The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

[I started writing this entry on my phone last year, trying to relieve the boredom of an airport lounge. I couldn’t get GPRS access at the time, so I forgot about it. Hey ho. It’s still relevant.]

Adding a few rules to tighten up my “everything random” playlist in iTunes the other day, I started thinking about how my music listening habits have changed over the years.

I started to get an idea of my musical tastes at 12/13, gravitating towards the louder, hairier bands on Top of the Pops. However, my scope for musical gratification was limited. I could afford to buy only the occasional record or tape, and otherwise had to rely on birthdays, Christmas or the local library’s meagre selection of rock and metal singles. As a result, my musical awareness was restricted to isolated songs by a handful of artists.

As a teenager, starting to explore beyond this rock/metal starting point, the album became my unit of musical currency. Listening to just one track, even one side, was unheard of; it would be a CRIME AGAINST MUSIC not to listen to the whole album right through. I could probably recite the tracklisting for every album I owned ;-)

With a small group of friends (and in contrast to most of the kids at school) I spent hours browsing Lincoln’s secondhand record stores, unravelling music history and the complex system of influences that led to the sound of my favourite bands. We usually arrived at school clutching bags of records under our arms… borrowing and lending kept things moving, stopping the process of musical discovery from becoming stale. Budgeting for blank cassettes was vital… remember the “home taping is killing music” warnings on record sleeves? It didn’t, and I suspect downloading won’t, either.

Fast forward a decade… in my 20s, earning money and living in London, there were now fewer limits to my musical exploration. The medium had changed (CD replacing vinyl and cassette) and my tastes were even broader than before, but things were still pretty much the same. I bought albums by artists I liked and listened to them in one go. However, I was having trouble keeping up with all the music I wanted to listen to, and as a result, several obsessions of previous years were all but forgotten.

Another ten-year hop in the time machine, and we’re up to the present day. One particular technological development has changed my listening habits in several ways…

Attached to this Mac is a 250 gigabyte external hard drive, named “Media”. I use it for digital photos, videos, scans and… MP3s! I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to sound quality, so I only encode mp3s at high bitrates (320 or 256kbps) because I have more than enough disk space to do so. Almost all of my CD collection is there, always available for instant access, and here’s the really good bit that I’d never have envisaged ten years ago… it can be RANDOMISED. Although I still buy whole albums on CD and listen to them as single musical units, I’m guessing that the majority of my listening involves setting iTunes to randomise absolutely everything on a track-by-track basis.

See what’s happened? I’m right back to where I started at the age of twelve… the song is my unit of musical currency. Lots of songs really work well in the flow of a whole album, but they can often work even *better* when framed by totally unrelated sounds. It wouldn’t be unusual for me to hear Opeth followed by Thomas Tallis followed by Djelimady Tounkara. And unlike ten years ago, I finally feel like I’m on top of things musically. I might not know every second of every album, but at least I’m not neglecting huge piles of CDs any more.

Now, here’s what’s weird. If you saw the ads for Apple’s iPod Shuffle last year, you’ll know that “Life is Random”. Now, while I use my full-size iPod for a mixture of random and standard listening, I use my little Shuffle very differently. For me, it’s a way of applying restriction and limitation to the vastness of musical possibility, focusing my ears on just one artist. I’ll usually fill it up with five or six albums by one artist and listen to the whole lot sequentially. In this case, the musical unit is the artist’s career, or at least a decent chunk of it. Life *is* random, but sometimes it’s nice to pick a thread and follow it through to the end.

I think I’ve mentioned this before… considering how much time I’ve spent listening to Frank Zappa’s music over the past twenty years, I’ve barely played any of it, given the vast quantity available. I put it down to a mixture of its complexity and my own perfectionist streak. You just don’t really “jam” or “busk” Frank’s music… if you play it wrong, it’ll sound *very* wrong.

However, I’m gradually chipping away. At last year’s annual UKMG social weekend, a few of us performed a version of “Peaches en Regalia”. The original features a very dense, multi-textured instrumentation, so I constructed an arrangement with the intention of fitting as many details as possible into three guitar parts (backed by bass and drums). A couple of people urged me to do a recording, so here it is…

Peaches en Regalia (5MB mp3)

Back in the home studio, with the infinite protection of the ctrl-z safety net, there’s no need to be quite so strict with the three-guitars rule, but I only took a few liberties with the arrangement. More details on the sfocata site.

So anyway… the reason I bought that “French Kitchen” book mentioned in the previous Dinnerlog is down to a long-standing tradition here (”here” in the offline sense, I mean). Way back when we were either impoverished students or impoverished just-graduates, I was wondering what we should do for Nicola’s birthday. Going out to a restaurant was out of the question, unless we went to one of our usual cheapo student haunts, which wouldn’t be very special. “No problem”, I said, “I’ll cook you a meal”.

