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Look at these chumps:
Wait! That's Captain the Parrot!
From left to right Andy, I, Katsuhiko; Captain the Parrot is our apparently annual musical project where we go into a studio with precisely nothing prepared and record what comes out of drums, a guitar, a mac, assorted other electronics and our mouths.
This year we came up with about an hour of... music! I haven't cleaned it up yet, but some of it sounds good so I'm going to upload the whole lot once it's neat and named.
Meanwhile you can refresh your memory of last years endeavours here.
Andy came to stay and we did things like going to parks and aquariums, making music and eating lots and lots and lots of food. I also gave him something to take back to the slow-cooker of Fukuoka to work on:
If things work out, Andy will draw something and send it back to me, then I'll draw something and send it back and so on until we've filled the book with some kind of narrative.
This was pretty much inspired by the notebookery project that I'm also going to (eventually) be a part of. That one's like 60 people all over the world, this one is just two so it should be easier to keep track of. You would hope! Aha, aha, ha.
This Sunday post brought to you with electronic hindsight from the following Thursday.
Over on Loom I actually uploaded a little music.
Loom is the creative blog that used to be five people and is now down to pretty much Paul writing his amazing, bewildering, fugue-state story of death and rebirth and death and rebirth. It's fantastic stuff and for some reason reading it reminds me of an infinite video loop in which a butterfly comes out of a chrysalis again and again forever. No, not a butterfly, something more sinister.
Here's what I posted over there - with luck the player will work and you'll be able to download the thing from there.
Liminal State Waste Services
Track copyright Alex Williams 2009, even though I don't remember how I made those noises.
I was going through my old recordings on the 4 track and found the tracks on there. It's a whole lot of nothing much, messy and simple, but I like the minimalism of it and I'm gonna try adding vocals and maybe making the whole thing longer.
On a side note I need to find out more about recording software. I'm using Audacity at the moment, which is good enough for all the bare minimum stuff, but I'm gonna need some good loop-making software I reckon. Recommendations appreciated.
Alarm! New project commencing... now!
While the Japanese assimilation of parts of the English language is always fascinating, I don't always find the humourous mis-steps that result as "LOL-tastic" as some folks do. What's more interesting is what the words and phrases that are chosen say about the people, companies and purposes that they are connected to.
So probably the majority of Japanese appartment buildings (known as Mansions, which is in itself a nice way of describing a block of flats) are named in English, and are given names that connect, in the Japanese psyche, to concepts of safety, security, luxury and... classiness? Something like that. I've been meaning to do this for a while, and cycling home the other night I figured there was no time like right then! So here is the start of my collection of poignant and eyebrow-raising Japanese mass-dwelling names:
I hope eventually to have a huge flickr book, or possibly a huge coffee table book of these. You'll have to leaf through it and choose the name of the building in which you want to live, and it will tell you a deep and uncomfortable truth about yourself. Dare you gaze into "The Book of Mansion Names"?
