Crate-Digging in Soho (Kind of)

Recently, I went to Reckless Records and Sister Ray on Berwick Street, and Sounds of the Universe on Broadwick Street.

Why? When streaming?

Because the streamers have yet to reproduce the experience of flipping through records / CDs in crates and boxes. In the same way that Amazon has yet to recreate the experience of looking at bookshelves of books in a given genre in alphabetical order of author. That is how people discover new stuff, because of the sheer chance of juxtaposition.

I picked up some very cheap experiments, a 2-CD set of 1960's Bossa Nova and a Steely Dan compilation CD.

Nobody had any flamenco.

This is a serious oversight in Britain's, and it seems, English-speaking music stores.

Anyway.

There are, I discovered, swathes of music I'm not even going near.

Reggae and its relatives. I was a Bob Marley fan back in the day. I even had a Burning Spear album. Not much more. I still have Catch A Fire in my collection. Don't feel any pull or curiosity about it now.

Beat music. There's a whole little world dedicated to beat-girl singers from around the world. 1960's boy bands I've never heard of. I'm going to pass on that. I have one Marianne Faithful album of her French hits, and that's enough.

Soul. Not the new stuff, the 1970's / 80's stuff. I may have had more of that than I think in my vinyl buying, but I felt no pull towards it. No curiosity about all those Northern Soul tracks, even if I did recognise some of the names. I'll leave those to serious crate-diggers.

Heavy metal and related genres. Will someone please explain the attraction of heavy metal? Actually, no, I wouldn't understand the explanation.

Punk. While I recognise the achievement of the Sex Pistols, I wouldn't want to listen to a whole album of it.

Obscure American and British bands who only made one album and that costs £85 second-hand. (There are YT channels about this kind of stuff, run by men who look exactly like you would imagine they would look like, if you had to think about it.)

Rap. I have a post somewhere about a number of rap tracks I can stand to hear more than once. A young colleague told me those were old old skool bands (Wu Tang Clan? I guess so) but then the best stuff was from that era.

Mainstream Chart bands. You know the ones. You recognise all the names, but I can't go beyond the hit single(s).

So what do I listen to?

Jazz up to about 1965 or so, plus all of Miles' output

Church vocal music from Gregorian chant to Poulenc's motets

Baroque, Galant, Classical, some Romantics, and some early 20th-century

Minimalism

Girl and guitar bands (from Jefferson Airplane to Halestorm)

Post-rock

EDM, electronica, and jazz-oriented hip-hop (but nothing that begins with thump-thump-thump)

Miscellaneous bands and singers from 1960 to the present (Electribe 101, One Dove, Joni Mitchell, Haywoode, Laura Nyro, Bert Jansch, John Martyn....)

Flamenco

What surprises me is that it seems to me absolutely natural that anyone who listens to, say, Leonin's pieces for church singers would also listen to Steely Dan, and that being able to sit still for the Bartok String Quartets also means sitting still for John Digweed's Structures. I'm hearing something in common between all this music, that I don't hear in the genres I pass by without even a moment's hesitation.

Nearly all the stuff I like is cleanly recorded, distortion and sheer volume is not part of the soundscape. It is instrumental and ranges from deceptively simple (Steve Reich) to absurdly complicated (J S Bach), so there's plenty to keep the brain going. Fluid rhythm is important - not a beat or a four-on-the-floor thump - and interesting sound textures help. That elusive touch of the blues, and the sense of an edge.

So I will leave you with a band you should know if you've never heard them before. Electribe 101 with the legendary Billie Ray Martin on vocals.

There are a handful more places to go looking, and I'll be doing those in the coming weeks.

Because random.

Only the physical world can do it well.

Buy Nice or Buy Twice

... or why you shouldn't spend your money on four mid-priced watches, but save for one premium one.

I've heard buying advice like this occasionally.

The idea is that, by buying something that's right up against, or even slightly below, what you really need, you may well wind up buying the same thing but with better specs and a higher price within a year or so.

