Moffat Toffees ("spoilers")

This has been simmering for a while, but I've really got a bone to pick with Steven Moffat. This started with what went atrociously wrong with the last series of Dr Who, but extends into similar things that have crept into Sherlock. The two series are so similar I regularly call them the wrong way round, and finished a series in the last year with the main character faking their death to their companions.



I jumped onto the Dr Who revival only when Moffat took over with Matt Smith as The Doctor. I hadn't taken to Tennent or the other one, but something about this incarnation got me going, and despite its hit-and-missity, I really enjoy it. Mostly the concurrent plot line with River Song and her tragi-romantic relationship with The Doctor. However, the last series really disappointed with the revelations, and I'd have let this slide if Moffat and his team weren't making the same mistakes with Sherlock.



Series 6 of The Who promised so much and fell so flat. It had a great set-up, that The Doctor is seen being killed by someone in a space suit who just walked out of a lake: the eponymous 'impossible astronaut'. Over the first couple of episodes we establish that the occupant of the space suit is a little girl timelord - what could be more exciting? Rubbish episodes (like the stupid piratey one, the not-scary-at-all-for-the-most-part child's bedroom one, and the didn't-need-to-be-a-double flesh one) aside, the mid-season-should-have-been-a-double-episode cliffhanger - River is Amy's daughter, bred and conditioned to kill The Doctor, meaning that he *is* the one she is in prison for killing, but is now lost in time - was tremendous. And it was very nearly ruined by the follow-up Let's Kill Hitler, which commited the unbelivable crime of 'making up a new character who everyone is supposed to have known for years but never mentioned'. This was shamefully done, on a par with Curb your Enthusiasm, except that that is a lean, episodic sitcom, and this is a drama with every opportunity to put some mention of the character Mel in at some previous point. They had a series and a half to introduce some reference to her, but her appearance was a total shock. Also, naming her Melody is a causal paradox and The Who is supposed to avoid those.



So Mel, still reeling from her childhood brainwashing, kisses the dr with a deadly poison. She is identied as is killer by a third party. Then she dies and regenerates as River Song.



The reason that i'm going over all this garbage in so much detail is because, at the end, it doesn't add up. She's already tried to kill him. Then she over-rides her programming and saves him by using up all her regenerations (with absolutely no foreshadowing that this was possible). Then, later in her life, she gets kidnapped by the whoever and put inside a space suit again, against her will, and apparently the space suit is in control? So she's not even particpating in the killing of The Doctor? Which renders her whole part in it pointless.



This isn't the way it was meant to be. We've already seen the little girl (who we now know is River) in the spacesuit. We know that River kills the doctor. What needed to happen was that it would be the young River Song who killed him, who then went on to meet him and grow to love him, knowing all along that one day (in her past) she will kill him. What a fantastic tragedy it would be, only possible in a time-travelling sci-fi.



And then there's the fact that leading up to the season finale, we had two perfect get out clauses built for the doctor: The flesh and the perfect impersonating robot. Both of these things fill the same function in the plot, a thing that can look like anyone. Why would Moffat need a choice of body doubles? It's the most superfluous mcguffin in existence; and it's made even worse by the fact that he's probably plaid the same trick again in Sherlock since, for all intents and purposes, Watson saw Holmes throw himself off a roof and got a good look at his bloody body on the floor? It's going to be a body double, again, isn't it? And again, we've got a superfuidity of options because a) we know that Holmes can make convincing corpse dopplegangers, Since he got one supposed to be Adler past Mycroft in 'scandle' and b) we know that Moriarty had a sherlock mask or something because the girl screamed when she saw him. Same escapement, same problem of not knowing which mcguffin was used.



Without going into theories of how Shelock avoided his death, I wanted to talk broaderer about the similar failings in the two shows. And succsesses; They're both superbly acted and engaging. But Sherlock can be a complete ramble. Take the Irene Adler episode; There wasn't even a crime that had been comitted, just some photos with no ransom note. Adler had no apparent agenda, motives, or demands. This might make for a gripping character study in literature, but at 9 o'clock on bbc 1 on a sunday night, I want a body, dammit, I want an apparently unsolvable mystery, and at most I want a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Anything else is just noise. There were times in 'Scandle', when I wasn't even sure who was meant to be in the room. And even with all that, it was a great watch.



The same with The Who; it's become too much revelation and not enough story. Too many plots are constructed entirely out of ideas and feel paper-thin. I like philosophy, I like allegorical sci-fi, but sometimes The Who strays *too far* into timey-wimey hand-wavey stuff, to the point of their being no actual action or anything happening, just a monster made of tears that only exists in their minds or something. The main problem here was put to me (and the world) on twitter by Rob Florence, along the lines of: 'my daughter doesn't get Dr Who anymore, it's over for us.' He also said "When you can barely explain the story of Doctor Who to your daughter, it's time to find something else until it straightens out." but I'm sure that wasn't the original quote.



