Oppenheimer, The Weddoes and some site updates.

Discovered the Irish band Oppenheimer via last.fm recently. Downloaded their first album the other day, listened to the first few songs before getting straight onto Amazon to order it. They are an electronic indie band playing quirky pop songs with jangly guitars and analog synths, which is of course right up Stephens street. There seems to be just two of them in the group – a guitar player and a drummer, accompanied by lots of (mostly) retro sounding electronics. Me and Matt should stop waiting for a bass player to turn up from nowhere and start doing stuff on our own I reckon. Inspired now.

Also been listening to El Rey, the new Wedding Present cd. There were a few grumbles on the mailing list saying it wasn’t up the usual standard, but I think its pretty good. Expectations weren’t high to be honest, but they haven’t been for a while when it comes to the weddoes. Still enjoy their music. The album was produced by Steve Albini again – so is much more guitary and raw sounding than their last cd, and the guitars seem to have a more traditional Wedding Present feel to them.

Have made a few updates to the site recently – most noticable is the new music player that has found a home in the sidebar. The sidebar player has just a few random tracks in it – to listen to everything I have uploaded to this site, click the link under it to open the player in a separate window. This will also allow you to browse this site without having the player reload for each page, which could be annoying. Although I suppose you could always time your reading to coincide with the length of a particular track if you don’t like lots of separate windows floating around your desktop (and if you’re a bit strange).

Other updates include a feed I have added from my last.fm profile, so whatever music I am currently listening to is displayed nicely in the sidebar, and a clearer link to this websites rss feed in the header, for those that want to subscribe.

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Summery Oslo

Summer has arrived here in Oslo. It seems like the weather decided to skip spring this year. Either that or spring was in a form I didn’t recognise (i.e. indistinguishable from winter).

The only rainy days we have had recently were the few days when Mum came to visit, just to make her feel at home.

Apart from that its been big blue skies, lots of BBQs in parks and not so much wearing of coats, apart from later in the evenings when the sun has gone down.

Life is quite ok at the moment. I’ve got a new synth – an Alesis Micron – an amazing sounding little red and silver beast which is sounding superb next to my Machinedrum. I’m reading a damn exciting David Gemmell book (Dark Moon) and generally having a nice time going for walks, sitting in parks and enjoying the sunny weather. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, I have a book about clouds (The Cloudspotters Guide) sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read.

So what has everyone else been up to?

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Tales of Mucus

Feeling rubbish at the moment – had a cold for the last few days. One of those ones which are bad enough to make you feel rubbish, but just not quite bad enough for you to justify taking time off work to recover. My nose is trying to drown me in snot, and my skin feels like theres small creatures crawling around in it. Maybe I should take the day off tomorrow.

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The Reptile House

Oslo has this wee card thing that tourists can buy, then spend the day going round town getting in free to all the various museums, galleries and other places deemed interesting enough for people on holiday to visit. Oslo being Oslo, these cards usually cost a months wages, but last Sunday the city decided to give them out for free to all and sundry. After spending all day Saturday indoors nursing hangovers and watching my new Mission dvds, Ollie, Matt and myself decided that getting out and doing the touristy thing was the thing to do.

We queued for our cards, then hung around in Rådhuset, wandering around the stalls and sifting through the myriad of leaflets trying to decide what to do. I fancied a boat trip, but the boats that would take us on a cruise around the new opera house were all fully booked, and it was starting to rain so the fjord cruise didn’t look too appealing either. Other options included the tourist tram (rejected due to the fact that it took the same line as I take every morning going to work – the fact that it looked dull as ditch water didn’t help either), the various museums on Bygdøy, the Ski museum, various art galleries including the Munch museum, and a reptile park. Ollie decided that she wouldn’t pay to go to the Munch museum (sacrilege!), so we might as well go while its free.

The Munch Museum has been in the news several times over the last 15 years due to people wandering in and stealing Munch’s most famous painting, The Scream. This has actually happened on two occasions – once in 1994 during the winter Olympics, and more recently in 2004. As a result, the security on entering the museum is worse than Heathrow Airport. While both the Scream and the Madonna stolen in 2004 have been recovered, they are currently being restored and so were not on public display.

Munch suffered from depression and anxiety, and much of his chosen subject matter reflects this, so a visit to the museum is not exactly what you call a happy affair. Instead I just got blown away by the emotional intensity that just drips off so many of his paintings. The Vampire was fantastic, as was The Kiss and Jealousy, but many of my favourites were missing: Separation, The Scream, Despair, Anxiety, Melancholy. There was also a room full of the many landscapes he painted once he had cheered up a bit. Forest and Towards the Forest were both excellent.

