays – they woke up in the middle of 6 weeks of holiday, and decided that they were going to work hard at school, to focus more, to develop themselves rather than just glide through the days to get to the end and leave. When will you ever get the opportunity to forge a completely clean break with your approach to life like that, without having to totally change your circumstances? It’s incredibly rare, but when kids are at school they get that chance at the start of every new school year. That’s too valuable to ever abandon.

3) The most important of all: once you’ve introduced children to an institution like a school, you have to show them the alternative: absolute freedom. If you want free-thinking adults, you always have to balance the education of your children so that they are able to decide for themselves, and that includes giving them the opportunity to see how the structure that school brings actually helps them to achieve. Yes, they might get a swimming certificate or a football trophy, but on the whole school holidays are pretty unproductive (and that’s great – see above). Once you realise that the people at school are actually there to give you something to do, rather than sit bored and restless, education becomes something you can engage with rather than endure. Sure, not everyone ends up loving their education once they’ve had a taste of doing nothing, but at least they’ve had the opportunity to choose for themselves rather than being blindly shepherded towards an institutional goal.

Now that’s all out of the way, I’m off to get an ice-cream.

This week's playlist includes, among other delights, a Kraftwerk cover performed on 8-bit video game consoles. Oh yes. Click below to hear it.

1. Bobby McFerrin - Cara Mia
2. Afrikaa Banbaataa & The Soul Sonic Force - Who Do You Think You're Funkin' With?
3. Femi Anikulapo Kuti - Sorry Sorry
4. Salif Keita - Djembe
5. DJ Shadow - Changeling
6. The Barbara Moore Singers - Hey Robin
7. Eddie Cantor - If You Knew Suzie (Like I Know Suzie)
8. Freddie & The Dreamers - You Were Made For Me
9. Billie Holiday - Lover Come Back To Me
10. The Pretty Things - L.S.D.
11. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - Rock The House
12. Telex - We Are All Getting Old
13. The Buggles - Kid Dynamo
14. Bubblyfish - It's More Fun To Compute
15. Soulwax/Tracy Bonham - I Go To Sleep

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5zOyzEDEUQgPjgIFTQBKDs

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #16 - 27-07-09

This week, Pieces once again spent a little too much time playing dumb computer games. When will we learn that there's a world outside with people in it waiting to be talked to...

Last week, it was revealed that biological engineers in the US have been successfully working on one something that could change the way we live, and I’m willing to bet quite a lot that hardly anyone noticed. The Journal of Biological Engineering reported that bacteria have been genetically engineered to solve mathematical problems including the Hamilton Path Problem and the Burnt Pancake Problem. This news could mean the beginning of a new age of computing that moves us away from silicon-based modes of calculation to biologically based systems. I know that sounds pretty dry, but I reckon this could lead to a massive shift in the way we view computers, intelligence, and the world around us.

Right now, when I use a computer, I bash keys and click mice to input data into something that doesn’t actually think. It just processes, theoretically with the same output every time given the same input, like a washing machine. Obviously, most of my experiences of computing involve some kind of loud shouting because this doesn’t happen, but the idea behind the computer as we know it now is that it it’s very definitely a machine. It comes in a box, it makes a soft humming noise that tells me it’s actually doing something, it clicks and clunks its way through most of the stuff I need it to do, and then I turn it off. I have no cerebral connection to it because it handles information in such a different way to my own brain, and more obviously, it’s made of metal. Once we start interacting with biological systems, all of this could change. Even if it’s still housed in a little box, when I ask it to do something, it will (in it’s own special, bacterial way) think its way to the answer. It won’t just clunk through every possibility one at a time and assess which was correct; it’ll lock onto every permutation at once and instantly know the answer. Like a brain. This won’t just be a thing that I switch on, demand some answers from and turn off again – this’ll be a living thing that I ask questions.

And once we have a world in which this kind of intelligence, as opposed to artificial, silicon ‘intelligence’ is recognised, what happens to the way we view ‘intelligence’? At the moment there are a few tests of artificial intelligence that are deliberately designed to anthropomorphasise computing functions – playing grandmasters at chess, the Turing test, etc. – and one of the key reasons for this is that the intelligence that computers display is so very different from our own. The idea is that when inanimate objects are able to mimic our way of interacting (not thinking), we’ll be able to consider them truly intelligent. The flaw should be obvious – it’s like saying you’ll declare that an amazing drag queen is actually a woman because his make-up is so utterly convincing. But if we start to work with organically-based intelligence, the distinction is removed. All of a sudden, there’s no need for a Turing test, because there’s no need to prove the strength of an act of mimicry. The system doesn’t need to be humanised, because it’s not artificial in the sense that a box full of wires and chips is. It’s also very different from the dumb logic gates that populate our TVs, our kettles, our toasters, everything, unlike the box I’m typing this into. I wonder what will happen to those ‘why aren’t you doing what I tell you to’ computer moments, when we’re talking to thinking machines instead of metal boxes.

