Why Some People Are Not Going Back To The Office

It seems that Civil Servants and the staff of retail banks, insurance companies and other large office-based employers are not rushing back to their offices.

The usually-cited reason they should is this, from a letter to the Daily Telegraph:

For the employee, interpersonal contact in the office promotes problem-solving, communication and the generation of ideas. It reduces isolation.

To which I say: BS. Or rather: that may be true in some places, but I haven't worked in any of them for the last twenty years.

Isolation is what you feel:

when you cannot talk, write, or even use a facial expression, without first estimating its reception by the audience

when you are surrounded by people who feel they can police what you say and how you say it

when there are corporate policies encouraging certain styles of communication, and penalties for failing to go along

when the decisions affecting you and your work are made by people you never meet for reasons that have nothing to do with any of your concerns

when you are in the middle of an over-crowded open-plan office, and for days on end, everyone you need to talk to is on a conference call, in a meeting, or just doesn't have any time to help you problem-solve and generate ideas

when the people you need help and replies from, can reject your request because they "don't have the resources"

when you cannot get a budget for the things you need to do your job

when you cannot get the support for the things you need to do your job

when you are the only person in your team using the skills you use and have the knowledge you have

This was the daily life of most of those Civil Servants and other Big Office workers in 2019

Why? How? 

A lot of employers spent much of the years between 2000-2019 making their offices less and less pleasant places by spending less and less on the buildings.

Where once there was a seat for everyone, now there is a seat for just over half of them.

Where once everyone had their own place, now nobody does.

Where once Directors and other Big Beasts had their own offices, safely away from us Little People, now they are scattered around the floor and we Little People can't relax, communicate and be creative, in case we're doing it in the wrong way.

Where once you sat with your team, now total strangers can perch amongst you for a day. They never introduce themselves and avoid eye contact, so nobody talks all day because it might be someone from HR, Audit, or some other internal policing group.

The quality of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) got worse and worse, because the requirements are based on building size, not occupancy.

The offices smelled of food from 11:30 to 14:30 every day.

Don't even ask about the toilets.

This too was the daily life of those Civil Servants and other Big Office workers in 2019.

The horrible quality of office life in 2019 was the main reason people packed up their laptops and went home so willingly in March 2020.

Nobody is talking about this.

If "working in offices" was so beneficial, nobody would need to make people do it. But they do, so it isn't.

Fear of Music: Why We Like Rothko But Not Stockhausen

I read David Stubbs' Fear of Music and Mars by 1980 recently. The second is a history of electronic music in the West, focussing heavily on the bands of the 1970's - 1990's. The first is an attempt to understand why Basquiat sells for millions, but David Bailey is pretty much broke. (You know who Derek Bailey is, right? See, that's his point.)

 

(Why you don't know who Derek Bailey is)

Stubbs love of this kind of music, from Edgar Varese to Sonic Youth, is sincere and deeply woven into his youth. He knows whereof he speaks.

So do I. I have a special section in my CD collection, where I keep Ligeti, Xenakis, Boulez, John Cage, Penderecki, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and even Sally Beamish. Anyone interested in music should know some of this stuff, and my dutiful listening was well before streaming. (You should stream it. Most of these people are dead, have academic jobs or quite enough money.) The only recording made by Mirror/Dash is in my Quboz favourites. I commend Olivier Assayes' film Noise to you: I was rooted to the sofa. As an undergraduate I went to the only performance at my university by Derek Bailey. I have heard Iskra 1903 on late-night Radio Three programs. In the right circumstances, I do like a bit of noise guitar. Those circumstances are not frequent, but Stubbs' book has made me think I should devote a little more time to the genre over the next few months.

 

(Stockhausen's Kontakte: I found it so you don't have to.)

A little bit of theory.

There are two broad business orientations: producer, and, consumer. The producer makes something, tries to sell it, and then blames the public when they don't buy it, or tries to get a Government grant to subsidise his operation. The consumer finds out what he can provide that the customer wants, checks that the customer is willing to pay an economic price, and provides it. Producers tend to think they are mis-understood and the audience doesn't want to put in the work to appreciate their challenging work. Consumers tend to follow the money and can have a wilting effect on high culture.

