A la recherche du Bugs perdu

A la recherche du Bugs perdu

Storm Bugs Live

Somewhat improbably Storm Bugs (as in myself Prof Jambon and Prof Fromage) will be performing Live in Nottingham in February. I say improbably as Storm Bugs were always more of a studio/bedroom band than a live outfit. Nonetheless we shall be dusting down our back catalogue for full and frank renditions of classics such as: Eat Good Beans, Tin, Car Situations, Dull Sound of Breath etc, etc.

As Storm Bugs we performed an "AV set" in the basement of the now defunct Foundry a couple of years back but to be honest it was more of a Sanderson/Ball video collaboration with little relation to the original recordings or Storm Bugs sound. In practice then this Nottingham outing will be our first live set since 1980 when we performed (but only just) in Brenchley Gardens in Maidstone. So this will be a recuperation of an imaginary former live existence mediated by time and technology. Get your tickets here

A Safe Substitute

A Safe Substitute the Storm Bugs’ magnum lo-fi opus originally released on Cassette by Snatch Tapes in 1980 is now available on red vinyl from Harbinger (cat no Harbinger 096).  Tracks from A Safe Substitute have appeared previously on compilations but this is the first time it has been released in its entirety - a faithful transcript of the Snatch Tapes cassette release complete with a scaled reproduction of the original sleeve artwork and full liner notes detailing the recording of each track.

Here are a few words on A Safe Substitute from the Mutant Sounds blog

‘…this is everything a fan of left field D.I.Y. song structure perversion (U.K. stylee) could hope for. Much of what's heard on A Safe Substitute (fragments of which would re-appear elsewhere) were generated from that great old British analog beast, the VCS3 synthesizer, a machine used to more tonal ends by the likes of Franco Battiato and Pink Floyd and here providing swaying pendulums of corroded bloop, greyscale warble and hollowed out rhythms triggered from filter fucked arpeggiations, upon which they graft passages of alternately morose and plangent song structure fragmentation.’

Hitchcock still by JS

Graphics

Analogized?

The transfer from reel-to-reel tape to a digital format is commonly referred to as digitization however if an analogy is defined as ‘a process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target)’ then perhaps we should speak of the tapes being analogized? A sematic distinction perhaps but one whcih highlights that the digital is an anologous represnetation of the analogue.

Any CD or download re-issue of an LP will proclaim that it has been digitally re-mastered – the term (and indeed the prefix re- itself) implies both a return to and a revelation of something. The implication is that through the process of digital re-mastering we might find again the elusive lost original. An original which existed as some point in the analogue past and in an analogue form. The digital promise is that through the act of transference from reel-to-reel tape to a string of bits we can travel back in time and our analogue original can be regained and preserved.

But did the analogue original ever truly exist or is it a mythical creation that haunts the re-mastering process always threatening to be revealed yet suitably unobtainable causing albums to be re-mastered not once but several times?

Let s don our white lab coats and take a look at the steps in digital re-mastering process. Firstly we must go to the vaults and take out the master tapes. The master tape would normally be large 10 inch ¼ inch reel to reel tapes recorded at 15 IPS (inches per second) and containing a two track recording. These recordings were usually mixed from (depending on the era) 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 multi-track tapes.

However there may well be more than one reel-to reel master. Until the late 1960s both a stereo and a mono master would be produced. The mono master would not simply be a mono mix-down of the stereo mix but a separate mix from the multi-track often with a quite different sound from its stereo counterpart. Whether stereo or mono a further reel-to-reel tape would be made from this ‘original’ master by the cutting room engineer as he adjusted EQ and levels in an effort to make the vinyl record sound as good as possible. Cutting vinyl was (and is) something of an art and certain cutting engineers would be valued for their work in knowing just how much could be squeezed onto the disc. Porky’s Prime Cuts for example was the name given to work by the mastering engineer George "Porky" Peckham who was famed for cutting discs - for example Porky cut a number of the T.Rex hit singles of the 1970sauch as Metal Guru (and indeed also the Table Matters EP by Storm Bugs).

