The Rambler

This is probably my last post before Christmas. Tomorrow I’m off to the snowy wastes of North Cumbria, and milady and I will be putting our faith in the tender mercies of Virgin Trains. Say a prayer for us.

I’ll probably be back, bloated with turkey and christmas pud, some time before new year, but in the meantime have a click on this lot:

Grey Album-style mashup fever: this time DJ BC gives the Beastie Boys the Beatles treatment;

The Standing Room blogs on Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night in San Francisco;

Carl Wilson blogs on Ukrainian post-election protest music;

Kyle Gann does horizontal time;

Marcus Maroney responds.

Plenty to chew on when the mince pies run out. Have a great one, y’all.

I really hope this isn’t true. And secondly, why?

So, quite a few people around the place have been buying big harddrives and transferring all their music onto MP3s – with attendant worries about organisation, and backups.

Well, much as may, in the past, have come across as an MP3-head, I’m very reluctant to lose my physical format music. I’ve been getting kinda bored with iTunes recently – finding myself playing CDs live on the computer rather than as MP3s, or just listening to the radio. Strange that. Something about the overabundance of choice iTunes presents you with. You can’t scan your racks and let something catch your eye. Or, even better, let someone play you something you’ve not heard before.

This really hit me when (shameful admission coming up), I was making some cheeky copies of discs I’d bought friends and family as Christmas pressies. Well, I’ve spent the money on them, why shouldn’t I get a listen…?

Ahem. I’m sure they do the same.

Anyway, thoughts of Christmas benevolence to one’s kith and kin aside, the fact that I now have MP3 copies of records that I’m not going to own physical versions of is really unsatisfying, and leaves me feeling pretty cold. For the purposes of research, and a basic desire to hear all music ever, then great, I’ve got some copies of some stuff I’ve not heard before, but I don’t actually have anything particularly nice to go alongside the basic acquisitive impulse. One of my greatest pleasures – in an OCD kind of way – is unwrapping new CDs, peeling off all the price labels and other crap, reading every single word in the inlay, looking for names I recognise in the acknowledgments. It’s stating the obvious, but MP3s don’t let you do that.

And this isn’t an ethical question for me. It’s one about the pure experience of music – and more and more I’m feeling that sitting in front of a computer watching it run through a giant database table is a pretty unrewarding experience – no matter the quality of the music. Music is best heard moments after slotting or placing a disc into or onto some sort of hi-fi machine and sitting down with a cup of tea; or through headphones on cold autumn streets.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that after thinking about such issues – and the aforementioned backup question – I decided I needed a decent CD burner. Not a second hard drive. 3/4 of my MP3s I already have on original CD, so no back up needed there anyway, which saves me a ton of data that I would otherwise need to store. And, properly organised, burnt CDs would bring everything into the living room and cups of tea on the sofa, and give me something round to slot into a machine. Enter ebay, and 30 minutes later I’ve bid for and won a nice Lacie drive. Isn’t the internet great?

I need to spend a bit of time reading this over at clap clap. Which I will do, when I have a bit of time…

Can anyone reading help me with this, or at least direct me somewhere useful? Thank you!

I’ve been sent a document in Word, it includes a couple of lines of text and a picture – is there any way to extract the picture (it’s a bitmap image, probably a scan) as a stand-alone jpg or gif? Any help (in comments or by e-mail) greatly appreciated, thank you!

Ah, December. List time.

I’m terrible at making end-of-year lists. For one thing, I don’t tend to follow trends very well. If I can afford music that day, it gets spent catching up one of those millions of musical paths I’ve always promised myself rather than opening up new ones. I think I bought maybe half a dozen new CDs this year. Fortunately, among them were The Streets and Kanye West, so without too much shame I can post my top two records of the year:

1. Kanye West: The College Dropout
2. The Streets: A Grand Don’t Come For Free

I’m confident that as top twos go, that’s pretty representative.

The other problem I have when compiling best-of-year lists is that I can’t remember what I’ve seen or heard that year. I think my film of the year was The Station Agent, but I’m probably missing one somewhere (and not Eternal Sunshine – I remember that, but enjoyed TSA more). Yancey Strickler is running a good take on the year-end thang – a top twenty of things that shaped 2004, with a post on each. Well worth checking out. I don’t have the inspiration for that sort of thing, but here are three thematic top tens:

Aural hits

Le Tigre: live at All Tomorrow’s Parties

A bit of an unlikely one this. I’ve seen more live music this year than I’ve bought new records, so almost inevitably a live show was going to reach the top. ATP was hugely enjoyable throughout, and there was a bunch of strong acts who might have made top ten. Sonic Youth were excellent, in an unsurprising, absolutely on top of their game, secure sort of way. Dizzee was brilliant, and technically the best act by a mile; Fiery Furnaces and OOIOO shone amidst a lot of early afternoon drudge; and LCD Soundsystem were let down by horrible PA problems. But Le Tigre’s show is what I remember most fondly. From the opening rush of their ‘I’m so excited’ cover they were easily the most fun on the menu, and while most acts inspired wall-to-wall beard stroking, Le Tigre spread a rash of grins that took a long time to wash off. In the end it was the fun that won it.