Not only that, but there’s every possibility that there’ll be as big a shift in the role of technology in the wider world as there has been with the growth of computing in the last 30 years. Only halfway through the last century it would have been unimaginable that virtually every household in the western world would have a little computing device inside it. Now we can start to think of similarly outlandish things that we might all learn to live with in the next 50 years – imagine a world where every home has a bacterial growth brewing slowly in the corner of the living room in a little petri dish. Designer petri dish, of course, someone’ll find a way to make them fashionable and make money from them. The slightly more scary thought is that once we start regularly relying on a form of intelligence that’s much closer to our own, we have to consider the ethics of every decision we make based on their calculations much more closely. Do computers have souls? Not really, it’d be difficult to argue that just because mine seems to willingly choose to disobey its master (me, allegedly) it has any kind of sense of self. Big dumb question I know, but it becomes a bit harder when you’re talking about something that doesn’t cease to exist when you turn it off, that doesn’t rely on the solid state of an electrical current and that forms answers based on a similar configuration of pathways through neural networks to your own brain. All a very long way off, probably, but the big stuff comes from big ideas that start in little petri dishes.

Now, this week’s playlist comes to you courtesy of…the same people as last week. And it’s just as much of a riot. Click below to hear it. Banzai.

1. Slave - Roots

2. The Residents - Blue Rosebuds

3. Tom Waits - Martha

4. White Williams - Smoke

5. Chas & Dave - Rabbit

6. Flanders & Swann - The Gnu Song

7. Francoise Hardy - Tout Ce Qu'on Dit

8. Roy Ayers - Can You Dig It?

9. Can - Mushroom

10. Beastie Boys - Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun

11. Kid Koala - Music For Morning People

12. Friendly Fires - Jump In The Pool

13. Atlas Sound - Winter Vacation

14. Ralph Vaughan Williams - 5 Mystical Songs, No.3, Love Bade Me Welcome

15. Nat King Cole - Lovelight

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5or7X55QlPSnmhPryN6Hhd

More next week.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #15 - 20-07-09

This week, Pieces suffered a cultural overload – Shakespeare, proms, libraries; if it had all been consumed by one person instead of three it would have probably led to some kind of breakdown.

This last week has seen a flurry of anniversaries relating to the Apollo 11 mission to land two people on the moon. On the moon. That’s really far away. Sorry to point out the obvious, but every time I think about it at the moment my mind starts to boggle. Here’s the thing: there’s a plan to take people to the moon again, by 2020 or something, but I’m not excited by it at all. It’s a bit like watching a big blockbuster movie with loads of CGI explosions: now that computers can do pretty much anything for us, there’s not really any thrill any more. Of course we can send a person to the moon: whatever the problems and difficulties, we can chuck a computer at them and everything will be fine. But 40 years ago, people were walking on the moon. 40 years ago, when people drove clunky dirty cars and steam trains had only just been taken out of service on British railways. It’s just staggering – and for someone like me who was born a really long time after all of this, it’s amazing that it has that much of an impact hearing about it and watching footage. But it really does; it’s like reading about sea voyages around the world (and even better because there’s less inherent imperialism and colonialism…).

A big part of the excitement surely comes from the well-documented primitivity of the technology that was available to the space program in the late 60s. To me, its not even statistics about the computer power in the spacecraft or whatever gets thrown around all the time. It’s thinking about what was available to an ordinary person at the time. Right now, I’m typing on a computer that’s pretty powerful, that can probably do a lot of the things that would be required to get someone to the moon again. That’s not me showing off my computer (anyone who’s ever seen it clunk and grind into action will no there’s really nothing to show off about…), it’s just a sign of how attitudes to technology have shifted since 1969 because what’s available is so much more sophisticated. Rewind 40 years and the most complex piece of machinery in your standard family home would probably be either the car or the television set. Imagine watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon’s surface and knowing that the stuff that got him there is only a few steps up from the car on your driveway. Whereas a computer can do anything it’s programmed to do, it takes imagination and a lot of adventure to get a dumb petrol-powered box to the moon.

As well as the thrill of watching what’s basically a big hunk of metal with no brain somehow fly a perfect course to a tiny object thousands of miles away, the moon landings show us that it is actually possible to achieve great things by being humble and quietly brilliant. Once you get past the big Kennedy speeches about doing things because they’re hard, and the All-American we’re-gonna-beat-your-asses cold-war approach, you’re left with three men in a spaceship, on a mission. Of those three men, it was apparently ‘Buzz’ Aldrin who was originally chosen to take the first step on the surface of the moon. But he was switched with Neil Armstrong at the last minute. The reason? The leaders of mission control felt that the softly-spoken, modest Armstrong would be better equipped to handle the pressures and notoriety of being the first man on the moon. So he did. And he’s spent 40 years being a nice guy, or just generally not showing off about it. No-one has a bad word to say about the guy.

Above all concerns about machinery and gung-ho bravado, the achievement that really sticks in my imagination is the imagery of a mission for all mankind. Obviously, it’s naïve to think for a second that the concept of landing a man on the moon wasn’t dreamed up as a riposte to Russian cosmonauts beating American astronauts into orbit around the Earth. But bearing that in mind, what a wonderful thing to be able to watch footage of men on the moon and have them talk about a ‘giant leap for mankind’ – not America, not ‘the free world’, but mankind. Just once, we were all able to say that, whatever its origins, something had happened that was actually, truly, attuned to the human craving for exploration without the destructive impulse that usually pollutes it. What a great thing.