Old-school publishing houses used to do both: they had an imprint for books that the public would buy but were not what anyone would call fine literature, and the money from that subsidised the low but prestigious sales of the fine literature. The publisher had social cachet from supporting well-connected authors, paid for by books the public wanted to read. It worked fine until the conglomerates came along, and dumped the fine literature imprints, because why lose money?

The Romantic conception of the artist is pure producer. The artist has their vision, is driven to produce what they have to produce, and it's the public's task to understand it, like it, and buy it. Otherwise the Romantic artist either starves to death, or gets embittered or cynical while living off a private income.

What is striking about the development of noise / electronic music up to about 1970 is just how much of it was supported by universities, Ministries of Culture, and State broadcasters. Everyone from Stockhausen to Delia Derbyshire was paid for by the taxpayer. After that, it seems to have moved into the private sector, with the invention of the Mood Synthesiser and its successors, until a simple Mac Air has ten times the music-making capabilities of the entire European avant-garde scene in (say) 1960, and with a friendly user-interface. State subsidies is very producer.

Stubbs is a producer. He likes weird noisy music and can't understand why the rest of us don't. He thinks it's our fault - after all, we can take Jackson Pollock, so why won't we listen to Edgar Varese? Why does Warhol sell and Xenakis doesn't?

 

(Ameriques by Edgar Varese. David Stubbs loves it.)

For one thing, the comparison is off. The pictorial analogue of a lot of the music he is taking about, is not Rothko or Pollock, but an especially impasto'd de Kooning at his misogynist peak, or a raw meat paintings by Chaim Soutine. Not what anyone wants to look at just before lunch in the restaurant at the Tate Modern. Or afterwards.

(Xenakis is more like this)

For another, the expectation is off. Avant-garde music is not the only art-form with small audiences. Go to a fringe theatre in London (when this nonsense is over). (I have been in one where there were more people in the audience than on the stage.) Morvern Callar, one of the best films of 2002, had a total first-run audience of about two thousand people in the whole UK. Unless they are an established name, a poet is lucky to sell fifty copies. So are some novelists. Many papers in science and mathematics are comprehensible to perhaps ten people in the world. All those people beavering away in Head Offices producing powerpoints, are doing so for audiences of less than twenty.

Small audiences are the norm. Large audiences need an explanation.

The avant-garde music scene is nowhere near as socially sexy as the avant-garde art scene was and the pop / contemporary art scene is now. The rich gather and network at Christies and Sotheby's, not at the Wigmore Hall. The reason is very simple: they can buy art, but they can't buy music.(*) The era of the court composer is over - blame the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The arts are not an examination that the audience has to pass. With some exceptions. If you don't like the music of J S Bach, you can say so and not listen to it. If you say that it is bad music, well, you would just be wrong. Audiences show their dislike of Luciano Berio by staying away. If they say it is bad music, well, they would be wrong about that. If they said it was wilfully harsh, discordant, and lacked a decent groove, could anyone disagree?

And then there's the whole attitude thing. Here's Evan Parker, a legend of the British avant garde music scene.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it.

On the other hand, here's Kim Gordon, who has been doing this stuff for literally decades.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it. But I couldn't stop watching and listening.

In an earlier post, I said that, amongst other things, art had to be self-sufficient. A piece had to stand on its own. Another thing art has to do is fascinate, a verb that descends from 'bewitching'. It has to reward our attention and focus, to let us sink in to it. Maybe we sink in meditatively, as before a painting in the National Gallery, or we give ourselves up to it, as with a favourite dance track.

A lot of avant garde music is intentionally off-putting and detached. It doesn't let us in, but keeps on slapping us about with sudden noises and shocks. Most people don't respond to that: I don't. Perhaps David Stubbs does. But he is in a minority.

And that's the answer to his question.

(*) The exception, and it's the only one, is the one copy of a Wu Tang Klan album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. Its history is worth reading.

Thoughts After A Visit To The Tate Modern

I went to the Tate Modern recently. I had to book, but I don't mind. It stops me changing my mind when I wake up and the weather is c**p (again).