This motto works well computers. Sure you can live with the minimum spec of the new Mac Air, but why not sling in some extra RAM and the next internal storage up? Just in case you suddenly want to start editing 1080p footage from a Go-Pro or something. The extra money gives you headroom and options. Maybe you use them, maybe you don't. At least you won't have to buy another one with the RAM and storage when you do decide to edit video. Gamers will have the same considerations over graphics cards, frame rates and other such.

In general, get the better tool in the price range. You don't have to get a hand-made German chef knife - that's silly - but that cheap Chinese junk on Amazon (is there anything except cheap Chinese junk on Amazon?) won't give you the lifetime or satisfaction of a Sabatier or a Global. Ever noticed that most of the professional builders you've seen have De Walt power tools? It's not because De Walt are the cheapest.

Or as the guys at my local Dulux Pro shop say: don't get the dog paint(*), get the Trade Paint.

Does this advice work for cars? If you need a small car with stellar fuel economy, upgrading to a BMW sports car is not meeting your goals. However, there may be a trade-off between one mini and another, and maybe getting the larger storage capacity and a little extra heft in the engine might be useful, even if it does do 5 mpg less. I would never buy a new car, or spend much more than £8,000 on a recent second-hand one. Given how I use cars, it's not worth it. If I drove long distances on a weekly basis, then I could make a case for a 2-litre recent model of something well-made. Some people like to buy new cars: different strokes for different folks.

At the other end of the scale, this is really bad advice for buying art. Buying art, you buy what you can live with and afford. There isn't a step up from buying a Calder mobile, or a small Sergeant watercolour, despite anything the gallerist might say. You buy nice or you don't buy at all.

Somewhere in between is the boy-toy stuff: cameras, hi-fi, watches, and for all I know, fishing rods.

I am never going to spend £6,000 (or even £1,000) on a watch. I don't trust myself not to lose it, or wreck it. You know how that goes: the cheap beater lasts for ever and is glued to your wrist, the expensive item falls off your wrist every chance you give it and a few it made for itself. But every now and then I get a yen for a style of watch, which I can get at the "affordable" price ranges. I'm not collecting, and I'm not looking for an heirloom. I want something that looks different from what I have already. The collectors are right: "affordable" <> "collectable". Also, the idea of collecting expensive watches is a marketing ploy by the luxury companies.

I'm not sure about spending £2,000 on headphones. Spend that on an amplifier, and you could be in for a treat. I'm not convinced that the potential to make similar improvements in headphones is there. Nor am I convinced that I would hear it, given the condition of my ears after all these years. I did hear different styles of sound on a test session recently, but not improvements within the same style of sound.

How about furniture? That stuff is expensive. A really nice wingback armchair can be £1,000+. Assemble a less fancy one from IKEA for about £250. I can't justify that kind of money to myself. Other people could, and I bet they live in bigger houses and do a fair amount of entertaining. But, buy too cheap, and furniture will fall apart in double-quick time, and will need replacing at least once, while the better piece would still have been going strong.

The same consideration applies to shoes and clothes. Shoes from a Northampton cobbler will last five times as long as high-street fashion stuff.

Buy nice or buy twice. Sure. As long as you are buying for a purpose and 'nice' is affordable (even if you have to cut out drinking for the rest of the month).



(*) Dulux' retail mascot is a long-haired Old English Sheepdog, now nicknamed 'Dulux dogs'. Dulux Trade paint is why professionals do a way better job than you do.

That Audiophile Soundstage

If you've got your speakers, room and listening position set up, the speakers should disappear. The music should be coming from the space between the speakers, which should seem to be sitting on their stands, or shelves, doing nothing.

You should also be able to close your eyes and point to where the instruments are located. Bass there. Voice there. Guitar there. If it's a piano solo, the bass notes should be on one side and the high notes on the other.

So goes the audiophile line.

Go to a live performance by a string quartet and you won't get this separated soundstage. The players will be sitting fairly close together, from the left: violin, viola (or second violin), cello, and bass on the right. They need to be able to see and hear each other, not have to wave across a wide stage. The result is a near-mono experience: the sound is experienced as one thing, it does not need to be assembled from this on the left and that on the right.

A lot of recorded string quartets sound like that: each instrument can be picked out easily, but try the pointing game, and they are all around the centre of the stage.

