I have been freshly tagged in a meme by Chris. It’s a seven songs meme. Here are the instructions:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“

First of all, I need to get this pedantry out of the way. If it doesn’t have words, it isn’t a song. Now on to my seven songs and / or other pieces of music.

I’ve placed this ‘below the fold’ because I’ve embedded YouTube videos and Bleep audio. Remember with the Bleep audio you need to press play again after it fades out every 30 seconds.

Click for more »

By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.

Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!

I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.

And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.

For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.

Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:

hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.

Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.

Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.

And make my own I did. Here is my Muxtape.

I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.

Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.

On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.

It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.

A couple of months ago the BBC announced that it had reached an agreement that allowed them to use commercial music on their podcasts. This meant that, at last, the BBC could produce music podcasts. The only problem was that music could only be included in the form of clips a maximum of 30 seconds long.

I don’t know what most people think, but that sets off sirens in my head — music podcasts where the music is cut short. Of course, it is much better than having no music at all, so we should be thankful for this.

The original blog post about it was on the BBC’s interesting Radio Labs blog — take a look at it if you’re interested in the future of radio. There, Chris Kimber made a valiant attempt at explaining how and why the new music podcasts would work.

The interesting thing for me is going to be working out what works well as a podcast as opposed to a linear radio broadcast. Our approach generally is to offer “short form audio snacks”, rather than try to replicate the whole programme experience but with short music clips instead of full tracks. All the research we have done into podcasting suggests that people generally want something special and different from normal broadcast radio programmes, and that short is better than long. Most of our speech podcasts are a maximum of 30 mins long, but with these new music podcasts we are aiming for really short form - about ten minutes is what I’m recommending.

This is just a personal preference (and I know I am in a minority), but I have always preferred long things to short things. I prefer 70 minute long albums, and can just about tolerate a 45 minute long album. But I feel offended and ripped off if an album lasts 35 minutes or shorter.

It’s interesting that most of the BBC’s speech podcasts are 30 minutes long maximum. Two of the four BBC speech podcasts I subscribe to typically last 50 minutes. A ten minute long podcast is not normally my cup of tea — I prefer them to be half an hour to an hour long.

So initially I was sceptical about these new music podcasts. But I went ahead and subscribed to the music podcast that appealed to me most — Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone. My fears came true the first time I listened to it. I found it an unsatisfying listen.

I think a lot of this may be to do with the style of the programme. Sadly, I am no longer a tweenager, so I don’t know if the format works better for, for instance, the Radio 1 indie podcast. But I imagine it would. An indie tune doesn’t typically evolve much from beginning to end, and a short thirty second burst is probably enough to get a full flavour of the song.

But the Freak Zone is too analytical and beard-strokey to treat music like this (interestingly, the podcast tends to last half an hour rather than the recommended 10 minutes). The show prides itself on playing the weird and wonderful obscurities that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. As such, the pieces of music are more deserving of a full hearing, as it were.

In the first episode of the podcast I downloaded, a short clip of ‘Autopsy’ by Fairport Convention was played. After that, Stuart Maconie began talking about the song’s time signatures, wonderful arrangement and lyrics. I just thought to myself, “Yeah, not that I heard much of it.”

Nevertheless, I am now a regular listener of the Freak Zone podcast. Even though the music clips aren’t long enough, the speech content is interesting enough.

The podcast is definitely doing its job, at least as far as the BBC’s hopes go.

There’s a buzz of excitement in interactive teams, and the radio stations too, about how this can get our audio content to people who don’t normally listen, or who would much prefer to listen in their own time, on their own portable media device.

That certainly describes me. Prior to downloading the podcast, I had only ever listened to the programme once or twice (back in the days when it was presented by Bruce Dickinson). The timeslot doesn’t suit me well, and it is true that I probably wouldn’t even listen to the full show even if I could download it (and I’ve never listened to it on Listen Again).

Despite my reservations, the digest podcast suits me very well indeed. Just a shame about the short length of the music clips.

Last week Channel 4 celebrated its 25^th birthday. John asked in the comments about people’s top ten Channel 4 programmes. I would have written this at the time anyway, but I didn’t have the time and figured I’d just let it slip under the radar. However, since the question was asked, I will answer it anyway.

Bear in mind that I am actually younger than Channel 4 is. As such, you won’t find me waxing lyrical about Max Headroom or Minipops. This is, I’m afraid, strictly 1990s onwards.

These are in no particular order, just what I thought would flow well.

Brass Eye

Following The Day Today, Chris Morris took the skewed news concept a step further with Brass Eye. The programme was sometimes controversial, with everybody specatcularly failing to ‘get’ the paedophile episode. Brass Eye highlighted and parodied media wrongs. Here is a clip about the Bad Aids.

Jam

Most people seem to be choosing Brass Eye in these lists, as have I. But I was more fond of one of Chris Morris’s other Channel 4 programmes, Jam. This disturbing sketch show was shot with strange visual effects and set to a constant background track of ambient music. Quite unique and strange, it really set itself apart from other sketch shows.

The programme often dealt with subject matters that might be seen as taboo. But you can’t help thinking, “doesn’t he have a point?” It would be irresponsible of me to compare this sketch to any recent news events.

