the corner office

I read this article about Black Sabbath which prompts a post which has been brewing for a few days.

This is 40 years old but I think it sounds as heavy now as it must have done back then:

I was recently digging around an obscure YouTube playlist, and came across this, which is a little less heavy but a whole lot more disturbing:

So this is a story about coincidences and connections. Last night Ronwen sat down to watch The Painted Veil on TV (stop reading if you don't like spoilers). I watched the opening part of it until she gave me the rough plot about the betrayal and how they eventually fall in love, and I said "in that case, the dude has to die at the end, right?" and Ronwen said "dunno" and checked on Wikipedia, and of course the dude dies at the end. With an apology for ruining the movie for her, I decided to stop watching and do some late-night surfing instead.

In the beginning of the movie, though, someone plays a tune on the piano. I recognised the tune, soon remembering that it's used in the beginning of a song called Dull Day by the Dead Brothers, an obscure Swiss (mostly) band who are something of a guilty pleasure of mine. Heading off to YouTube, I discovered that the tune was in fact the same, and is called Gnossiennes No 1 by composer Eric Satie.

It doesn't stop there. Reading a comment to the video, I discovered that Dull Day was originally performed by The Birthday Party, an early and influental post-punk band notable for a few reasons, one of which was that their lead singer was Nick Cave. Their original version is quite different but no less excellent. I own one Birthday Party CD which I bought about a decade ago and listened the hell out of for a month or two; I'd intended to get the rest of their stuff, but as with so many bands, never got around to it and apart from an every-few-years 'oh yes, should add them to my wishlist' recollection and mental note, have explored no further.

Just to add another twist, though, I was digging around tonight read, sadly, that Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S Howard, who wrote Dull Day, died two days ago of liver cancer.

Nearly 5 years ago I wrote a blog post about Kula Shaker, a psychedelic Britpop band who'd disappeared into the ether, leaving a trail of forgotten and neglected 90s-era fan websites.

As it turns out, they'd secretly gotten back together around the time I wrote that post, surfaced in 2006 and released a new album in 2007 called Strangefolk. And I got it for Krismis, and give or take a dodgy track or two, it's pretty damned good, if retro-esque psychedelic rock does it for you (as it does for me).

I discovered a new word this weekend: 'sharity'. There seem to be a few unrelated software products with that name, but it also refers to music buffs who rip their old, out-of-print vinyls to mp3 and share them on the Net. Since these albums have never made it to CD, and might never make it to CD, the copyright implications seem fairly innocuous.

I can't imagine these vinyl free-for-alls will last forever though (as one blogger said, all it'll take is for someone to post a bunch of 80's Madonna vinyls and they'll all get sued), but in the meantime, following these 'underground' bloggers, many of whom are encyclopaedically clued up, is a cool way to expand one's musical horizons.

After a bit of a hiatus I got back into the CD ripping. I've been making my way through the Rs, and currently on rotation is a compilation Ronwen bought a while ago called Rocking Against The System. It's a collection of South African music from the 80s, and it really is a trip listening to some of these old songs again. It's not that I was nuts about all of these songs when I was growing up, but a lot of these really were part of the theme music of the 80s in ZA, as it were, for better or worse. The passage of two decades and evocation of fond memories makes some of even the tiredest of these songs sound a whole lot better.

Of course, some of these tracks are Damned Fine Tunes, nostalgia notwithstanding. Most notably for me, the Psycho Reptiles' 'Monster From The Bog,' because, well, if you were a kid in the 80s in South Africa, then that ska-esque tune is well and truly imprinted in your psyche, and being schoolboys and all, the line 'There's a monster... in the bog' took on a whole meaning of its own. No Friends of Harry's 'Competition Rules' is a close second, because, well, NFOH rocked and I thought they were cool long before I knew what 'goth rock' was. I don't remember The Dynamics, but 'Thugs' is just plain groovy. Celtic Rumours weren't bad (and as a youngster it just seemed so wrong and too close to home when vocalist Kevin Van Staden died in a car accident), and listening now, stuff like Via Afrika's 'Hey Boy' just says '80s' in all its eccentricity, and songs like Falling Mirror's 'Johnny Calls the Chemist' just stand as plain well-crafted pieces of music.