An orchestra is a nearly-stereo experience live and on recording: low notes - horns, basses, cellos - to the right (facing the orchestra), high notes (violins, bells) to the left, woodwind, trumpets and flutes in the middle above the violas. Orchestral recordings veer to the left a lot. Listening live, you do find your eyes moving to the source of a sound, especially if it is a brief solo passage.

Those speakers at a club or a live gig are mono. That way everyone hears the same thing. If it was stereo, only a handful of people would hear it all, and most would be getting one side or the other. At Sadlers Wells flamenco performances, it used to take me a few minutes to train my ears and eyes to allocate the sound to the instruments.

And the whole point of medieval choirs is that you cannot tell one singer from the next, let alone where they are standing. The sound should seem to come from heaven itself, in one blended voice that can sing different notes at once. People who sing that music tell me they cannot pick out the individual lines either.

In the 1960's stereo was sometimes done by putting some instruments on one side and the others on the other side. Maybe the drums and voice appeared in the middle. Early stereo recordings mostly come from the speakers, not the space between. It's not a good sound, to my ears.

The way audiophiles talk about their soundstage, you'd think that every mix took the trouble to place the instruments apart, distinct and to use the full width of the stereo. But a lot of records do not do that. Miles Davis' 1980 albums have all the sound grouped towards the middle of the stage. I wondered why for a while, then realised that Miles wanted it to sound good to anyone in the room no matter where they were. He wanted to make music people would party to, not sit on their own in the sweet spot, venerating. Jazz has always been party / club music.

Famously, mono is supposed to feel like it is coming from the middle of your head over headphones. Sit in the sweet spot of a stereo, and the music seems to come from a band about six inches wide. It's like there's a third speaker in the middle. Stand further back and that mono-band gets wider. The instruments are distinguishable, not smeared, but not stereo-separated. It sounds like you're hearing the music through the door of the club.

The audiophile soundstage is an artefact of two-channel audio and a particular way of mixing the sound to space it out. That's why it does not work outside of a sweet spot, and why, when a piece is mixed for the sweet spot, as often as not, we wind up listening to it on headphones, where we don't have to worry about our exact placing in the room.

Why Am I Taking Photographs I Don't Care About?

Recently I said that my photography was c**p and I could not see anything anymore. I put up a photograph of a flyover stairway to prove it. Sis, who knows about this stuff, said it was an okay photograph, and that she had similar feelings, but more about why am I taking photos like these?

Which is about motive. Why am I taking these photographs?

It's common for big-name photographers, especially towards the end of their careers, to take reels of film that they never develop, let alone print or exhibit. It's as if the act of photography had become some sort of obsession, and not in a good way.

Most people take photographs to have something to remember the event and the people. At weddings, that is often done by a pro. At most other occasions it's done by one the group, and consists of the rest of the group smiling and mugging for the camera. Not my life, but neither am I knocking it.

Professionals take photographs of the client's cooking equipment because money, and because they know the tricks of the food photography trade. (Few of which the rest of us would want to know about. Here's a starter: none of the food is ever hot.)

Some professionals take photographs on spec to sell to us, the general public. Or in the case of photo-journalists, or sports photographers, to sell to newspapers. Then there are a very small number of fine artists who take photographs of carefully-staged images. Cindy Sherman. Gregory Crewdson. Add your favourite.

Leaving a small number of amateur art photographers. Why on earth do we do it?

There's the satisfaction of seeing and recording the image, of knowing we have the eye. But that's a small part of it.

It is, I think, about finding and recording the moments of magic, transcendence, mystery, majesty, artistry, beauty, humour, and otherwise notable-somethings in our lives. An assertion and a re-assurance that our lives are not one endless sequences of drudge and mundane blah. Even if we have to travel for hours overnight to find those moments at daybreak on a hill-top.

That's why there's such an interplay between where we live our lives, how we are feeling, and the photographs we take, or even our belief that there are any photographs worth taking. When it works, it's a dream, but when it slumps, it's a tangle of factors and emotions that just won't fall out of its own accord.