4Later

4Later was a strand of late-night programming that ran for a few years earlier this decade. The range of programmes was pretty eclectic. Low budget games and DVD review shows Bits and Vidz were cult classics. Disinfo Nation was an “alternative news programme”. 4Later was the home of the last series of Babylon 5. Late Night Poker was the original poker programme that started the craze. A remixed version of Chris Morris’s Jam was perfectly suited to the late-night vibe.

It is such a shame that 4later was unceremoniously axed, taking with it all of its good programmes. Late nights on Channel 4 simply haven’t been the same since.

One of my favourite programmes on 4Later was The Trip, which mixed archive film footage with arty music. I’m so delighted to have found some clips of it on YouTube! It was just perfect for the late-night slot, and well worth staying up for, especially since the feeling that you were about to drop off just added to the vibe. It is probably fair to say that, combined with Jam, this programme shaped my taste in music a lot in my mid-teens.

The Big Breakfast

Kudos to Channel 4 for trying something different with the morning slot. Normally, if you don’t want news or children’s programmes, you can forget about morning television.

It was a tricky balancing act though. It was sometimes unwatchably chaotic, and sometimes seemingly the whole programme was on the verge of complete collapse. At times it also seemed as though they were all just having fun for themselves and completely forgot about the viewer. I found this particularly during the Johnny and Denise phase.

I was quite fond of the programme in its later years. But for whatever reason, the viewing public switched off. Channel 4 tried something similar with its replacement, RI:SE, but it completely misfired. The Big Breakfast had some kind of magic ingredient that made it work for a few years in the 1990s. But today, we are back to the usual diet of news and children’s programmes. Anything else would just feel wrong.

This isn’t a particularly special clip, but it is typical of the kind of material that was featured on The Big Breakfast in its later years. Nigel Buckland, presenter of late-night film show Vidz, reviewed some Christmas DVDs in 2002. You might see what I mean when I say the programme was a bit shambolic.

The 11 O’Clock Show

It is true that The 11 O’Clock Show was sometimes embarassingly bad. This was bound to happen when it was broadcast daily (soon cut back to three days a week). I still thought it contained more good jokes per week than just about any other programme. Still, it was all too easy for the programme to lapse into telling easy cock jokes.

Let’s not forget, though, that it was the early home of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais. The huge writing team also had some great names working for it. Charlie Brooker leaps out in my memory. So it’s not as if it had unfunny people working for it. It was worth tuning in to wait for the good bits.

At the time, the programme was perhaps most famous for Iain Lee’s vox pops. Sometimes I got the feeling that the people in the vox pops were told what to say, but they were still funny nevertheless. This one doesn’t look like it has actors, but it does contain lots of dirty jokes about bodily fluids.

Whose Line is it Anyway?

I guess with the improvisational nature of the show, it was bound to be hit and miss. But when it was hit, Whose Line was hysterically funny. It has also stood the test of time rather well. The American version is screened regularly on Five US, and recently the UK version began to be shown on Dave. I find that it’s well worth giving it a look whenever it’s on because there is likely to be at least one laugh-so-much-you-cry moment.

Here is a ‘hoedown’ game from one of the later series of the UK version. Tony Slattery is obviously near his lowest point here which isn’t good to see, but nevertheless it is very funny.

Father Ted

This programme surely needs no introduction. The silly sitcom is the best of the past fifteen years in my view. Here is the classic moment from the Christmas special when Ted, Dougal and others get lost in Ireland’s biggest lingerie section.

The Chart Show

I can just about remember a time when The Chart Show was not The ITV Chart Show. A few months ago I found myself getting very nostalgic and watching lots of videos of old episodes of The Chart Show on YouTube. It was so different to the other music programmes on offer, with nothing in the way of live performances, and no presenters apart from quirky Amiga graphics.

Of course, nowadays most music programming is like this because it’s the most cost-effective way to do it. But even watching The Chart Show today, it has its own little quirks. The whole ‘FFWD’ / ‘RWND’ stuff was a bit gimmicky, but remained in one form or another until its last show in 1998.

For some reason, all of the Channel 4 versions have been removed from YouTube, while many ITV episodes remain! Here is a clip from not long after the change of channels in 1989.

The Crystal Maze

Is this the greatest gameshow ever? Yes. The Crystal Maze also must be one of the very few programme adaptations to be better than the original it was based on. Fort Boyard was good, but bland in comparison to The Crystal Maze.

Partly this is down to the ingenuity of the puzzles, and the different zones. But a lot of it is also down to the charismatic Richard O’Brien. His sarcastic comments just sum it up whenever the team messes up, which it invariably does. And of course, he had that harmonica to hand whenever he felt like putting the team off. And then there was that strange relationship with the computer in the futuristic zone…

Popworld

While the staid BBC subjected the nation’s youth to Fearne Cotton’s asinine interviews with boring boy bands, over on Channel 4 you could watch Simon Amstell being sarcastic to them. Some bands played along with it, while others took great offence. And who would believe it, it was those wankerish indie bands who were worse than the bubblegum pop groups. Essential viewing for weekend mornings, as I have already written on this blog.

Channel 4 is 25 years old today. It’s really the only commercial broadcaster worth watching. Mind you, even Channel 4 is a bit shit these days.

But the important thing is that its idents are still awesome, as they always have been. It’s great to see that Channel 4’s continuity is all in the style of the original iconic designs, with a range of classic idents being shown (some of which I’ve never seen before).