Convoluted is the word. It feels in Dr WHO that they're sometimes building episode plot lines around revelation and nothing else. In the golden age of the X Files, I remember episodes that seemed completely stand-alone until the last ten minutes when you spotted someone or somehow it related back to another episode and you went 'ah!' In sherlock, with shorter serieses, it's a different but related problem; playing mind games with the Ultimate Villian seem to take up about a third of the series.

I just want my prime-time family friendly dramas to be... I don't know. what am i trying to say again?

Oh yeah and moffat also has wierd views on women. But that's another story.

a quick tought

should the amount of people you're emailing affect the number of Xs? do they get divvied up between the recipients, or is the amount you put in an average of what you would normally send to the recipients?

songs of 2011

2011 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

So I did the above mix, and then realised I'd left out a track off the portal 2 soundtrack. I don't know how that happened, but I began to realise there was a whole bunch of stuff that I hadn't put on from this year.

So what's the story of my music this year?

First off, we've got the usual characters popping up as always: Euros Childs, Half Man Half Biscuit, 65DaysofStatic; you can pretty much take those as read. Network-related artists always turn up: Girls Girls Girls, Marmaduke Dando (my next door neighbour knows him), Muddy Suzuki (FOAF via two routes), Blue Bambinos (Justin from work's band, who sadly left at xmas), Aaron, and a whopping 3 tracks from myself: two from the forthcoming album and a not-entirely-successful demo for something I want to do after that. I'd include Cats In Paris in that list, but I don't think they were around long enough to become an utterly predictable choice for me to include (didn't stop me [putting them on almost every mix in the last 4 years)

What's new is, I think, a shift towards black metal (as oppose to math metal or spazz) and synthesisers. In fact some of the tracklisting started out as a synth-based mix tape that got subsumed by the 2011 goblin. Profanum represent the bottom of the black metal barrel I think, a sign of how bad things have got when you're listening to nothing more than drums, screaming, and simple MIDI orchestration. Anaal Nathrakh represent a deeper, more intense barrel bottom. I first heard 'hyperblast' on their website around 2005, but that mp3 was utterly distorted. Sounded brilliant, but I've waited until now to mix it since it came up on a UK black metal compilation I got for xmas.

I finally bought Orbital's 'Insides', after a wait of about 13 years. It's really good, and the 12 minute cut of 'the box' is superb. There's some real John Carpenter vibes around my head atm. Also the track sounds massively like radiohead's 'where bluebirds fly'. I've found myself listening to more and more ludicrous music like Igorrr on Ad Noiseam, whose label samplers are always a joy.

Anyway, time to move on and see what 2012 brings. Have fun with these.

Further to 2011 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

UFOEU

So, as an addition to the last post, I've been playing a bit of UFO:EU again to compare with my recent recursion to Syndicate Wars.

This in itself is not unusual, I frequently get the old UFO bug again and fall back into it every few years, like the Silmarillion. But in light of some of my recent comments about it, and about save games, I've developed some more thoughts.

Firstly, I tried playing the game, from the start, without saving and loading. It was impossible. Even playing 'perfectly' - saving time units for aimed shot, meaning walking forwards at a snails pace - does not guarantee your troops survival. A shot from a hiding alien can come out of literally no-where, from your first step in a mission, and your defenceless grunt falls over nine times out of ten. First mission: 5/8 made it back. The fallen were replaced, but second mission, all were dead in a few turns. So I started trying to judiciously save before each mission, and loading only if it all went wrong, but before long, I was saving every time I made a good move, and loading every time a troop was iced. It's just the only way I can get through the game, especially early night-time terror missions. It's like having infinite free re-rolls, and to be honest, breaks the game, because it becomes a dream walk-through.

This changes considerably after you research the heavy plasma gun. I clearly remember the first play through with my brother, or atleast the first one after we'd got the hang of it. The game starts with only primitive, 20th century tech available. We dilligently worked our way through all the research topics that were presented to us, through all the iterations of laser weapons before looking into the items recovered from excursions. By the end of the game, we had everyone equipped with the heavy plasma gun, met mere weeks into the game. Now, I know better; skip everything, head straight for that weapon. It's now 2 months in, and already my squad are unstoppable. the time cost is lower and the power and accuracy way up, meaning you can stroll forwad while carrying it and still have time for an aimed shot, which now almost certainly hits and kills. my lot, with barely four missions experience, are picking off sectoids ss soon as they see them. I know it'll get harder again, but still.