The saddest thing is that given the limited market this music had, a lot of these albums are out of print (although Fresh Music is reissuing some of them), and there's very little to be learned about these bands. Ditto for anything as exotic as their music videos (a number of which, I realised, I can still clearly remember). Googling for the Reptiles comes back with around 200 hits, and the majority of them are for the handful of compilations their songs have been added to.

Anyway, I figured I'd do my bit for history, and see what sorts of cool things Google can do with this ;-)

Moon is hiding behind the clouds
The swamp is full of eerie howls
The monster from the bog
He's gonna come out all covered in slime
He's gonna make sure that he gets you this time

A few miles away there is a laboratory
Mixing up the chemicals and pumping them in the sea
All the toxic waste goes to the bed
And that's where the monster was born and bred

Only female flesh can satisfy his need
It's got to be alive and it's got to bleed
The monster from the bog
Yeah he's real ugly and he's slimy and mean
and when he rips your head off you're bound to scream

A few miles away there a laboratory...

The monster from the bog
Be careful what you throw down your kitchen sink
Cause it's not quite as harmless as you might think

Weeell, his hands are calloused and his teeth are green
The elephant hide man it's so obscene
The monster from the bog
When he knocks you on the head and drags you to his cave
It's not quite certain you'll be seen again

There's a monster... in the bog

The CD ripping continues; I hit the K's this weekend. Ronwen has a couple of Kula Shaker CDs. I remember they were kinda famous in South Africa for about 2 weeks in the mid-90s. I've given the CDs a listen before and I quite enjoy them - big fat slabs of Gibson-laden (late update: except that Crispian Mills played a Strat, pfeh) Brit-rock with a lot of cool 60s psychedelic references and fairly decent melodies. The Eastern spirituality stuff gets a bit too shee-wow for my agnostic tastes at times, but still worth listening to.

Depressing, though, is doing a Google search for the band. Yes, you hit the official site, but it's been neglected for about 5 years. Dead links, a 404-ing forum. Clicking around a few of the top-scoring fan sites, is even more depressing, because they're pretty much the same, and most of them still sporting all the hot new web design trends circa 1997.

Ragging the sites isn't my intent though - everybody's sites looked that lousy in the 90s - the sad thing is that these sites were once lively, labours of love... and they just ended up being... forgotten. That always gets me. No "it's been real, but this is now Officially An Archive," no "the proprietor of this website got married/had kids/forgot the password/died in a freak boating accident" messages to mark the end of the owner's relationship with the site. Just frozen-in-time snapshots where the links and webring images and counters and widgets slowly decay and break. A bit like a town where everybody was given 5 minutes to pack up and move out, never to return. Eerie, no finality, and "why did they leave" and "what was this place once like, when it was alive?" questions hanging thick in the air.

For every dynamic, up-to-date corner of the web that we regularly frequent, there must be a dozen of these ghost towns... years old, long forgotten by everyone but the search engines and the occasional passer-by. In the real world we bulldoze our history and relics and sling up new office parks and drive-thru takeaway joints on top of them. On the web, our history sits forever on free site hosters, on tripods and geocities and angelfires, and lingers for years on ISP servers, each relic a few kilobytes in a long-unsubbed user directory amidst tens of thousands of other user directories, where sysadmins almost never bother to root them out and rm -rf them.

The popular web is pushing a decade old, and if it's like that now, what will it be like in another decade's time, I wonder? How many of these old Kula Shaker sites will still be serving up a page or two to bored web surfers in the year 2015?

Unbelievable. I mentioned earlier this week that I was ripping my CDs, and was using a tool called cdparanoia. Well, cdparanoia finished off reading a single CD track last night, that has taken days (literally) to read. Good sense said I should have cancelled the process, but I was curious to see what the end product would sound like, and also because this is a CD that I really was heartbroken to see damaged.