The original idents lasted an astonishing 14 years. That’s an age — you’d never see an ident package lasting that long nowadays. Even more amazingly, the original ‘4′ logo has never changed, merely being adapted for each new era.

The coloured blocks were well loved and recognisable enough for Hamlet to create this spoof version for an advert. For me, it’s surprising in two ways. For one, I’m surprised Channel 4 and the regulators allowed them to do it, given that it could have easily been confused for an actual ident.

Then there is the fact that it is tobacco being advertised — something from a different era. It goes to show just how far Hamlet were determined to advertise despite all the regulations. Sometimes a restrictive environment can make you come up with the best ideas.

It was always going to be a tough act to follow the coloured blocks. I seem to remember the circles era was quite unpopular, but I thought they were quite good.

I also liked the ’squares and stripes’ era, although it dated really quickly.

So it was a bit of a shock to see just how excellent the following ident package was!

Genius.

Channel 4 have a couple of special websites up and running for the occasion as well.

• Channel 4 at 25
• Channel 4 News at 25

More classic Channel 4 idents can be found at The TV Room. BBC News Online has 25 facts about 25 years of Channel 4.

I am quite a fan of Freeview. Even though I hardly ever watch any television these days, I think it is so wonderful to have that kind of choice fairly hassle-free for £20-odd. There have been quite a lot of changes to Freeview recently.

First came the unexpected and abrupt death of ABC1. It wasn’t a bad channel, but it always seemed like there was something that didn’t quite work about it. When it launched there were no adverts for months — so how was it funded? Then there was the distinct lack of space on prime-time on Freeview, which essentially made ABC1 a daytime-only channel.

ABC1’s schedule was therefore restricted to rather tame American comedies. The same ones. Over and over again. What’s more, they did that odd thing that digital channels sometimes do, of showing the episodes seemingly in random order. This was especially problematic for 8 Simple Rules. One minute John Ritter was dead, the next he had come back to life! And then he was dead again.

In a way this was a good thing though, because you knew what you were getting. Unchallenging, homely television. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I imagine that if ABC1 was around ten years ago, I would have loved watching it on the days when I was off sick from school.

Then came Virgin 1, which is Virgin Media’s latest little stone thrown in their big bear fight with BSkyB. “Oh, they think they’re so smart having a channel called Sky One,” some Virgin Media big-wig probably said on day. “We’ll show them! We can have Virgin 1.”

So, Ftn has been killed to death just when it was getting good. I loved Ftn in its later days. Its repeats of retro gameshows like The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye were strangely captivating. Then later at night there was always Takeshi’s Castle if you were up for vegetating a bit. While it was always Freeview’s worst channel, in the past year or so it had carved out a distinctive identity for itself.

The new channel, on the other hand, does not have a distinctive flavour. In fact, it is almost as if they looked at Sky One and decided “we want a programme like that, a programme like that, and a programme like that.”

In short, it is like a watered-down version of Channel Five. Do we really need another channel full of sub-standard American imports? I think not. I would have thought that, especially with the Virgin brand attached to it, they would have put a bit more effort in to make it more distinctive.

Then this week there was the launch of Dave. Dave is essentially a re-branding of UKTV G2, so it’s good to know they’ve gone from one silly name to another. A lot of people are going on about what a great name Dave is for a channel, but I think it is quite silly. They say that it’s based on the idea that “everyone knows a bloke called Dave”, which is true. The problem is that whenever I hear the name I think of that balloon-faced Conservative leader.

As for the programming it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Watching Dave is like being transported back to the 1990s. Have I Got News For You, Red Dwarf and Bottom are among its roster. Essentially, Dave seems to me like BBC Two 2. It’s the channel that BBC Three secretly wishes it could be, if only it could be unleashed from all of those quotas to do with repeats.

Then there is Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I can’t stand watching it, at least when it was hosted by Mark Lamarr. He seems like a genuinely spiteful person. He tells nasty jokes about people, which I don’t mind usually. But Mark Lamarr doesn’t seem to tell them in the sense of “I’m only having a laugh”. He seems to be genuinely nasty. I can’t stand watching it. For a further insight into the dark world of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, check out this blog post by Adam Buxton.

But without a doubt the worst programme on Dave is A Question of Sport. Why does this programme still exist, even in repeat form? It is just diabolical.

Fortunately, this crime is outweighed by the repeats of Whose Line is it Anyway. Now, why is Whose Line is it Anyway not on any more, huh?

Despite the patchy output, the launch of Dave on Freeview seems to add a lot of value. It is replacing UKTV Bright Ideas, which I doubt will be missed by many people. The hours for UKTV History have been cut back, which might not be very popular. But let’s face it. Everyone knows that history channels only ever get ratings if they either

1. Show programmes that are nothing to do with history
2. Dedicate their entire schedule to programmes about Adolf Hitler’s second cousin twice removed’s hairdresser’s pet ostrich.

Despite my interest in electronic music, my collection — shamefully — doesn’t contain very much from before the 1990s. The only ones that I can think of from the top of my head are an album of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, some Brian Eno and Steve Reich. A recent purchase makes me wonder if I should be buying more old electronic music.