Anyway, enough of the cheesy schoolboy star-eyed wonder. On to this week’s playlist, which features not a single moon-related song. Unless I’ve missed a really subtle link, in which case feel free to let me know and you’ll get a prize. Or something. Click the link below to hear all of this:

1. Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint III: Fast
2. Roy Ayers - Can You Dig It?
3. Public Enemy - Who Stole The Soul?
4. Helen Shapiro - Tell Me What He Said
5. Dinosaur Jr. - Pieces
6. Francis Poulenc - Sonata for Two Pianos: II. Allegro
7. Paul Simon - The Coast
8. Panda Bear - Bro's (Terrestrial Tones mix)
9. Lionel Richie - All Night Long
10. Psychic TV - Just Drifting
11. Radiohead - Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)
12. The Boo Radleys - Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock
13. Randy Newman - The Great Nations Of Europe

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/38J1Zmf6bvgUX9xZe1KgU9

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #14 - 13-07-09

This week, Pieces grappled once again with the never-ending quest for the perfect band name, for the benefit of a good friend. For some reason, he was less than impressed with our suggestion that ‘PRICK’ would be a good name for a Modern Jazz quartet…

The last week saw at least two events involving culture-related injuries. the Pamplona bull run saw its first (human) death in six years, and at least two other grizzly gorings that had newspaper readers turning away in disgust as they saw more-graphic-than-necessary pictures. And it was revealed that Tate Modern is fighting at least two claims for compensation from people who have injured themselves at exhibitions including Carsten Höller’s slides and the recent recreation of Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings.

Both of these revelations made me think about the role that danger plays in our cultural experience. There’s not many traditional art forms that can offer us real danger as part of the thrill of experiencing them – difficult to think how you would produce one, although a painting that reached out and grabbed random viewers and strangled them a little bit would be pretty amazing. But the experiences that do offer us something that we just can’t get anywhere else – that feeling that it could be the last thing you ever do if you’re not careful. Obviously people work in the armed forces and on building sites are exposed to this kind of dangerous environment on a daily basis, and it’s not necessarily a thrill to do so. I think that makes it all the more remarkable that the rest of us would ever choose to put ourselves through things that could potentially do us a lot of harm, and not only that but under the guise of a cultural encounter.

All of this has to be kept pretty distinct from experiences that provide us with simulations of danger, like rollercoasters or going to watch a horror movie, because they don’t (intentionally) expose us to any real danger. You can sit all the way through a horror movie and be a real killjoy by smiling the whole way through, safe in the crystal clear certainty that nothing bad will actually happen to you, just the same as you can ride a rollercoaster without any serious repercussions unless you have some kind of heart condition – in which case you should really have read the safety bits at the start of the queue. No matter how much anyone tells you about how going on thrill-rides at theme parks is all about pushing the boundaries of fear, the fact is they’re designed to be completely safe. Now no-one who’s ever been on Air at Alton Towers could ever say this makes them boring – all I’m saying is that this kind of ride is not where the real danger lies.

The real danger lies in the blood and gore you could see at the bullfight, the bones that could get cracked falling from large wooden structures in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, even the thought that one of Anthony Gormley’s ‘statues’ might slip and fall of the plinth in Trafalgar Square. All of these have been described as Art rather than Sport or even Recreation, and the Art comes from a knowledge that there is beauty in the willingness to gamble life (or even just an eye or two) for experience. This would have been Ernest Hemingway’s argument anyway, as anyone who’s read Death In The Afternoon will know (and if you haven’t, check it out – best book about bullfighting you’ll ever read). We even get thrills from watching other people go through this kind of pain – think about how, even if you tell everyone you hate them, you still secretly giggle at Jackass, Dirty Sanchez, Tokyo Shock Boys etc. Only here it’s not art, it’s in the same category as sport – it can be glorious (a great catch in cricket that nearly breaks the catcher’s neck), heroic (think of Terry Butcher or Paul Ince bleeding profusely through bandages while playing for England), even moving (German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann being hailed as a hero after winning the FA Cup even though he broke his neck in the 75^th minute). But they’re not beautiful. Beauty through danger, beauty as the result of danger, that’s the preserve of art.

And so to this week’s playlist, which is another hour of little cool noises. Click the link below to hear it all.

1. Ubu Dance Party - Pere Ubu

2. Swell Maps - Big Empty Field

3. The Mekons - The Shape I'm In

4. Classics IV - Spooky

5. Matmos - For Felix (And All The Rats)

6. Tal Farlow - Fascinating Rhythm

7. The Johnny Mann Singers - Up Up And Away

8. Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire

9. The Harmonising Four - Pass Me Not

10. Babatunde Olatunji - Aiye Mire

11. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Abba Zaba

12. Fennesz - Caecilia

13. Camera Obscura - French Navy

14. Igor Stravinsky - Symphony In Three Movements: I

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3eJvOPavlMWum2gCXNIU6m

This week, Pieces missed the last set of the longest and tensest Wimbledon final ever, but we’re not bitter. We’ll just make sure that if Roger Federer or Andy Roddick ever come to a Pieces gig, they leave before we play our last 3 songs. We know it wasn’t their fault. But someone has to pay…

In a week where all kinds of events have forced us to reconsider the merits of past achievements and figures, the idea of critical reassessment has loomed large. As the world watched Federer become the first man to win 15 tennis majors, we were bombarded with commentators, pundits and former players telling us that he’s now without a doubt the greatest player ever to grace the game. All well and good, and statistically sound I suppose, but imagine how Rod Laver, who was in the crowd on Sunday to watch Federer and until the end of that match had the title of ‘Best Ever’ in the palm of his hand, must feel. In the space of a couple of break points, his achievements shift from the pinnacle of on-court dominance to the second-tier, where the Great players fight for the right to polish Federer’s tennis shoes. Even if you don’t care about tennis at all (which, as everyone knows and accepts, not many of us do except for 3 weeks of strawberry-and-cream love-in in summer), you have to feel sorry for the guy. Once someone’s come along to top your trophy count, all you’re left with is the die-hards to fight your corner on the grounds that ‘the game was different then’.

