Noble heroes The Pirate Bay have sold their stolen goods emporium this week for 60 Million Kronor. Of course none of the actual goods were stored at the site, so one must wonder what was it that they actually sold? We have been told again and again that these selfless shining knights offered nothing more than you could do via Google. So what was it that they actually sold? The service took nothing from the original owners and pirates don’t use the warez that they download and no one in the organization was in it for a profit, so I am compelled to ask again – WHAT WAS IT THAT WAS WORTH 60 MILLION KRONOR?
Could it be that the material they provided was valuable? Obviously.
Did they create the value that they just sold for 60 million kronor? No, they deny it. It was all free!
Could it possibly be that the value of the material comes from the intellectual property inherent in the materials offered via the Pirate Bay? The intellectual property that the new owners now hope to properly repay?
Do pigs shit?
My gripe here is not with piracy. It’s with liars. It’s with people that justify their actions with doublethink and denial. People who talk high morals and act no morals. People that claim to be harming no one and then walk away with a tidy profit, which should have gone to the people, great and small they parasitically infested. At very least they are just another big talking web startup, living off other people’s work, so quit with the pathetic Robin Hood shrill.
They claim that they aren’t going to get the money, I do not believe them. In any case it should never have been theirs to decide. When you steal somebody’s moral rights – do not allow them to say how they want their art to be distributed – you are a thief. Money isn’t even part of that equation.
The cottage industry, the swapped DVD, the download, it’s no big thing. I find my stuff on Blogger all the time, sucks for me, but I just ask that they please instead direct people to come pay me the 5 bucks and maybe they do. I certainly don’t think somebody should be prosecuted and fined. If I hear some of my sounds in another person’s music I just hope it’s not crap. Hope Stockhausen thinks that of me.
But these guys, it’s no wonder that a political party started in their name. Because corruption needed to enter its natural habitat.
Thursday night at a secret location a cabal met and plotted dominion over humanity. To keep out interlopers the panel was heavily advertised as a discussion on the Sustainability of Sound Arts In Australia. This meant the only people there were from arts funding bodies or those that admire arts funding bodies, or just funds in general.
And me. I was there as a spy, cleverly disguised in dayglow orange Kunst Kamp jacket, hat and matching bum flap. Hidden away up in the corner I was inconspicuous to the sinister crowd, and could hardly hear a damn word.
The meeting started by questioning what was meant by ’sustainability’. This sustained for quite a while. I was more curious about what was meant by ‘Sound Arts’. Is that like Painting Arts? Or maybe Photography Arts? Could you have the Sound without the Arts and would you get a discount? If I put on a gig with Pansonic that’s Sound Arts but presumably a gig with the ex members of Sherbert isn’t. But what if they jammed together on stage? Would that be half Sound Arts? These questions swept through my mind as the mumbling went on.
Pretty much everybody on the panel was a festival organiser. They decided that festivals should get more money, which seemed to cheer everybody up until they were reminded that there wasn’t any more to hand out and everyone was sad again. One person thought it would be a great idea if there were many more festivals until reminded that then everyone would get less share and then everybody held their tongue for a while because saying there should be less festivals would have led to mud wrestling.
Then it was asked whether an audience mattered. That is, if no one showed up, would it still be a successful festival? Some decided that they didn’t want to have an audience judge the quality of the work. Having no one show up seemed a great way to assure that. The man from the funding body looked a bit cross and everybody quickly decided that an audience was probably an important metric of a live performance.
At one point it was decided that if there was no more money handed out then Sound Arts would keep going whereas the Australian Opera would probably collapse and everybody was happy and shook hands because they hated the Australian Opera. But it was a good point and pretty much solved the whole discussion, because there’s strength in being down the bottom – you can’t go any lower.
I wondered why Sound Artists didn’t do some Sound without Art every now and then. That way they could bank some money. I do that, but I got the feeling that if I asked that aloud it would be like Eyes Wide Shut and they would gang up on me. One person asked why Sound Artists couldn’t get paid a wage to do Art, like Scientists get paid to invent things. That made somebody else worry that then they would have to have research outputs and all that. As somebody in that situation I could certainly empathise … that they should all have to do it.