White Noise was the idea of David Vorhaus, a classical double bassist with an interest in electronics. After attending a lecture, he approached members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — Delia Derbyshire (creator of the famous Doctor Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson (who created the sounds of the Tardis and the Daleks). Together, they worked for a year on An Electric Storm, perhaps one of the most seminal electronic music albums there has ever been.

Incidentally, Delia Derbyshire was a genius in her own right. On an album showcasing Music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire’s work stands out. ‘Time to Go’ takes the famous pips of the Greenwich Time Signal and turns it into a cacophony of blips and bleeps before descending into farts, burps and squirts. I wonder if it inspired David Lowe?

‘Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO’ is my favourite though. An utterly mad piece of music centring around a mad robotic chant. It sounds like it could have been created by a trippy early 1970s rock band, but it was made by a geek in a lab. There is a clip about this particular piece on this page about the BBC documentary ‘Alchemists of Sound’.

Back to An Electric Storm though. Listening to it, you can tell that it is not a recent work. It contains the sort of tricks used by the Radiophonic Workshop. But in a way this is what amazes me the most about it. This album is almost forty years old, yet it sounds more amazing than a great deal of the electronic music made today.

It’s all the more impressive when you consider the multiple hurdles the group had to clear. Having signed a contract with Island Records, they realised that they didn’t know how they were going to record the album. The first works were made by sneaking into the studios of the Radiophonic Workshop. But making an entire album this way would have been too risky. They had to build their own studio and using home-made equipment.

The album was made in an era before the widespread availability of synthesisers. Most of the noises were made by tape manipulation, a laborious task. The technique sounds a bit like an audio version of stop-motion animation. An original sound (from, for instance, Vorhaus’s bass) would have to be sped up or slowed down for each and every note. Even echo effects were achieved by rather crude means — playing two identical tapes out of phase.

A particularly ambitious song, ‘The Visitation’, took three months to make. Recording was taking so long that they faced legal action from Island and had to finish the album overnight. That the track in question — ‘Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell’ — doesn’t sound as though it was particularly rushed boggles my mind.

And what did White Noise receive for their toil? The album sold a paltry 200 copies in its first year, and the group made just £280. Luckily for us, and for electronic music as a whole, it gained traction in subsequent years and became an underground classic. This year it was remastered and re-released.

It is a genuinely pioneering record. Today an artist is labelled ‘experimental’ just for using a farty synth. But White Noise were actually pushing the boundaries and creating something truly amazing. It’s incredible to think that something so ambitious for its time should actually stand the test of time this well.

The album opens with the intriguing ‘Love Without Sound’. Vorhaus’s intention was to release this as a single to try and convert the population to electronic music. The result is a song that is equal parts accessible and impenetrable.

John Whitman’s vocals are other-worldly and detached. The music is a surreal, part-humorous, part-unsettling cacophony of clicks, clacks and warbles. This cleverly interacts with female laughs and moans. Despite the wide and unpredictable range of sounds, the resulting collage makes perfect sense, in its own surreal way. Think the “ho-ho, he-he, ha-ha” bit in ‘I Am the Walrus’, but lasting for an entire song.

This is followed by ‘My Game of Loving’. This track features a famous section of mad tumbling drums laid on top of a kaleidoscopic orgy which is comically followed by snoring. The sex-frenzy is sonically interesting, but make sure you don’t have your iPod too loud or you’ll get some funny looks on the train.

This track particularly reminds me of two more recent electronic acts. The spliced tabla-style drums remind me very much of Asa-Chang & Junray, while I would be amazed if the orgy section didn’t inspire some of Aphex Twin’s more humorous moments. This is not to mention Stereolab and Broadcast, who are influenced by White Noise as a whole.

The humour continues on the next track, ‘Here Come the Fleas’. While today’s electronic musicians are perceived as being serious, beard-stroking types, ‘Here Come the Fleas’ reminds you of the comedy potential of electronic music. The song lays into a lazy slob’s poor hygiene standards. The middle of the song is dominated by a brilliant section that would have made a cool guitar solo. It would have been so easy just to pick up a guitar and do it, but they had to go the hard way and make it with tapes, didn’t they?

That is on the “happy” side, known as ‘Phase-In’. People must have thought that this pioneering electronic music is a barrel of laughs. They were in for a shock when the turned the record over for the ‘Phase-Out’ side. The smiles and laughter are wiped away and the listener is treated to something that approaches the horror genre.

‘The Visitation’ — the track that took three months to make — is, for me, the highlight of the album. This stunning piece is about a couple of lovers who are torn apart by a motorcycle accident. As the girl screams, “please don’t go”, the motorcycle crashes. The spirit of the man who was killed tries to communicate with his weeping girlfriend, but is unable to.

It’s quite spine-chilling really. The music is genuinely haunting and really paints a picture of a dark, rainy night on a remote road where the motorcyclist is killed. It uses stereo to brilliant effect as well.

The singing and narration also creates the right mood. The spirit’s voice echoes spookily, while the singer is the coldly neutral bearer of bad news. When he sings, “Her lover’s not asleep, he’s DEEEAAAAD”, it makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

As I said, it could actually be a horror film. It would make a cracking piece of radio drama. This could be one of my favourite pieces of music. An eleven minute journey into a horrifying affair — it’s impossible not to feel sad listening to it.