The same can happen retro-actively, bizarrely. It usually disguises itself as nostalgia, like when (god forbid…) you’re forced to sit through a TopTen Best Ever Selling Mega Smash Hit Saturday Night TV ITV3 Filler show, and the last things to appear are from years and years ago and are championed by people saying ‘they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore’. They’re doing the same thing as the tennis commentators, only in reverse: once you’ve found a set of criteria to judge something on, you can raise the best performer above everything else and treat it as if there’s no need to pay any attention to anything other than ‘the winner’.

You would expect this trend to run pretty strongly through music, given that we as humans do tend to get over-excited about most things in this way. Just think about the glut of magazine articles devoted to reviews of ‘criminally underrated’ albums, or ‘lost gems’, or, even better, ‘[Terrible Album X], [Artist X]’s true career high’. (Check out this painful example). All set up in tandem with the unconscious drive we all have to plot the ‘development’ or ‘progression’ of music, even of an individual band, in a single linear direction like a story with a beginning, middle and projected end. Of course it doesn’t really happen like that – although people like Pete Frame create brilliant, fascinating pieces of art based on this idea, and www.bandtoband.com is also pretty fun. But think of how many bands you’ve heard being dismissed because you’ve heard someone, somewhere, do something better than them. The Beatles? Well, my mate said they just copy Chuck Berry. The Sex Pistols? Well, they would have got nowhere without the Ramones to lay the ground. Let’s just have done with it and declare Robert Johnson the best ever musician of all time ever, and leave it at that so no-one actually needs to listen to any music except his collected works, over and over again. Until they unearth the guy that taught him to play guitar, and we have to whitewash our taste all over again…

Thank goodness no-one (well, almost no-one) actually thinks this way. But what a strange brutal world we’re surrounded by that constantly reinforces the idea that all we should ever be aiming for is the biggest number. Mahatma Gandhi phrased the answer better than anyone, and you can see his words on billboards all over the London Underground at the moment: ‘There is more to life than increasing in speed’. Well put. So I guess that makes him The Most Quotable Commentator On The Human Tendency To Rank Achievement, EVER! See what I did…

So, to this week’s playlist, which includes probably the best song Blur didn’t play at Glastonbury (well, the best Blur song anyway).

Click the link below to hear it all, Spotify-ers.

1. Blur - Ambulance

2. Kurtis Blow - The Breaks

3. Karl Bartos - Electronic Apeman

4. Parliament - Do That Stuff

5. Caravan - The Dog, The Dog, He's At It Again

6. The Bar-Keys - Soul Finger

7. Donovan - Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)

8. Siouxsie And The Banshees - Switch

9. The Smiths - Hand In Glove

10. The Kinks - People Take Pictures Of Each Other

11. Lonnie Liston Smith - Expansions

12. Bobbi Humphrey - Blacks And Blues

13. The Birthday Party - Release The Bats

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3LaUhEXeL3TrVTmsO78hpA

More next week.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #13 - 29-06-09

This week, Pieces enjoyed a British player actually being quite good at Wimbledon, got drenched in the inevitable British summer thunderstorm, and felt more shocked than we thought we would when Michael Jackson died.

Now, this isn’t going to be a post about the life and times of Michael Jackson – it’s been done by every newspaper, blog and tv channel already. What really fascinates me is just how much of a big deal people are making of the event. Apparently, a detailed statistical review has showed that since last Thursday evening, 85% of all music played, all over the world, has been Michael Jackson. (this may or may not be made up, but anyone who’s walked down the street and heard snatches of Billie Jean through car windows every 5 minutes will understand.)

As far as I can see, there’s only one explanation: Jackson’s death has to be the last superstar event. It has to be. Noone since his glut of publicity in the 80s has come close to generating the kind of hysteria that followed him wherever he set foot. Noone has really tried – those who have have just been confronted with apathy (Madonna – who is in danger of slipping down the same once-I’ve-run-our-of-musical-ideas-I’ll-resort-to-weirdness-to-keep-people-hooked slope) or hostility (sure, U2 sell a few records, but you can bet if Bono was accused of touching children he’d never work again). Now that we can all communicate with people over the world, some of whom we never need to actually meet, and find out any information at the click of a mouse, there’s no need for anyone to perform the role of the superstar. And the idea of a person being the perfect superstar doesn’t really fit with the times any more. Noone’s untouched by cynicism enough any more to believe in that kind of myth.

What’s going to happen when other giants of pop music die? Noone, no matter how influential or much loved, is going to inspire the same level of posthumous devotion. Why? I haven’t really got a clue, but watch how Paul McCartney gets celebrated but doesn’t make people spontaneously start dancing to ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ in the street the day after he dies.

There was a time when ‘the superstar’ seemed more appropriate, more in tune with a feeling of wanting something better, but that time was finished way before anyone my age was born. Look back at ‘superstar’ deaths before the mid 80s, and consider how revelations about private lives have affected perceptions of the people involved. JFK – apparently a major womaniser, but noone questions his credentials as a great man. Elvis Presley – mega drug and food junkie, washed up and worthless for so long, but still people clamber to call him the greatest voice in Rock and Roll, as if the blots don’t matter. John Lennon – despite allegations of wife-beating and neglecting his first-born child, he’s still treated like a saint. It’s as if we have to continue to elevate these people to a status that is impossible to achieve. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating their achievements, but to a generation (mine) who have grown up exposed to information and opinion from every possible angle, denying human faults – crucial aspects of character no matter how unsavoury – seems like it detracts from a legacy rather than enhancing it.