Suitably depressed, we wandered down to Grønland for a curry, before taking the bus to the Reptile Park. The Reptile Park was really just someones house with a few lizards in it, but it was free, very warm and full of the most fantastic creatures imaginable, from head-bobbing Iguanas to the fastest tortoise on the planet. It also turned out to be just around the corner from our flat, so we met Vibeke there then went back home for a cup of tea.

There were a million things we could have done on our free tourist card, which would almost make me think that paying for one would be a good idea. Problem I see is that there is only so much site seeing you can do in a day, and I’m not entirely sure I would have the energy or inclination to make the most of the card. Still, might end up grabbing one anyway for when Mum comes over to visit at the end of the month.

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Rose coloured

The following are a list of points taken from a junk/chain email I received today. It confused me slightly, so I have added appropriate comments

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1920’s, 30’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!

I was born in 1973, so I suppose that means me.

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos..

Some of us survived anyway..

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Ok…

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

…right. And this was a good thing?

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Thats right, and many people died in accidents.

Riding in the back of a truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

I did ride in the back of truck once on the Indonesian island of Flores back in 1997. Fantastic journey, but I wasn’t aware that this trip resulted from my being born at the beginning of the 70s.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

Anyone spot the slight inconsistency in the above two statements?

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, Subway or Burger King.

Is someone honestly suggesting that British cuisine (fish & chips) is better than Italian pizza? Fair enough with giving the American chains a hard time, but really, people in glass houses and all that. Still, at least they didn’t mention Asian food – that would have really got me started.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no videogames at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, nosurround sound,no mobilephones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….. WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We had several personal computers in our house as we were growing up. Anyone remember the Vic 20? Started my interest in computers and (eventually) led to me to start a career as a software developer. Still got no friends though.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents

I agree that the lawsuit situation is getting rather silly.

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

Not having to work could be nice. Not having an option in the first place due to your gender is another thing entirely.

Footy had trials and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Some bitterness coming through there..?

Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather staps and bully’s always ruled the playground at school.

Ah, bliss. Nothing like a good beating from both your fellow students and teachers to start the day.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy fruit Spangles and some bangers to blow up frogs with.

Blow up frogs?!!! Thats what years of bullying at school does to you.

Our parents got married before they had children and didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like ‘Kiora’ and ‘ Brooklyn ‘

Our parents got married before they had children?!! Maybe this was previous to the 70s.

Only girls had pierced ears!

No comment. Really. Or I might start hitting someone.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!

Congratulations my arse.

You don’t get innovation and ideas with the conservative and conformist mindset demonstrated in the rest of the email. But yes, the past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and ideas – like computers, the Internet, mobile phones, globalisation, multiculturalism, and pretty much everything that was listed and slagged off.

I think I might make my own chain email letter to send around. It would go something like this:

• In my day, people actually read what they get sent, and actually think about whether it makes sense before passing it on to others.
• We use our intelligence to sift through the tons and tons of rubbish and bigotry that gets pushed in our faces via the media and chain emails, and don’t believe the first thing people tell us.
• We use our experience of life to realise that things weren’t any better in the past.
• We use our understanding of other people and other cultures to realise that our way of doing things isn’t the only way, and not necessarily even the best way (shock horror).

If only that was true.

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Highlights in the History of Concrete

Brilliant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7317933.stm
Cheese Problems Solved is my favourite, closely followed by The Joy of Chickens.

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The Kingdom of the Ice Bear

Svalbard is an island archipelago not far from the North Pole. Ollie and I were lucky enough to have been bought a trip there as a wedding present (thanks Leif and Astrid!), which we took recently. We first flew to Tromsø, a small town in the north of Norway, where we stayed for a night. Tromsø is a cool wee place, situated pretty much in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, fjords and lakes. We wandered through the town during the day, then settled in a bar where we polished off a bottle of wine for the evening. We even managed to find a nice Thai restaurant for dinner (after I had spent the day complaining bitterly about how rubbish eating out is in Norway).

The following morning we flew to Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen – the main town on the main island in the Svalbard archipelago. Landing in our wee plane, which was a lot less wee than I thought it would be, and full of people, I got my first glimpse of a ‘proper’ Arctic landscape. Since seeing Life in the Freezer back in the early 90s, I have dreamed of visiting the Arctic or Antarctic. It was so beautiful and exciting and managed to exceed all expectations that I had been harbouring for the past 15 odd years, as well as make me completely forget the hangover I had been nursing all morning. We got a bus into the town and to our hotel, which was not in the prettiest part of town, but very warm and cosy inside.