Listening to An Electric Storm, there is no doubt that it is a unique product of 1969, the like of which could never be made again. Pitchfork’s review of the album says:

White Noise’s landmark 1969 album An Electric Storm might not the first thing most people think of when considering 1960s music, but there are few records anywhere tied more intrinsically to the moment of their creation. Recorded in the months immediately prior to the widespread availability of keyboard-based synthesizers, An Electric Storm might be one of the most painstakingly crafted electronic recordings of all time. Pieced together on improvised equipment via innumerable tape edits, this remarkable album is at once futuristic and unavoidably date-stamped, serving as a fascinating audio snapshot of a bygone era in sound generation and recording technology.

This was a time before the widespread use of synthesisers and computers, but at a time where there was a lot of enthusiasm and ambition for electronic music. I can’t help thinking that it’s just a little bit too easy to make electronic music today. It is impossible to imagine anyone except the bravest / maddest of souls dedicating a year of their lives laboriously fiddling about with tapes when they could just use their laptop to embark on a sonic adventure.

Given just how mind-bending this early electronic music is compared to a lot of today’s identikit techno, I can’t help but wonder if advances in technology have restricted musicians as much as liberated them.

If you are remotely interested in electronic music, I would recommend this almost as a must-buy. Not only is the music amazing, but it is also a real insight into the painstaking approaches of electronic musicians of the past (the sleeve notes are brilliantly educational in this regard). It really is true to say that they don’t make them like they used to.

• Last.fm page for An Electric Storm with sound clips
• A great review of An Electric Storm
• White Noise Wikipedia entry
• Official White Noise MySpace (!)

It doesn’t feel like they’ve been away for long enough for a proper reunion. But when you think about it, the last album Blur recorded with Graham Coxon was released almost nine years ago! This should make every Britpop fan feel really, really old.

The rumours have been going for a while. Just last year I had heard that all of the members of Blur were suing each other. Now it seems confirmed that they are all — including Coxon — going into the recording studio very soon.

The fact that Graham Coxon is back is the real news though. He was pretty central to Blur. You could tell that just by listening to the sans-Coxon Blur album, Think Tank, which felt really empty and half-arsed. After a lacklustre album, it wasn’t a surprise to see Blur fizzle out.

Meanwhile, Graham Coxon’s solo career sky-rocketed. And who could blame Damon Albarn for not being too bothered given the success (and, let’s face it, damn good music) of Gorillaz. (The less said about Alex James’s WigWam, the better. At best the song sounds like an awful re-hash of ‘Girls and Boys’. And worst it sounds like the consequences of too many drugs.)

Think Tank and the death of Blur was a disappointment because their previous album, 13, is for my money one of the best albums of the 1990s. I still feel that the was completely overlooked by the media and the public, who at the time were too busy still fawning over OK Computer to notice anything else.

Listening to some of the older Blur material, it is easy to see why everyone got so excited about the whole Britpop thing. Blur wrote so many of the great pop songs of the 1990s. You can see this by looking at the tracklisting to their Best of album — more notable for the omissions than the inclusions (where were ‘Popscene’, ‘Chemical World’, ‘Stereotypes’…?).

To celebrate the news of the reunion, it is time for a Blur with Graham Coxon Nostalgic YouTube Extravaganza! (This means a bunch of videos that I will post and will stop working within a week as they get pulled off.)

Coffee and TV

The height of Graham Coxon’s powers as part of Blur.

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There was another reason why the European Grand Prix was great. It brought the one-off return of Murray Walker, commentating on an F1 race for a UK broadcaster for the first time since 2001.

Radio Five Live’s regular Formula 1 commentator, David Croft, was off to watch his baby being born. Murray Walker was invited to fill his chair for one race only.

This presented a dilemma to F1 fans: do you stick with the ITV coverage, or do you switch on the radio to listen to Murray Walker?

I was a little bit worried that Murray Walker’s commentary would not be up to much. He did, after all, retire for a reason. His later years on ITV were sometimes frustrating to listen to. His mind was not quite as sharp as it once was, and he regularly had to stop mid-sentence to have a coughing fit.

On the one hand, we knew what we were going to get by sticking to the ITV commentary. James Allen is disliked by many, but at least he does not make as many mistakes as Murray Walker was known to in the latter part of his career. ITV also has the excellent Martin Brundle.

But this was a one-off. A chance to listen to the greatest commentator in the world say, “And it’s go go go!” just one last time.

I opted to listen to Murray Walker, but in retrospect I should have recorded his commentary and listened to it after the race. But that wasn’t anything to do with Murray Walker. He was, in fact, much better than I expected!

But the nature of Radio Five Live meant that three sporting events were being covered at once. And while the Grand Prix took the bulk of the airtime, there were long periods where the focus was on golf or cricket instead. So it was not a full race commentary.

But apart from that, it was a joy to listen to. The producers obviously knew the sort of people who would be tuning in to listen to Murray Walker, and the broadcast began with a familiar tune — but one that hasn’t introduced a Grand Prix for over ten years.

“Aah, they’re playing my tune!”, said a delighted Murray Walker. And immediately he was into the swing of things. He didn’t bumble along as I feared. He might be 83, but you would not be able to guess it. He still knows how to broadcast.

