Twelve

Three albums (one very Christmassey one!) and an EP this month.

Pretty much a sliding scale between songs and electronic wibble on this month’s albums and a particularly damp, chilly feeling to proceedings too.

A cat reaches the top of a mountain after a long climb through the snow. He is cold from the bottom of his fur to the tips of his claws. He is sodden and wet, and we all know how much a cat hates to be wet.

The second Woob album (AKA “Woob 4495”) is probably the greatest ambient album ever made and is certainly the best one you have never heard of. Originally released in 1995 on the em:t label it is also a rare record. I don’t have an actual copy but I have seen one! I downloaded it off the internet and even that is quite difficult to do. My friend is an avid collector of all the em:t releases and it is easy to see why: all the albums are titled in a specific way that is very appealing to people who like to collect things and they also have very striking nature photography on the covers. In a strange way, the label was able to create an identity for its releases in a way that many artists would try to.

Sometimes, when I am feeling a bit down, I like to write down some of my ambitions. As you can see from this list they are mostly pretty humble but they are also a bit cheesy and embarassing, so I have put them after the fold!

So, two short reviews in a row. I had the day off work and went to see “Rust And Bone” this afternooon. It’s the new film by Jacques Audiard, who directed “A Prophet” – one of my favourite films of the last five years.

I went to see "Skyfall" last night and I really enjoyed it. I knew nothing about the plot, mostly because I had avoided all discussion of the plot with people who had already seen it and I even avoided reviews as so many these days seem to just rattle off plot points, instead of discussing what makes the movie any good. With that in mind I will obviously try not to give away any of the plot in this brief review.

It has been a strange month and I found that I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. I have been a bit down and when that’s the case I tend to take refuge in music that I know well, stuff that cheers me up. I have listened to last month’s fave a lot, Nelly Furtado’s “The Spirit Indestructible”. I said a lot of nice things about it but it probably didn’t come over in my writing just how much I really liked it.

Tonight, despite feeling a bit under the weather, I went to Stevenage to watch Portsmouth play a League One game at the Lamex Stadium. In addition, I met a “person off the internet” for the second time in a week – this time Tom, a friend of a friend from Facebook: our shared passions being Portsmouth FC and really cool music. We met at King’s Cross and caught a packed train to Stevenage, a non-descript dormitory town that was even more non-descript than I remember St Albans being. I’m glad I went, even though Pompey lost. It’s funny how sitting in a shed in the cold watching your team lose counts as entertainment!

This is another mathematics post that does not actually feature any equations or graphs. It is intended to set the way clear for writing regularly about nonlinear systems. This in itself is a precursor to writing more about mathematical biology as biological systems are inherently complex and nonlinear. I am reading P. G. Drazin’s textbook on Nonlinear Systems and this post is a glossary of terms from the start of the book laid down here because I wanted to remember how to typeset definition lists in Markdown (though in the end I (ab)used <h4> tags because it looked better).

I had a bit more time to listen to this month’s albums because I was on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t manage to write about them while on holiday though! In fact I bought and listened to a few more, but I will save them for next month. The albums I will discuss now (in order bought) are:

Over my holiday I read "Even The Dogs" by Jon McGregor. I've not quite finished it yet but that will at least prevent me from giving away spoilers. I am not sure I would want to give any spoilers anyway because it is unrelentingly grim so far. Perhaps there is a happy ending but both you and I will have to read it to find out.

Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project. I’d also like to understand strategies for playing the game and what better way to evaluate strategies for games of chance than to have a simulator to play all those millions of games that you don’t have time to play?

It’s rather spooky but shortly after deciding to write about Nelly Furtado’s “Folklore” as the next understated classic, I found out that she has a new album out this week. As a result, I have been listening to a lot of her music while writing this post, and I’ve been enjoying it too.

Album Digest August 2012 is also from the stack of albums that I mentioned last month. I chose this selection (along with the Passion Pit album) because the colours looked good together in the mosaic of covers that I make each month. Last month’s digest was about the right amount of detail so this will be another briefer digest. These are all good albums but not ones that will change your life, they'll just happily sit alongside it. They are:

“The Gone-Away World” is a novel by Nick Harkaway. It’s about a world slightly askew to our own in which the powers-that-be have deigned to unleash a weapon that simply wipes the enemy out of existence. Unfortunately the enemies also have the same weapon and there are terrible consequences to the extent that the very fabric of reality is threatened. If you don’t already know what reification means, you will by the end.

“I see the people working and see it working for them.” (Sat In Your Lap)

Just a short album digest this month. I bought a stack of CDs and am parcelling them out over the next few months (together with important additional releases as they crop up). This is in the hope that I can write more considered pieces about each one. This month I’ve grouped together albums with monochrome covers and a BT album from June that I found out about recently. These albums are not just linked by their artwork, they also form a cohesive whole. As a result I dispense with reviewing each album in depth. As usual there is a playlist at the end.