But stiller, UFO is not a game you can win in the battles. You can try, but eventually you will be overrun. The whole thing is about winning the battles but losing the war; each mission won merely puts off the inevitable defeat of earth for another day. I preferred playing it when I didn't know what to do. It's a great game to dick around in, to be directionless in, because even when you've got no idea of how to progress, there's still the day to day running of your organisation to do.

The story is completely simplistic, but I think that's an inevitable consequence of having such a free-form, replayable, game structure. Not that it's inevitable for a computer game to have a simple story; for instance, an RPG like Torment's replay value comes from the fact that any one play through will only show about a quarter of the story. But a linear plotted game like, say, a classic Lucasarts graphic adventure, has less replay value, because a playthrough shows you pretty much everything there is.

SO how can you improve this game? I can't think of another game that gives you so much control and freedom. There really are not many ways of improving the game, but the only thing I can think of is making the enemy less lethal. Some rudimentary armour, available from the beginning, just to keep your people from dying so quickly, would make it... fairer. Towards the end of the game now, with all my troops in flying power suits, they usually don't feel being hit, or get away with a few wounds. It's quite surprising there's not a flack jacket or something amongst the random things you get given at the start - like hi-explosive, flares, and rocket launchers. But the only way to play the game from the start is by breaking it through saving and loading, which sets a dodgy precedent for the rest of the game.

And as I have nearly finished the game, again, with nothing left to research, and the last mission is in sight, I must wonder why I have wasted so much time on it, when I've got so much other stuff to do. Because it seems to fit into those little five minute slots I have, when I don't have time to sit down for a few hours and work on music. Even if those little slots turn into hours. It's a 'brainy' game, but I still don't really have to think while I'm playing. Not compared to doing the things that I really enjoy doing. And then I go and write a bloody boring blog post about it, because it's taken over such a huge part of my brain. I'm quite embarrassed by this, but it feeds into something I think I'll save for a future post regarding the lack of conversation on the internet these days. So... mu. bollocks to it. I'm posting this complete waste of time because it's better than deleting it. I apologise.

sequal like a pig

So, as a person who doesn't play many computer games anymore, but still has a large interest in them for some reason, I'm intrigued by the revivals of games that meant something to me. Both Syndicate and UFO: Enemy Unknown were quite formative.Especially intriguing that these two games should be hyped at the same time, because i remember them from the same period of my life. They both came out in 1993, and though I didn't play syndicate at the time, I remember having an argument with Wij about which was better, both of us only having played one. We sparred off each other with feats that we thought only our game could do. Research, upgrading your team, tactical squad-based gameplay... They sound quite similar on paper.



Later, when I had syndicate wars, I realised how different they were. As well as the matter of real-time vs turn-based, Syndicate gave you absolutely no punishment for killing civilians. Bystanders were little more than hedges, although they could be captured and armed, and oh the joy of working your way up the hierarchy of civilians, police, and eventually agents to capture. Syndicate gave you the freedom to do anything - murder citizens or local police, steal cars, rob banks, nuke office blocks - without consequences. UFO let you do anything, but everything had an impact one way or another. To different extents, these both both hugely emergent games. UFO's levels were randomly generated from set pieces; you had no idea when you landed what you were going to face. On the other hand, Syndicates cities were set-up to deliver unexpected consequences to your actions, and to reward improvised solutions to problems. They were sandbox-y enough to work as both living environments and missions.



I've just been playing syndicate wars again recently, and what strikes me is how much of an action game it is, when it's remembered more for tactics and strategy. Syndicate was already a lot more like Doom than UFO; it was fast (when the action kicked in), and it was your reactions and aiming that was the defining factor, not the qualities in your team. In Syndicate, you screwed up when you missed (and missing with the LR rifle sometimes meant all four members of your squad couldn't shoot again for ages); in UFO, you screwed up when you didn't sufficiently plan for the risk of your troops missing. Syndicate had some of the trappings of tactics and rpgs, but wasn't really a plan-ahead strategy game; on the one hand, you couldn't save mid-mission, and the missions could be big, so there was a lot of casing of joints, a lot of reconnaissance, and then only as a last resort, loading when things went wrong; but mostly, it's a trial and error game of learning to respond to ambushes before they happen. The only stats bonuses your drones get are the three levels of 5 different cybernetic implants on offer, and I've just maxed all those out by half way through the game.



With the 'remakes', Both the trailers for these games have similar, 2010s trappings - linearity, cut-scenes (press x to extract chip OMFG), sops to rpg elements with lame-o-rama upgrades, and chest-high walls. But I can totally forgive a large amount of the changes in Syndicate; the remake actually seems to capture some of the atmosphere. Hacking into people's brains is totally what Syndicate was all about (in that it ripped off loads of cyberpunk), even if the choices you have when you've hacked them is only 'suicide'. And bundling a four-way co-op into the bargain is great, because Syndicate Wars offered the same thing. XCOM, on the other hand, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and kept nothing but the name and the vague concept (which only bears as much relationship to UFO as to any other game ever. It might as well be a remake of R-Type).