It was classic Murray. He used plenty of catchphrases without descending into self-parody. No one else can start a Grand Prix like Murray Walker.

One light. Two lights. Three lights. Four lights! Five lights! …AND IT’S GO! GO! GO!

It was not perfect throughout. At times he was commentating for the radio, but a couple of times he slipped into saying things like, “and you are looking at…” He also often got tangled up, forgetting people’s positions from time to time.

There was also a classic “Murrayism”.

And Winkelhock goes through in the orange Spyker, well down the field… Well, he’s not well down the field, he’s actually in tenth position because he’s yet to come in.

That was when Winkelhock led the race! Although Murray Walker can be forgiven because I found that fact difficult to believe myself…

I do not agree with everything that Murray Walker says. He supports the British drivers a bit too much for my liking. He was also far too sympathetic to Michael Schumacher. He is seemingly the only person in the world who does not believe that Schumacher deliberately caused crashes at Adelaide in 1994 and Jerez in 1997.

But it is impossible not to love him as a broadcaster. As a describer of action, no one can rival him. Clive James said, “In his quieter moments, it sounds like his trousers are on fire.”

If I live to be 83, I hope that I can have just a fraction of the energy and enthusiasm that Murray Walker has. When something interesting his happening on the circuit, Murray Walker is the first to get excited, and soon enough everyone knows about it.

A particularly colourful and vivid description of Alonso overtaking Massa towards the end of the race showed exactly why Murray Walker is so highly regarded.

Alonso is practically sawing the Ferrari in half with his nose cone!

Utter genius.

(Thanks to Tom for giving me the opportunity to hear Murray Walker’s commentary even though I was at work when the race was on!)

The Guardian has quite an interesting article about “classic” albums that do not warrant the hype (via DJ Martian). I wonder if that has one eye on the 10^th anniversary of the release of OK Computer?

One interesting album on the list is Dark Side of the Moon, as nominated by Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh. I was just thinking recently about how Dark Side of the Moon is probably not Pink Floyd’s best album. Then someone brought it up in a conversation I had. Now this!

But the one that really made me happy was the inclusion of Is This It by The Strokes. Ian Williams of Battles wrote a paragraph about its mediocrity. Everything he says is spot-on.

I recently wrote about how I loathe indie music. I noted that the turning-point came when I was about 15 or 16 in 2001 — the year that Is This It was released. Never was an album title so apt.

There was so much hype surrounding The Strokes, it seemed impossible to believe that they would be anything but good. But when a friend made a CD-R of the album for me, I hated it so much that I returned it!

Is This It was so bad that it actually gave me a headache. It was so unbelievably conservative, derivative and certainly anything but “alternative”. The sheer monotony of the entire album made me depressed.

While I am often willing to give an album more than one chance on the basis that repeated listens can reveal hidden treats, I have refused to listen to Is This It a second time. It was obvious that this album had absolutely nothing to offer. And I didn’t want to risk getting a migraine.

As if to top it off, Is This It — if memory serves — lasts barely more than half an hour. This makes it an absolute fucking rip-off if you buy it at a normal album price. I expect an EP to be that long. Half an hour is roughly the length of a single that is released in the pretty much ubiquitous CD1 + CD2 format.

In short, Is This It lacked breath, depth and length. The personification of one-dimensional music. The prospect that The Strokes were the future of guitar-based music absolutely horrified me. So I turned my back on it all.

At the same time I discovered bands like Broadcast and Tortoise. I spent many evenings that year exploring the Warp Records website, avidly listening to the audio clips of their releases. A door had been opened to an amazing world where exciting and innovative music was being made.

Six years on, I am still listening to exciting and innovative music released on Warp — in the shape of Battles.

For an alternative view on The Guardian article, here is Richard Havers.

I’m not much of a gigger really. In fact, since the first proper one I attended six years ago (My Vitriol, who must now rival Portishead as the slowest-working band in the world), the only other gig I’ve attended was a really awful local band in a pub. I was dragged along, and I haven’t really recovered since.

There are a few reasons for this. One of the main ones is that hardly any of the bands that I like ever play in Edinburgh. My brother says this is because Edinburgh has a 10pm “noise curfew”. WTF! It’s meant to be a city of culture, but no music is allowed in case it wakes up Tarquin. Shameful.

The trek from Kirkcaldy to Glasgow is tiring, time consuming and expensive. But I don’t think anything would have been able to prevent me from seeing what Battles are like live.

Of course, we had to endure a shite support act first. The Penpushers have four members, but only two of them ever seemed to be doing anything at any one time. (My brother pointed out that one of the members was called Obsolete — and wasn’t he just!)

The music was nothing special. I think if this was fifteen years ago, when DJ Shadow was at the height of his popularity, this would have felt fresh and maybe even exciting. Today, the sound is rather dated and underwhelming.

At one point the frontman bemoaned the lukewarm reception, calling the audience “an Edinburgh crowd”. But they deserved an Edinburgh reception. Especially since we were about to see possibly the most futuristic band around at the moment, Battles (not The Battles, as Mr Penpusher annoyingly kept calling them).

The start of the performance caught by surprise. Bassist Dave Konopka, without the other members present, appeared just to be fiddling around, preparing or practising something. Then, all of a sudden, he just turned round and hammered out four bars worth of music.

