Time & I

Sound It Out

Biff — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:01:46 +0000

This makes me want to go to Teeside right now:

In fact, it makes me want to go to any record shop right now. But I’ve got too many things to do up here on the top floor of the mill I suppose.
There’s nothing like walking out of a proper record shop with a proper record.
Mailorder is exciting, but the online browsing/finding/buying experience isn’t as exciting as the physical one. I literally get goosebumps even if something looks similar to Red House Painter’s Rollercoaster LP. Derby has just got an independent record store back from the dead – BPM. From what I remember it was the main one once, dealt with everything, and then got marginalised by Way Ahead’s indie/rock A-Z prowess, and mainly dealt in House and Trance. Now it’s back it’s a one man job and is so far just full of fairweather stuff retrieved from fallen record shops or dead people. But there’s some gems. I got ‘Blood’ by This Mortal Coil last week on double LP. Beast of a record. Once the chap gets on his feet I can’t wait for the distributors to start chucking new releases his way.

On the flipside, I got this through the post today, and (as is now typical to point out on this here) there’s some nice links and thoughts on time therein lifted from the liner notes…

“Time Out is a first experiment with time, which may well come to be regarded as more than an arrow pointing to the future. Something great has been attempted…and achieved. The very first arrow has found it’s mark.”
- Steve Race

On The Inaccuracies Of The Back To The Future Related Twitter Meme

Biff — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:54:49 +0000

Today a lot of people have been sending me messages about today being the day that Doctor Emmett L. Brown would have ended up in had he not ‘got shot’ at the start of Back To The Future. They’re not far wrong, but today is not THAT DAY that hundreds of people have been retweeting about. Prepare for a geek-off…

For one thing, Doc never got to set the clock, so we couldn’t have seen it in the film. That’s why Marty ends up back in time, on the “red letter date” of November 5th 1955 (the day Doc Brown hits his head on the toilet and wakes up with the vision of the Flux Capacitor).

Here’s Doc saying how far he’s going into the future:

See there. Twenty Five Years To Be Exact. Damn straight. But…

Presuming he was going exactly twenty-five years into the future (can we presume that though, can we really?) he would have gone to October 26th. Check it:

That’s from when Einstein (the dog) went one minute into the future. Oh, and even at the end when Doc does go to the future, he’s heading for “about thirty years” which could mean anything. See you there though…

So…right year, wrong date. Fucking cool though. Hopefully I won’t get sued for using these pictures…and if I do, maybe I can pay the legal fees by doing paid public speaking on Why It Might Be Necessary To Ignore The Opening Of Back To The Future Part II In Order To Fully Enjoy The Sequels, And Why In Doing So You’ll Enjoy Them More, You’ll Even Enjoy ZZ Top’s Appearance In Part III When They Were Allowed To Keep Their Twirly Guitars When Huey Lewis Wasn’t Allowed To Keep His Mullet.

“Run For It Marty!”

Always Celebrating

Biff — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:03:35 +0000

Someone’s made a film about Fine Before You Came. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Italy a few time over the years, and travel around with these guys either with The Little Explorer or Crash of Rhinos, on my own or with company. Because of Fine Before You Came we met Maurizio from Triste who ended up inviting us to Turin for a week-long recording session. Good shit just seems to happen around these five Italians.

These guys are the best kind of people. Really. I met them at The Victoria Inn in 2002. Since then I’ve made sure to go and be with them at least once a year. It’s a poor year when that doesn’t happen. The title of this film, made about their recent shows since the release of their incredible fourth album ’sfortuna’, translates to ’self-congratulation’. Literally, I guess that would be a kind of bad thing…but these guys haven’t got a self-indulgent bone in their collective body. It’s more like the celebration of The Self. If you meet these guys you’ll have a good time, and probably end up laughing until you throw up, even though you can’t understand a word they say. Go and download ’sfortuna’ from them for free here, then order the 12″ (it sounds immenso), then go and see them and say “Hi”.

Things Of The Present

Biff — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:37:14 +0000

Toby brought me this back from SXSW this year. Proper glad I am too because, apart from it being a limited edition (and I do like limited editions), and hand numbered, and A NEWSPAPER (something that still excites me a lot about Newspaper Club (who made it)), and full of great writing and images, it’s also got a lot to say about time and stuff…

“What Charles Darwin did for all life through time, Vernadsky did for all life through space. Just as we are all connected in time through evolution to common ancestors, so we are all – through the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and these days even the ionosphere – connected in space. We are tied through Vernadskian space to Darwinian time.”

- Foreword to Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s The Biosphere. via Matt Jones‘ article on the sun, Solar Storm Watch, Chizhevsky’s ‘Heliobiology’, and the numinous experience.