What I really resent about both remakes is that they put you into the action. In the old syndicate games, you controlled brainless drone cyborgs in trenchcoats, expendable up to the point of having been financially invested in. In UFO, your people were incredibly valuable to you - but you were not one of them. Now, maybe these plot elements were dictated by the available technology, and the fact that in 1993 people were still more used to playing action games from a third-person view (like alien breed or chaos engine). But the change of perspective makes you the action hero, not the boss. It means your the actor, not the director or script writer. The story of the game was always the same, but the details were all up to you. But now every play through will be the same. So why call the new UFO game XCOM at all? I could ask the same thing about the new Syndicate; while it might capture the spirit of the original, the setting is so hackneyed that there's no sense in just taking the name. My point is, the perspective makes the game. It dictates the feel, and it grows stories from the missions in your head but never get put into words. Are we looking at the death of emergent gameplay in mainstream games? No, as exemplified by the popularity of GTA and Elder Scrolls. But I find it a worrying trend.

There's a more sinister point. Only a small minority of gamers today were playing games 20 years ago, when the originals came out. And they are not the ones these reboot/sequals are aimed at. So why acquire the licences at all?



Because of this lot (I mean games journalists. I googled 'games journalists' and a picture of Gillen came up, albeit in his role as a comics writer). The fact that these games have something - anything - to do with games from the fondly-recalled childhoods of the people currently rating and reviewing games for the mass market, is basically free advertising. The companies know that it means the game will get talked about, talked up, and given an extra chance when they might not have deserved one, as oppose to just flopping out of the industry like every other fresh-faced product. It's the cynicism that's so depressing. Despite the fact that the games aren't sequals, aren't in the same universe, aren't anything to do with the earlier games, doesn't matter. It's like a Led Zeppelin tribute band, who are allowed to call themselves Led Zeppelin, and play songs that LZ didn't perform.



It's like when they made Inspector Gadget: the movie, and showed The Claw as a person from the outset. The whole point of IG is that you never see The Claw beyond his eponymous hand, you don't even know if he's human. Sigh.

So Why do I have time for 1998's Battlezone - a remake arguably as flimsy as the ones I've discussed above?
BZ was so far removed from the simplistic gameplay of the 1980 original (note the similarity in timespan) that it could have come from two directions: either they said 'let's make a new 'battlezone' game', and just not stopped adding more and more cool stuff; or, more depressingly, some creative types had this wonderful idea for a game, set in space, that combined strategy and fps elements, with a plot, where you could build and ride around in tanks; and then the managers said "did you say it has tanks in? let's call it battlezone, for some free publicity!".



Ultimately, it's just a good game, irrespective of it's licence, which meant nothing to me at the time. But maybe I'd only heard of it because of the backroom shenanigans that led to it being given a name familiar to games journos of 1998.

So I suggest remaking another classic 1993 top-down strateg-action game: Cannon Fodder.



Remake cannon fodder? As a linear, cover-based FPS? Could it be done? Of course. Because it needn't have to be anything like the original; As long as the name's there, and the journos are excited, the bosses are happy. let's do it. Jools and Jops for 2012!

Where's Nick Clegg?

Today is strike day, and I'm ill in bed. This is a shame. Its a waste of a good day as I'm technically still striking.

So lying here, my thoughts turn to the coalition government, or as they're also known, the tories. Because as someone who watches and reads the news quite a bit, I have to say I can't remember when I last saw clegg. I remember seeing cable, looking grumpy in the wings like an understudy waiting for the lead actor to die, while osbourne announced his horrifying/unzurprising news that things are worse now than when he started.

But where's clegg, who made all those promises in the campaign, who everyone sucked up to? he's vanished from be media, like a discarded mascot lost in a 'merger'.

A merger like when sky and bsb merged to become... Sky.

Or a merger like when 2000ad and starlord merged to become... 2000ad.

Or a merger like when HSBC and midland merged to become HSBC, or when santander and abbey merged into satander, or when walkers and smiths merged to become walkers.

What I really hate about the lib dems is that they have given the tories the pretence of having won an election, and thus legitimate control of the country. They didn't, and they don't have it. But thanks, clegg, for giving your name to everything they're doing, and then fuckjbg off, so that everybody who voted for was tricked into voting tory.

Where did it say that, in your manifesto, clegg? Because if you can't find it written in black and white that this was your plan, I think we've got a caseof false advertising.

Never was a politician so aptly named after a race of alien lizards.

Things I don't need on a sunday

*spex breaking, improvised repairs.
*hot water bottle bursting on me.
*two counts of illness, with bodyaches and headache for me and the long-suffering being sick all through the night.
*having to plan a lesson to be judged on for tomorrow.
*dishwasher breaking (and then turning out to be fine but still).