Considering its in such a remote, desolate and inhospitable place, Longyearbyen was suprisingly cosy and developed – it has several shops, a supermarket, a library, cinema (showing a film once a week) and several bars, cafes and restaurants. No-one actually comes from Longyearbyen. The average duration a person lives in the town is 2 years – and if you get pregnant on the island, you have to fly to the mainland and have the baby there. There is a big university teaching all manner of interesting subjects, and the state owned mining company, which employs many of the people living in the town, is actually making a profit for the first time in its history. You are not allowed to leave the town without a rifle, due to the fact that the surrounding countryside is full of polar bears.

We spent 5 days on the island. We took a snow scooter tour to the west coast, went dog sledging, ice caving and generally wandered around dressed like teddy-bears, most of the time with my jaw hanging open looking at the most incredible, most awe inspiring scenery I have ever seen. The day we spent on snow scooters had to be the highlight of the trip. We sped over ice and snow at up to 90km/hour, and managed to cover a distance of over 200km by the end of the day. We saw a polar bear over on the east coast, although he was out on the sea ice quite a distance away. But we saw him wandering about, doing his own thing, looking suprisingly yellow in amongst the bluey-white landscape.

The weather was great. We were there during the week the sun first comes back to Longyearbyen after months of winter darkness, so the days started with dawn, which hung around for a while, before skipping the middle of the day and going straight into dusk. My two favourite times of day are dawn and dusk, so this suited me quite well. The light was fantastic, giving everything a warm glow – at least, as warm a glow as you can get in the arctic. It was quite chilly – around -15′C most days with a nasty wind just in case -15 didn’t sound cold enough. The east coast, where we took the snow scooters, was decidedly colder – the Gulf Stream warms the west coast where Longyearbyen is situated, stopping the sea from freezing, and making it a slightly more pleasant place to live (the west coast is known as the ‘tropical arctic’). On the east coast, the sea is frozen and the temperature is bitterly cold.

I haven’t stopped being able to think about Svalbard since we returned to Oslo. I wouldn’t mind doing a masters degree at some stage, and I really couldn’t think of a better place to do it. Saying that, I think we were there at the best time of year. The girl that took us on the snow scooter trip remarked that the summer days are all the same – no dawn, dusk, no night time – and the winters are long, dark and depressing. Definately planning another trip there though – would be great to see the place in the summer. Photos from our trip can be found in the photos section.

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Another year, another address..

Being buggering about with the idea of a new site layout for a while. Played around with Django, the Python framework for a wee bit, but in the end decided to avoid all the work and just install Wordpress. Wanted to start hosting our photos here rather than on 23 in order to keep everything in one place as well, and a very nice plugin for Wordpress, Nextgen Gallery, made it very easy to do. Hope you like the new site.. let me know if you find any problems

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Christmas and all that

Ollie left for Madeira yesterday to enjoy relatively warm sunny christmas with her parents. Im off back wales to spend the holidays with my family at the end of the week. Looking forward to that.
So I will just leave you all with my best wishes for the festive season – have a great time and a fantastic new year

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Machinedrum

I bought myself one of the new MKII Machinedrums from Elektron the other day. Have fancied one for years, but was always put off by the high price. Said sod it a few weeks ago when I got my new job, and went and ordered one from their website.
Bloody fantastic machine! Its a drum machine of sorts, but so much more than that. It really does sound good, with four different synthesis types, which can all produce very useful sounds. It is a percussion synth, but can be talked into making melodic sounds as well. Saying that, adjusting the pitch to try and find the note I’m looking for is not always that easy, but can come up with some interesting results never the less. But its the whole work flow that just suits my style of writing so well. I can see my self writing complete tracks on the MD alone, although I imagine that more often than not it will be accompanied by Matt on (real) drums and me on guitar. Routed my wee blue Nova synth through it last night – sounded better than I’ve managed to get my Nova to sound on its own – the filters on the MD gave the it that edge that it lacks sometimes. The MD will definitely be accompanying me back to Wales for Christmas
Other toys on the horizon – I’m tempted to say a Monomachine, the other synth that Elektron produces, but first more practical issues need to be sorted. I am speaker-less at present, so a set of monitors is needed. I also need some guitar stands to tidy up the studio a wee bit, plus lots of clips for the million leads that are everywhere. Matt has set up his drums in the room as well, so I am trying to find a way to accommodate both live playing of all this stuff as well as having it all set up for recording.
Time to start writing music again

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