“…what newspapers are really good at: understandable, highly portable, physical objects that make digesting certain kinds of information easier. Like magazines, they can get you to read things you would never usually be interested in, simply through clever design decisions.”

- Bobbie Johnson on newspapers, and how they are constantly evolving, always in beta, and how they’re not dying – they’re just changing.

Where people congregated in Texas at different times of the day.

Time-sinks. Beautifully arranged, as always, by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful (who did one of my favourite things here).

“The most invaluable resource any writer has is time.”
- Warren Ellis, in the midst of thinking about print, publishing, notebooks with rulers on them, and it not hurting to value the physical…

“Capitalist newspaper names, then, are either temporal or political – and what is politics, but an attempt to freeze morality in time?”
- James Bridle, on the naming of newspapers.

28 Copies

Biff — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:48:27 +0000

It’ll be a while until A Lullaby Hum… gets pressed up onto vinyl. June or July I think. Before then, though, I wanted to make something to give to everyone who helped make it – either by playing, or by (in whatever way) providing inspiration in the making of it.

I turned 28 while making this record, so this first, completely hand-made edition, will be limited to twenty-eight copies. I always meant to ‘document’ the making of the books we did as Time Travel Opportunists a couple of years ago, because when we started it was hard to find methods of binding that weren’t completely hardcore…like for binding bibles…a method for folks binding small runs on a small scale and no budget; folks that don’t own huge paper slicing machetes.

So here’s some pictures for your eyes to look at, probably with some notes (and also, if you’re the hand-making type, pop some links in the comments…I like handmade stuff (see Sonic Pieces for some of the best))…

1. Nice card. Bought this stuff from Green Door Printmaking Studio in Pear Tree, Derby. Fabriano – hand sewn apparently. Expensive stuff…but gorgeous, and I decided to keep the rough edges as they’re really natural and fibre-y.

2. Aaron made a sketch based on a photo I took from the bottom of Sadlergate in Derby (Cheapside for anyone in the area – just stand outside the disused building that is sometimes used as the No Parking art gallery and look up towards the Guildhall). I used this picture because I walk this way everyday, at all times…it’s a key piece in my mental image of the album as a journey through the city at night. All the covers are hand-inked from a carbon transfer made from a printout of the original sketch that Aaron (pictured, looking proper 1950’s) drew.

3. Turn your kitchen into a print-shop. It’s the only way. Unless you’ve got a print shop.

4. I laid out all the pages in Photoshop, and paginated them manually. Using the ‘centre’ option in the print menu isn’t massively accurate for doing double-sided printing on a non-double-sided printer, but with a few tweaks here and there on a test run I was pretty happy with how everything aligned. The inner pages are printed on my favourite paper – good old off-white Conqueror laid. Get a stanley knife, and cut the shit out of your pile of print, fold each sheet carefully, then stick the detritus in the recycle bin.

5. This is the easiest, securest, and most durable method of thread binding I’ve found so far. Double up your thread through a needle, in through the centre, out through the top, in through the bottom, and out through your centre-hole. Tie up the two ends, snip it off, and you’re done. Emma found this method in a book…I can’t remember which book. It was small and red. I’ll find out what it was called…

I’m using little black cd spongey things to hold the cd-r on the inside back cover. I got about 100 for a fiver. The cd-r has handwritten text on it, and the last page is hand-numbered. Here’s some pictures of the finished thing. N.B. On the last page there’s a print error (these photos are of the prototype (first copy/my copy)) – Picador should be “Bloomsbury, 2002″. More about the quote, its origins, and its attribution in a future post…

Album Recording Photoshowpop

Biff — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:33:44 +0000

I didn’t take that many photos of the actual recording of A Lullaby Hum For Tired Streets. Too busy playing stuff, or staying warm for the most part probably. I’ve just got round to sorting through the ones I did take, and they’re in a set here or in a slideshow below. This one, though, is my favourite as, at the end of the day, this was the last step. And it’s a beautiful tape machine.

Also, I forgot until I started working through these photos this morning, that as I listened to the master CD while Nils packed for his flight on the final day of mixing, it started snowing.

There Are Ghosts

Biff — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:56:27 +0000

“I think perhaps if that sort of thing does happen – ghosts – it must be more beautiful, more surprising than all these old tales would have us believe.”

- Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger, p. 62.

Drew A Blank

Biff — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:34:57 +0000

dbh got in touch the day we started mixing down to tape in Berlin, asking if I had any tracks for a magazine he’s helping out with. Proper flukey. So I said yes, and he said did I want to be the ‘featured artist’ on the site for the whole month of April. So I said “yeah!”. So I am. And here it is.