I can't wait for wednesday.
On the plus side, I get my golden hello this week. Do you accept cash? Chaching.

day 06 - a song that reminds of you of somewhere

In at number 6: "You just stepped off the curb..."



I know Kemo City so well; I drove a cab there a few months, looking for a way out. I would always feel so lost, exploring new parts of town, but every area had such character that I would quickly learn the way around the main thoroughfares and the districts they carved the city into.

Okay, so bullshit attempt at NGJ aside, This song on the quarantine soundtrack puts me straight back into the game when I hear it. Bugged as it's engine was. Quarantine was the first game I was aware of to have a 'proper' soundtrack, pre-empting Quake's cd or GTA's radio stations. Most like GTA, you had a whole city to explore by car, and one of the best features of the car was the built in cd player. This was the DOS era - no multi-tasking. If you wanted to listen to your own music while playing a game, you had to use your actual hifi.

These places are as real to my brain as physical spaces I've genuinely travelled to. I know the architecture of the levels of doom and quake so well because i've wandered round those strange, pointless spaces so many times, looking for secrets or just replaying for fun. And while this song, from the soundtrack, brings me back to Kemo city, there's other songs that remind me of other virtual spaces; Captain Beefheart's Zig Zag wanderer instantly transports me back to the ice level of Dark Forces, Mansun's Legacy e.p. was on continually while I played Quake, and Blectum from Blechdom (and other bands featured on the 'structure of scientific misconceptions compilation) bring me back, bizarrely, to Shadowrun's hitech backstreets (I downloaded the snes emulation around 2003).

This is something that games, especially first person games, have that movies and books don't. Sure, hearing the music from Brazil reminds me of the film and makes me shudder, but it doesn't remind me of being in that world. hearing NIN's blasting opening to quake reminds me those cathedralic corridors, doors and lifts. I'm back in those spaces.

And then I went all mp3, and by the time I was playing Planescape: Torment (surely, the The Wire of computer games?), my soundtrack was a random mix of everything I listened to, and nothing stuck. I didn't even listen to the Torment soundtrack, regarded as a classic. No music reminds me of torment now. And most games I play, being indie, don't have much music. I'm listening to the Portals soundtrack now, and while it's great, I don't remember a note of it from the game and it doesn't bring me back to it as a place. Not like Kemo. That's a real place.

that gig from last night

So last night I did my first gig in a huge long while. In reflection of the times in which I live, it was a solo show, similar to the christmas show i played at with girls girls girls the year before last. No hang on, what's the chronolgy here?

I remember playing at betsy trotswood with the band and girls girls girls.
I remember playing at betsy trotswood solo with girls girls girls around christmas time. oh yeah, this was two years ago because: I debuted intelligence and paradise gas, and I played killing in the name because 'it's a christmas song'.

That time, I remember someone complimenting me on my combination of electric guitar playing and picking style. So, sans band, I thought I'd run with that idea, with a two-amp setup and a few choice effects.

I got home from work, ironed out a 'burnt ogre' t-shirt (logo by Corey), was fed pies and mash by the long-suffering, and threw my things in a taxi.

Upon arrival and unloading from the £7 taxi for a 1 mile journey, I learned of a tragedy having befallen headliners The Feminists: they'd left their violin in Berlin, and had been up to Watford and back to obtain a new one. But that had broken a string. Where are you gonna get violin strings from at 7 o'clock in Hackney? Well if only they'd asked sooner, there's a music shop 30 seconds from the venue, but never mind that now. I opened my big fat mouth and said I had a violin somewhere in my flat, although I couldn't remember where. Upon protestations that the string was 'essential', Sam and I turned tail and drove the 5 minutes back to my flat, where Sam went gooey over Esmeralda, and the violin was nowhere to be found. A guitar string was made to suffice; thus I missed my opportunity to sound check. oops.

Barish's band, 'the outfit glitch', were on first, and played a familiar kind of accessible and pleasant grunge.

I played:
Oh, Esme
Fumito U
Flim (by aphex twin)
Intelligence
Waitrose
Paradise gas
Encore: Purple Milk

My set was, as far as I could tell, a shambles. Having not had time to balance my levels, The effects just didn't sound right; the flange felt too crude, the delay feedback felt too long. The two distortion volumes weren't balanced. I didn't feel comfrotable on stage, unable to see the audience for the lights. My playing was so-so, and I was barely even trying to hit the right notes on my first vocal song, 'Fumito U'. My finger nails felt slightly too long, great for picking but on the verge of breaking (especially when i was going for my trademark plectrum-free pinch harmonic)

After the first three songs, all in open D major (DADF#AD), I had to retune up to standard tuning for intelligence, and broke the e string. I'd toyed with the idea of having two guitars, to get around this, longest, retuning point. I should have trusted my instinct, or not trusted the crummy strings the shop put back on the guitar. Either way, I had to shout out for a guitar to borrow; out came Jeremy's (should have asked for Barish's! he has the same guitar!), which had a totally different tone and a strap that went down to my knees. How does anyone play with any precision down there? So I took the strap off and grabbed what looked like a stool to sit on, which was actually a monitor stand that went down a few notches when I sat on it and felt like it was about to collapse, and I had to rest my feet on the top of the breadbin.

