KK joined a group of record producers (including Steve Levine and Simon Gogerly) for a geeky discussion on the changing face of record production (hosted by B&W Music Lab)
iTunes users listen to the (free) podcast here – http://xr.com/bwpodcast
alternatively an mp3 version and text transcription is here – http://blog.bowers-wilkins.com/lab/
What are dreams? .. I’m still trying to figure out the impossible limbo between asleep and awake.. I feel like most of us I lead a double life, and so have recently been very much exploring the grey (or not so grey) link (if any) between two distinct existences.
Waking up / going to sleep.. I don’t seem to be the only one with this problem. My laptop takes about a fortnight to power up or shut down. It seems to spend more time ‘thinking’ than Steven Hawking but has yet to contribute anything of value to society..
My most original ideas come to me lucidly by night and my work whilst awake is very much about adventuring into strange otherworlds, of which the dreamworld is one. The portals are not always obvious and often hide in the periphery, to vanish instantly and annoyingly on conscious inspection. It’s a bit like trying to get through to Vodafone customer services – the connection is nebulous at best and you never really know if you will ever get through (and how long it will actually last when you do).
I’m inspired in my musical explorations by the work of Dali and Gaudi, as well as someone who famously sketched many of his wildest ideas in the small hours, the great polymath himself Da Vinci – sculpter, painter, anatomist, inventor, astronomer, MC..
No one really knows why we dream. No one’s entirely sure why we even sleep. Perhaps as Carl Sagan suggested, it’s simply a mammalian hangover to protect us from the nightly cold, and large predators who want to eat our small furry bodies.
The science of sleep is fascinating, for example did you know that gut feeling of suddenly falling is literally your blood pressure dropping? – that night-time feeling we all know well, the ‘hypnic jerk’ happens when drifting off to sleep your body can mis-interpret the brain sleeping as the onset of death(!), and so drops blood pressure and sends an electric pulse out to attempt to revive your body, often resulting in you waking up with that strange but familiar AAAH! WTF!? thing..
I woke up oddly this morning, ripped brutally from my vivid nocturnal adventures, I awoke instantly though not entirely lucid – the kind of awake one is ten seconds after snorting vodka off a teaspoon (I don’t recommend this by the way).
So here I am.. slowly phasing back into the ‘real world’ (whatever that means) with my daily (re)birth trauma accentuated by a mild but irritating hangover. It dawns on me now that I possibly had a little too much wine yesterday afternoon/evening.
Ah, seduced yet again by the pleasures of the senses – so ironic many of the few bonuses reality has to offer is escaping it in one way or another, and there’s always a painful pay-off. Perhaps death is nothing to be feared, possibly the ultimate pleasurable experience even. We’ll all find out sooner or later let’s face it, there’s no hurry.
Life is for living as the cliché goes. Which brings me neatly to wine.
There are a couple of absolutely stunning wines available at the moment which (despite my current state) I simply must recommend you. For white Marlborough region Sauvignon Blanc is just awesome this year, and red, pretty much any New Zealand Pinot Noir is always a great bet. Californian Duck Pond label is reeally good too right now (especially the Merlot). New World is the way I reckon. French wine of course is always best enjoyed in France itself – they just don’t export the good stuff, or rather when they do, they weigh it like gold dust (perhaps they fly it Ryanair)
Now to drink wine properly of course we all know one needs to *slurp* – allowing oxygen to flow around tongue activating the necessary sense of smell which combines with the base of taste to give a full spectrum of flavour (our tongue sensor is 4 bit, our nose -16 bit). So only neck the really bad stuff basically. Although lately I’ve been applying The Slurp to all manner of drinks, lemonade, tea.. it certainly enhances taste in general. Okay, this advice is hardly rocket surgery but it’s a neat thing to bear in mind, and it can also bug the hell out of your drinking buddies/dinner date if you so wish.
Morning for me is centered not around wine, but a different beverage. Yes I am a national stereotype. I am of course talking about TEA.
Ahh, just typing that made me feel good.
From a teapot mind.. none of this teabag malarkey (or teabagging for that matter, let’s keep this clean).. Of course if you’re in the US or Europe never attempt serious tea-drinking, unless you enjoy another great British pastime, the art of secretly craving disappointment at every opportunity – stick to coffee which is generally far superior globally.