Three fantastic albums for Album Digest June 2012:

This post is about the films of Wes Anderson. I am no expert, I’ve just watched them all recently (inspired by seeing “Moonrise Kingdom”) and spotted a some similarities and differences between the films and I thought it would be fun to write about them. My appearance on Mastermind with “The Films of Wes Anderson” as my specialist subject will have to wait for now. Feel free to add to the discussion in the comments. In case you don’t know what the films are, here they are in order (with links to their IMDB pages):

As indicated by my reading list posted a couple of months ago (which has since been added to here), I’ve started to try to read more about the things that I felt that I did not understand so well. Most notably perhaps is this book “on love” by Helen Fisher. Lest there is any innuendo it is not a book about technique nor does it attempt to explain love to those who have never known it, instead it assumes that we have all been there. In fact, the book attempts to explain the neurological mechanisms of love (specifically romantic love) and describes how science has helped reveal these mechanisms to us.

This arrived on Monday and I thought I would give it a post of its own because at over 3 hours of music, I am unlikely to do more than dip into it before writing the album digest next week. It is a far bigger and more enjoyable artefact than I thought it was going to be, so it probably deserves special attention for that reason too.

Another book from the “university of life” pile (though not in the picture), “Gonzo” is the biography of Hunter S. Thompson in graphical form. In case you don’t know his work, Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist who invented the so-called “gonzo” style. This was basically to rock up at some major event and become embedded within it, usually writing up a long form piece from an outsider perspective. He was particularly famous for his work on the Hell’s Angels and Richard Nixon’s campaign for presidential re-election in 1972.

Tonight I avoided the first half of the football along with my friend Albert Jan and we went to watch “Moonrise Kingdom” at the wonderful Everyman cinema in Hampstead. It was a real treat in every sense. To start with, the Everyman is a lovely cinema. It is quite expensive but you do get what you pay for: a comfortable seat in a great theatre and the chance to watch more than just the latest blockbusters (though it shows those too). I think it was the only cinema in my area that was showing Moonrise Kingdom, though it has been out for a while now.

Say what? We’re allowing compilations now?

Four albums for Album Digest May 2012:

A mostly instrumental month with a comeback from Orbital, an excellent remix collection from Battles, an amazing movie documenting a live performance by the Chemical Brothers and Austin Wintory’s soundtrack to the game Journey.

Sit back and let it happen, / Let us take your time away.

When your birthday brings the world under your window

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon was written in 1956 and tells of the experiences of West Indian men moving to London for work. It has been described as the definitive novel about the experiences of the Windrush settlers. The narrative centres on a man named Moses who was one of the first to come to London and finds himself the first port of call for many subsequent immigrants:

I pay to have this blog up and running. That is, I pay for the space where it is stored and I pay for the name. I have to look after all the files and plug-ins, I have to perform all the updates and optimise the database tables. All this is great fun but wouldn’t it be cheaper to slap the mattischro.me address onto a hosted WordPress.com account?

Five albums for Album Digest March 2012

Among Fields of Crystal / Wind in Lonely Fences

One EP and three albums for Album Digest February 2012:

Ages ago I set out to write a post for each of JG Ballard’s novels. In fact it is the oldest post on this blog. Most of the novels (I don’t have the two autobiographical novels Empire Of The Sun or The Kindness Of Women and the late period novel Milennium People) are sat in a row on top of my broken bookshelf, part of the weight there that bowed outer frame of the unit and made the inner shelves collapse. Had I known that it would be a task unfinished nearly eighteen months later and destroy a piece a furniture that I did not yet own, I may have been less ambitious.

Five albums to see in the new year:

I got into Début via a cassette from the library, much like I did with Together Alone by Crowded House. I suppose it is less obscure than many of my choices for this strand but I do think that Post is more well-known (because of It’s Oh So Quiet, which we shall mention here only briefly) and that Homogenic is probably more popular among her fans.

Once upon a time there was a man who loved to paint. He studied the art and craft of painting for many years. He chose to invest his time and energy into creating the most realistic portraits that he could paint. For him the joy came not from completing the paintings but the process of recreating the real world with the strokes of his brush.

Dreams Of A Life is a documentary about Joyce Vincent, a woman who was found in her flat three years after her death surrounded by wrapped christmas presents and with the TV still on. £2400 in arrears on her rent, she was discovered by bailiffs who forced the door down. The film attempts to work out happened to Joyce by interviewing people who knew her. In two other strands that unfold in parallel, various events from her life are re-enacted along with the clearing of her flat by forensics officers.