But Jackson has to be the last of this breed. I just can’t see how it could be possible, in a 21st century world where ‘being true to yourself’ is enough of a venerated quality that it creates celebrities out of base materials like Jade Goody, for anyone to survive as much of a shitstorm, justified or not, as he must have faced in the last twenty years of his life. I have to admit that the overwhelming feeling I’ve experienced since about Friday evening wasn’t shock, or even sadness, but relief – for two reasons. Firstly, whatever your feelings about this man, whether you think he was a boy-saint or a kiddy fiddler, he must have lived a life of pain and anguish, and I’m relieved that a fellow human being doesn’t have to go through that any more. But more importantly, I’m relieved that this is probably the end of the kind of star-worship that presents people like Jackson with that kind of life. Who knows, it might turn out to be his biggest achievement.

There will be no further mention of Michael Jackson. Promise.

Now on to this week’s playlist, which pulses along like it knows you’ll have fun listening to it.

1. El Guincho - Antillas
2. Broadcast - Black Cat
3. Gang Gang Dance - God's Money V
4. Os Mutantes - A Minha Menina
5. TV On The Radio - Golden Age
6. Sunset Rubdown - Nightingale/December Song
7. Dirty Projectors - Two Doves
8. Kraftwerk - Tour De France (Live)
9. The Marvelettes - When You're Young And In Love
10. The Go! Team - Ladyflash
11. Young MC - Principle's Office
12. Lou Donaldson - Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)
13. Neil Young - Rockin' in the Free World

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5xkP9AGC72ZBBTrtBH1Xg4

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #12 - 22-06-09

This week, Pieces discovered that, actually Paul McCartney playing with synthesisers isn’t such a bad idea…

One of the things that riles me occasionally about the state of current music is that there seems to be so little worth caring about. I don’t mean caring like caring enough to listen to it on the radio – cmon, I’ll give anything my attention for 4 minutes, even if it’s rubbish – I mean properly, live-your-life-by-its-principles caring, really grab-you-by-the-unmentionables-every-time-you-hear-it caring. Maybe it’s a lot to ask, and call me an idealist, but I think that’s one of the things that the best music should do: create that feeling of really, deeply caring about the people who made it. On the other hand, there is also a shortage of the opposite kind of music at the moment: the kind that you really, really want to like, but you just can’t. No matter how many chances you give it, no matter how many times you listen to it again, through headphones, on crappy speakers, while walking, just to see if it finally clicks – it’s still just crap.

The roots of this kind of association with certain music can normally be traced back to childhood: we usually have at least one person who we look to for musical inspiration, or one person who effectively chooses most of what we listen to. For people with older siblings, it’s usually those siblings who fill this role, dominating the CD player with annoying mopey teenage music while you want to hear something that actually makes you want to smile. For those, like me, who have only younger siblings, or none at all, the role usually falls to parents. Having someone else effectively choose the soundtrack to your lifeis bound to breed some kind of resentment, and no matter how hard you try there’s just no way you can align your taste in music with another person exactly. If someone doesn’t like mushrooms, feeding them mushrooms over and over again isn’t going to change anything.

People who surround themselves with music are inevitibly susceptible to this condition. There’s always going to be a next big thing that you just don’t get, no matter how cool you think they look, or how nice they seem. When, a couple of years ago, everyone started talking about a band called Glasvegas, I thought they sounded brilliant. Informed lyrics, great. Crunching, but jangly guitars, fine. Scottish accents: score! Then I heard their record. Less said the better, really. In fact, at the moment I’m getting a bit frightened, because for the first time I find myself not liking a lot of music that a lot of people younger than me really, really do. This admittedly means my reasons for wanting to like it are a bit shallow: I just don’t want to feel like the kind of old fogey who says ‘Call that music? Honestly, back in my day…’ But I can't help it. God, the pains of growing up, eh?

Some music can surprise you with its sudden transformation from want-to-like-it-but-can’t to can’t-believe-there-was-a-time-I-didn’t-like-this. I can remember desperately wanting to get excited by the Stones’ 60s records, because I’d heard so much about them, and being so disappointed when I discovered that they were just a bunch of blues and limp rock and roll. I tried so hard, listened to Beggar’s Banquet over and over, but nothing changed. In the end, all it took was to treat them like a story: start with Aftermath, then try them all in order. Aaaaah, finally it all makes sense. And to this day it’s the way I approach any new band I come across with more than one album under their belts.

And so to this week’s playlist, which brings you all manner of surprises in no particular order. Feast yourselves by clicking the link below.

1. Tito Puente & His Orchestra - Cuando Te vea
2. Eek-A-Mouse - Ganja Smuggling
3. Ornette Coleman - Eventually
4. Richard & Linda Thompson - Dimming Of The Day/Dargai
5. Shorty Long - Here Comes The Judge
6. Arcade Fire - Lenin
7. Kevin Ayers - Rheinhart & Geraldine/Colores Para Dolores
8. Quincy Jones - Just Once
9. Mazzy Star - Bells Ring
10. Madonna - Physical Attraction
11. Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch
12. The Germs - Forming
13. The Replacements - Favourite Thing
14. Paul McCartney - Waterfalls

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/2vxTNKxDgq5rMPP4PHurcL

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #11 - 15-06-09

This week, Pieces gorged on Futurism at Tate Modern, marvelled at how much better Kate Bush sounds on vinyl, and discovered the joys of cardoid microphones. All very geeky. Do we care? A little bit...