So I started playing intelligence, and stopped when I realised I hadn't found my note at all. I started again, having tuned up my voice. Waitrose should have gone better, but it sounded muddled and lost with the guitar sound. Then Jeremy came up to play his organ on paradise gas and it sounded great. I asked for requests and Sam shouted for purple milk. I couldn't remember the chords at all when i started playing, just dicking around in C; it came together with the first chorus, and I could hear Sam singing along. There was someone I didn't recognise asking for one more when I finished, but that was it.

Girls Girls Girls were on next, and you know what? it was a really entertaining show, as Lizzy Hawkins and I both agreed, having been watching them play for about ten years, these new songs were top fun. At times reminded me of a mix between roxy music and 10cc; at times, reaching their chaotic hilarity that they do best. I played Jez's organs on 'dogs', which probably went better than my entire set.

In between the bands, Mat, Nikki, Lizzy, Carol, and Carol's friend and I talked about the new edition of Star Wars... ok that's all I can remember.

I've got a theory you see, I might have mentioned it in a previous post; we should put our money where our mouths are, and pay McGregor, Portman, Oz, and McDiarmid to star in a 'real' star wars prequel. I want to see a moment in it where Kenobi and Yoda think they've rumbled Palpatine, only to find that they're too late; everything's in place for him to take over the republic. And I realised that this technique is exactly what Alan Moore uses in both Watchmen and V for Vendetta; Watchmen when Ozymandias monologues, safe in the knowledge that he's already done what he's talking about and the heroes have failed, and in V when the detectives realise that everybody else to do with the Larkhill camp is already dead. It's the same moment, viewed from different angles (although the detective in V is a very sympathetic character). Where else does it turn up? not often, because in mainstream stories, heroes don't often lose.

Headlining, as I said, was Sam's band The Feminists, and blimey, I haven't seen such incredible musicians acting so daft for, perhaps, ever. They'd played together for 5 years as an instrumental rock band, and then one day saw Sam busking; and decided he was the one. He simply stood, pointed, helped 'alright', thrusted his crotch, took off his sunglasses, put them on again, and lept. Meanwhile 5 technically super-competent and imaginative players took off in every genre of rock, from zappa to 'schlager' (The bassist was very happy with his purchase of the UK mono edition of Zappa's 'cruising with ruben and the jets', which he assured us 'sounds completely different').

Minutes after performing, Sam very kindly and gently drove me home. He's an absolute treasure and I can't wait to see him again, which I know will not be soon. But what a magical night it was. I'm going to go and practice guitar now.

Hey Record Labels, stop being idiots

So I had a bit of a splurge today and bought a couple of cds from various record labels.

I love buying music direct from the artist or the label; it gives me a sense of enormous well-being. It feels like fair-trade or something. I get stuff cheaper, they get more money. Everybody's happy, except rough trade who keep having to find new reasons to exist (cafe, bike racks, guitar strings, a one-day-a-week gourmet synthesiser shop; literally every time i go in, there's a new stupid, desperate thing in that shop).

But this particular shopping trip has given me a bad taste in my mouth.

I've recently got more into vinyl. I needed a good record player, so I bought one, so I thought I might as well make the change to 12" as my main listening avenue (other than mp3, obviously). So I've started looking for the vinyl option more.

But both Monotreme and Probe Plus records have thwarted me, by 'giving away' the cd with the vinyl. I don't want two copies of most albums (a couple i've bought in both formats... stupid, i know). I can buy the cd without the vinyl; I can't buy the vinyl without the cd.

Just give me the vinyl and the mp3s (or flacs). That covers all my bases - the lounge for the vinyl, everywhere else for the mp3s. What do I need the cd for as well? It sounds just the same as the soft copy, but takes up space. The vinyl copy sounds different and better (I actually think this now, after comparing analogue and digital versions of Cephalic Carnage's 'Anomalies'). How ever much I can save by not including the cd in the package, I'd like to save that money please. It must be an actual number, cds can't be so cheap as to be free.

So because of the lack of a pure vinyl (plus mp3) option, I've resorted to buying the cd version of two albums. It seems really wrong, but I just don't want two of every album. Vinyls are big enough as it is, without me having to store the cd as well.