Tea has to be one of the high points of British culture. Don’t get me wrong I’m not being ‘patriotic’ here, I couldn’t care less about the Queen, Teletubbies, Benny Hill or bad dentistry, I just really like tea (interesting the word patriotic comes from father as used by the state and church (pope/papa/our father) to give a sense of family structure, hierarchy, etc)
I heard the other day the Apollo moon landings cost 1 US dollar per citizen, Vietnam $3, and the recent economy/bank bailout, about $4000 per US voter.. even with 40 years of inflation that’s some diff.. Perception is a funny thing though. Money doesn’t really exist of course. The jury’s out on whether we even exist in any real sense of the word, but here we are so I guess we’d best get on with it and get spending our nonexistent money on nonexistent things.
The Future.
Ok we don’t yet live on biodomes on the surface of Mars, but there is some evidence the future (as promised in 1980’s documentary Back To The Future) is finally here.
Yes a working hoverboard !
http://www.futurehorizons.net/hoverboard.htm
Ok, so it’s basically a crude hovercraft powered by a lawnmower engine but still..
Or how about this cyborg?..
http://scienceroll.com/2009/03/14/usb-finger/
OK, I look around, it’s hardly Metropolis (visually) is it? .. Ever seen Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings? That is what I expected 2009 to look like.. Asimov stuff..
Oscar Niemeyer lived to 101, though perhaps spent too long asleep looking for cool designs in dreamworld, if only he had been more prolific here (and Gaudi wasn’t hit by that bloody tram) there are so many ugly buildings…
Not that any of us notice as we’re all looking at screens writing nonsensical rambling blogs (exhibit A) or telling everyone how bored we are on Twitter..
Yes I’m now too a resident of Twitterland (www.twitter.com/kkmusic ) .. I don’t (yet) have a USB finger tho.. a matter of time perhaps
Anyway my musical Park Guell will be open later this year, will keep you posted, you will of course be the first to know especially if you are brave enough to click here and join my mailing list
Meantime, if we meet in the dreamworld, do stop for a cuppa..
KK
I’m writing to you on this historic day, as Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th US President.
It’s historic of course because Mr Obama happens to be black, and so today marks the (hopeful) end of the quite ludicrous racial prejudices which have plagued the country for years. Quite how the melanin content of someone’s skin should be such an issue is beyond me, but anyway, it’s happened, it’s fantastic and a grandoise backdrop of Washington celebrations and a new, hopeful America dawns on my TV as I blog away on my little laptop in frosty London
So, Jan 20th, already.. WTF!? time flies huh.
I thought instead of my usual rambling words, I’d share a few interesting ‘pub quiz’ facts I’ve found out in these first 20 days of 2009 ..
1. Cellphones are not likely to be unsafe in flight
Airplane cockpits have apparently been shielded from electromagnetic interferance since the 1960s. Huh?
The main reason mobile phone calls are not permitted on planes is that when your phone looks for a signal at 30,000 feet it can hit hundreds of aerial towers at once, which causes technical hassles for the mobile operators, in that simply put, they’re not sure how to bill you for the call. No mystery there then.
2. The gas in an average flat screen TV is 17,000 times more Global Warming than CFCs
Irony in action if, like me, you’ve sat in front of one of these things and watched ‘Planet Earth’ for hours on end.
Nitrogen trifluoride (or NF3) is a greenhouse gas just like CFC, though it’s much much more destructive. It just happens to be not covered in the Kyoto agreement and therefore legal. Flat screens are so popular, emissions of NF3 are almost doubling yearly. We all value this meaningless crap over our planet, it makes me sad. I listen to (now) President Obama’s inspiring speech, and hope he, America, myself and the Western world can indeed change in the ways he expresses so well.
3. The printing press was pioneered by the Catholic Church
Yes, we all know their big fairytale was quite the blockbuster, but in fact even this was not what got the printing press off the ground. Fact is in 1455 only a handful of people could read, so replicating a book would have been pretty pointless (even by religion’s standards).
No, what they needed (at the time) was money. So rather entrepreneurially they decided to make some. Not in terms of printing bills (that would of course be pure fraud, which a religious institution would never be guilty of), no just mere exploitation, printing small handwritten notes they called “Indulgences”.
These notes would ‘forgive’ the bearer of a particular ’sin’ and literally buy their way out of Purgatory (a kind of middle hell).. Anyway, these became extremely popular across Europe, so popular in fact that the old method of handwriting them was soon overtaken by printing, and so the newly invented printing press boomed!