So already the ‘original’ analogue master tape is becoming a shifting target. A digital transfer from the cutting engineer’s master might in theory sound more like the vinyl record but that then doesn’t take into account the degree to which a pressing can shape a sound. A cutting engineer may for example have boosted the treble in places (especially towards the middle of the record) which on the finished vinyl sounds fine but if transferred to digital would sound too bright and so on. Then there is the issue of hiss. Engineers in the pre-digital era spent considerable time trying to eliminate the background noise which any analogue system naturally produces. Digital technology has accustomed us to a hiss free soundscape and the advent of noise reduction hardware and plug-ins will tempt all but the most resolute to remove at least some of the hiss not to mention clicks, pops, crackle, hum and other analogue undesirables.

This all assumes that any version of the master tape is still in existence. Had the two track master been destroyed we could if we still had the multi-track tape mix the tracks once more. However a final mix down in the 1970s (before automated mixing desks began to appear) was often a very much an on the fly process with many hands on the mixing desk faders bringing different musical parts in and out as required throughout a song. Furthermore some effects such as echo and reverb might have been applied only at the mixing stage and so to recreate the sounds we would need to have the same effects units available and maybe in a similar way to the moving faders adjust them during the course of the mix. It soon becomes clear that replicating the original mix is going to be a far from easy task; we might approximate it but probably not reproduce it.

The re-mastering process then become not so much a one-off event as a series of séances in which the producer assisted by the latest algorithms and the finest new plug-ins attempts to make contact with the phantom original and call forth its presence - only for it to fleetingly appear before receding once more to the other side.

Exorcism in Colour

Can the hauntologogical be exorcised?

Adding colour by hand it was felt brought photos ‘to life’ though often as not the overall effect was often far from naturalistic or realistic and gave many pictures a somewhat other worldly quality. An analogy can be dawn with the clever handiwork performed in many an American funeral parlour whereby a sallow corpse is turned into a presenatable body an idealised frozen represntation to be viewed by the grieving relatives. In the case of the hand coloured photograph the tiny death (La petite mort) of the back and white image is replaced by a lifeless yet preserved colour image; set apart from the moment fixed (moment fixe).

Patinas of the Past

..arguably the boundaries between past and present are blurred such that there is an ongoing dialogue between the two. One might even imagine that the library and soundtrack music of the 1970s which so inspires the bands labelled as hauntological may not have been recorded in the past at all but could have been recorded now or indeed in the future and have simply seeped through the fluid pores of non linear temporality to physically manifest itself as piece of vinyl in the 1970s or as a download now or as who knows what at some future date.

Ah if only…..

 ‘Holding a battered copy of the Ziggy Stardust LP in one's hands, it can seem like a repository for nostalgic residues, as if the grooves in the vinyl were in some way the sculptured marks of time¹s passing.  Rather than let the sediments settle, the idea behind Suicide Suite was to create a means of once again setting in motion the sounds and images that have lain dormant since 1972.  Suicide Suite dose not aim to remix or add to the original but rather to create a ghostly twin; an echo of the LP that occupies a parallel but somewhat warped trajectory.‘

Through a Telephone Box Darkly

Library Sale

As part of the American Ground festival in Hastings the library had a sale on - you know the sort - the ones in which they get rid of lots of interesting books to make way for popular autobiographies. Anyway I'm not complaining as I picked up some rather fine titles at 40P each. It occurred to me that if in a year's time you were strapped for cash and could not afford the new £9,000 university fees you could do worse than read these titles from cover to cover (total cost £3.20). Mind you my education was a little like that...

     

Secret Scuplture

In the 1960s and 1970s you might be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't much sculpture on TV - in fact there was a significant amount of subliminal sculpture by anonymous artists used as a backdrop behind bands and singers as they performed on TV shows. Echoing the contemporary sculptural forms of the day these often bold and yet unassuming works (they were never mentioned or acknowledged) have never been catalogued and are all but forgotten. Many no doubt had a short life span and some were probably destroyed after the performances in which they were used. Youtube (as ever) gives us an opportunity to revisit these works. Here are a couple of stills and an edited Barry Ryan video in which a rotating wire construction take up roughly a third of the on screen time.