Konopka stopped playing, but the music continued in a loop. It was a loud, bassy line — the sort that you can feel as much as you can hear. It seemed vaguely familiar, but nothing I could place from Battles’s records. Then he turned round to attend to his magic box. A few button presses later, and all of a sudden the unfamiliar sound was transformed into the very familiar beginning of ‘Race: Out’.

The rest of the band arrived, and we were to be treated to an hour or so of mind-bending music and technology. And the use of technology is quite important, because this is what pushes their unique sound. A simple guitars-and-keyboards band, Battles are not.

Pitchfork seemed to think that their album, Mirrored, is nothing short of revolutionary. Also read their review of Seefeel’s Quique for a comparison of Battles’s mix of guitars and technology to what Seefeel were able to achieve 15 years ago. Battles could not have existed in their current state before today.

It is just as well that they do exist today. Ever since the likes of IDM started to sound a bit stale a few years ago, there has not been much in the way of forward-looking music. It looks as though, right on cue, Battles have come to save the day.

Five or ten years ago, Mirrored would have been one of those studio albums that is impossible to replicate in a live environment. To watch the guitars and Tyondai Braxton’s vocals being electronically manipulated like this in real time is pretty extraordinary. As you may be able to tell, I was as impressed by the technology on display at the gig as much as the music itself.

Indeed, the music itself was a little bit off-colour. Particularly at the start of the set, a few mistakes were being made. Ian Williams in particular seemed more excited by the prospect of jumping around and looking energetic than actually hitting the right key on his keyboard. For a band that is often labelled “math rock”, they seem to delight in being imprecise from time to time.

And this “math rock” band is not just about chin stroking. Infact, particularly on Mirrored, they seem to be almost anti-chin stroking. At times whimsical and humorous, Battles are not afraid to produce an unashamed crowd-pleaser such as ‘Atlas’. And ‘Atlas’ really is a crowd pleaser, with members of the audience singing along to the “whooa-aay-oooh” bit, though they were probably prohibited from singing the rest because of ambiguity as to what the rest of the lyrics actually are.

I suppose the sheer energy is part of what makes Battles awesome live. This is particularly true of their stunning drummer, John Stainer. He clearly has his admirers. One person in the crowd seemed to be there solely to see John Stainer. At one point he just randomly started chanting, “John! John! John! John! John! John! John!” I think in his head the whole crowd was chanting with him.

Unlike Williams, Stainer is so relentlessly dedicated to playing correctly that it almost defies belief. Fast, precise and intricate, it was inevitable that he would start sweating. But I have never seen somebody sweat so much in my life. By the middle of the performance he looked like he had just come out of a swimming pool.

It wasn’t just sweat either. At one point I was unfortunate enough to look up just in time to see a huge string of gob come out of his mouth. I have a feeling that, when I’m old and senile, that will be my best memory of the gig.

I was a little bit annoyed that they didn’t play what I think are the two best tracks on the album, ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Ddiamondd’, but you can’t have it all.

Battles in action: ‘Atlas’ live at Chicago Glass Bottle, 30-03-2007

That full concert (!!) is available on YouTube here.

More Battles awesomeness

• Last.fm event page: Battles at ABC2 on 23 May 2007
• Flickr photoset by Mike Quin: Battles at the ABC
• Battles MySpace
• Battles official website

Blue Peter is in the news at the moment because it is losing a show per week. So it will be going back to two programmes per week, just like it was up until the mid-1990s. And this is not long after it went down from five shows per week.

Of course, like most decent people, I am outraged. But if I was in the programme’s target audience, would I give a monkey’s? Probably not.

When I was actually in Blue Peter’s target audience, I thought Blue Peter was one of the most boring programmes in the world. I just couldn’t understand the appeal.

There were only two different things that ever happened on Blue Peter. The first type involved a twatty presenter abseiling — and the presenters of my era were twatty. Take your pick from Tim Vincent, Stuart Miles or — worst of all — Katy Hill. No bloody wonder I didn’t watch it.

The other type involved making some rubbish makeshift doll’s house out of a bunch of ropey catchphrases. Here’s one I made earlier, sticky back plastic, yes, yes I get it. Ha ha ha.

Apart from that, I have no real memories of the programme from my childhood. In fact, all of my strongest memories of the programme are from when I was in my mid-teens.

Now I am more mature, and I think that Blue Peter is an important institution which is what puts the Great in Great Britain, or something like that. But here is the problem with Blue Peter: it is not aimed at children at all. It is aimed at adults or, more specifically, parents.

Most children’s programmes are, actually. You only had to look at the reaction to Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow, which split people into two camps: children and parents. The parents were shocked that Dick and Dom did not educate, and raised their arms in horror at the ‘Bogies’ game.

But these elements of no-holds-barred immaturity — and the fact that it didn’t provide advertising slots for the shit boy bands that are usually the staple of Saturday morning television — were precisely what kids found entertaining. As for me, the first time I saw it I was actually crying with laughter. I think it would be a sad state of affairs if po-faced parents banned children from being children.

That is why I am suspicious about the Blue Peter institution. I don’t find it offensive, but I think the reason it exists is to keep adults happy. Blue Peter is mostly about mythology and nostalgia more than anything else. It’s about watching the new presenter fail to flip a pancake. It’s about sticky back plastic and “here’s one I made earlier”. It’s about “what a lovely pair of knockers”. It’s about that elephant that did a massive shit on the floor.