John Cage, Uncaged: Barbican
Kanye West: The College Dropout
Dizzee Rascal: live at All Tomorrow’s Parties
The Streets: A Grand Don’t Come for Free
Michael van der Aa: One
Ce’Cile
Joanna Newsom
Bollywood Freaks: ‘Don’t Stop till you get to Bollywood’
Rinse FM

Net clicks

MP3 blogs

If 2003 was the year of the music blog, 2004 was undoubtedly the year of the mp3 blog. The year in music and the net has been dominated by copyright and downloading issues like no other since the arrival of Napster: mp3 blogs rose to the top of, and above the debate all year. Whereas music blogs made a minor splash on the pages of the Wire and occasionally even the Guardian, mp3 blogs hit genuine mainstream media radars – heck, even the Sunday Times’s pedestrian online section managed to notice Scissorkick and A Million Love Songs the other week. Services like the MP3 Blogs aggregator and forkslovestofu’s stunning Musicblog roundup on Monkeyfilter have helped to spread the word, and now mp3 blogging is big. The most remarkable thing is that with a few exceptions it all seems to have remained out of sight of (or tacitly sanctioned by) the record companies – a good word on Fluxblog, say, is worth thousands in promotion – and in some instances companies have enlisted bloggers to lauch new tracks. Long may they all continue.

Bloglines
del.icio.us
Downhill Battle
Dissensus
Dj Dangermouse: The Grey Album
Scholar Google
Postclassic Radio
iTunes
Cheap trainers on Ebay

Other kicks

Married life

– I’m not going to bore you with the details on this one

Warsaw
EU accession for East-Central Europe
Firefox
Andrew Flintoff
XML for Blogger
Non-league football
The birth of a new Ukraine
Gardens
DAB radio, and having Test Match Special back in my life.

Here’s to 2005!

Further to the closure of Exeter University’s music department posted about below, a ’sad and disgusted’ Evelyn Glennie has returned her honorary degree too.

The University of Exeter – University News

Amidst all the recent and ongoing kerfuffle about Exeter University voting to close its Chemistry Department (the fourth Chem Dept to go this year – prompting Nobel Laureate Sir Harry Kroto to return his honorary degree), Newcastle losing Physics and Cambridge considering dispensing with Architecture (prompting high profile protest from Norman Foster, Antony Gormley and Griff Rhys-Jones) at least two Music Departments have also been chopped in recent months.

Reading University voted to close its Department earlier this summer. And the meeting that saw Exeter’s Chemistry course vanish also did for their music too:

The Senate of the University of Exeter, at its meeting on Wednesday 1 December, supported a package of measures designed to position the University to take maximum advantage of its strengths in teaching and research.

[...]

Music making will continue and be strengthened by the appointment of a full time Director of Music but the academic study of Music will cease. Italian will continue to be taught as part of the School of Modern Languages.

Senate voted on the proposals as follows.

[...]

* Music: 33 votes for, 10 against, and 5 abstentions.

[...]

The University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Steve Smith said: “These were difficult issues for Senate to deal with. Our proposals have been the subject of regional and national debate and have served to highlight the pressures facing all universities in the UK.”

The proposals put before Senate are designed to refocus the University’s academic activities, enabling it to reduce financial losses in some departments and allow those making a surplus to invest in their future success. They are a response to recent changes in the higher education marketplace, principally the increasing concentration of research funds into 5 and 5* rated departments. The University’s senior management want to make changes now in advance of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise so that Exeter can protect and enhance its position as one of the UK’s top research-led universities.

[...]

Arrangements will be made to enable students on affected courses to complete their degrees. We expect there to be no drop in the quality of teaching under these arrangements.

We will now be sitting down with the students to discuss how this is achieved. There are a variety of options. These include:

* ‘Buying back’ existing lecturers or employing lecturers from other equivalent universities to complete the teaching.
* Enabling students to transfer to courses at equivalent universities. Two universities of similar standing to Exeter have already offered to take students.
* Transfer to other courses within the University where appropriate

Whatever the eventual solution, the University will manage the process. Student liaison groups are now being established within the affected areas to ensure that students have an input into the process and that their concerns are heard at the highest level. A great deal of senior management time will be devoted to managing this situation and the welfare of the students is our paramount concern.

What’s most worrying in the long term is that the Exeter decision was made on the basis of departments achieving less than 5 or 5* RAE ratings. The Reading statement is less explicit, but the phrase “Reading, like many institutions, has to direct its limited resources to academic areas where there is a realistic potential for excellence” sounds as though similar considerations came into play. This has huge ramifications for so many departments in all subjects, and the effect on the national university system could be devastating.