Google Moogle

Loving Google’s Moog synth on their Google Doodle spot today, in honour of Robert Moog.

Here’s a quick challenge for you. Play this riff and let me know which classic 80’s song it’s from:

C C [ [ + + [ [
2 2 9 9 [
Q Q I I P

See it here: http://www.google.com/doodles/robert-moogs-78th-birthday
Official Google blog post: A tribute to Bob Moog, sonic doodler

A nice Spotify app – Boil the frog

This is easily my favourite of the many Spotify apps out there: Boil the frog

Boil the Frog  is a Spotify App that will create playlists that gradually take you from one music style to another by analysing adjacent styles and creating an arbitrary path from one to the other.

Sadly not available to the public yet, but the creator of it, Paul, kindly did me one that went from Dubstep to Beethoven. Check it out: Dub-hoven

Gigging with Sylver Tongue

Here I am playing keyboards for Charlotte Hatherley’s awesome new outfit Sylver Tongue on Sat 28th April, at The Waiting Room, Stoke Newington.

More pics on Midnighta GoGo Facebook page.

Look out for the album later this year – it’s gonna be electrophonic!!

Sylver Tongue on Facebook & website.

Fiona Banner at Tate Britain

Wasn’t expecting big aircraft at Tate Britain when we popped in today, but they seemed to have some.

HARRIER

Although the caption was going on about it being a Harrier aircraft and looking like a dead bird, we thought it looked much more like a dead shark being lifted out of the sea. And painting a sort of feather effect on the wings and fuselage we thought was over egging the pudding a bit.

But that apart from that, you can’t deny the impact of a decommissioned warplane hanging vertically in an art gallery!

JAGUAR

Meg patiently stood by the archway so I could take my ‘arty’ shot. It was well worth the effort, yeah?

Anyway, it was a good exhibition and the TB has more good stuff in than I thought, including modern art….the Tate Modern hasn’t nicked it all, after all!

avɑ̃ɡaʁd

First Boris…

…and now this.

Well done idiots!

Steampunk (without the punk)

Visited Kew Bridge Pumping Station today. Very nice indeed if you like a bit of steam whooshing around, powering huge but finely engineered lumps of iron and brass. Here are a few snaps to give a flavour of the place.

Not an invented Steampunk set of dials, but a real set on a triple stage 1910 steam engine:

Big bad machinary (painted a nice green)

It’s important to have Corinthian columns in your massive steam machinary.

Giant wrenches for when the telly goes on the blink.

BUT WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE BYPASS VALVE FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE?

Are you sure?

This was a lovely machine. Enormous, but virtually silent except for pleasing whirrings and hummings.

Machinery.

Very Large Beam (Two of these, driven by 90 inch diameter cyclinders pumped drinking water round London in the 19th Century and early 20th)

A fascinating visit & highly recommended. Check the dates to make sure the biggest engines are running when you go for full impact.

Home

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Bridge_Steam_Museum

I like Brian Eno

I hope we all watched the Brian Eno documentaries last night?

This bit particularly struck me:

“Kids now, they seem to have very little of the snobbery about music I had, and the downside of that is that it doesn’t play a kind of ideological part in their lives. It is slightly surprising to realise that something that had enormous meaning for you doesn’t have so much meaning for them. It’s just that the currency is devalued in some way. So what I look out for is: what does that for them now? Because I assume there’s always a currency through which people are communicating with one another. So they do pass music around and they appear to love music, but what they really seem to like is the communal experiences that music can give rise to. So what they really like is going to festivals, what they really like is exchanging music on Facebook, not for the music, but for the fact of exchange, the communication.”

Spot on. It’s obvious when he puts it like that – people don’t care about the art of music, they just love swapping the tokens of culture. Rather brilliantly, they showed crowds of people worshipping Coldplay at a festival as the above quote was spoken, ironic as Eno produced their last album…

Creationist Comedy Jokes

When you have a believe system as silly as creationsism it’s all too easy to make lovely jokes about it.

So here they are..

When you have a believe system as silly as creationsism it’s all too easy to make lovely jokes about it.

So here they are..