4. Leave the lights on!
I was taught as a child not to be wasteful, and in these economic and environmentally aware times, I have been doubly aware of the simple act of turning off the lights when I leave a room. Turns out I’ve been wrong. The new type of lightbulb uses most of it’s energy on ‘bootup’ and therefore turning it off and on all day makes it highly inefficient!
So now, if you’re leaving a room but plan to come back (within a few hours anyway, not like, ever) leave the light on!
5. Mouthwash was originally a floor cleaner
Listerine, the original mouthwash was invented in the 1800s as a surgical antiseptic. It was later sold as a floor cleaner, but it wasn’t very popular.
So, in quite a brilliant piece of PR spin, in the 1920s they decided to abandon the cleaning racket and market it as a new product instead – a “mouth-wash”. Later, the brilliant advertiser involved said, “we didn’t so much invent mouthwash, as invent halitosis“. Shame no-one told my science teacher to drink the floor cleaner instead of endless cups of foul coffee (urgh, can still remember the stench).
Well, no doubt I’ve bored you enough. Back to America, check out this wicked 17 gigabyte photo of Yosemite..
KK
Last night I had the most horrific nightmare.
Like most people I generally dream in colour, but when I have a nightmare it is always in the same vivid tone – a kind of dark, high contrast black and white (those of you with ‘Raw Fear‘ will have seen Simon Marsden’s stunning photography, it’s not unlike this)
Anyway, I’ve never been able to fathom why this is the case.. maybe I caught a glimpse of a black and white horror film when I was a child?, or perhaps it’s a universal thing (do you dream in colour or b&w? are your good dreams the same tone as your bad ones?)
I personally think it has something to do with the abstraction of time, I even find watching very old cinematic footage disturbing sometimes, kind of like looking at ghosts..
I read of a study recently which found that people who grew up before colour television dream almost exclusively in black and white, and the rest of us in colour, suggesting the media has a lot to do with it. This however doesn’t explain it, after all I don’t dream in a kind of 1980’s video hue, and I doubt todays children dream in a YouTube pixelated style. Besides, my monochromatic reveries only apply to the dark and twisted.. the plain old surreal and sexy ones broadcast in glorious technicolor.
Back to my nightmare. Like most vivid dreams, the intensity was more in the mood and feeling, the details of the ‘plot’ have since vanished into the ether. Needless to say it was quite Saw/Hostel esque and involved some crazed butcher chasing me and cutting people up and me waking up caught in the grip of the primeval fear of the hunted which nearly all life on earth experiences daily.
We are fortunate that for most of us human beings such intense fear is limited to the bedroom (missus), that said the insanity of the horrific genocide of Rwanda 14 years ago (which left behind 500,000 machete’d corpses) has flared up again in the Congo. Africa, the world, humanity, we’re in such a bloody mess, it’s daunting.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the now trivial matter of mon petit cauchemar.
In the cold light of day I can see the intense animalistic feeling of hunted/hunter in such a dreamstate are related to the fact that largely dormant part of the brain, the R Complex (which has evolutionarily been there since we were even smaller and less furry) wakes up and flexes it’s crude reptilian feelings a little in the night when the more ‘human’ areas of the brain are resting or busy sorting out memories (allegedly one of the main purposes of dreaming).
Aside from this, I realised this morning I have not the faintest idea what causes bad dreams, so I wiki’d it..
“Nightmares are typically caused by illness, anxiety, stress, bereavement..”
ok neither one of which I’ve suffered from recently
“..or are alcohol related”
ah.
Ok I have to confess I am typing this with something of a hangover.
Last night was the launch night for an album I produced earlier this year for a fun new band called Elova. A three piece (one piece of which is essentially just a wooden box), Elova are fellow Devonians (a part of the ‘West Country’ here in the UK), and onstage are this multicoloured explosion of upbeat party pop, musically they range from 1940’s Tom & Jerry style cartoon music to soulful 70’s funk. Was certainly a fun and different thing for me to be involved in (they kept a ‘behind the scenes’ blog if you want gory details on that). As for the record, it’s called ‘Sweetbox‘ and you can get it (and more info etc) on their site..