I was sitting eating some brilliant homemade soup (potato and vietnamese coriander – suppose it could have been a bit more middle class, but not sure how, not to bite the hand that fed me) at a friend’s house last week, when he said something pretty innocuous that nonetheless came as something of a revelation. “I’ve still got your book and CD”. Now, it’s not that much of a big deal that this friend had these things. But those seven words made me realise how much of a habitual lender I’ve become over the years. As soon as I’ve finished reading or listening to things I really like, I’m desperate to get them off my hands. Maybe the reason this particular moment caught my attention so vividly is that the book in question is one of my favourites from the last year (The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross – read it now if you’ve ever thought you could be interested in twentieth century music), and the CD is one of my favourites ever (a collection of early New Orleans funk). In spite of my intense attachment to these things, they haven’t been in my possession for at least half a year, probably more.

The knock-on effect on my life at home is surprisingly significant. It means that at any one time more than half of my favourite things (given that a hell of a lot of my favourite things are books and/or CDs) are not in my possession. My bookshelves are full of a combination of books that I either haven’t read yet or don’t really like so much, even though I may still really like them. Thanks to Spotify I don’t need to worry so much about lending music, but until someone makes every books available to download (and when someone comes up with a viable way of consuming them that doesn’t involve staring at a headache-inducing screen for hours on end) I’m stuck with this malady. Of course it goes the other way, and I’m really grateful for the fascinating book on animals that are nearly extinct (which I really should give back…) and others that I have lying in neat dust-free piles – another symptom is that I treat others’ things way better than I do my own. This has all made me realise that when the time comes that all media is available from central hubs and noone needs to own anything any more, I’m really going to miss being able to basically loan my soul out and share it with people I like.

It’s also got me thinking about how my situation fits into the wider world, where people lend each other more than just books and pens. Even though it doesn’t quite seem like Capitalism is going to melt slowly and caramelise any more, we’re still living through a time where lending and borrowing are tricky things to talk about in terms of money. Obviously despite Shakespeare’s (well, ok, Polonius’) oft-quoted advice to ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ whole countries built there economies on the assumption that it’s ok to borrow against future earnings and potential success. Just last week, Florentino Perez, the new president of Real Madrid Football Club (stick with me, non-football-fans, this won’t last long…) justified spending a world-record 80million euros on Christiano Ronaldo by claiming that "Shirt sales will fund the deal". Borrowing, rather than lending, has become a tool to manipulate money markets, and indeed all kinds of markets including those for Real Madrid football shirts, to produce millions of multiples of small profits that together make a big profit.

What has always puzzled me about this situation is that it makes it incredibly easy for anybody to make massive amounts of money. All you have to do is convince someone to lend you enough cash, at a low enough interest rate, to be able to invest in enough money-making schemes (and these can be as wonderfully brilliantly profitable or as gut-bustingly hard work and low profit as you want) to turn that money into more than you started with. Most business people will insist that it’s possible to make a conscious decision to make a lot of money and become stinking rich, and they’re partly right: if you’re happy with creating wealth by basically playing a game where you match big numbers with small numbers in the right order, then it’s yours for the taking. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

I like to think it’s because humanity has an inbuilt safety mechanism: one that makes at least a protion of the population realise that for everyone to survive at least some of us have to actually make things. If every farmer suddenly decided, you know what, fuck it, I’m sick of digging leaf mulch into my tomato beds every morning, I’m gonna get a fat bank loan and invest in millions of Tesco shares and sell them at a fat profit in a year’s time, the world would starve. It would be so easy for them to do it. But they don't. Safety mechanism at work. Please don't let it get rusty any time soon.

This week's Piecesounds mixes it up a bit with some live poetry alongside the one and only...well see for yourself. Click below to mash up your ears big style.

1. Gary Numan - Airlane
2. Cyndi Lauper - Money Changes Everything
3. Tammi Terrell - I Can't Believe You love Me
4. Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
5. Morrissey - You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side
6. Django Bates - Once A Penguin, Always A Penguin
7. Antony & The Johnsons - Aeon
8. Leonard Bernstein - Serenade II (Allegretto): Aristophanes
9. Buddy Rich - What Is This Thing Called Love?
10. The Cookies - Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys
11. The Walkmen - No Christmas While I'm Talking
12. Walter Lowenfels - All Our Valises Are Packed
13. Fela Kuti - Mister Follow Follow
14. The Flaming Lips/Stardeath/White Dwarfs - Borderline

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/543P5UzIESHwtbJSk1HRyI

Enjoy!

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #10 - 08-06-09

This week, Pieces travelled across London to vote, and look what happened - we now have BNP representatives in Europe for the first time. Brilliant. Almost as heart-warming as the news that the Tube will basically not exist for two days this week. Why can't they strike like they do in Australia, where instead of closing things they let people in for free over the strike period? Imagine, a strike that actually made people happy and got them on the side of the strikers...

One of the advantages of delaying this week’s Piecespeak (I would love to be able to blame the Tube strike but a] I do this from home and b] it didn’t start until after I finished writing this. Never mind) is that I get to do one of two things: either point anyone who didn’t see Nick Griffin getting pelted with egg at a self-organised press conference outside Westminster in the direction of this video, or remind anyone who did just how good it was to see him literally get egg on his face at last.

