Something for the Weakened

A month or two back, I again attempted to do some co-hosting at The Blenheim pub quiz. As per usual, it was a cheery shambles – my muttering and peculiar mic technique, combined with my associates thick Irish accent made most of the questions we were reading out barely intelligible. Never the less, we eventually managed to get most of them across to the assembled throng and something resembling fun was had. But that’s not what we’re here for today. As per usual, I was responsible for the sound rounds and now present them here to see if anyone else is prepared to listen to them and hazard a guess as to what’s going on. Here’s the first round -

Subjects

In this round, I spent more hours than I’m prepared to admit to* editing out snippets of interviews that Chris Morris conducted for his Radio 1 shows back in the early ’90s. What you have to do is guess who is the subject of the  interviewing. They aren’t all that tricky (I don’t think), though I suppose a knowledge of media figures active in 1994 would probably help. Quick clue – they’re all individual people except for the first clip, where it’s a pop duo being scrutinised. Meanwhile, round two lurks here -

8-Bits

The sanctioned fun to be had in this round is guessing the name of the song that’s being covered using some kind of 8-bit technology. I like to imagine that they were all put together on Gameboys, but that’s probably just wishful thinking on my part. I deliberately made it so that it starts with some horrible noise (mainly to annoy the bar staff), but stick with it. They’re all pretty easy to get.

So that’s that. Please stick your answers in the comments bit at the bottom of this post and I’ll try and give out the answers at some point in the next week or so. While your at it, do have a go at the last couple of rounds I created – I’ve still only had one response to that and I’m buggered if I’m going to give out any results until I’ve created the vaguest semblance of a competition.

More posting soon, as I attempt to breathe some sort of life back into this wretched backwater. I hear your whoops. Really I do.

* About six!

When wandering around near work, my eyes are often cast toward the ground – a mixture of mild ennui and no desire to make eye contact with anyone nearby. If it wasn’t for these downcast orbs, I wouldn’t have noticed the peculiar phenomena that seemed to start about six months ago.

I think it was about that far back when I noticed the first one. Looking down in the gutter, my eye was caught by an unexpected splash of colour. A vibrant pink something. I paused and examined closer. It was one of those furry coverings one puts over the ear pieces of earphones. Unusual to find one in that hue, I thought (or something like it, the exact phrase eludes me and probably included more expletives), but having lost so many headphone accessories in my life, thought no more of it.

Until a few days later.

When I saw it again.

Or did I? Because this time it had brought a friend. If I’m perfectly honest, I forget the exact course of events, but over these past few months, the number of these tiny bits of pink fluff in the area around (and, on a couple of occasions, inside) my place of work has continually increased. Where are they coming from? Did someone drop a big box of them months ago and they’re slowly coallescing in one place, through the tidal winds like that slick of rubber ducks somewhere in the Pacific? Is someone dropping them deliberately, one or two per month, waiting to see if anyone will ever notice? Are they actually some kind of Bodysnatcheresque new lifeform, come to burrow into the ears of all mankind? Are they what postman wrap their little red rubber bands around?

Perhaps I’ll never know. I did pick one up that I found in work and put it through the washing machine. Like I say, I’m always losing bits of headphones. Funny thing is, I can’t seem to find it now. And my ear feels sort of weird. I just left it on the bed when I went tohuil.cfkw.fvhdujk cb m klm dv

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Fine. Everything fine now. Ear feel better. Happy now.

Haaaapppppyyyyy.

I generally try to avoid writing about dreams on here (recently I’ve mainly avoided trying to write anything on here, but that’s another matter altogether). Partly because I seldom remember my own night thoughts, but mainly because listening to people bang on about them in regular life is normally bloody tedious. I apologise for breaking this embargo, but I awoke a few nights ago after mind took me some intriguing places that I’m going to inflict upon you all. Consciousness came upon me around 5AM, which was a bit harsh frankly, but I don’t recall it kicking in with a shuddering jolt or waking in a cold sweat – as I’ve stated before, I’m still yet to ever have a nightmare, due to either not having anything in my life that particularly scares me or some hitherto untapped sociopathic tendencies. Once I’ve left Mr. Sandman’s embrace, it is very rare that I can get him to hug me again, so lay there, letting my mind wander. I believe that that was when I began recalling the dream that had preceded my waking. Perhaps I was making it up in my semi-lucid state, but I don’t think so.