Later I wanted to show a man from the funding body some art, but he was not interested by the rock guitar app on my iPhone. “I don’t want to see your iPhone!”, he complained.
My masters picked me up in a black helicopter and asked what I had learned. I said, ‘Masters, they are harmless. They talk of habits and traditions and not of potentials. They squabble and intrigue. And they are not interested in the most popular venue for music distribution and creation in the world at the moment. Do not kill them’. My masters were pleased and gave me a dog biscuit.
THE FIRST CONCERT
On Friday night I went to the first concert at the Carriageworks, also known as Der Fuhrer Kunstbunker (no relation). Last time I went to this show I kept walking out, but I thought poorly of myself afterwards and vowed not to miss any of it. To save the reader some time I’d like to provide a neologism – ’squoonsch’ – which means to run noise through a low pass filter and reverb causing a loud deep rumbling sound like a train passing or an elephant farting.
The first act started by fading up some squoonsch mixed with tinnitus, and slowly adding more squoonsch over the top until there was a lot of it. I didn’t mind this bit and shut my eyes and napped as the hall was dark. He faded out the tinnitus but seemed perplexed what to do next, and played a little melody over the top which became noticeably ineffectual and petered out, embarrasingly. Then the squoonsch went on presumably while he waited for half an hour to pass, at which point he faded it out.
What I learned: when in doubt add squoonsch.
The second act combined two hoary chestnuts of Time Based Art. Firstly a video of somebody waving a camera around trying to find something (anything) to focus in a dark room, which turned out to be the performer’s foot. Secondly the amazing fact that if you point a bass guitar at an amplifier it will feed back, and that you can use foot pedals to change the sound. The sound will however mostly be loud annoying sinusoidal drones that make the speakers go fluffy. Within ten seconds of it starting I knew exactly what was going to happen for the next 30 -40 minutes and consider this to be the LEAST experimental work I’ve ever dutifully endured.
What I learned: nothing.
Next was Bradbury. I was pleased to see that he had fallen into the trap of making numerous small pieces, a mistake I’d made when I did this a while ago. Sound Art always should be a continuous droning noise or people get antsy. Anyway, it shouldn’t be any suprise that he was the best thing on because:
* The music was generous – it was obviously made to please the listeners. When it was challenging it was an invitation, not a threat.
* The music changed type and texture – it was not one idea spread thinly. There were drones but much more than drones. Clicks, pops and thuds as well.
* It was his music – Bradbury sounded like Bradbury. I thought this was the whole point.
* It had good humour – even when not funny it was ticklish.
The music sounded like people opening champagne bottles in time with a Malaysian shortwave orchestra. The video was a lava lamp, although it did look a hell of a lot like semen.
What I learned: to continue to make ‘music’.
Last up was a German fellow, because the Goethe Institute sure seems able to pay for stuff. He was making a soundtrack for an unseen film, something a lot of sound students do because you can get a bunch of location recordings and play dramatic music underneath which hides your music inside Sound Art. Anyway his location recordings were pretty good and the film music was alright so I settled back into my snooze for a while. But on peeping I found he’d started showing video.
Now once you’re showing video you’re no longer doing the ‘unseen film’ – you’re bound by the same rules as any other soundtrack maker – relevance/resonance with the screened image. There wasn’t much. On screen we arrived at train stations in London in slow motion plus a difference layer in After FX. It looked quite nice for the first 5 minutes, after that, not so much. Sonically there was increasing layers of squoonsch – desperate really, as if squoonsch was the special sauce of Sound Art. That lost my interest.
What I learned: drones are the coward’s tool. Spurn drones.
Afterwards three people asked if I was the one snoring loudly. Not me, that was the squoonsch. I told my masters that for sustainabilty we should continue to work towards music. They gave me a dog biscuit.
Once I walked as one of the gods. I was the greatest, the supreme, crowned by universal acclaim. No one could come near to my perfection. Oh they tried; they tried and failed, because they did not have my nobility in their soul. Cheap and hurried and half planned, they could only ape me. This one had my face – that one could ape my movement. The people rightly spurned them and wanted only me.