It's a very different collection of exhibits from the last time I went, in the Before Times. A few of those exhibits were accompanied by some socially-significant rhetoric, but mostly it originated from the artists. (*cough* Joseph Beuys *cough*)

But now, it seemed to me, everything has to relate to one of a well-known handful of Good Causes. Pollution; climate change; all the complaints of feminism; war; poverty; immigration; capitalism and its related -isms, such as consumerism; Britain leaving the EU...

Just one example, a 1952 photograph by Mitch Epstein, taken in West Virginia.

And here's the blurb that goes with it.

I will spare you a line-by-line review. I wrote one, but it's more painful to read than it is to write. Its implication is that the photograph is valuable as a work of art because the photographer addresses Good Causes in the right way.

I demur.

To ask the timeless question: what is art? Anything can be, because of or despite its creator's intentions. One condition is that a work of art should be self-contained. It can refer to other cultural items, as with Claude’s 1648 Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca

and the viewer's appreciation of it can be enhanced by knowing the references. I have no idea who Isaac and Rebecca were, and why they might be in that landscape, but I can look at Claude's painting for quite a while. The landscape alone holds my attention.

My appreciation of the painting as art does not and should not depend on the references.

Epstein's photograph is, for all its technical skill, not an image I find engaging. Knowing that it had one social message for him, and that the curator has linked it to others, may make me look a little longer to see if I agree, but I've moved on in a couple of minutes.

Claude's intention was to produce a decorative and absorbing landscape, and he threw in the marriage group to give it a sense of scale, and because maybe it would mean something to the client who commissioned it. Epstein's intention was to produce what amounts to low-key agit-prop, and if the picture was captivating, then so much the better.

Claude is an artist, Epstein is a journalist. And to re-affirm: journalists can produce art, but despite their intentions, not because of them.

The difference between museum blurbs and those of auction-house catalogs is striking. If you've never read a contemporary art auction catalog from Christie's or Southeby's, it's quite the revelation. A major work for sale is put into the context of the rest of the artist's output; the circumstances of its creation are set out; any cultural references in the work are tactfully noted, as if jogging the purchaser's memory; it may be compared and contrasted to work by other artists; and, of course, its provenance and exhibition history are carefully noted. Those guys know how to sell a painting.

If I'm going to spend money on it, I want to know that the painting is genuine, and what is its story. And I need to like it as an image. Because my interest is the image, not the interpretation, I do not care about the artist's views on this week's social issues, or his or her morals. I care about the quality of the work.

The "Good Causes" approach puts the artist's opinions and moral character front and centre: artists with the 'wrong' opinions, or an unfortunate period of their lives associated with the wrong causes, don't get shown. The quality of their work is not judged on its ability to hold and entrance the eye, but on the "issues" it "addresses".

If you really cared about pollution, you would put the money towards cleaning it up or preventing it, not buying an art-work that tells you what you already believe. If the Tate really believed it, maybe it could donate some of its vast riches to cleaning up some pollution, and leave a blank space on the wall with the blurb "We spent your taxes on preventing this beach getting dirty again, instead of buying a photograph of it when it was dirty, and leaving it dirty."

Though, if we put up the documentation of the work clearing and protecting the beach, wouldn't that be a performance piece?

Sounds like a win-win to me.

The Search For Headphones 2: Entry-Level Strikes Back

A pair of Meze Empyrean will cost around £2,800. The Sennheiser HD800S cost around £1,400.

Audiophiles. They must be bonkers.

Here's a thought that came at me from left-field. My new speakers cost three and a half times the old ones - even allowing for the sale price on the LS50's and an additional subwoofer. The amp+CD transport cost about the same multiple of the original amp + cd player + Dragonfly Black for streaming.

The HD650 cost about £400 when I bought them. That's more than I paid for the amplifier I was using.

Applying the 3.5 rule, I get £1,400. Applying the "more than I paid for the amplifier" rule, I get around £2,000, since that's what an H120 costs (but that includes DACs which the previous amp didn't. Take the cost of a comparable DAC out, and we're back to about £1,400). Apply the "pay more than the amplifier" rule and... no, I just can't justify it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the HD650 started sounding much better. Especially after I replaced the ear pads, which had been getting a little soft. That made a real difference to the sense of space in the sound. These are just fine, I told myself, what do I want to change for?