The other album I produced this year, was of course the new Mediaeval Baebes record, ‘Illumination‘
Some of you from the USA or Europe might have caught the fair maidens in action on their recent tour, they are doing a few dates in the UK around Christmastime and then back to the US for a longer tour in the new year. Illumination will be available generally in the new year and is available at the shows and on their website.
Winter has really set in here in London. Cold and with approximately 40 minutes of daylight per day, it’s now the middle of the afternoon and already dark.. Later it’s ‘Bonfire Night‘ and there are already explosions in the frosty London air (great for the aforementioned hangover). In reality, the UK’s Guy Fawkes Night lasts from September until January when the last fireworks shop in town returns to its default state of a sad looking disused unit. It’s like our equivalent of 4th July but with hints of good old British misery and drunkeness. I’m actually sat here with a large cup of tea, feeling quite the stereotype..
Anyway, I shall have to drink my tea and type quicker as I’m sooned to be dragged to the fireworks display at Alexandra Palace, which this year is apparantly accompanyed by a mock German Oktoberfest (ironically the huge building was used as a POW camp for captured Germans during WW2) .. anyway it all sounds rather hideous and being a bone fide nerd, I would rather of course stay here basking in the warmth of my laptop screen.. but such is life..
I actually had the geniune Bavarian bierkellar experience a few weeks ago when visiting Munich, during which I drank my bodyweight in Weissbeir (I can’t remember if I had nightmares, nor indeed anything much of that day)
Munich is a very pretty historic looking city which oddly seems to have more cathedrals than houses, about one per street, sometimes two. Anyway something struck me as I wandered past these huge old churches..
It’s well known that monolithic towers, church spires, monuments, Effiel Tower etc are pretty unsubtle phallic symbols… is it me or are some cathedral entrances decidedly vagina shaped?!
Perhaps it’s sexually frustrated architects, or like the phallic towers, some kind of subtle symbolism (birth/rebirth?..). I dunno..
from the sublime to the ridiculous.. nun urinals
Nun Urinals
..or something like that.
Two spanking new KK videos below
Like buses, two arrived at once.. enjoy!
Magic Spell
Dust
It’s been running for a while now and we’re all still here.
The Large hadron Collider has finally been switched on in history’s biggest experiment, an attempt to recreate the conditions of the big bang and unlock the mysteries of the universe.
14 years work and £4.5 Billion invested (500 million from the Uk alone, or about £10 per Uk citizen if you like), the LHC is an extraordinary, gigantic machine, manned by over 6000 scientists from all over the world. It is basically a 27km circular tunnel, frozen to deep space temporatures, 100m underground below the France/Swiss border in which they are attempting to spin two protons (steered by superpowered magnets) round in opposite directions at 99.9% the speed of light and then smash them together to recreate the conditions of the big bang! It’s a little ambitious to say the least.
Over breakfast we watched as news teams tried desperately to make a bunch of camerashy scientists in front of a few monitors look newsworthy, a bemused BBC presenter spoke over the even said “well its not exactly the space shuttle is it?” (rrriight.)
I must admit having read a fair amount on the subject, and for comfort, the myriad spin press releases by CERN to counter the doomsday writers (a lot of which have been dismissed as Cassandras or even strangely disappeared from the web of late.. erm who was it that invented the internet again? hmmm), I was a tiny bit nervous this morning I admit (if only that my last meal would be cornflakes).
As one YouTuber put it 6 mins after Switch On – “Dammit I’ve already slit my wrists!”
Disaster is of course very very unlikely, the LHC is not likely to produce a black hole anywhere near big or powerful enough to swallow up the entire planet, or that wormholes into new dimensions will be opened at these energy levels, killer stranglets will not be released which will turn our universe to mush, etc etc.. though of course these stories, though unfounded, can’t be totally written off as totally impossible – we’re dealing with a whole frontier of the unknown here.
The LHC is perhaps however best explained via the medium of rap -
In fact once today’s press formalities are over and (most of the world) has lost interest, the two more likely dates for a manmade apocalypse would be Oct 21st, ie when the first collisions are made, or in the new year when after the holidays they reboot the LHC at the full power of 14Tev. The end of humanity (the Earth itself is pretty tough) is far more likely to be in the hands of nature (eg a meteor), disease, poverty, overpopulation, genocide or terrorism/war in the hands of religious/political nutters. In short, the LHC is the least of our worries.