Touch and Play

Passing by the modernist toy shop of Paul & Marjorie Abbatt (2Bs and 2Ts) at 94 Wimpole Street I noticed Goldfinger carefully cutting out wooden letters, his Savile Row suit protected by a jute apron on which the small splinters of wood landed before being brushed towards the floor.

Stepping inside the toy shop to take a closer look at the merchandise I was approached by a nice lady in a blue cardigan who said ‘you may touch and play’. Goldfinger nodded and smiled adding ‘toys should be functional in design and educational in purpose”. I sensed though his mind was elsewhere, no doubt contemplating his big new commission at the Elephant & Castle.

Modularity for Modern Living

The flexibility of the living space is derived from its modular construction in which numerous adjacent square and rectilinear sections can either be used independently as individual zones or combined together to form larger units as required. 

It's just an illusion

Use the scroll bar on the right of your screen to scroll up and down quickly.

Fewer frames make finer films - Contracted Cinema

Contracted Cinema – the reverse or, better still the inverse of expanded cinema.

In terms of defining that which we seek to invert namely expanded cinema, we could choose Gene Youngblood’s interpretation – a fluid liquid a go-go of art and life colliding as retinal consciousness which, for years had all the appeal of some bad hippy trip but now, in the age of media convergence seems timely and prescient. Alternatively we might prefer the English somewhat more sober focus on expanded cinema as involving the transformation of the spectator’s reception of the cinematic.

So contracted cinema then is the opposite of all that? In trying to achieve contraction we might try simple physical ploys like ensuring that all seats have a restricted view with pillars and obstacles between them and the screen or indeed we could take out the seats and make the audience stand to attention or slump against the wall. We might ensure that the sound is all but inaudible so audiences strain to hear over the amplifier hum or indeed we could crank up the volume sending the punters from the auditorium with ears bleeding. In terms of timing the contracted cinema programme should always begin before the audience arrives and end before they leave. But you protest, this is all too familiar, this is nothing new, your contracted cinema is what we already experience when we visit artist projections in the gallery; the black box in the white cube.

Bother - we need something less simplistic than just making life difficult for the audience or spectator. So contracted cinema could mean just less of everything; a sort of rationed cinema. Our slogan could be ‘Fewer frames make finer films’. To be fair though film stock was always so damned expensive that an excess of celluloid was rarely a problem it was video that could and often did go on and on. ”Cut out the bits you don’t need”. Sounds like a recipe for lo-fi. Should we be considering the material nature of the medium and how to foreground this, reducing everything down to the bare essence. Hell why not dispense with the whole paraphernalia (if we set light to it, it could be parafinalia) and just look out the window?

English Vernacular

Whitstable doesn't have any grand buildings or architectural masterworks it does however have a lot of good old English Vernacular as per this example. For no particular reason I had a go at sketching the building which was slightly tricky as it was raining and I was standing up holding the pad in one hand and attempting to draw with the other - oh and I hadn't done any sketching for quite a few years. Excuses aside it did demonstrate almost straight away how much more of a building you 'see' when you draw it rather than photograph it if only as you repeat the action of looking back and forth from the building to the paper having for a split second to memorise what you have just seen and then reproduce or interpret it. Clearly I will be signing up for the summer water colour and drawing school.

Spotting and Foxing

1st edition, hardback with inscription on frontispiece. The pages are clean and bright although slightly yellowed. The cover is a little grubby with some staining. The corners and spine are bumped and worn. The spine is split in the middle and repaired. Damage from what looks like sellotape. The dust jacket is clipped with tiny closed tear to rear, slight bumping to illustrated boards, some spotting and foxing to endpapers and closed page. Ex library stock has a number of stamps throughout the book mainly on the back of the colour plates. Numbers written on first endpage, light shelf wear, showing signs of rubbing and marks, but still pretty neat. Early pages have a few pencil notes, though generally book is clean and very readable. A used second-hand book. Condition: Fair.

High Street

Spent a few days last week down in Whitstable. It had been some ten years or so since I was last there and though undoubtedly a little more touristy it still manages to avoid being like a novelty model village. The high street has working fishmongers, butchers, bakers, greengrocers, hardware shops etc all run independently, just as you used to find on any high street before the advent of the supermarket and which, you still find in most of mainland Europe (though yes I have heard the reports of Boulangeries closing at an alarming rate). It is not so much that one should be nostalgic for such times or romantic notions of ‘community’ but a working high street (and I would contrast this with the boutique foody 

artifice of Borough Market) just makes the quality of life so much better.