The outcome is amazing. Playing this CD normally was a bit like listening to a scratched vinyl - jumping, and non-stop scratching and clicking noises. After days of whirring up and down, I now have a nearly perfect-sounding digital copy of the track I was ripping. It'll probably take more than a month of non-stop ripping to get the rest of the CD, but I'll do it when the rest of my CDs are done.

What CD am I so desperate to preserve? It's the Abelarde Sanction's Best of 2000 compilation CD. The deterioration isn't surprising - it was only ever a home-burned, supremely limited edition affair. And why am I so desperate to preserve it? Because it's the only CD that has me on it!

Way back in 2000, friends of mine had an electro-punk-ish band called Atmosphere Control Unit. They were between guitarists at the time, and I offered to jam with them until they found a "real" guitarist. I was (and am) an utterly unaccomplished guitar player, but my ham-fisted noise-making seemed to work and I ended up playing with the guys for well over a year... got to play a good few gigs, and we recorded one track at the time, a badly mastered version of which made it onto the Abelarde compilation. Playing in a band was an awesome experience and I was always grateful for the chance to do it.

I realised after the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2004, that this CD is the only copy I have of that recording, and so, it is... precious to me...

In addition to that, this compilation just takes me back to the "live music" days before Ronwen and I became complete hermits... amazing bands, amazing music, amazing experiences. Many of the bands, the venues and the people have moved on, so this CD is a once-off, small piece of history and a happy reminder of what it was all about.

I started ripping all my CDs this weekend. I decided I'd had enough of the grab a few, play 'em, re-file 'em schlep I've always gone through before. Being able to share everything on my home network and get to whatever music I want with a few button clicks is the way of the future, baby... As soon as you dive into it though, you realise it's not a simple job. What software to use, what encoding formats, what bitrates, decisions, decisions.

I've ended up using a nifty Linux command-line tool called abcde (A Better CD Encoder), which is a really simple front-end for really awesome pieces of software like cdparanoia and lame - tying in CDDB lookups, naming, tagging, the lot. One or two config file settings and off you go with a simple abcde.

Cdparanoia rocks in that it seems to do a really good job of "repairing" otherwise shaky tracks. A few of my CDs have been "sensitive" (polite way of saying poorly manufactured or succumbing to rot) and almost unlistenable on most CD players. Cdparanoia's done a decent job of constructing an error-free digital copy of the CDs, and I can listen to them again. The most frightening part is looking at the diagnostics as cdparanoia works its way through audio CDs... I'm amazed that they work at all!

The other major decision is what encoding format to use. With some of these damaged/dodgy CDs, I've encoded the files in flac, a lossless (and free) format which is an exact copy of the digital data on the CD itself. These "masters" can then be used to create mp3 or other "lossy" formats for normal listening. It would be great to keep everything in flac format and know that my CDs are fully backed up, but at a few hundred megs per CD, my hard drives will be overflowing in no time. The downside is that I'll probably want to redo all of this again some time (when terabyte disks come standard with new PCs), but I'll just treat that as another chance to amble down memory lane in the future :-)

For most of my (healthy) CDs, I've encoded them to mp3, using lame's default VBR presets. My ears aren't the greatest, nor are my speakers, earphones and sound card, and most sites suggest that the defaults are near-enough to CD quality for most plebs, so that's what I've relied on.

... there's only so much surf music you can listen to before it's time to re-wire your brain and mosey back into other musical styles. I think I passed twang overload about 2 days ago.

Many many many years ago a phenomenon shook the Net: Afrosquad. I still have all their movies. Then, one day, *poof*, the domain disappeared and they were no more.

I got to thinking about them a few minutes ago, and pointed Firefox at www.afrosquad.com, 'cause you know, maybe they'd come back one day. Lo! In a serendipitous twist, the site came back online a few days ago. Not much there yet, but one of the founders has been bloggin' for a while, too.

(The reason I was thinking of Afrosquad, actually, was watching this similarly-lo-fi-styled home-made music video of a Deadbolt ditty aptly named "Patches". Deadbolt rocks. Patches the evil clown rocks, too.)