(A couple of weeks later)

I went through this exact process with the amplifier + CD player + external DAC combination, before getting something way outside of anything I'd been looking at before. I would listen to the Marantz and telling myself that it was just fine and didn't need changing. (It is just fine, but it did.) The HD650 are darn good headphones, but they weren't quite the sound I was looking for. Those things are intense. Seriously.

I realised I wanted something more... open, relaxed, something along those lines.

I watched a few more YT reviews.

And went back to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden, with a new list to try.

Meze 99 Classics. Hifiman Sundara. Audeze LC-1.

Yep. All "entry-level hi-fi".

I can't hear anything over about 11kHz. I have "entry-level" ears. Years of 60dB-70dB noise from trains, tubes, traffic, offices and passing aircraft will take its toll.

The Meze 99's are comfortable, have nice tight bass, and are easy to drive, but there was something...

The Audeze LC-1 sounded okay. At these price levels "okay" doesn't cut it. I didn't like the fit over my ears. Put to one side.

The Hifiman Sundara fit just fine. And had a clear, wide sound. The bass wasn't quite as snappy as the Meze 99's. But they had something.

Acid test. A Bruckner symphony.

No contest. The Meze were probably not even designed to handle orchestral music.

The Sundara's did just fine.

We have a winner. At £299.

I'd say the Sundara's are closer to the monitor-like sound and clarity of my LS50's. The HD650 are darker: clear, good definition and detailed, sure, but as I said, also intense. I have the Sundara on now, and I'm thinking, "yep, this is the sound I want".

Turns out I didn't want better (and even if I did, I could justify the expense), I wanted different.

The Sad Story of a Three-Times Faulty Pro-Ject T1 Turntable

I am assured that Pro-Ject make excellent turntables.

Lots of hi-fi stores seem to agree, since some stock little else.

I bought a white T1 from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi recently as a present for Sis, who has shelves of inherited vinyl and no deck.

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

Was the drive spindle supposed to wobble like that?

(How was I supposed to know? It could be a design feature.)

Called Sevenoaks Hi-Fi on the day and asked them. They said they would ask Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Nobody gets back to anybody for a couple of weeks.

The drive belt fell off when Sis tried to play a 45. That's not supposed to happen.

Drive half-way round the M25 to collect it for return to Sevenoaks. Who send it to Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Who tighten the screws on the motor mount.

And return it to Sevenoaks Hi-Fi a couple of weeks later.

The spindle is still wobbling. In fact, it's worse.

Because one of the screws is in a soft patch of wood (or some other such flaw) and vibrations of any kind loosen it.

Back to the distributor.

A week or so later it comes back. The spindle was secure.

They had shifted the motor round and re-secured it in new screw holes. (I know because I called the distributor and spoke an incredibly helpful member of staff.)

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

The belt fell off when we tried to play it at 45.

Called Sevenoaks immediately and said "That's enough. I want my money back".

Drove it half-way round the M25 to return it and get my money back.

Like Sis said: why didn't the distributor just say Send it back and we'll send you a new one in the first place?

I don't think it would have made a difference. I think there are design flaws.

The screws securing the drive unit to the plattern are small. Way too small.

The drive spindle has a wide lip top and bottom of the 33 rpm section. The belt is not going to fall out of it. The lip on the 45 rpm section is way too narrow.

Finally, each unit is not tested before delivery. The parts might be, but the assembled unit is not. Otherwise they would have found the loose motor mount before the unit was even shipped.

Which is why Sis does not want another Pro-Ject. (Personally I hope she takes a liking to a Technics DJ deck....)

Music Streaming By iPad

Am I the only person who wonders why anyone would pay hi-fi prices for a streaming device when there are iPads?

More to the point, when there are spare iPads, or even a recent generation iPod, or an iOS 12 or later iPhone left over from an upgrade. I re-purposed an old 16GB Air after I upgraded to a later model with more storage. My only mini-gripe is speed of app loading. The response once loaded is just fine.