My initial intention was just to make something *nice*, but I was surprised at the range of international cookery books on offer at (pre-fire) Norwich library. Concentrating on one country, I figured, would be fun, so I grabbed a particularly promising book on Mexican cuisine and headed, pen and notebook in hand, for some of the Fine City’s most obscure delicatessens. To cut a long story short, we feasted like Tory peers that evening and learned a lot about Mexican (not Tex-Mex) food in the process. Oh, and started a bi-annual tradition that still continues to this day, part of the fun lying in the birthday celebrant’s task of trying to guess where the food/drink is from.

This year wasn’t the first time we’d done France; we sampled the hearty northern flavours a few years ago. However, browsing the aforementioned book, I noticed quite a few recipes from the rural southern heartland around the Auvergne region and decided to explore that area. Here’s one…

Soupe aux Cerises (Cherry Soup? Not exactly!)

First of all, put 500g of pitted black cherries in a pan with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of kirsch. Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 mins. That done, slice a baguette thickly (this amount of cherries should do about 8 slices) and fry in butter until golden. Dust the bread with sugar and ground cinnamon and put at the bottom of a serving dish. Remove the cherries from their juice and pile over the bread. Now, blend half a tablespoon of flour with a little water and whisk this into the cherry juice. Bring this gently to the boil and thicken slightly before pouring it over the cherries and bread. Eat like you’ve never eaten before.

With complex, controversial issues such as the Muhammed cartoon affair, there’s a temptation to avoid voicing an opinion at all. Whichever side of the argument you take, you’ll inevitably find yourself in the company of some unsavoury bedfellows. However, that’s life. There is no black or white. Here’s my shade of grey…

Freedom of speech is not absolute. It requires responsibility and sensitivity to the context. You wouldn’t stand up at a friend’s funeral and shout “I’ve been shagging his wife!”, for example. With that in mind, one of my mixed feelings was sympathy for normal, unassuming Muslims whose deeply cherished faith was being ridiculed for the sake of a newspaper trying to prove a point. No religion should be above criticism, satirical or otherwise, but the boundaries between fair criticism and downright offence are different for each social grouping. In this case, we’re dealing with a religion which is sensitive about *any* sort of pictorial representation, so extra care is required. As it turns out, the cartoons aren’t much good. As satire, they’re nothing special, and as symbols of our fine Western civil rights, they’re pretty weak.

While we’re on the subject of the freedom of speech, the same guidelines have to apply to people protesting against perceived abuses of that freedom. If the various Muslim councils had calmly voiced their dissatisfaction with the behaviour of Jyllands-Posten, the whole thing would probably have turned out differently. Instead, we have Danish embassies burning in the Middle East and people killed in Afghanistan and Somalia. Here in London, the protest was smaller than certain newspapers probably wanted to suggest, but was notable for some of the laughably ironic banners held by protesters, such as “freedom of expression go to hell”. Right… so that’d include your freedom to stand in the street holding that banner, then? Many other banners would constitute incitement to violence and were all photographed, according to police on the scene, so look out for dawn raids in a town near you.

But what an over-reaction! The cartoons have now been printed in lots of other newspapers worldwide, but let’s not forget that the original furore erupted after they appeared in *one* newspaper with a circulation of 150,000, written in a minority European language. I’ve been having a browse around the Jyllands-Posten website; here’s an excerpt from a recent editorial (my translation)…

See? There’s something of the Daily Mail about that tone. Well, they probably don’t deserve that particular comparison… either way, the editor was shocked by the response and made an apology at the time. No big deal. If your religion doesn’t have the resilience to shake off little setbacks like that, what hope do you have?

But then, of course, all this worldwide hysteria wasn’t started by the regular Muslims, quietly going about their daily lives. After the cartoons had originally appeared last September (with only localised protests in Copenhagen) a group of ultra-conservative clerics set off for a little PR tour of the Middle East, armed with copies of the offending pictures. Oh, and just in case they couldn’t whip up the desired level of hysterical outrage, they decided to include a few extras in their press pack… some far nastier pictures totally unrelated to the original set, depicting Muhammed as a pig and a paedophile (more details in the Observer). Alhamedi suggests that this, in turn, was an attempt by the Saudi government to deflect attention away from the fact that rather a lot of people had been trampled to death during the Hajj.

Cynical stuff, and if the extremist Islamic factions want to create a worldwide climate of animosity towards Islam, they’re going the right way about it.

Incidentally, the original commission and publication of the offending cartoons was a reaction to the difficulty that author Kåre Bluitgen faced in soliciting artwork for his book “The Koran and the Life of the Prophet Muhammed”. Mindful of the Islamic law against idolatry, many artists were too fearful of the potential backlash to submit work. Anyway, the book is due to go on sale this month, so hang on to your hats…

I had been intending for a couple of years to make a more formal statement of my availability as a freelance transcriber. After all, the brief mention on the “Who?” page of this site wasn’t really going to drum up an awful lot of work. So when my friend Steve Cobham (a talented and experienced guitarist, teacher and transcriber himself) suggested we join forces and pool resources, it seemed an ideal opportunity to get something done.

The result is this website…

Custom Transcription

We are now officially “available”! If you’re in need of transcription, notation or guitar arrangements, please get in touch…