Retromania

In an attempt to get the blog up and running (or even walking) lets try going diaristic for a while.

Just came back from town after dropping off my snappy snap disposable cameras at the Boots Piccadilly Circus one hour lab, Having 60 minutes to spare/kill went off to Waterstones and sped read the new Simon Reynolds Retromania book.

Reynolds writes in a relaxed style that quickly catches you in its slipstream and there is much to recommend the book especially the sections where he documents the impact and development of online music downloads - not iTunes but firstly peer to peer and then full album downloads on blogs such as Prog not Frog, Mutant Sounds and the Library Hunt. In particular he captures perfectly the rampant collector spirit that once had Reynolds (and to varying degrees many of us of a similar age) rummaging through boxes of vinyl in second hand record shops but which in the digital age led to the downloading of so many mp3 files no one could ever possibly listen to all (or any) of them.

As documentation of such changes Reynolds is at his best, weaker though is the socio-cultural analysis and as always with Reynolds there is a nagging streak of conventionality – a reluctance to stray too far world view formed in the 1970's by the writings in NME and Sounds of the likes of Morley, Penman and Savage. This orthodoxy, which was also evident in Rip, it Up rarely departs from the accepted musical cannon. For example when writing about Minimal Synth, Reynolds describes it as in part a cunning ploy on the part of record collector/dealers to create a new category or genre and help shift otherwise unwanted self released electronic LPs from the mid 1980s by bands which Reynolds asserts would have been Dépêche Mode if only they could have penned a decent tune. For all his downloading such sentiments display a resistance to tinker with the mainstream hierarchies.

Having part digested Reynold's book I picked up a copy of the Chapman Barrett book and headed back to Boots to pick up my snappy snaps, which were suitably disappointing, and at £20 for processing and a CD rather pricey.

On Meritocracy

Arguably…

In an ideal meritocratic society there should be a matching of the abilities and skills of individuals to the tasks to which they are most suited.  In a situation in which there is more than one candidate putting himself or herself forwards for a task then an independent and objective way of testing who is the most able may be used as a way of determining who should best be performing it. This testing may occur at the point of application or more likely prior to applying through and education system in which the person’s skills and abilities have been developed and also simultaneously assessed. 

Put in this way a meritocracy draws no subjective value difference between tasks (or those who perform them) nor does it imply that any task be better rewarded. In practice in advanced capitalist societies such as the UK. governments have promoted a narrow version of meritocracy in which certain tasks are perceived to have much greater value than others, are rewarded far more highly and for which there is much greater competition. In this narrow meritocracy much time and energy is spent on matching skills and abilities to a certain number of very specific roles and the whole notion of ability itself comes to be defined in relation to its applicability to these relatively few specific high value roles. To not have the ability and skills for these roles is to be in danger of being perceived as having no skills or ability at all.

Index

Work In Progress
Ectoplasm Experiment
Pretend my Pen is a Stylus
Battle of the Pixels
Folkestone Harbour Station

Art Matters
Vested Interests
Film Gate As Cash Register
Patamatic Cinema
Connect
Bedtime stories
Altermodern
The War on Television
Camera Dances
Fishing Line

Remade Readymade
In Praise of Pastiche
Gillespie Kidd Coia
Process Progress
The Submerging Artist
Fair Trade
Gustav Metzger is my Dad
Eno
In a Whirl
Chelsea Space
Well Hung
Woolworths

Film, Photography, Illusion
Picture Motion-Some Thoughts On
What is wrong with Photography
kleptographia
Multi Faceted Cinema
Reflections on Le Grice
Subversion
Immediate Cinema
More on Photography
Turning the Picture Down
Then and Now