It’s not really a worry at all in fact – it’s Hope – and welcome evidence that humankind can come together in the pursuit of knowledge and intelligence in the reptilian face of materialism, greed, power, dogma, superstition and ritual. And the rest.
It is far more possible that the work achieved at CERN over the next few years will advance science and our understanding of the universe considerably, and in a way which could eventually help SAVE us all, give us a good future. The risk (if any) is negligable.
“The world will not come to an end”, says Professor Stephen Hawking (who I’m honoured to hear has my latest Cd “Telescopes”!). When the true genius was asked if he absolutely had to choose between the space program and the LHC, he said – “That is like asking which of my children I would choose to sacrifice. Both the LHC and the Space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out.”
A safety study by CERN itself said the following on safety – “Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists.”
It’s of course the elusive Higgs Boson (the ‘god particle’) which they are hoping to find (or not – either would be a result), and there is of course dark matter, anti matter and more to uncover.. all sorts of wild possibilties over the next few years – excitingly the possible discovery of proof of extra dimensions!One of the wildest possiblities is that the machine, once fully operational, could be effectively the very first time machine – this would effectively make this ‘Year Zero’ for temporal travel.. ie vistors from the future could only visit back as far as today.
Time travel is of course only a theory, but proven by Einstein’s colleague Kurt Gödel in 1949 (based on Einstein’s theory of relatively), but not yet fundamentally disproven. So if you see a car with flaming tyre tracks, or strange people in tin hats appear from nowhere in the next few months, ask them for some lottery numbers..
As for the practical implications, of course we have CERN to thank for this thing we’re sat looking at now, the Internet, which they invented 20 years ago of course. And of course there’s the PET scan, etc, if you really want to know where your £10 went.
It is however knowledge, exploration and inspiration here that is the most valuable asset to humanity. Exciting times. This is real history.
Find out more about KK’s “Telescopes” project at www.KKTELESCOPES.com !
Some recent reviews of KK’s new album ’Telescopes’ :
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It’s not often you get to listen to an album you just don’t want to end… well, this is the case with KK’s new album “Telescopes,” which is as cosmic and lyrical album as I’ve heard in a long time.KK has worked with the likes of Eno and Bjork, so he brings us his music from high up. Pianos flicker, synthesizers rustle, percussion tinkles, strings swell, and over all this KK himself speaks and sings, sounding remarkably like Green of Scritti Politti.…
Many of these songs drift and sigh like The Beloved in interstellar space. The story is of the vast number of planets, stars and galaxies in our universe, a tale told with a real sense of melody and emotive underlying chords. Wonderful stuff.
Some songs (for example “Pale Blue Dot” and the swoonsome “Dust”) feature female vocals also. Mixed into one too-short album, this work deserves real success. So, I didn’t want this one to end. So I played it once again…
Terrascopic
Terrascopic.co.uk
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Clearly not one to sell himself short, KK proclaims himself a “21st Century Genius” and although the name may not be familiar to many his CV boasts work with such diverse artists as Bjork, Eno and Britney Spears. ‘Telescopes’ is very much his own work though and it’s a journey through space, time and continents, largely based on electronic music.
Dispensing astrological wisdom, KK also knows how to write music that is attractive and listenable. ‘Magic Spell’ and ‘Voyager’ are made up of serene instrumental parts whilst ‘Pale Blue Dot’ takes the dreamlike state one step further with a beautiful sequence of synth melodies. Here, the journey of space exploration makes perfect sense.
Further on in the album, ‘Codebreaker’ mixes Eastern mysticism with beats and KK’s own Green Gartside-like singing. KK comes unstuck the more inflated his ego seems to get; ‘Ancestor Simulation’, for example, begins with the noirish atmosphere of a detective story before collapsing into a bombastic arrangement which wouldn’t sound out of place on ‘Riverdance’.
KK has created a concept album which flows nicely; capturing the ideas of an artist who has clearly learned from the vast range of talent he has collaborated with in the past.
Leonards Lair
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….
The press release says that he’s a technical wizard who has worked with master technical geeks Brian Eno and Bjork. Press releases are sometimes dubious, but after hearing the album, it’s pretty clear that this guy is a technical geek first-class.The mixing, instrumentals and sound effects are some of the most dazzling displays I’ve heard.