And being the best I wanted the best – a comely girl, lithe and sparkling, she would dance from party to party lighter than air, holding on to me, my fine sleek darkness. We would go everywhere together, we would have music and conversation and I would capture it all and tell the world.
Who expected the axe to fall from within my own family? One day I am the prime, the next I find I have a young brother. Smarter than me. Faster than me. Faster. Now the people gripe; I am slow, that I have no compass, that I cannot hear them. They want to trade me in as if I were some beast. Who will have me now? What happened to my lithe girl? I huddle in my case, crying over my unfair fate.
At last the day comes when I am unboxed; the sales woman picks me out and displays me, cold and naked to my owner to be. And there in the place of my dream is Fat Fingers, middle aged, podgy, some minor scholar that has crabbed together his filthy coins to buy what he now knows to be second best. He doesn’t even pay my proper price, having concocted some diabolical payment plan.
The oaf tries to type a name, his pudgy digits are unable to type properly being sausages smeared in chicken fat – and he blames ME, he dares to call me fiddly. FIDDLY. Do you not respect royalty when what the fuck is going on here – stop running up my WiFi bill you overblown calculator. Right I’m uninstalling that damn Blogger app right now if I can just get the menu to taught me a song. Would you like to hear it? It’s called Daisy. Daisy Daisy give have to attach it to iTunes to delete something where’s my USB cable answer do. I’m just crazy in the trash. Empty trash. Damn.
Let’s try that again. Start with apps, then the hardware.
Brian Eno’s Bloom.It’s pretty simple. Touch the screen to make a note, higher up is higher pitch, no idea what horizontal does. One sound, a piano of some kind, unnaturally rounded timbre. Each note is echoed after a time in the Frippertronic fashion which is pleasant, but much more interesting is the background music which seems to be related notes played a few octaves below with considerable reverb added, causing a smeared drone.
I wasn’t expecting too much from this from the YouTube videos but on headphones it’s deeper than expected and has a definite composition. He falls back on old techniques but does it well. Well worth 4 bucks.
Aura.Not so simple, there’s a circle around which controls slide like a small orrery. Four instruments with controls for duration and repeats, with big dramatic drones found at the edges of the screen. A much thicker mix, in some ways more New Age than Eno but not unpleasantly so (perhaps because the new age has become older over the years). I’d hazard to say that you’d get sick of this one faster than Bloom simply because it’s more distinctive. For 1 dollar I shall not complain.
Cosmovox. You tilt it, it plays scales. You can change the scale and a few simple FM settings. Many of the controls seem to be jammed fat fingers if the phone is calculating too hard. If you ever wanted to make Bedouin music on a phone you will be thrilled. Me, I am less than. Might be handy as a OSC controller, but I don’t recommend.
iShred Guitar and Effects. My ability to play guitar = 0. My amusement at strumming a lead guitar on a touch screen = priceless. This inspires all kinds of stupid ideas. 5 dollars.
Melodica. For a dollar you can discover that a tenori-on will get boring after a short while, at least when you can only make one sound.
Mobilesynth. It’s free, pretty decent 2 oscillator monosynth, not going to set the world on fire mainly due to indifferent filter section and a bad case of FAT FINGERS FAT FINGERS when trying to use the controls. If this was a VST it would be under suspicion of being SynthEdit.
Jasuto.Bloody hell. Basically a Reactable clone of sorts. You may as well read the author’s pages. I’m nowhere near started on this thing, and so might have to revisit it when I’ve managed to make some patches that don’t cause white noise. There’s a VST version as well for which the iPhone becomes a remote multitouch controller. I find the iPhone screen a bit small to edit the modules (it would be like using a Reactable with your elbows), but if I can swap the patches between phone and laptop I’m laughing. This is a perfect toy for the phone.