Or am I looking a gift horse in the mouth? Is the cd version really really free?

Robert Webb BBC3 Filler Fan Fiction

Famous Movie Title Inconsistancies, starring robert webb
episode 1: the Final Destination series

"hi, i'm tv's robert webb. you might remember me from 'robert's webb' and 'great movie mistakes', as well as 'britain's top 100 dance crazes'.

The final destination series has one of the most inconsistent naming formulae in recent cinema history. The first three were fine, aside from the awfulness of having sequels to something that started off as supposedly 'final', with the aptly named 'final destination', 'final destination 2', and 'final destination 3'.

It all started to unravel with the fourth film in the series, 'THE final destination'. This reboot-style gambit would have paid off, if the next film had not been called 'final destination 5'. Surely, 'THE final destination 2' would have been a more apt title, or simply 'final destination 4'. Their choice of title totally undermines the logic so far, unless at some point they decide to release a different film as 'final destination 4' in the future. People like me wait, earnestly, to see how the film titles will resolve themselves."

jesus, grilly, wasn't plinkett fan fiction enough?

originally posted as a comment on cawreigh's facebook update of "We're waging a fierce war of incompatible computer OS security settings and missing ports...all this, just to watch Final Destination"

The Page You Made

Today is the 9th of the 10th of the 11th, and it's been a year since I've added anything to the 'ongoing remix project' that is DJ Gallowslutt's 'The Page You Made'. So, in accordance with my mantra 'if you don't use something for a year, get rid of it', I announce the project closed, completed, and retired.

I might still rework tracks, but I think I'm done with the dj gallow slutt persona, and this era of recording. I guess in times of austerity, you gotta makes some cuts. Enjoy the album, and kudos to the grist.

Things I learnt from SUPERUNKNOWN

Soundgarden's 'Superunknown' was one of the first rock albums I fell in love with. I was 12 when it came out, in 1994, and I remember 'Black Hole Sun' being on the radio, and it being about the same time as Primal Scream's 'Rocks', which I think I knew was a fraudulent pastiche even then.

I gave it a listen yesterday, and noticed a huge amount of pointers in the record I've just stolen whole heartedly. I was writing about covers in a previous post, and how SFA and Bravecaptain influenced me to incorporate the remix into the song (my song 'tofu' on the forthcoming album has elements of this now); but listening back to superunknown, there's a whole slew of themes that I've been casually using that I didn't even realise went straight back to this record.

1. Odd Timings Are Cool
You can hardly call Soundgarden 'mathcore'. They're don't play that way. But it's an album where 4/4 can hardly be called the norm; it opens and closes the album*, but only features in about half the tracks. My first impressions of the album were that it was self-indulgent, but the odd timings here aren't that odd in general. There's lots of dropped beats; Notice in the similarity in the rhythm of 'The Day I Tried To Live' and my song 'Tofu', both have a jaunty (7+8)/4 (I use this to mean alternating bars of 7/4 and 8/4). But even the predominantly common-time songs have dropped beats all over the shop - like 'Mailman' - or some fantastically perverse ways of arranging 4/4 time. 'Fresh Tendrils' has some awkward back beat, likewise, 'Head Down' manages to make 4/4 sound like a chaotic eruption.

I wonder now if the reason I'm fascinated by odd timings is that i suffer from dysrhythmia; Moby's 'honey' sounds completely wrong to me. I just can't resolve the beat on it. I had a lot of trouble with e1m9 on doom, too; I've literally only got the rhythm right in my head for it in the last year, 19 years after it was released. Maybe these songs sound normal to other people. Anyway, if it hadn't have been for superunknown, I might never have become interested in anything outside 4/4.

2. Odd Tunings Are Cool
You wouldn't know from listening to the record that the band are playing in anything other than in drop-d and standard tuning. When I looked up, and printed off, the transcriptions on the internet, I was amazed by the plethora of unusual tunings (also, it was a clear indication they'd been ripped off the official songbook). A bunch of songs are in tunings that you could only play that one song in - 'My Wave', for instance with its ludicrous E-E-B-B-B-B tuning, 'Like Suicide' with its D-G-D-G-B-C tuning (for non-musicians, let me explain: you'd never normally tune a guitar so that two strings are only a semi-tone apart. This is a very specific tuning to make one particular riff sound 'just so').

I was a fairly inexperienced guitarist at the time, and this completely opened my mind not just to drop-d tuning, but also the whole idea that a guitar should be tuned for the performer. Often, since then, I would find a melody or riff, and decide that the guitar could be set up better to play it. Maybe it would be easier if it were in drop-d, or open G, or open D, or even something entirely new. Or maybe I would start with an odd tuning, and play around, see what comes out. It's a great way to break out of old habits and freshen up the fingers.

