Tuesday 18 November 2008

Today I wasted 4 hours trying to work out why my laptop was now producing random short bursts of white noise with certain tracks loaded. Ignoring the advice on one website 'you have trial version of software loaded', I tweaked every parameter and clock I could find until eventually tracking down the culprit as a VST plugin that, yes indeed, was a trial version I hadn't registered since putting it on the laptop. Fixed in a few minutes. Oops.

At lunchtime I bumped into Karen McAulay at the RSAMD, which was fortuitous, as I've recently worked out that because it's 15 years since I tried to do any serious academic work, all of my bibliographical tools are 15 years out of date, and the innovations of those 15 years include such helpful delights as the widespread use of the three w's. Who better to ask for advice than a music librarian who's writing up her PhD?

Back in circulation on my iPod after being ousted by all the Maria Kalaniemi albums is the new one from Flipron, which is on release at last. Thanks to my soon-to-be-relinquished role as a 'specialist media tastemaker' (yes, that's really how Music Week described me) I got a copy a couple of months early. And it's everything I would have liked it to be: funny and heartbreaking, polished and ragged, and extremely intelligent without being ashamed to use the word 'arse'. Get it here. As if that wasn't enough, Jesse has just admitted to me that his great-grandfather was Arnold Dolmetsch, and now I'm utterly confused as to whether that explains anything about Flipron at all. One thing is for certain: this man is no stranger to a gamba. And my timewasting this morning is best summed up in his final words from the album: "I've always known the price of each squandered day/I've always known what each hour cost/Something lost...".