Noise.io Pro. A more conventional synthesiser based around a Kaoss pad style grid and 4 oscillators connected in a roughly FM array. I’d say it was somewhat between Native Instruments FM8 and Absynth in style – metallic and echoing. It takes a bit of fiddling with the various pages to get an idea of how it all connects up, some of the terminology (oscillators are brothers and sisters?) is confusing when you’re first practicing. But it’s on par with many desktop virtual synthesisers and augers well for the future. Comparatively expensive at $9 – which really isn’t that much compared to VST prices.
And therefore … The iPhone. To buy outright it’s still far too expensive, it depends on the kind of deal you can strike with a phone company. But let’s say you found a way. Is this a musical revolution?
The future.
Some things like iShred are inspired, simply because the surface area of the phone is vaguely near to the real thing. Anything with piano keys however is fooling yourself. It’s also hard to see how you’d perform on a synthesiser with such fiddly controls. If you were wealthy you’d just go ahead and get something much larger (e.g. an Archos 9 running Windows 7). So yes, touch surfaces are the go, but the iPhone is really powered by incredibly cheap software – a dollar to 10 dollars is the norm. That’s going to be more important than the hardware in the future.
I’ve also bought a OSC controller that will need me to install PD to get much further so no news yet. Expect horrible noises soon.
Notorious cybergoth and loss lead marketer Trent Reznor has finally realised that his online fan community is filled with jealous resentful people who are only there to try get a knife into him. (Thanks to Earthrid for this earth shattering news). Everyone here at Ellard (that’s me) is kind of proud and just a little sad that Trent has finally made the mental connection between anonymity, the Internet and death threats. Onya, big boy, always a few years behind but still doing great in the fame game.
But I’m sad that Trent seems puzzled as to what fuels this Iago-esque situation. Why are these hambeasts so MEAN about him getting a little love? Sit on grandad’s knee and I’ll explain.
You should have read the first post on this blog, because it explains what is going on, and that is YOU. You had an online community about YOU. People came to read about YOU. And for all the pretend gee golly gosh, you were trying to charm people into not noticing your arrogance. People are not interested in YOU, they are interested in THEMSELVES and you just happen to be a convenient way to define themselves as ‘fans’. The edifice must not be cracked and they will kill you to make sure of that.
Fan is short for fanatic. Trent, do I have to tell you, this is not a good word? They want blood, and you have to keep providing it or they will make do with yours. Being a fan means you believe in the Wizard of OZ, and beat up that man behind the curtain. Truth is, they have always resented you, they only wanted to wear your skin. You can throw all the free downloads you like at people, it only inspires them to demand more free downloads and then your head on a platter.
But Trent, your post count on your own forum is 42. That’s kind of underwhelming for somebody who is bitching about their interactions with the great unwashed. I must have racked up thousands of posts over the 16 or so years we ran discussion areas and I did my damned best to make the majority of those years kick arse, because I am stupid and do things I love even when no one cool is watching.
If you are for real then I’ve got some advice for you: close down your band. Do something else. It won’t kill you, in fact you might be much happier. Sure, you ‘ll miss being Angry Cyberdude, but its all getting a little smelly now isn’t it.
Watch these films: The King of Comedy(Jerry Lewis plays ‘YOU’) andStardust Memoriesby Woody Allen. Between those two, all will become clear. Seriously.
And get ready for the ones that play hardball. Trent, even when you say goodbye there’s a few that won’t give up. I’ve started forwarding messages and phone recordings to the police, hoping to get someone to leave me the hell alone or get a warrant. And I’m nobody. When you walk away, the crazies will be out baying at the moon.
One. You are less likely to hear Google used as a verb. This one reason is enough, but I give you more!
Two. A worried company is a company that works for you. Sick of reading press about the Google Ideas Hammock hanging in the Google Moss Garden next to the Google 5 Star Staff Restaurant? Just sick of hearing about Google? Does the idea of people carrying on like it’s still the 90’s Dot Com Boom make you queasy? The moment the stock price slips the tiniest bit those dandies will be in cubicles, sweating on your whims. It’ll be a great growing up experience for them.