But children don’t care about any of that stuff. If children like it as much as adults do, then that’s fair enough. But I suspect that they don’t. Part of me hopes that Blue Peter exists for as long as television exists. Part of me suspects that it really ought to be consigned to nostalgic clip shows.

I was all set to have a little bloggy party. “Another blogging milestone reached!” etc. There I was sitting pretty on the rankings of every blogger’s favourite website, Technorati.

doctorvee
98 blogs link here

That is the message that greeted me when I visited Technorati’s home page yesterday. Fans of round numbers will undoubtedly have noticed that 98 is tantalisingly close to 100 (which is technically less of a round number than it is two round digits and a straight digit).

Of course, we are talking about Technorati here, so I could probably get a more accurate idea of how many blogs are linking to this one by throwing darts. But still, I could say that 100 blogs link here according to Technorati, which is good enough for me.

So what did I see when I logged in to Technorati today?

This reminds me of the good old days of Ceefax. Page 360, motor sport news, was always one of my favourites. So I would call page 360 and keep my beady eye on that top line that scrolls through all of the page numbers. Almost there. 356, 357, 358, 359… WTF? 361?! I have to wait a whole while longer.

I wonder if one of the great promises of digital television will not be kept in the long run. Theoretically, Freeview offers viewers more choice than the old five analogue channels. At first it was true. As well as the five channels we already knew, ONdigital launched with plenty of sport and film channels, childrens’ channels and a variety of other niche channels.

That’s still kind of the same with Freeview today. But Freeview is becoming a victim of its own success. There are dozens of channels on Freeview. But once you take away the shopping and quiz channels, many of the remaining channels spend much of their time broadcasting shopping and quiz programmes, or advertising their own subscription services.

Having a Freeview channel is like gold dust for a broadcaster now. But this means that if a company only has one channel on Freeview it has to make the most of what it’s got. Now, instead of each channel catering for its own niche, channels are scurrying around chasing the average viewer. So instead of having loads more choice than we did in the old days, we now have slightly more choice.

It’s a bit like local radio stations. There are millions of them, but as far as I can tell they are almost all exactly the same. Listeners don’t get choice here. They get the same bland middle-of-the-road pop music with over-excited presenters yelping over the top. I mean, how many radio stations have a slogan along the lines of “Classic hits and today’s best music, only on 97.3 Scrotum FM”? All of them?

Freeview still has a lot of quality channels. But most of the choice comes from the BBC, Channel 4 or (at a stretch) ITV. Even then, you sense that this is only because each of these broadcasters have multiple Freeview slots to fill.

Disney has one channel on Freeview: ABC1. Its diet of cheaply imported, inoffensive daytime-friendly American comedy has barely changed in years. Yawn.

BSkyB has three channels: Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. That was, until they decided to replace Sky Travel with a general entertainment channel especially created for Freeview, Sky Three. So what about the fans of travel programmes? They’ll have to make do with gameshows that were originally shown on Sky One five years ago and cheaply imported American comedies. Boring. (Apart from Futurama, of course!)

Even Channel Five couldn’t manage to come up with interesting Freeview channels. Overnight it brings us The Great Big British Quiz, one of the worst quiz channels there is! Past the watershed, Five US is filled with wall to wall repeats of CSI. During the day we are treated to cheaply imported (imported from the past, that is) episodes of Happy Days and comedy backwater Joey. Pass me the pillow.

Five Life is so inconsequential, I won’t even go into it. All it ever seems to show is The Ellen DeGeneres Show (a cheaply imported American chat show). I shat my duvet out of boredom.

The latest culprit to contribute to the increasingly tumbleweed-infested airwaves is Viacom, whose sole Freeview channel is TMF. It used to be called The Music Factory. Just one problem. You’ll never find any music on it. This was understandable when it showed MTV programmes such as Newlyweds or Dirty Sanchez. For one thing, it brought MTV programmes into terrestrial homes which I guess you should be grateful for. And there was still a (tenuous) link to music.

But now TMF has brought into its schedule “classic comedies” such as Cheers, Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years. WTF!!! TMF is now even unrecognisable to what it was last week, never mind a few years ago! What do these programmes have to do with music?

Even the higher quality Freeview channels, such as ITV2, More4 or E4 show more than their fair share of American comedy and drama. Sky took off their travel channel to show more American programmes. MTV have changed their music channel beyond recognition to show more American programmes. Now Channel Five have an entire channel dedicated to it. So where has the variety gone? We may have more choice, but we no longer have variety.

But there is a silver lining! Ftn has been on Freeview almost since the very start, but it was easily the most uneventful channel on the lineup. This was despite all the potential. It could draw from the pool of Flextech channels, which surely have a few quality programmes to rub together. But whoever was responsible obviously didn’t care. Ftn was like a piece of shit on your shoe that you hate so much that you won’t even bother to wash it off, so instead you scrape your shoe all over the pavement as you walk along and hope that it just goes away. Yes, Ftn was exactly like that.

Until now, that is. On New Year’s Day, Ftn’s schedule was shaken up to include more quality programmes. The phone-in quiz shows and Thomas Cook TV segments have gone, and they’ve been replaced with repeats of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor