A Rainbow in Curved Air

Last night saw me in Bristol's Old Vic theatre for the third night in a row, this time to see and listen to a performance of Terry Riley's "A Rainbow in Curved Air" by Charles Hazlewood's All Star Collective and Danceroom Spectroscopy. I'd seen the All Stars perform the piece last year - in fact, embarrassingly, their performance was my introduction to this seminal work - and was keen to hear it again, and whatever else they'd play in the concert.

Charles Hazlewood educates the audience prior to the performance

I wasn't disappointed; not at all. Charles Hazlewood introduced the piece with a short lecture about the nature of minimalist music and explained that the night's performance would follow the form of Rilley's piece but would be improvised and that the musicians would be interacting with Danceroom Spectroscopy's visuals.

Charles Hazelwood, Will Gregory, Ross Hughes 

And what a performance it was. Danceroom Spectroscopy' visuals were spot on, a great blend of abstract, photographic and algorithmic, and I enjoyed seeing the band members interacting with the visuals. Sonically the performance was grounded in the late 1960s with parts coming straight from Rilley's original and parts sounding like they'd been sampled from the more experimental parts of Pink Floyd's The Piper at The Gates of Dawn or from the first two Soft Machine albums. The piece became very free-form at times, and just as it seemed on the edge of falling to apart Tony Orrell's drumming would bring structure back into the piece and bring the audience to edge of their seats. 

Overall a great evening. I hope someone has recorded it and a copy finds its way in to my hands. The Pit at The Old Vic was a great place to see the performance from - although the next time I'll opt for standing rather than sitting. The only other thing I'd change would be to project the visuals over the whole performance area rather than on a screen - then we'd really be back in the 60s. 

Apple iPie

More and more people I know are trying and buying Apple products. It's not just the entry level ones either, but MacBooks Pros and iMacs. Pondering why is a good pastime and I thought I'd give my thoughts.

Let's start by following my own first steps into Apple ownership. Sony introduced the Walkman in 1979, the year when I first acquired a disposable income. The Walkman wasn't the first portable music player I'd owned. I remember hearing Itchycoo Park for first time listening under the covers to my transistor radio, and I recall carrying a laptop sized cassette player with me so I could listen to whatever Pink Floyd or Henry Cow opus I wanted. But the Walkman was much better; small, high quality, personal and cool. So, for me the appeal of the iPod was clear - the noughties Walkman. But in the early noughties I no longer wanted to listen to music on a personal stereo so it was no iPod for me. Then came the RSS feed and podcasts; I could obtain all sorts of wonderful programming on my computer - music (thank you Tartan Podcast), science (thank you ABC for Occam's Razor), business (thank you BBC and Peter Day). However, I rapidly found that listening to podcasts on my computer wasn't what I wanted to do. So I bought my first MP3 player, I think it was a Creative Muvo with a 2 Gbyte hard disk. It was great until it broke. Then I tried some number of cheap solid-state MP3 players - why would you pay ~£100 for an iPod Nano when you could buy something just as good for ~£25? What I learned was that even if once playing an MP3 the cheap player worked well, getting it to play, and keep playing an MP3 was a bad experience. So I tried an iPod - job done; happy.  

I'd like to pick out some lessons from this.

The first is that just because a computer can do something, it doesn't that the best way to do that thing is with a computer. And just because a device has a computer inside, it doesn't mean that device is a computer. If Apple is a computer company then Black and Dekker is an electric motor company. Apple understand this and the populous have some understanding of the. The iPod is not a computer. But what of the iPad?

Another lesson is that people will pay for well designed and ergonomic devices. This seems to come as a shock to some people, especially techies, who focus exclusively on function and not on form (and here I consider the ergonomics to be part of the form). Strangely enough, some of those people drive BMWs or Audis rather than Fords. 

Let's now move from the personal stereo to the personal computer. Surely no one buying a computer with their own money would buy a MacBook? Everyone knows you can buy just as good a laptop for half the price. Except you can't. You can by worse laptops at half the price. They're not as responsive, their displays are worse, their keyboards are worse, their software is worse, their battery life is worse, they look cheap and nasty, etc. For a buyer who can pay Apple prices, why would they settle for anything less?

Actually, the really interesting question about personal computers is not which one people buy, but why people would buy any personal computer in the first place. Now let's be clear, by "people" I am excluding the hobbyists, the type of people who would own a personal CNC lathe or a personal arc-welder - I mean normal people who would no more write a computer program than build their own motor car. This question is one I remember being asked from when the first personal computers appeared until, I think, the nineties when the Web and CD-ROMs became commonplace. It should be asked again because I think the answer is now that people shouldn't buy a computer, they should buy an iPad. I didn't link to Wikipedia for "iPad" because Wikipedia describes the iPad as a "tablet computer" and I don't think it is any sort of a computer. There's a great post about the nature of the iPad by my friend Richard Taylor.

So

• Once technology is "good enough", product form is as important as product function
• People don't want general purpose computers. 

and these are the basis of Apple's current run of successes. It will be interesting to see how the forthcoming iPad versus "tablet computer" war will progress. I'm expecting Apple to win this one, although based on my experience with my iPod touch, I'm holding out for an iPad with multitasking, a camera and a higher-resolution display - I don't think it will be very long before it's here.

Wish I Were There

Hoping Foundation benefit performance from Hoping Foundation on Vimeo.

Echoes

I blogged about seeing David Gilmour at the Albert Hall last year. I got the DVD "Remember That Night" for Christmas and I'm looking at it for the first time this evening. I said about the performance of Echoes:

... an absolutely stunning performance of "Echoes". The band seemed to be really into the piece and there was a very good middle section (I guess improvised) with great interactions between David Gilmour and Rick Wright. ... Wonderful, great, ...

Understatement. And kudos to Guy Pratt.

"A Breath of Fresh Air" and "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"

Many years ago, before the easy availability of bootleg recording, while I was educating myself about the early music of the Pink Floyd, I came across reference to a song called "Embryo". It hadn't made it on to record, but had been part of their live repertoire, although dropped before I first saw them in 1973. Then I discovered that "Embryo" had appeared on a Harvest Records sampler called "Picnic: A breath of fresh air", and I spent a lot of time searching for "Picnic" in the record shops of London. Eventually, I bought a copy, and discovered, not only "Embryo" but a whole host of other goodies by people like Michael Chapman, Quatermass, Kevin Ayers, Pete Brown, Forrest, Roy Harper, ....".

Subsequently, I heard lots of stories that Pink Floyd were not happy about this release of Embryo, and had had the album pulled, although the track did turn up on the US compilation "Works". But now, thirty something years since the release of "Picnic", Harvest have just released Breath of Fresh Air, a triple CD which includes "Embryo" and "Careful With That Axe Eugene".

My copy was waiting for me when I got back from Grenoble on Friday. As was may boxed set, 3CD, 40th Anniversary Edition of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Stereo and mono mixes, and a third disc with various interesting items such as the singles from 1967 (Arnold Layne, See Emily Play, Apples and Oranges). Oh, in case you are interested, here is the original video for "Arnold Layne".

All I'm waiting for now is a CD release of "Point Me at the Sky".

Dark Side of the Uke

Pink Floyd on Ukuleles. I've heard the Floyd do it worse.

See also Polka Floyd.

Polka Floyd

Yes, I meant Polka Floyd. Interstellar Overdrive is OK but the others are horrid.