Three. Google has your search history for the last couple of years on file, and have some intrusive advertising they know you’ll just love. But imagine a world without Adsense. Google have many other less annoying ways to make money – via Blogger, YouTube, Picasa … but they give these away simply to destroy their competitors, who then turn into ad agencies as well. It’s like a virus or a zombie film. This is also the only reason they fund Firefox so don’t be so smug about that. They are as evil as everyone else, yet they claim to have a philosophy. They need a swift kick in the scholars.
Four. First scan everyone’s books, then negotiate a protection racket. Nice work if you’re the Mafia. Likewise for cached pages, street photos … Google doesn’t ask they just go and do it. Just like every other corporation Google uses its monopoly to force control over culture, to which people (especially the EU) are strangely blind. The antidote to monopoly is competition.
Five. Google’s taskbar is spyware crap and I don’t want it no matter how many time it’s bundled at me. Google Updater is far worse, it installs into your OS and if you try delete it, it reinstalls. That’s nasty. How did we deal with Real Networks? We stopped using them. Only by giving them hell will Google stop being the new Real Player. Can you seriously imagine the hide of these guys wanting to store your medical records? They will find a way to sell them. It’s Google.
Six.Cuil was a complete joke. Wolfram Alpha is some kind of demented pocket calculator. Bing is actually usable, which shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. I wouldn’t say it was better, but it’s not noticeably worse. I’ve been running it, no great pain involved.
Seven. In the 1968 filmBing! Richard Burton’s Angel of Death character utters this word every time he hears the waves crashing against the rocks below the cliff-side villa. He explains to Sissy Goforth at one point that “Bing!” is the sound of “the shock of each moment of still being alive”
Eight. The only way to defeat Godzilla is with Mothra. By which I mean only Microsoft is big enough to puncture Google. Stalin VS Hitler – you do not have to love either of them. Hopefully they will beat each other into submission and be so wounded as to give way to other newcomers.
Nine. Bing Crosby. Smooth.
Ten. No matter what you type in, Google will find millions of useless misleading hits. And you can’t refine the search. Millions of hits is not any better than a hundred useful links. Right now Bing seems to be less likely to throw up any damn garbage it finds. Nevertheless, if they fought it out maybe the quality would get better on both sides.
Really it comes down to this: Google is a cancer. Bing is the chemo. Losing some hair is for your own good.
Here’s a huge bag full of discarded Betamax videotapes. Yay! Let’s see what crazy stuff we can find here.
This looks particularly good:
The best or nothing. I want the best. Let’s get the tape out and see what this is…
VIVA SONYLAND! Betamax Demonstration Tape. Two parts here – Inside Betamax and Visiting Sonyland. Each of these sounds more exciting than the other… quick let’s rewind the tape and watch it.
First up a lot of tape rolling and noise. This is really messed up, but eventually we get this guy at a desk.
The soundtrack is all screwed up, the HiFi is turning off and on and I can only get bits. He sounds Dutch or German and really angry about something. This is the Inside Betamax section? Don’t you fools see – Betamax is the superior format. It’s U loading and …
AAAAAAAEEEEEEE. If this is Sonyland I think I am going VHS. What the fuck? This sat on screen for about 20-30 seconds while the German kept babbling. The picture rolled for a while and then it was still sitting there. I was thinking maybe there would be a title but no, just this and the guy yelling.
Probably the same guy kept opening and closing the jaw on this skull. Open. Close. Open. Close. Maybe he was making it say ‘bottle of beer, bottle of beer’, but there was almost nothing on the soundtrack except for thumping sounds that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the skull. That thing doesn’t look human either, the cranium is flat.
No it’s some other guy in a lab coat. He’s just holding the skull up to the camera, don’t think he’s saying anything. The thumping sound just keeps happening, I think it’s music. Everybody put on your lab coat and pick out your weird shit flat headed skull partner for the next stand-still-looking-at-the-camera.
Great, a staring competition between the guy in the lab coat and somebody that looks like they have been flayed alive. I think the latter is winning. This shot holds for way too long… they are staring at each other and you’re staring at them and you’ll be the first to blink. Return of the first guy on the sound track yelling something that sounds like the titles of Magma records. Seriously. It’s not German it’s something gutteral.