This a sci-fi concept album with plenty of geeky lyrics, and it sounds a lot like David Bowie’s 21st century masterpiece Heathen. (Apologies to anyone who wanted to know what the concept is about. I’m not that interested in deciphering it… I haven’t even gotten around to trying to figure out what Thick as a Brick was about.) There are so many colorful ideas and instrumental developments jam-packed in relatively short tracks that it’s insane. Amazingly so, these wild, unpredictable developments are so well-done that most of these tracks hold together very well.
Take “Dust” for instance. It’s just four minutes long, and it’s as though he worked pretty extensively on exploring different atmospheres and textures to fit in there. It’s really fun to listen to. “Magic Spell” is a masterpiece! If you’re a sucker for dream-pop/shoegazing stuff, it’s worth going out of your way to hear it. It’s one of the album’s most wild examples of this scatter-brained instrumental development, plus I adore that intoxicating, sort of atonal groove that pops up every once in awhile. Really nice stuff!
“Andromeda” is a fun, cinematic instrumental that sounds like a Starship Troopers battle piece. “Ancestor Simulation” is also a sort of cinematic song, with an obvious Asian influence. The ties to world music gives it a cool, exotic flavor. We can also pick up on some Indian influences in a pair of back-to-back songs “Infinity” and “Codebreaker.”
KK brought his head out of the fishbowl, briefly, to deliver a relatively normal song called “Paradise Found.”, a very pleasant ballad with a rather gorgeous, earthly atmosphere. The repetitive melody is fine, and has enough staying power to keep it sounding fresh for the whole five minutes. The first 30 seconds of “Pale Blue Dot” is excellent and earns second-place to “Magic Spell.” It’s based on four chords, which really raises a sort of mystical atmosphere… and of course, the highly developed instrumentation standards intensifies that emotion.
It’s really exciting for me to get an early look at this talent with a fresh debut album, and there’s a lot of promise. The geeky lyrics are definitely cool and cheesy (the way they were meant to be), and I was really dazzled by a lot of this.
Track by track highlights:
Dewdrop
This is a one-minute instrumental (although there is some vocalizations … though they were seemingly altered by a computer). A mid-range twinkly piano plays some scales while some synthesizer orchestrations pick up dramatically. It was designed to give us that outer space feel, which I think it did rather well. It makes an impression despite the short running length.
Dust
Listen to that technology! This guy really knows how to work those computers! This is a sort of spaced-out extravaganza with so many instrumental ideas packed into such a small amount of space that it’s almost jarring. I don’t dare count how many different sorts of instruments that can be heard throughout this… it’s like counting dust, I guess. Amazingly, these instrumental sections come in and out almost at random, and it doesn’t sound so incredibly awkward. You’re walking a dangerous line when you want to clutter up your songs with music, because usually it just sounds cluttered. But this is pretty fun to listen to.
Magic Spell
This is definitely worth listening to! It’s a lot like “Dust” except the ideas are even more extravagant, and the technology is about as dazzling as it gets. What’s more, the harmonies pass the test this time with flying colors. When the song first plays, we’re treated to an intoxicating, sort of atonal groove… and what ensues can only be described as “some really weird stuff.” It’s fun to listen to, also. Once again, there’s so many instruments and ideas that it’s impossible to count them…
Andromeda
I guess this would be a space military march, or something. Once again, this really sounds great. It’s not quite as busy as “Dust” or “Magic Spell” (and therefore, I guess, not as dizzying). But it’s still quite impressive in the technological front. We have a typical militaristic drum beat, and slow build-ups of different instruments. Notably, some Medieval-sounding vocals. This is fairly typical for something in any movie soundtrack, except I really like that wildly bending operatic soprano and I suppose that cool, sci-fi bass-line. Paradise Found
Hey, this is almost a normal song. And he’s even pretty good when he decides to go down this route. This is mostly a piano pop tune with a few guitars and light synthesizers added to the mix. The sound effects are brought to a surprising minimum! The melody isn’t so much hooky, but earthly. Nicely done!
Pale Blue Dot
The beginning is really mystical, thanks in part to a simple but effective harmonies, which raises the alien feeling of it. The sound effects, of course, are the whole point of the song. Those radio voices at the beginning were really cool, coupled with the atmospheric instrumentation. Crunch This is another one of those weird spacey songs that consists of cheesy spoken dialogue and funny synthesizers. It’s a little more “out-there” than “Sol 3,” not to mention longer. Bringing in those synthesized choir in the middle was great. This is the sort of thing you’d probably get at a planetarium show. (The final third is a dead-ringer for that.)