Fun as it was to watch an arsehole get peltered with righteous anger and abuse, this was the perfect illustration of the contradictions facing anyone who seriously opposes extremist parties. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Do you ban them from the political process, or censor their broadcasts and policies? Then you’re just instigating the same discrimination you’re trying to prevent. Do you leave them to it and try to ignore them in the hope that they’ll either just go away or that noone will care about them? Well, nice idea but this just leads to a bizarre kind of press martyrdom, where the BNP campaign along the lines that they’re being unfairly marginalised – and they would be under those circumstances. Not very democratic. The view taken by Unite Against Fascism, the organisers of today’s protest, is that they are justified in trying to silence the party, because the BNP’s aim is to silence the views of those they hold grievances against. But if you have even the smallest, most wavering belief in free speech and the power of people to make up their own minds, you have to believe in the right of any political party, no matter how unsavoury, to express their views and present their proposals for ways of running the country.

See, there’s no way out! And it sucks because not only are a lot of the possible ways of making extremist parties very counter-productive in the sense that they serve to fuel their ‘discrimination’ fire, even more of them actually provide amazing publicity, that they clearly relish. Does Nick Griffin actually get a strange kind of pleasure hearing people calling him a wanker in the street? Probably – at least it means they know who he is and it might get him a slot on the news. Would the BNP have got any TV coverage today if their amateurish press conference on a patch of grass hadn’t been ambushed by protestors? Probably not.

At a party recently, I was talking to an old friend about ways to stifle the rise of parties like the BNP, UKIP (just as an aside, how can anyone, no matter how disaffected, take a party that chooses bright garish pink as its colour seriously??) and in Europe the NPD and FN. The best he could come up with was the idea of introducing intelligence tests before voting, to ensure that noone under a benchmark IQ would be able to have a say in the selection of the Government or local Councillors. I know, I know, not exactly a great solution, and we could go on for hours about what’s wrong with ignoring the very people who probably most need to be heard by political ears. But what it does show is that if that’s the best idea a pretty intelligent, insightful person can come up with then any kind of solution must be pretty damn hard.

In any case, most political historians seem to agree that what’s really alarming about the results of last week’s elections is not the rise of the Right across Europe (troubling though it might be), but the total collapse of the Left. In almost every voting country there’s a lack of support among traditional Left voters, and because the nature of ‘the working class’ has changed so much since the last major continent-wide political shift, there may never be the same support base that parties of the Left have enjoyed up to now. And if that proves to be the case, what happens to political choice, balance and liberal democracy? Who knows. But we’ll probably still be able to get crisps and a drink with our sandwiches.

This week’s Piecesounds is a lot of fun: crazy homemade synthesisers, funk freakout Beatles covers, ridiculously high notes and mega key-change spectaculars all over. Lovely. Click the link below to hear all of this, and more! Not much more, but still.

1. David Bowie – Speed Of Life
2. XTC – Making Plans For Nigel
3. Silver Apples – A Pox On You
4. Company Flow – Silence
5. Run-DMC – Jam-Master Jammin’
6. Allen Toussaint – Goin’ Down’
7. Gregory Isaacs/The Revolutionaries – Leaving Dub
8. Camille – Money Note
9. The Staple Singers – This World
10. Eddie Hazel – I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
11. The Pretty Things – Baron Saturday
12. Stevie Wonder – Something To Say

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/11lSGbNl671Prg5Ct37imL

Next week: something even deeper. Maybe.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #9 - 01-06-09

This week, Pieces walked a lot to save bus money, ate home-grown to save food money, and generally enjoyed the free pleasure of basking in bright sunlight. Best time of the year? Sunny late May runs Christmas pretty close…

Besides the sunshine and the improbable heat, the main thing on our minds this week was the difficulty of finding band names that don’t sound either ridiculous or stupidly contrived. Several friends are looking for names for new groups, and each one asks for advice, and each time we say the same thing – ‘oh, that’s the hardest bit of being in a band’. Because it is. The pitfalls are many: pick a bad name and you’ll be labelled with it for all time, the shelves of HMV will forever mark the moment of madness that saw you decide that Arctic Monkeys was the best you could do. Poor guys.

There are actually precious few really, really good band names written in the annuls of history, which may be one of the reasons that we find it so hard to do right now. The ranks of the massively great bands who went by similarly great names is very small. Joy Division is probably the best band name ever – exciting, full of both suggested and referential meaning, wonderful metaphorical implication. Thank god it was found by a group whose music fit it perfectly and not a bunch of leather-dressed pub rock stallions from Philly. Thank god also that The Mother Of Invention were formed by someone as effortlessly inventive as Frank Zappa.

The catalogue of bad bands with bad names is too huge to properly sum up in a blog post, so I’ll just list a few of my favourites: Gay Dad. Hootie And The Blowfish. Bowling For Soup. Milli Vanilli. Wet Wet Wet. Babyshambles. KoЯn (as in, sweetKoЯn?). Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Coldplay. Counting Crows. And so on…

Then there are bad fits. These can be subdivided into at least two categories: Bad Bands With Good Names, and the infinitely funnier Good Bands With Bad Names. Razorlight are a great example of the former – decent name, sounds like it could mean something. Then you put on one of their CDs and it all unravels. Never mind. I always thought The Darkness was a pretty good name too, and it’s amazing that noone actually used it before a bunch of cock-rockers with silly voices came along six years ago. By contrast, there’s any number of good bands whose good taste just didn’t quite extend to picking a good moniker. Then the ultimate clunker – The Beatles. Bad pun, bad connotations, looks awful. Guys, you’ll never make it in this town with a shite name like that. Not a chance.