Why am I taking these photographs? I don't want to. You know, I'm sure there was something happening recently that has a bearing on this, but I can't remember what it was... so I have to get out of a pair of ruts: one in my own head, and one the way I spend my time. Neither of those is as easy as it sounds, especially when it's too damn hot.

Amateurs. They can so indulge their feelings.

Middle-Class Straight Edge

Straight-edge was a movement that started in the 1980s in the punk / hardcore scene as a reaction to the excessive use of drink, pills, and other intoxicants at the time. They adopted a fairly simple creed: don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs. Not screwing around was optional. As ever, some of the cause-parasites (vegans, animal rights, chastity) hooked onto it. It wasn't popular with feminists or left-wingers: any movement consisting mostly of white teenage males won't be. By the end of the 1990's it had more or less wound up.

But you can't keep a good idea down. Straight-edge was about avoiding the things that screwed up your head and life. For teenagers, that's mostly booze, drugs, and cigarettes. Now take the principle and apply it to the life of a middle-class man in the early years of his career. What screws up his life?

Booze, drugs and cigarettes sure don't help. Plus our young man can save a lot by not buying that stuff, and also by avoiding what passes as the life-style that goes with them. Saving is Good, hookers 'n blow are Bad.

The next one is: avoid anything that lets the State into your private life. The way to keep social workers, unemployment bureaucrats, Family Court and Child Services out of your life is, yep, you guessed: stay employed, pay enough taxes to stay under the radar, stay single, and don't have children.

The next one is: avoid crazies, users, losers and abusers. Oddly, I think it's got easier for the middle-classes to do that in the last few decades. Moving to universities across the country, and then again to jobs across the country, takes a brutal toll on the unfiltered bunch of people we knew from school and the old neighbourhood. By the time our middle-class young man is set up with his degree and job in GloboCorp, he's left most of the old bad influences behind, and making friends after the late-twenties... we know how that goes

The next one is: avoid buying anything with debt, except the house you're going to live in. This will pretty much mean you don't buy s**t you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you don't like.

The next one is: learn how to get what you need from the gatekeepers (official or self-appointed). Learn how the gatekeepers think, what rules they have to follow, what BS they are obliged to believe by their profession, what the magic words are to get what you need, how to behave. Learn Game, which after all, is about dealing with gatekeepers.

A lot of middle-class people live bits of this from time to time. What makes Straight Edge is consistency and follow-through. No exceptions for That Special Person, or Because It Was Christmas (or whenever). Consistency makes the believer.

On and Off Treadmills

As best as I can figure out from a diary-search, my life started to close in on itself in 2017. I was 63, after all. All the fun kids at work had moved on, and being replaced by Snowflakes. I couldn't hack the full hour session at the gym, and was doing about forty minutes instead. No holidays. Girls were pretty much a thing of the past. I was not learning new things that were work-related. I was three years past the normal retirement age at work, had almost three more years to go before I could claim my State Pension, my savings weren't great, and though my financial advisor kept telling me I was okay, and much better off than a lot of people, what he didn't mention was that 'most people' are terminally screwed come retirement. Every month I stayed at work was another month's money saved, and another month I didn't have to live on a pension. I kept that up for another four years, until I could keep it up no more.

That's a long time to be in treadmill mode. The job was okay, the people were okay, I was in the City, the commute was manageable, but regular readers will remember I spent a while bitching and moaning noting dispassionately how going to bed at 09:30 to wake up at 05:15 does not leave one with much of a life. Plus no-one was making or showing movies I wanted to watch, which is why I got an Apple TV and a MUBI subscription. And I was going round and round in a figure-eight, not travelling and not `going anywhere'. Every now and then I'd go to an early evening Meeting in Soho, and I even got a commitment so I had to turn up every week. When I came out at 19:00, Soho was rammed. Nowhere to have a coffee or a light snack. Not like 2010.

One on level, I hardly noticed Lockdown. Except for the lack of commuting, the money I wasn't saving, and the whole silly working from home stuff. In fact, life was probably better, since I wasn't going into that horrible office.