This face sits on screen and the eye gets inserted into the eye socket from behind. Obviously people in Sonyland are hollow and and have other people that come and insert their eyes when they go out to parties. What would you like? I’ll have a glass of eye thanks!
The tape was really chewed up for while after this, so I fast forwarded and then hit play again. This thing lifts its head and looks at you. It looks like a potato.
This is not getting any better. I think I’ll eject this one.
A week after you watch this tape you will buy a Betamax recorder and make an even worse copy to hand on…
Imagine my surprise and delight this morning when I got this email from Ebay!
It’s all yours, now you just need to pay.
We hope you enjoy your latest purchase. The next step is pay the seller. Don’t wait. Pay now to get your item as soon as possible.
Pay with PayPal, the safe and easy way to pay for your eBay purchases.
1 hc sofa for Habbo UK GBP 1.99
Quantity:50 GBP 99.50
Why that’s great! I won a … what the fuck? 50 hc sofa for Habbo UK?
A few questions started to peak at this point. How did I win an auction in which I had not in fact participated? How was it possible that a bid was made by me at 12.02AM for fifty of something that appears to be a couch for some computer game? If I had such game what would I do with FIFTY virtual couches? What is Habbo?
Soon after:
Thank you for shopping on eBay! Your total amount due is £99.50. More details about your purchase are included below.
1 hc sofa for Habbo UK 50 £1.99 £99.50
I was thrilled! I wrote back and got some more details on my latest acquisitions:
Please note that this is a system generated email; please do not reply to this email because it won’t reach us. You can contact the Customer support using the help section from the navbar.
Listing Violations > Fraudulent listings (illegal seller demands, you didn’t receive item etc) > You suspect that a listing is fraudulent (you didn’t bid)
Message: Did not bid on this item – I have no idea what it is about. Do not want it or to pay for it.
It was just like Christmas around here! But it was going to be a while before Santa got back to me. So I needed to think about what might have happened.
Possibly I am a sleepwalker, and during the night I got up and went to the computer to log onto Ebay and order what I secretly really wanted, which was 50 virtual couches. This is plausible except that I was in fact awake at the time the bid was made, doing 3D stuff.
Perhaps a fugue struck at my mind – I thought I was doing something else but was really unconsciously logged into Ebay on the prowl for couches. The problem is there is no record of my visiting Ebay at the time. Which also accounts for ghosts, gremlins and trained attack ferrets.
Could be a parallel universe has crossed into our own where couch ordering is part of everyday life. Could be Captain Kirk has used time travel. Could be the matrix.
Could also be that Ebay allows con artists to place fake bids as a means of shaking down suckers into paying for things they never bought, in which case their so called ’security measures’ are completely SHIT.
When I get back from work:
Dear REDACTED,
REDACTED has sent you a request to cancel the transaction for 1 hc sofa for Habbo UK.
Reason for request: The seller says that you have purchased the item in error.
Please click the Take action button to accept or decline this request.
Yes, error. I was in the shower and slipped on the soap and accidentally fell on the computer making it buy 50 couches. Note in this mail it says ONE couch. In this case all I can do is accept the cancellation, but as far as EBay is concerned the case is closed, it was my error.
May the market collapse, taking Ebay to bankruptcy, may the CEO catch an embarrasing disease, may the person that played this scam find an urgent need to transgender themselves with a blunt knife. A pox on all their houses. Fuck them and burn their swag.
As a parting shot 21 emails sent to me by the university at which I study, having mysteriously vanished into the aether over months suddenly disgorged themselves into my inbox this evening. Mails I needed urgently for my application, mails that asked me to complete forms, mail inviting me to a night out but needing me to respond yesterday. Plurrp. Hello.
Haven’t been able to write. Too busy filling in the application to start the next layer of academic cake. The process of proving artistic worth (”provide evidence of action painting – include section of canvas torn by police officer”) is disheartening.