Then there are the It Could Have Been So Much Worse files. The band names that could have been foisted upon an unsuspecting world but instead were snatched away just in time. The Beach Boys were only given their all-american-surf-buddy name by a record company drone at the last minute, when he realised that The Pendletones is, well, just terrible. Blur were famously called Seymour before having second thoughts about their ‘why don’t we give it a person’s name’ moment. Pink Floyd toyed with The Tea Set for ages before finally noticing that it’s crap, and would have led to lots of uncomfortable ‘so you play with The Tea Set?’ conversations. And the less said about On A Friday the better. Before anyone asks, Pieces were once known as Out Of Her Reach, so we’re not immune to the perils of awful, awful bags of poo being slung across our shoulders.

There. See, occasionally we think about things other than massive cultural or political trends. Next week – Pieces shows you how to erect an attractive yet practical yurt.

Piecesounds this week combines the slick with the very, very daft. Enjoy Sparks rubbing shoulders with Van Dyke Parks – possibly the biggest silly/sensible divide in the history of pop music. As ever, click the link below to hear all of this in, of and through your own ears.

1) Spank Rock – Chilly Will

2) Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races

3) Johnny Trunk – Sister Woo

4) Ofo The Black Company – Eniaro

5) Sparks – Amateur Hour

6) The Bonzo Dog Band – Canyons Of Your Mind

7) Van Dyke Parks – All Golden

8) Nico – The Fairest Of The Seasons

9) Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!

10) Sly Stone – You Really Got Me

11) Thomas Dolby – Hyperactive!

12) Richard and Linda Thompson – When I Get To The Border

13) Gene Greene – King Of The Bungaloos

14) Manic Street Preachers – William’s Last Words

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/62wYvLieWQdpVtHvS2fFeX

Catch you next week for more

Pieces x

Piecespeak #8 - 25-05-09

This week, Pieces spent too many hours playing annoying computer games. Shame on us for getting hooked on something so unproductive, when we could have been outside in the sun, doing cartwheels and picking daisies. Or something.

Speaking of picking small flowers, watching one too many old movies this week got me thinking about little things that fill childhoods. Sliding down slides, falling off climbing frames into piles of bark chips, digging around in sandpits filled with greying sand – all pretty typical kiddy things. Except that hardly any children growing up today will do any of these things, because something about childhood is gently changing under our noses…

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a big rant about how kids grow up too fast nowadays, and ooh isn’t it awful how we dress our children in little versions of adult sexy clothes and my-goodness-gracious-why-not-just-let-them-be-kids. That’s all been done. I’m talking about the little things that seem to get ignored by the typical rants, because it’s assumed that they have stayed the same in the face of some all-encompassing shift. We may well force young people to wear mini-Topshop monsters, but they still have playgrounds where they can swing on swings, right? And they still eat ice-cream and accidentally dribble it down their shirts in that awww-it’s-so-cute way. And cmon, they might be exposed to sex and money and swearing much earlier than in my day, but they still. Right??

Well, yes and no. this train of thought began as I was walking past an old childhood haunt, a playground that used to be filled with half-rotting wooden ladders to climb and a massive sandpit filled with anonymous brown lumps that mothers always seemed to be nervous of (can’t think why). All of these wonders have been ripped out and replaced by a state-of-the-art twenty-first century grey-and-black streamlined…thing. And it looks amazing. Best thing to play on, ever. No slide, but still – climbing studs, really soft-looking crash mats to land on, poles to navigate and climb up. Perfect. But charm? Sadly lacking. I’m not exactly a stickler for old-fashioned anything, but there’s definitely something a little…sterile about it all. There’s definitely something very unnatural about it all, it’s all plastic and flashy bits of metal. Not a single bark chip ANYWHERE. Scandal. Maybe this means our children are going to grow up not knowing what a tree looks like, or where bark comes from, or what wood can be made into apart from Primark bags and bog roll. But hey, at least the kids still have somewhere to run around and play, right?

So yes, lots of children do still technically have a lot of the things that supposedly ‘make’ a childhood. But I can’t help thinking that the tokens that are left are being changed in ways that influence the ways they’re growing up in ways that are just as profound as the whole Daily-Mail-shock-horror-twelve-year-old-dad bag.

And finally, just in case there were any suspicions, none of this has anything to do with the Pieces song Playgrounds. Definitely not a subliminal plug. As if we’d Children ever do Of something Fire like that.

And so to Piecesounds, which this week is remarkably bouncy. Apart from the slower songs. And the jazz. And the frankly astonishing fragments that make up Tzigane. Remarkable.

As always, click on the link below to hear all of this in your very own ears.

1. Animal Collective – Peacebone
2. Dr. Octagon – A Gorilla Driving A Pickup Truck
3. Sonic Youth – Tunic (Song for Karen)
4. The Flaming Lips – It Overtakes Me
5. The Neon Philharmonic – Brilliant Colours
6. Talking Heads – Love = Building On Fire
7. Jane Birkin/Feist – The Simple Story
8. Jett Brando – The Centre Of Gravity (Sit Right Down)
9. Yo La Tengo – Damage
10. Joni Mitchell – Car On A Hill
11. Maurice Ravel – Tzigane
12. Django Reinhardt – Night And Day

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/24l8bl8dDcqpv840IJFd4H

Stay here. And there. Until next week.

Pieces x