The definition of treadmill is doing what you're doing so you can do what you're doing, and not getting anywhere doing it. I was doing what I was doing to bank the paycheque, and once I had done that, I'd done what I was doing for the month. Except not spending any money because I had to bank it.

(That will be your life as you approach retirement: putting as much cash as possible into bonds or savings so you can pay for a new roof when the old one starts to give, but the insurers won't replace it.)

No, parents, you're not on a treadmill, not while you're raising your children. You're not on a treadmill if you have friends you like being with, holidays you enjoy going on, activities you like doing. You're not on a treadmill if you just love love love the office gossip and the shenanigans after work, and all the gossip on your social media apps. Nope, you're having some kind of fun.

It takes a while to get out of the habits of the treadmill. Work seems like a decade ago, but it's only eleven weeks. Which don't count as real weeks, because lockdown and other BS. I thought it would help if I had some plans and objectives to work on, but that turned out not to do the trick.

The Interwebz is gung-ho for the idea of volunteering, part-time jobs, getting involved with your community, and otherwise replacing paid work with unpaid work. Because that's what you retired for, right? Or we could travel... wait, no, we can't. The advice is as asinine as the advice to I used to hear when I was out of work in the Nineties. But hey, if you want to volunteer, please go right ahead.

So the next phase is getting off the treadmill. Which means not working up schedules about how my days and weeks should be - I tried that and it didn't feel right.

Things I Suddenly Got Bored With

I rolled out of bed at 7:05 a couple of mornings ago, saw the sky was blue and the sun was bright, and put my walking shoes on for a quick stroll round my local park. Before the cloudy periods set in for the rest of the day.

Settling down to breakfast and starting to flick through the Daily Telegraph's app, I suddenly felt utterly bored by:

The Virus, or rather, the utterly bonkers policies that Governments across the world have taken towards it. It's a bad case of the flu caused by an enhanced function virus that escaped from an American-financed lab in Wuhan, China. It is going to infect every single person on the planet, and leave everyone alive, unless they have pre-existing conditions or is old and frail. Being infected by the Virus is being treated as if it is the Mark of the Devil. It isn't. Wake me up when the BS is over.

Woke. This is partly the creation of academics and Vicitim groups talking up the need for their grants and services (cf Stonewall). It's a money grab. Or else it's a lot of emotionally-disturbed people and their useful Betas posturing.

Dumb Managements Taking Woke Seriously. Take names. Sell short or divest if you can't.

Objecting to Snowflakes. A lot of the objections to Snowflakes can sound like "I was beaten every day at school and it didn't do me any harm". A lot of the time, the Snowflakes have a point. Sometimes they don't, as when they push Woke causes.

Slavery. See under Woke.

Carbon-free energy. It's posturing when it isn't an excuse for a Sin Tax. But sure, let's do more with less energy, and have a lot of different sources so that we can never be held hostage by one group of suppliers again. It might also stop the endless Oil Wars.

Women Most Affected. For those who don't know this one, it's in headlines like "Women more likely to suffer from oranges" wherein it turns out that in 2020, 2,019 women had an allergic reaction to oranges, and only 1,950 men did.

Feminism: aka Privileged White Women Need More Privilege

Feminism: aka Men Are Horrible

The Fall of America. It's a tragedy, but it's happened. America is now where South Africa was about twenty years ago, and look at where South Africa is now, because that's where America will be in about ten years' time.

The EU. No further comment needed.

Whining About The BBC. Once upon a time it was full of eccentrics and techie wonks and was the pride of the country. Now it's full of untalented hacks and is a national disgrace. If we shut them down tomorrow, they would only wonder what took us so long.

Making Social Media Important. It isn't. It's all posturing and fake. No girl is as happy as she sounds on Facebook, as hot as she looks on Instagram or as funny as she sounds on Twitter.

Artist / Gallery / Museum Virtue Signals. Really? Gee. Never happened before.

Global Warming / Global Cooling / Climate Change. Yeah. Whatever.

Sugary / Salty foods. Where is the interfering Nanny state when you really need it? (Looking at its Party donations.)

There's way too many people making way too much money off this stuff. These are problems that won't be solved in anyone's lifetime. Which means they are damn good earners.

<i>Basta!</i>