Michael Lawrence
Don Ignacio’s Music Reviews
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to buy or find out more about KK’s Telescopes visit www.kktelescopes.com
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We humans have a disturbing tendancy to think of ourselves as more important than anything else, the paragon of creation. Taking longterm survival as a measure of success as a life form, we are by no means successful.
Even the ill fated Dinosaur will likely (long term) to have fared better than us lot.
If you’re really keen to know, Arthropods are in fact the most successful type of living life form (on Earth anyhow), many species in this group (for example spiders and crabs) have been around a lot longer than us primates and yet have remained almost unchanged by evolution, unlike us of course who have evolved considerably over the millenia (with the exception of the current US president and Scouting For Girls fans).
Bizarre fact about arthropods: their heads and bodies can (for a time) function quite independently. In fact, in the case of the infamous preying mantis, the female often decapitates the male before sex, which apparently (with the brain safely separated from it) the body is left free of sexual inhibitions and therefore insuring she gets a ‘right good seeing to’. She of course then eats whats left of the male afterwards. Romance isn’t dead after all.
It may simply be limits set by having predators, disease, or starvation, but somehow wild animal populations manage to remain under control. It’s as if a natural form of family planning has evolved as an evolutionary strategy for the greater good. Animal birth rates typically remain stable, and don’t escalate in the way the human population is growing exponentially.
The current population escalation is scary to say the least:
In 1800 the human population on Earth was 1 billion. It is currently 6 billion. In 2040 (at the current rate of expansion) it will be 12 billion, by 2080; 24 billion!, 2120; 48 billion!, and so on..
The land (let alone the resources we have) cannot (and will not of course) support this amount of people. Drastic, and likely horrific things will happen, if we don’t control it somehow.
A brilliant example of this exponential growth given in Richard Dawkins famous book ‘The Selfish Gene’ -
“Taking South America as an example, current (1975) population of 300 million, many malnourished, individuals. In less than 500 years the population there alone will reach a point where people in standing position would form a solid human carpet across the entire continent.. in 1000 years they will be standing on each others shoulders a million deep, and in 2000 years the mountain of people travelling outwards at the speed of light would reach the edge of the known universe. “
It’s all about perspective. My last birthday was my Billionth. I had reached the grand old age of 1,000,000,000 (seconds). Thats a lot of candles, or shots of tequila.. (i’m not sure if some sort of crisis is in order, but gifts gladly accepted)
Point is, Mother Earth got a lot more crowded in that one year since i last blew out my candles – an increase (ie the surplus after equalising births and deaths) of 70 million people. Another 70, 000, 000 mouths to feed – for perspective, the same amount as the entire current population of the UK. What is the solution?
It is well documented that one cause of high birth rates is poverty. The developing countries are reaching an evermore crucial state. Alongside abject poverty, starvation and the horrors that we in the West have almost become immune to hearing/caring about, there are major issues with education and birth control. The grim alternatives (war, famine, disease..) are cropping up more and more frequently in the place of us sorting out the world’s poverty problem (and therefore it’s population/resources problem).
It’s not of course that simple, but it is a major part of the problem/solution. As the exponential growth curve is generational, one very simple way we can slow it down is this: to try and have children later in life (for example at age 30 rather than 18), again going back to the poverty thing, we see this trend happening more often in economically comfortable environments, so this perhaps happens naturally when the circumstances are good.
Now I’m not being misanthropic here, I just think we humans need to learn a bit of humility (!). Overpopulation could literally dry out the earth’s resources in a matter of years. We’re already seeing this happen with the current grain-food-oil flow problems. We won’t necessarily ‘be alright’.. no one is going to ‘fix it for us’ (as citizens/consumers all of us it is so easy to become sedantry about these things). We’re arrogant enough naturally (as a species) about our divine place in the universe, and the way things could go, we won’t last that much longer. The arrogant always, always fall with a mighty bang.
I’ll sign off on a slightly lighter note.. Mr Bill Hicks explains The Dinosaur to creationists :
Life is currently mediaeval mayhem, as I’ve found myself in the company of six fair maidens known as the Mediaeval Baebes.
I’m home in London producing the girls’ sixth album, and we’re having a blast. It’s sounding fantastic.
More on this later, for now here are a few ‘behind the scenes’ pics of us recording at Air studios..