I’m proper chuffed. It’s a well nicely produced webzine. My track loads up as you open it in your browser, and the interface is nifty and smooth. Using your arrow keys you can skim through the ace content, and it’s all really clear and quick loading. There’s also a PDF download so you can put it on a device or something. I think if you tried to print it out it would take ages and screw you for ink, but it’s not for printing…it’s a WEB zine.

The track is Francis Thompson and it’s from the album I’ve been talking about. I’ve put four more tracks up on Soundcloud for people to try out in their ears…see how they fit. If, using the soundcloud player, you listen to After Catalunya, Four Million Silhouettes, and A Lullaby Hum then pop over to Blank Media Collective and listen to Francis Thompson then you’ve heard Side A of the album. Magic.

A Lullaby Hum For Tired Streets #1

Biff — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:42:58 +0000

Late last year I started gathering together all the sounds/songs/sketches I’ve been collecting/writing/making over the last few years and arranged ten of them into an Emphemetry album that I’ve had in my head to make for about six years. Me and Jim (Cork, from The Little Explorer and Crash of Rhinos) started recording it properly at dub:rek in December. It was fecking cold. Dub:rek is situated on the third floor of an old dairy warehouse, where the brickwork is designed to keep the cold in rather than out.

This record is all about Derby at night. About wandering around when no-one or not many people are even awake let alone outside. I do and have done this a lot, and this record is what goes through my head when I’m there. It’s pretty quiet music, and dub:rek has loads of bands practicing all the time…so we made this record really late at night, or really early in the morning…basically any time when no-one else would be around. One day, it was -7 degrees outside, and probably colder inside, and we did a live take of a song in the big live room, and you could hear me shivering between lines.

We got most things done, but took the rest of the recording to Robbie at the Snug Recording Company because it was too cold at dub:rek to perform one of the last songs. My fingers wouldn’t work. Everything got taped on one Sunday afternoon there, and then we got drunk on Polish lager.

Speaking of booze, I was drunk in a museum last summer, and spotted that one of the violinists in the string quartet playing there was my old music teacher. I got it together enough to get her phone number, then they went and I finished off the free vine. Basically, I’d had a few sessions playing with Harry Cooper on violin, and wanted some strings on the album but knew of no-one and had no money. Luckily, Strictly4Strings play because they love to, not to get paid, so I ended up visiting them a few times with a score. The song I wanted them to play on has some strange and subtle time signature changes, and my musical notation is, to a professional, nonsensical bollocks. Violinist Karen Eveson was gold and invited me to her gaff in Long Eaton for a couple of evenings of getting the score to sound right, in time, on the beat, with all the necessary flourishes.

The night before I was supposed to be in Berlin with the finished album for mixing, I got the four of them to pop up to my new studio on the top floor of a mill next to a weir, and recorded the piece in two takes, before heading back to dub:rek, gone midnight, to record the guitars and edit it all together.

Basically, this record has been carried around all over the city for most of this winter just gone, and mostly at night…which wasn’t deliberate or pre-planned. It was just…necessary. I struggle to find superlatives that do enough justice to my thanks to Jim, Robbie, Sarah, Karen, Pete, Gary, George (who came to the mill on a Saturday afternoon to play flugelhorn), Claire (who popped up on a Sunday morning to play violin), and Harry (for helping me to understand what a violin could sound like on my recordings).

The mixing was done by Nils Frahm at Durton Studio in Berlin, and that was a whole other experience entirely…

Lately, and Soon

Biff — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:04:23 +0000

Some Emphemetry shows coming up this month. Close to home, where I haven’t been much lately.

Friday March 19th in Nottingham at Lee Rosy’s Tea Room – playing with one of my all time favourite lyricists, songwriters, guitarists, etc. Geoff Farina (Karate, & Secret Stars), and Chris Brokaw (who’s been in some fecking awesome bands like Codeine and The New Year). Proper gutted I won’t get to see them play until Leeds the following week as I’ve got to shoot off straight after I play, but I’m hoping we can have a cup of tea and a natter beforehand.

Monday 29th March in Derby at Vines – I’d never heard of Stairs To Korea before I got asked to play this one, but I have now, and I’m glad, and I can’t wait to see him play live. Reminds of Plans & Apologies. He proper sounds like Dave Williams, and can dish out long strings of tastily assembled words and a crafty melody like I only wish I could.

I’m finishing the recording of the Emphemetry full length this week, before going over to Berlin next week to mix and master it with Nils Frahm. Then, in April, will start playing more and more, starting with a gig with dbh, probably in his kitchen.