Music does not need state-of-art kit - video does. My music files (AAC or MP3, granted) are on a removable HDD, attached to a ten-year-old ASUS netbook running Windows 7 on a Celeron chip and connected by WiFi. The Stratospherix Music Streamer finds the HDD as a regular Windows drive, and scans the directories to create a catalogue with album art on the iPad. A rescan of my 1,000+ CDs takes about ten minutes at most.

Connect the iPad to your amplifier as follows:

Apple Camera Adapter with power pass-through. There's one for Lightning ports and one for USB-C ports. Connect the Lightning / USB-C pigtail to the iPad, and the cable from the transformer to the pass-through port. This will provide power without draining batteries. Connect to an external DAC or amplifier digital input using a USB-A to USB-(whatever the other end is) cable. If you don't have an external DAC or a super-integrated amplifier, you can use a Dragonfly or some other USB DAC, and connect its output to an analogue input on the amp.

Download whatever streaming or music apps you need onto the iPad - those apps are free, subscriptions for content may apply. I have the Sonos (don't judge me) app, Qobuz, and Stratospherix Music Streamer (that has a minimal cost). An iPad can handle Naxos and other services that don't play nice with Sonos and other streaming-controller-apps (from e.g. KEF or Naim). It can also be a Roon controller. Of course it can: it's a computer.

The path is digital all the way from the music server to the DAC, wherever that may be.

There are discussions about whether the hi-fi people can build a digital link between their wi-fi card / LAN port to their DAC which is audibly better than Apple's link in the iPad. I will leave that argument to more techie heads than mine.

Two things.

It has to be Apple, because Android re-samples everything to 16/48 (or near offer). Apple pretty much passes the digits through, so if you get 24/192 or whatever in through the wireless, that's what will go out of the Lightning / USB port.

And, this only works if you have an older iPad, a superceded iPhone with iOS12+, or a recent iPod, hanging around.

Otherwise cost becomes a factor. iPads are £400 or so, and those Camera Adapters are £40-80. If you don't have a DAC, a Dragonfly Black is around £100. iPods are less than £200 and have the same functionality but a smaller screen. (I started streaming using an iPod. Didn't notice a difference moving between the two.) Whereas the Bluesound Node is £399 at Richer Sounds, everyone says it's wonderful, and it has its own DAC so it plays nice with an analogue-only amplifier. And you do get 500 Audiophile Points if you have Bluesound Node. (I think there's a penalty for using Apple gear.)

Hence the qualification of my question: when there are spare iPads.

Low-Fi, Hi-Fi Defined

It's low-fi if the recording is a test of your kit. As in I never heard the guitar part before.

It's entry-level hi-fi if you say That's really good, much better than what I had before.

It's hi-fi if your kit is a test of the recording. As in Jeez, that mix is a mess.

John Darko is the only reviewer who really talks about this. Sometimes the production just does not warrant a highly-accurate, clear, analytical set-up. All that does is make you hear every bit of scratchy playing, poor balance and messy microphone placement in the studio. Not to mention the faults in the recording deck, and the mixing engineer's tin ear.

Every time I've started doubting a piece of my kit, I put on a different piece of music, and there is everything I thought was missing before: the soundstage, the tight bass, the instrumental separation, the details. It was missing one the earlier music because it wasn't in the recording in the first place. If you doubt this, play some jazz from the late 1950's, preferably recorded by Rudy van Gelder. It's all there in the recording and mastering. Then play Seether, which is a terrific noise, but it's mixed for headphones and low-fi kit.

This raises an interesting question. Shouldn't we have different kit for different types of music? Distortion-heavy rock is not well-served by highly-analytical gear, but baroque and jazz is. It's not going to work for speaker-fi and amps, because the only people with more than one of those at any given time are reviewers. The rest of us pays the money and lives with the consequences. Choose the gear to suit what you spend most of your time listening to. I don't listen to a lot of distortion-heavy rock music.

When I do, it might be nice to have a pair of headphones to soften the harshness of the distortion. Which is maybe why some people have multiple headphones.