Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
The week of Monday 21 to Sunday 27 February 2022 was a week of rain. La Niña owns us now, and she made is bail about 300 litres of water out of a storeroom, maybe more. Still, I got a podcast done, and sorted out a lot of things behind the scenes.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 613: Recording a podcast while La Niña has her way with the entire east coast”
The week of Monday 22 to Sunday 28 June 2020 saw me pass the 100-day mark in my Quarantimes. Some COVID-19 restrictions have started to be lifted in NSW, but I still think it’s too early, in my totally not an expert opinion. We shall see. Meanwhile, The America is fucked.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 526: Forget the Quarantimes, listen to Korean techno DJs”
Last Sunday the Australian government launched its COVIDSafe contact tracing app, and my week of Monday 26 April to Sunday 3 May 2020 contained a lot talking about it — for which I’m not paid of course. However my writing for ZDNet was about longer-term issues of national cyber resilience and diplomacy. Mostly.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 518: COVIDSafe, cybers, and a lot of wind”Back when I was cool (roughly 1990-1995), I was executive producer of a four-track vinyl release of new Adelaide dance music: The Core EP, named after our magazine The Core. The lead track We Are The Future was by DAMC (Dave McCann) and DJ Brendan. And here it is.
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Dave writes:
[It] then got licensed to Rabbit City Records UK, released on the Australian EP 12″. You can also find it on a Vicious Vinyl CD compilation. Carl Cox gave this track a lot of spins in 1994.
Dave has also posted a list of all the music he made as DAMC.
Other tracks on the EP were by Aquila (Matthew Thomas), Quantization (Mat Farrington) and Maas Unconscious (a duo whose names escape me just now).
Here are the web links I’ve found for 06 May 2008, posted automatically.
The godfather of British electronic music, composer Tristram Ogilvie Cary OAM, died on 24 April 2008. He was aged 82.
Cary’s story is told in his Wikipedia profile and the Times Online obituary. If anyone outside the “serious music” world knows him, it’s usually for writing the soundtracks for early Doctor Who episodes and films (which he hated talking about), or the Hammer Horror movies Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971).
However Cary was also a pioneer of music synthesisers. Trained as a radar technician in WWII, he co-founded Electronic Music Studios (EMS), which created the first portable synthesiser, the VCS 3.
I worked briefly with Cary one summer as a programmer. He was director of the electronic music studio at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide. I wrote a digital filter in PL/1 (!) for what I think was the Synclavier synthesiser — though it may have been something else, because as a hardware hacker Cary was well wicked. In his studio, it was difficult to see where one machine ended and the next began, they were so cross-linked.
I remember he was particularly fascinated with the sounds of bells, which then were starting to become achievable through digital synthesis. It was the first time I’ve ever found my applied mathematics knowledge of Fourier Transforms to be even remotely useful.
If you enjoy any kind of electronic music, you should take an hour of your day to learn more about Tristram Cary. He made your world.
[Footnote: I found out about Tristram Cary’s death from a most unusual source: the end credits to Shaun Micaleff’s program Newstopia. The more I discover about you, Shaun, the more I think my initial assessment of you as an arsehole was a mistake.]