I had been lying in what appeared to be a bath, though not one that I really recall having lain in before. I was calm, comfortable. Ten I looked down at my body. Rather than the scrawny, pot bellied thing I’m used to hanging my head upon, my eyes were met by an altogether different sight. Beneath me was a swirling mass of amorphous, constantly shifting flesh. It didn’t seem to actually have a surface, but was constantly shifting, folding in on itself, casually going through it’s motions. It was halfway between the end of Akira (but less luridly coloured) and watching one of those machines that kneads dough (watching the dough, not the machine). I watched this for a while, fascinated. There was no fear, no real emotional reaction at all, just me taking an interest in this unusual development in my torso. As I was lying there, recounting the thing, it occurred to me that this slowly writhing mass resembled the speculative descriptions of how four dimensional entities might look were they to appear in our three dimensions, only less crystalline, more organic.

I remember nothing else about the dream, nor do I know what it was that woke me. But I pretty certain that it wasn’t a Cronenbergian terror that my body was no longer my own.

Created for a compilation cover a couple of weeks ago – my first in colour! Pen on paper, followed by dodgy, half arsed Photoshop shenanigans. Really must learn how to use that program properly. The original was drawn free hand, rather than my usual pathetic tracing efforts. That came out better than I was expecting it to. The colouring process was trickier, especially using a mouse that has tendencies to wander off of its own accord. Not entirely happy with quite how magenta it all is – I only really twigged how easy it is to replicate colours  half way through the job. Also thought that they wouldn’t print out quite as vibrantly. They did. Pleased with a lot of it, but it’s a bit splodgy in places (I was unable to find a way to not create a darker colour if I went over an area twice).

The Residents did not appear on the compilation.

No, I haven’t forgotten about you. I’ll be back soon. Promise.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself co-hosting another quiz. Once again, I tasked myself with putting together a couple of music rounds. I had hoped to do something new, so started mucking about with reverb, delays, phasing and pitch shifts. Inevitably I only started tinkering around with these a couple of days before my hosting duties were due to take place. I discovered that I could make some fairly well known tunes sound quite interesting, but not in any way that particularly obscured the original tune (having them as normal would have been far too easy after all). So instead, I went for the usual trick of playing things backwards, but with a very slight twist. Instead of the choruses, I used the intros. Here’s the round -

Outros II

It’s actually quite easy – two of them sound pretty much identical backwards to how they do forwards. Only this round was played during the quiz (after a number of technical issues), but I did create another round. This one was vetoed by my co-host as being too tricky, though he did only hear it in a busy pub coming from the mp3 player I recently acquired, which has around half a watt output (the cause of the technical issues when playing the round we did use – I should have thought that one through really). Instead, he cobbled together something with movie soundtracks, which probably saved us from a lynching as my other round was pretty much identical in concept. The vague criteria I used to divide the intros was to split those that were primarily guitar led away from those that weren’t. Here, for the first time ever, is the guitar round.

Outros I

See what you make out of that. If anyone wants to hazard some guesses at either round, sling them into the comments at the end of this post. I’ll try and keep things hidden to keep some illusion of competition going, but if you do see someone else’s guesses, please don’t copy them. You’re only cheating yourself. I’ll probably give away some old tat I don’t want any more to the person with the most correct answers. If you attended the quiz, your answers won’t be taken into consideration if you try answering the round you should already know the answers to. If you’ve forgotten them, that’s your fault and you’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks until I post the results.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, I must repeat my thanks to everyone who slapped some cash into my Movember fund. It was very much appreciated and all for the good of my prostate’s future. The ‘tache is thankfully only a memory on my face now, but if anyone was curious as to how it looked at its full bushiness, here is your answer.

If you still feel any compulsion to make a donation, please do so here.

That up there is the result 19 days worth of upper lip growth. Look, see, it is actually visible at that distance! Should anyone else like to contribute to the charitable cause it is attached to my face for, please go here. Many many thanks to those who have already chucked a few quid in. Ta.

What follows was originally written on October 9th and culminates with events that occured the previous day. It is only really relevant to four people, for which I vaguely apologise. Still, the rest of you might potentially find some of it mildly interesting, so here’s a spot of background. For the past six and a half years, myself and some chums have been swapping compilations on given themes once a quarter. The process of the swaps has evolved to the point where we now gather at the home of the person that has chosen that quarters theme, where we listen to all 240 minutes of ‘music’ over the course of an afternoon/early evening. This quarter’s swap occurred on the Saturday just past. I was the host and finally had the chance to put into operation the ploy that had been gestating in the back of my mind for over a year.

The seeds of the idea were first planted when I last hosted a swap. Not being in possession of anything resembling a decent stereo or set of speakers, I had planned on playing all the discs from my DVD player and through my telly. As is the tradition, the host’s disc is the first to be played on the day, so I hit play and prepared to listen. My opening track was Come In by Peter Wyngarde which, as I’m sure you’re all aware, features a certain amount of stereo panning. What I was unaware of at the time was the fact that one of my housemates was using the scart for his Playstation, so the DVD player was plugged in using the connectors that one might use to create surround effects. Knowing nothing about this, I was surprised to only hear two thirds of Wyngarde’s meisterwork coming out of the TV. I monkeyed around a bit, but couldn’t get the full extent of the sounds to come through, so had to resort to using a discman and the speakers from my computer. Everything was a bit tinnier, but at least every note on all the records were audible.

I don’t think the idea struck me on the day itself, but within the next couple of days it occurred to me that this could be something I could use to my advantage. I had a means of playing a CD in only one stereo channel. Therefore I could conceivably play just that to my guests when next I hosted, and hide all manner of goodies in the other for them to discover when they got home. Double the length of the compilation I was making. Plus it would be nigh on impossible to review (yeah, we review each other’s compilations, something I’m still against as I am all forms of competition, namby pamby weakling that I am (I’m not against it because it’s sad – that’s you that is)). Effectively create a side two.

So that’s what I did.

To create a decent 160 minute playlist I had to choose as broad a theme as possible, so decided on television. An afternoon was spent compiling a sizable longlist, comprising of songs with titles relating to the TV, followed by a few more hours whittling that down to what I deemed good enough and would fit onto the disc. This was then divided into two playlists, an A and a B. The A would be the one I was presenting as 80 minutes of compilation, the B about 77 minutes that was to be hidden. There were two reasons for my making it that little bit shorter. Firstly because I was rather keen on having a period of just the A side playing on its own before B came in, lulling the listener into a false sense of security. Secondly so I could create an audio tracklist for side B. The jape would of course be destroyed if I were to make any mention of any extra tracks on the disc’s packaging, so an audio description seemed the best way to go. I considered recording it myself, but as the deadline loomed ever closer, it seemed more sensible to acquire a programme that would do it for me (I used TextToWav in the end, fact fans). This was doubly beneficial as it was possible to speed up the file to better achieve the length of silence I wanted at the start of side B.

With this sorted, it seemed like it was time to check that the technology worked. I bought cables similar to those my former housemate had used (we’d both moved in the intervening 15 months) rammed them into the appropriate holes and had a test run with a couple of tracks from We’re Only In It For The Money.

Disaster.

I’d remembered the stereo panning of Wyngarde being complete. But playing the Zappa only resulted in a partial pan. Yes, I was predominantly hearing the left or right channel, depending on which output I connected the wire to, but so much of the other side was bleeding through that it would be impossible to hide another side there without anyone spotting it. I feared that I’d have to abandon the entire plot.

A couple of days after the failed experiment I happened to be rummaging through a cupboard at work. There I found some aged computer speakers that I’d stowed there a couple of years before hand. I had used them to play music in my office, they had broken and, horder that I am, I’d evidently decided not to throw them out. Racking my brains, I couldn’t recall exactly what it was that had gone wrong with them, so decided to take them home and perform another test.

I plugged them in. The light came on and there was a faint buzz. Evidently the power supply was fine. I stuck the Mother’s into my discman, plugged in the jack and pressed play.

The right speaker played Absolutely Free.

The left was silent.

The pan was perfect.

I squealed with smug glee. I was going to follow the plan through and could abandon the back up of buying some new speakers and purposely breaking them (which I had been seriously considering).

The next part turned out to be more laborious than I’d expected. All of the tracks I was using were in stereo, some with panning of their own. To get them onto the compilation sounding as they were supposed to I had to convert all of them into mono. Using Audacity as I was, there followed a fair amount of Googling until the right wording finally took me to a forum that gave me instructions (their own online help pages completely miss out any guidance on how to do this). Unfortunately the program is unable to create the mono files within itself, so each track had to be imported, then exported. Thankfully this was made marginally easier by my just creating two eighty minute long tracks. With that sorted, I then had to import everything again to sync the tracks up. The length of silence I was going to have to use at the start of the B side became obvious after I’d spotted that the last track on side A ended with a short gap before a fuddley dumf. As the end of side B cut off quite sharply, I simply bumped the silence forward until the cut off preceded the fuddley dumf by a split second.

To complete the illusion it was then just a matter of exporting the now joined stereo tracks as WAVs (you can’t do them as mp3s unless you pay for some sort of Audacity upgrade). By cutting and pasting them into another Audacity window, I could slice them where the tracks changed on Side A, thereby making everything appear perfectly normal if anyone happened to look at the discman while it was playing. This all went perfectly well until the very last track. I exported that without cutting and pasting and had forgotten that the original window was panned to one side. I’d also not been saving the files as I’d been going along as I A. like that little sense of danger and B. was worried that the size of the file might kill my computer (it is poo). It wasn’t until I was checking a test disc I’d burnt that I discovered that the last track only contained a mono recording of side A. As the tracks weren’t of the same length, the fast tempoed last track on side B now stopped abruptly half way through. An hour or so followed of me trying to sync everything up again, cutting split seconds here and adding them back there, trying and trying to get the beats perfectly aligned. Eventually I got them to a point where they sounded as close together as they could be and exported that last file. Listening back on disc, I’ve done a pretty decent job and there doesn’t seem to be much, if any of a jump. I am great after all.

Everything was in place. All I needed to do now was to keep a poker face throughout the event and make it appear as if nothing odd was going on. Obviously I couldn’t play anyone else’s discs through the partially broken speakers, as that would have been a massive giveaway. I toyed with the idea of faining some sort of dead battery issues and putting everyone else’s through the television, but concluded that that might bring too much attention to things, or there was the possibility that someone might have some fully charged Duracell about their person. That being out, my only other option was to position two sets of speakers next to one another. My rechargable batteries being as old and tired as they are, there was enough of a chance that they wouldn’t play constantly for 160 minutes that I’d have to change them after each disc finished. This would facilitate the perfect opportunity to switch speakers without arousing too much suspicion. All I’d then have to do would be to make up something convincing if anyone questioned the presence of four speakers.

Which they didn’t.

The fools.

The sting was made. At time of writing I await their responses. At time of posting, I believe they are all aware that something is wrong, but are possibly unaware of what I actually did. Perhaps they do now.

This is the first November in four years where I haven’t been attempting to write 1500 words a day. Regular readers will have seen my annual attempts at competing in NaNoWriMo, as can anyone else if they care to wander through the site’s archive. The first year was pretty successful – I managed to get the 50,000 words down within the time limit and was reasonably happy with what I had at the end (which I’m still yet to edit into something I’d be properly happy with). 2009 didn’t go as well. That time I had no real story, so just started throwing up ideas and hoping that if I kept going a story would emerge that would bring them all together. It didn’t. That, combined with some lurgy, falling massively behind on the daily deadlines, the fact that I had no one that I knew to compete against (that competitive aspect really did help the first time around) and a general sense of malaise caused me to abandon that year’s go. 2010 wasn’t a lot better. Again, I didn’t have much in the way of a plot going in, but kept going at one core story rather than just starting lots of threads that I could weave together when an idea struck me. Things coalesced a little bit better when I struck upon the idea that actually one of the protagonists was God, but it became harder and harder to write as both of the principal characters were so bloody nice. Word counts began to conspire with an absence of known competitors and I once again found myself bailing.

This year I’m not even participating. Not because of the past two years failures. I have (to some degree) worked out what went wrong on those occasions and should be able to take measures to not fall into those same potholes. Not because of an absence of known competitors – I know of a couple of people having a go at it this year, both of whom I’d have happily sparred word counts with. I’d even got as far as putting together the beginnings of a plot outline, which is where the start of my reasoning comes in. To do any justice to the idea would involve my conducting some level of research, which I’d not even started by the time October was winding down. Another potential issue would be the fact that around 30% of this particular story would have to be utter filth, which of course my pure white brain would find near impossible to process. But by the start of this month the idea was not fully formed enough for me to really believe I’d stick with it for a whole month. Plus I’m still in the midst of collaborating on a project with someone and dread to think how much further they’d cock that up without my participation.

I am however participating in another month based task which involves using my head in some way. I will assume that you are all aware of what Movember is and its endeavours to raise money for prostate cancer, but here’s some more info if you’re curious. My father was diagnosed with said canker around two years ago. Thankfully it was spotted pretty early, so was whipped out before anything really unpleasant developed, but the operation still left him hopelessly zonked out for several months, which was actually pretty unpleasant. Mercifully he’s pretty much back to normal now, but it was a worrying, hard going time for me back then. It must have been so much harder for him and the way he dealt with it all has increased my love and respect for the man colossally. Though research doesn’t show that it’s a hereditary condition, I’m still hedging my bets, paranoid little worm that I am.

If anyone should wish to chuck some money at a good cause (and I don’t just mean my looking like a tool), please donate here.

In which I move away from the format of the previous installments of this irregular feature and invite you to do some comparing and contrasting. First of all, I wish to bring to your attention the track Widowmaker by hippety hoppity hardcore chaps The Criminal Minds. This is what it sounds like.

Widowmaker by The Criminal Minds

Good, eh? Well I rather like it, so nyerr. This particular track opens the compilation TCM that was put out by the fine folk at Rephlex last year. It continues on in a similar fashion and I would highly recommend it if you like this sort of thing. My first exposure to them came in a Norwich based secondhand record shop. I was completely unfamiliar with their output and even their name, but having been a fan of a fair amount that Rephlex have put out in the past, decided it was worth a punt. Plus being the massive cheapskate that I am, the fact that it was only three or four quid made it all the more appealing. But the reason for the low price wasn’t just the fact that it was pre owned. It was a promo copy.

Now I’ve bought promo copies a fair few times in the past. I can generally live with the fact that you don’t get all of the packaging or occasionally end up with something that isn’t a final mix (though I’ve yet to hear one that sounded any different to an actual release yet). I’ve read all the disclaimers stating that they’re still the property of the record company, but as (in my experience) they’ve always been on sale at some point after the material has had its proper release, I don’t see anything wrong in reviewers flogging/giving away something they seemingly no longer have any use for. To be against that would be akin to going against the very idea of secondhand record shops, which would be the mark of a madman (even though I have none left in my general vicinity, sniff). The fact that a lot of them seem to be just CDRs these days, rather than properly pressed CDs is a bit of a blow to me and my slowly dying stereo, but I can see why the labels have started doing that in these cash strapped days. My issue and of no consequence to anyone else. Anyway, as I said, all of my promo acquisitions have contained recordings indistinguishable (by me) from the actual releases. All, until I listened to The Criminal Minds.

What I present to you hear is a snippet of the version of Widowmaker that features on the disc in my posession. The whole thing is commercially available, so in a vague attempt to stay within legal parameters, I’m not going to put an mp3 of the whole track out there for public consumption. Go and buy it. Granted, I didn’t in any way that actually benefitted them fiscally, but as regular readers should know by now I am nothing if not a morally compromised, hypocritical skinflint. Does that make it okay? Probably not. Hey it’s some free publicity (not that anyone reads this shite anyway). Actually, having done some more digging, I’m not 100% certain that it is officially available any more. Rephlex don’t even acknowledge the album’s existence on their own site and there don’t seem to be any obvious results coming up for paid downloads. There were apparently various issues with sample clearances when some of the tracks were originally released (early to mid 90s! I thought it was all brand new! Maybe I only enjoyed it all because it sounded old…), so maybe they reared their ugly heads again. Dunno. I’ve not been able to find any further information after some pretty weak Googling. But no matter, we’re veering further and further away from the point. You’ve listened to the first clip, yeah? Well go back and do that now. I’ll still be down here when you’ve finished. Done?  Now wrap your ears round the first 2 minutes again.

The Criminal Minds – Widowmaker Extract

Having tracked down the Soundcloud version, I was quite surprised to find that there was an intro. The promo version starts exactly where my extract does, which to be perfectly honest I much prefer. I suppose it’s partially down to familiarity (I have listened to the album a fair bit during the month and a bit I’ve had it), but I really think it has that much more impact coming in straight with the beat, rather than a sample and some fannying about. But that’s not what we’re here to discuss. Have you got 1 minute 46 seconds in yet? You’ll know when you have. Hear that? There’s one of those on every track! Almost all with a different message. Catalogue number, release date, website details, all sorts really.

Obviously I have the ability to cut them all out – I can make an extract with a fadeout, it’s not tricky to hack out five seconds of audio from the middle of a track. But I’ve no intention of doing so. Why? Because I really like them! I presume they’re put there to deter people from piracy, to at least make it faintly possible to track the pirates down, without distracting the reviewer/potential pirate too much from the music. I am obviously neither of these things (honest, m’lud), but I don’t find that they detract from my listening experience. Again, it’s familiarity with what I’ve listened to. Hearing the Soundcloud version, I was slightly disappointed when the “Crunch!” came in without any preceding message. I don’t find them distracting anymore, they’re just parts of the tracks as far as I’m concerned and I’m really rather fond of them. I have to wonder if all Rephlex promos contain similar incidents. I’d rather like to hear some more.