Sunday 21 February 2010

I've been rediscovering the joys of the great WFMU on my phone. This morning I was particularly enjoying the very curious choice of music being played off vinyl on Airborne Event with Dan Bodah (he even played Andreas Vollenweider), only to discover that the whole point of the programme is that it's made up of records and CDs people have sent in to be played one last time before he cathartically smashes them with a hammer on air. He did make an excellent case for Mr V's LP's destruction. Afterwards: 'The world is a better place'. It's genuinely refreshing to have a whole show where the DJ talks at length about the worst aspects of the music, even when he likes it. And my life is richer for having heard this, but I don't want to hear it ever again.

Talking of mining music of questionable quality from the past, I spent some of yesterday's sunny Saturday afternoon reliving the past with my old Atari ST and Steinberg Pro24, which unlike Cubase v2, will run on a TV without the now defunct mono Atari monitor. All I could recover was the stuff that I'd recorded in 1989 and 1990, but I did find out that I only made a backing track for the first 10 exercises of Hanon after all: the full 20 must have been on the drum machine a few years earlier. I'm not sure if I can summon up the will to do it all again in the interests of less tedious technical exercise: let's see ... 

Otherwise, I've been dealing with the endless deluge of email, enormous application forms, record companies, and a forthcoming visit to a potentially very rich collection of unknown manuscripts.