As I started playing live with a band, I went back to playing with a standard tuning more often. We weren't soundgarden, with roadies, budget, and hundreds of guitars waiting in the wings to be brought on, ready for the exact next song we were going to play. But in solo shows, I love the opportunity to have a moment of retuning, offer some jokes, some anecdotes, and be more intimate with the audience; the different feeling from different tunings is more pronounced when there's just one instrument on stage. Nick Drake was a great re-tuner as well, but reputedly froze up on stage with no banter, the poor thing.

3. Fretwanking is ok, as long as it's not centre-stage

Bill Bailey look-a-like Kim Thayil is a great guitarist, that's not up for debate; 100th best guitarist of all time, according to rolling stone. I find him a mysterious figure on the record; his lead guitar lines don't cut through the whole song, and he just seems to contribute when necessary. When he's not beefing up the main riff, it's not usually melodic, but improvised, flailing guitar; and then sometimes, he just had some nice simple harmonies. The best example of this is during 'Fell on Black Days'. But when he's fretwanking, it's never the point of the song; many prog-rock and metal bands would have virtuoso instrumental performances as the entire raison d'etre of the band. Here, it's just a touch, it's in it's place, and it's a part of the whole mix. We're not meant to hear it and go 'wow, he's such a good guitarist!', it's not mixed to the foreground, with a sign next to it saying 'listen to me go'. It's expressive, but it's not dictatorial. Maybe this is simply in keeping with the times, the shift away from extended guitar solos; maybe the success of Superunknown helped form that shift. Either way, it taught me that there was a point to guitar soloing, and many of my tracks leave room for an improvised section, usually around particular key notes and phrases. That self-indulgence is ok, as long as it's not the point, as long as you're not force-feeding people your 'genius', but letting it float on the mix instead.

4. Can't Make Your Mind up which take to keep in the mix? Use both
There's lots of double-tracked rhythm guitar on the record; that's usual. It gives more depth and longer-lasting appeal. But what I remember from the record is not just Cornell's vocal range, his variety of styles that he could draw on and switch between - the rock wail, the harmonious voice, and his barely-singing murmer - but how he would use them together, in ways you could only do with overdubs. For instance, 4th of July; a droney-stoner rock song, with the rock vocal lower down in the mix than the soft vocal. The contrast and balance is fantastic; either take would have been good but by putting them both in, we've achieved both simultaneously, plus the contrast.

For the same reason, I love 'Crossing Over' by Cult of Luna, a track that has wonderful doubled vocals. I love the stacked vocals in TV On The Radio songs. In my own recordings, I've usually tried a couple of different takes, then decided the track sounds best with both. This isn't a comment on multitracking itself, but how the interplay of different interpretations is highlighted when they're mixed together. Maybe a more subtle approach would be to do one style one verse, another style the next; that's fine too.


5. Keep The Tracklisting and Instrumentation Varied
Superunknown is a pretty pessimistic album. Opening with 'Let Me Drown' and closing with 'Like Suicide' - a song written after Cornell had to kill a bird that flew into his window, the hook lyric being "love's like suicide" (prefiguring, probably co-incidentally, the similar line in Smashing Pumpkins' 'Bodies') - the lyrical themes are of desolation, apocalypse, despression, and on 'The Day I Tried To Live', the perils of trying to get up and dressed. Meanwhile, the music is as varied a collection of rock songs as you could find outside a Blur album. You could broadly describe it all as grunge, but that doesn't capture the variety of styles in the album. It 'runs the gamut' of rock, from sludgey doom to punk and riffy rock, with a few more things too; actually, thinking about it, this is quite usual for grunge bands. And while the lineup is fairly constant through the record, most tracks have some extra instrumentation that piques the ear a little, such as melotron, extra puercussion, spoons, or simply very bizzarre-sounding guitar. The variety of harmonies, scales, instruments, timings, effects, all add interest and psychedelia to what could have been a very rough, dull, monotonous album. kind of like 'badmotorfinger'.

So yeah. It's a great record, but unlike other great records, I can see so much of what I love about music, and so much of what I love about the music I make started here. I reccomend it to anyone.

*I'm excluding 'she likes surprises' as the official last track since it's a bonus track, but I will include it while talking about the record.

Autumnal Ephemera

So this is a mix that kind of ended up being quite autumnal. Outside of the brashly seductive 'Willow's Song' (from the wicker man), it's pretty regretful; there's a lot of break-up songs, plus a couple of tracks that are pretty disrespectful to one social group or another; 'Graffitti...' which, in the same vein as 'harrowdown hill', is actually one of the angriest songs i know, and 'Absolutely Free', which both captures the ideals of hippydom and disses flower power. The bitterness seems quite autumnal, like the traces of a betrayal.