Hearing Things
Lo Fi
A Safe Substitute
Sound Projector Railway Special
Voice Box
Oramics Live
Sound Waves
Tagging
Old Poster
The Unnecessary Object of Desire
Boating for Beginners
Supplementary Beenefit
Sound Stairs
Snatch Paste
Domestique Electrique
Under Press of Sail
Answering Back
Instant Kitten
The Death of the Long Player
Clinging to the Wreckage
Band loyalty
Cassette Fetish
Not Fade Away
Earwitness
Instructions are contained on the tape, which you will find in the blue rucksack.
Lights Out
The venerable VCS3
Record Test
Unbalanced
Covering up the Head

Cuts
Tuition Fees
The Mask is Off
Make Art History

EVP Ectoplasm Experiment

in the Raudive Breakthrough experiments one of the ways of recording paranormal voices (Known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)) was to use the white noise from a radio as a type of carrier frequency. In this ectoplasm experiment rather than a radio an algorithm is used to digitally create a constantly changing nebulous visual form. The image is scanned by and oscillator to produce sound which tracks the form and morphs from white to pink noise. This is a short two-minute extract, which may need repeated viewings and studied listening before EVP may be recognised.

Watch QuickTime or Flash 

University Tuition Fees Triple - Daily Mail readers needed for protest

Those who work in a sector naturally have their ear to the ground on matters directly concerning its future in a way the mass media and general public cannot be expected to share. However yesterday’s announcement by David Willets of a 2 to 3 fold increase in tuition fees brought the subject of student finance to the head of the media queue and, rightly so for what is being proposed verges on the absurd.

Students from next year on are no longer being asked to contribute towards the cost of their degrees or “top-up” the contribution made by government but in most cases cover the entire cost of their teaching. Fees will rise from the current approximately £3,000 to at least £6,000 and probably more like £9,000. What extra will the student get for this 100-200% increase? Precisely nothing as the government withdraws all funding for teaching except for some limited support for STEM subjects. Some ‘top’ universities have already signalled that they will seek to charge the full £9,000 and there is an expectation that post 92 universities (or the former polys) will charge closer to £6,000 or £7,000 though, none have signalled that this is what they intend to do. In either case universities will find that with the teaching grant gone they will actually be no better off and in the case of those who feel they can’t or shouldn’t charge the full £9,000 many colleges will actually have less money. Unless of course they increase student numbers and class sizes and lower further the quality of the learning experience. In short students will pay and extra £3-6,000 a year for less. Staff will be expected to deliver more, again for less, especially as salaries are frozen and may well actually decrease in the universities charging less.

Under the proposed changes most student will leave university with a debt for tuition fees alone of somewhere between £18,000 and £27,000, factor in living costs, add on interest and you are looking at a bill in the region of £50,000 per degree. The notion that this won’t be a deterrent to going to university or a life term burden for most young people who do is simply not sustainable.

To start quantifying degrees in financial terms is to arguably play the politician’s game but can a fee of £50,000 be justified on any grounds? The higher than average life term earnings of graduates is often cited but ask anyone working in the arts or the public sector about these supposedly high earnings and they will simply smile. When only 10% of the population went to university a degree may have been a passport to (if not even then a guarantee of) higher earnings but no longer. A degree is simply seen as a prerequisite in many walks of life. In a whole range of professions 30 years ago A-Levels would have been sufficient to start and there was an expectation that the employer would provide on the job training or time off for day release study. The modern neo liberal employer in Britain though wants it both ways; they seek ever more qualified staff but expect to pay no part of the cost for the training needed. In an entirely regressive move to a Victorian model people are now expected to pay for the privilege of learning skills need by employers.

In terms of protest at these increases there will be marches, sit-ins, possibly strikes. One imagines much of this to be water off a duck’s back to a government that is fast showing a callous disregard for the public sector that makes Thatcher look like a caring socialist. What may well turn the tide is the rising consciousness in the middle classes, those Daily Mail readers whose instincts are often conservative with a small c and who often vote for the Tories (forget the LibDems they will disappear as any kind of meaningful political party).

The middle class group are waking up to the idea that their sons and daughters may well not now be able to attend university at these prices or that every asset they have will need to be sold to cover the cost (or equity realised to use the neo liberal parlance). This group for whom a free liberal education has never perhaps been a priority may now begin to voice their disquiet and seek to overturn these absurd proposals. The government has no fear of lecturers and students but it needs the middle class vote.