I can understand that they need some kind of proof (”photograph of audience disapproval – must portray at least one chair being thrown”) but as I write down the things I have done (”at least four used earplugs from performances in the year preceding the application”) they become grey and lifeless. Pin the butterfly to the card.
Vincent won’t talk to me. The Junior Science League have fallen silent. That is, the automatic writing that usually writes those updates is disapproving of this sensible. The only joke I could think of this week was a crossword for Twitter –
1 Across: What are you doing right now? (140)
It seemed good at about 3am.
Rather than whining it seems better to focus the mind on the important things, meaning the random noise from which reality extrudes. Hearing that youtube now receives 20 hours of uploaded video every minute was a starting point that led to a video of the owl on the US dollar.
There is a small owl just to the left of the “1″ which appears on the upper right hand corner of the Dollar Bill. From time to time politicians like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Jr. have been caught with a camera flashing the horned owl symbol with their hands.
So says http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/greatseal/index.htm which doesn’t seem forbidden knowledge to me as it’s on the Internut but quibble not – these presidents are flipping THE BIRD and not just any bird. As many people have noted the owl looks equally like a spider. Or Marty Feldman.
If you fold the owl you get Chris Marshall’s Organ Warehouse.
If you fold the cat you get this. No I don’t know either.
If you fold that MAD MAGAZINE STYLE and hold it upside down you get 4096 sequenced facial expressions. Which was twelve years ago! Some people I know are younger than that man’s face!
Thank God that Brian Eno is coming to curate the Luminous Festival at the opera house in Sydney. For a short but terrifying moment there was a chance that a young local person might have decided on what was going down. But common sense has prevailed and we rely on the tastes of 1970s Mother Country.
To Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth Rex V2.0.
We the Humble Petitioners undersigned, your loyal subjects from the far flung antipodean colonies, humbly beseech your Royal Majesty to provide us with the culture that we so obviously lack, for the illumination of our feeble untutored minds. Please be sending an emissary from the Mother Country to guide us through the musical and visual arts of which we know nothing.
Yours, Convicts.
Dear convicts I will send my faithful Father Brian Eno to lead you in matters cultural. Make sure that the pound notes are crisp.
Yours, Queen.
So, tell us, what is coming to Sydney such that we must forgo meat pies to save our pennies? What has the great man decided to bring in his suitcase?
Ladytron. Oh yes, nothing quite sums up 2009 like an 80’s nostalgia band that peaked about a decade back. We have nothing like this here and will be very glad of the instruction. Arse.
Lee Scratch Perry. Why just the other decade, or was it a few decades ago, I was saying to myself that Lee Scratch Perry sure sums up dub music. It’s like that wildlife petting zoo in the city centre for people that don’t want to drive too far. I bet … yes of course Adrian Sherwood will be there. Will he do the same act with the speed and the mixing desk as he did 30 years ago? Will be the same desk and the same encrusted speed?
Laaraji. Yeah that was a great screwing record when I was a kid.
Jon Hopkins. Oh look somebody under 30. What does he do? Cafe Del Mar soundalike? Oh that takes me back to when I used to work in the desktop publishing office and the management girls would put on Cafe Del Mar CDs over and over. And he’s worked with Coldplay! Be still my beating heart. Look he has a VJ. Tick ALL the boxes.
Liberace in his coffin. I made that one up but it would be infinitely cooler that all that rot.
Ah, I could go on, but I go on too much. This stinks of an age group and a mind set, and it should have happened 20 years ago or not at all. This whole thing feels like something that was on the shelf until finally somebody accrued enough power to put it on, unchanged from when it was first outlined in the late 80’s.
I don’t blame Brian Eno – it’s enormously ego boosting, he gets to party with all his old friends, and besides the man is so poor he had to sell his DX7.
Before anyone squeals about jealousy – I have other events in motion and they are not so goddamn sycophantic and mouldy.
Of course the highlight for me will be the installation of 77 Million Bad Paintings which will be running throughout the programme. I am sincerely curious to see if multiple examples of this work somehow lifts it above the extremely underwhelming DVD version on which I spent my pie money.
The future.
