Taking Sides

Digital music has eroded - indeed removed - the whole concept of a “side” of a single or album. I reckon there’s a sense in which the medium has had an artistic effect on the message...

In the vinyl days singles and albums were inherently games of two halves. Unless your masterpiece was complete within the capacity of a single side (case in point: Rush's "2112") there had to be a split down the middle. A pause, a break. Something that’s easy to forget now we can have hundreds of hours of music literally in our pockets: audience participation was required.

In the break you had to act - to flip the LP, or turn the cassette around. It was like an interval in a theatre show, though of course you didn’t have to pop out for an ice-cream or extortionate gin and tonic. The disruption was lessened, but not removed, by such inventions as auto-reversing cassette players, and I’m sure some folks had record players capable of flipping the LP over. (1)

An artist's awareness of this structure would show up most keenly in concept albums, and I recall Marillion's “Misplaced Childhood” having a distinct “End Of Act One” climax (the end of "Heart of Lothian"), and a rattling, back up to speed Act Two opener with... whatever the first track on side two was called. (Tangent: I reckon concept albums erode one’s caring as much about individual track names... or perhaps I’m just forgetful. Occam’s Razor on standby.)

So though auto-reversing cassette players took the labour out of an album flipping, there was still the pregnant pause as the tape hissed to the end, the silence as it played through its leader, then the click chunk as the mechanism reversed. A few seconds later the hiss of the empty tape before side two began. Tension, house lights down and the chattering of the audience stopping (hopefully). This was dramatic structure, there were choices to be made as a recording artist - which track should close side one, which should open side two...

CDs ended all that. It took a while of course - longer than expected I’d imagine. I reckon it was probably only after the industry stopped releasing albums on cassette that artists were properly free to exploit having an uninterrupted 74 minutes of space, and the big divide in the middle was history. Concept albums, for those still determined to make them, could run uninterrupted! Non-stop dance remix albums were now really non stop - for 74 minutes.

Then the mp3 came along, and now we’re in the tail end, perhaps, of a similar change of structure. The difference this time is that there’s almost no practical limit, beyond the storage space of servers and players. A concept album could stream live and never end, a non-stop dance remix could actually be just that - non-stop. In practice of course the need to chop stuff up into saleable bits means there are still such entities as albums, but this is now largely convention. Once physical media is gone the last barriers will fall away and artists will be utterly free to make an album that lasts an hour, or lasts a year (though their fingers might get very sore in the latter case). Also, the concerts would surely get dull for even the most hardened fan.

"What did you do last year?"
"Went to the John Cage duet with Robert Wilson."
"Any good?"
"Well, March was a bit dull..."

To be more realistic there’ll always be a sense in which the idea of an “album” exists - artists will mostly have to decide the scope of their work, the amount of time they can spend creating and refining material, and the final length that will best suit their material.

Which brings me to another thing - the ability to buy and play music track by track, moreso perhaps than the removal of media limitations, is what’s truly threatening to the idea of an “album”. There was and remains an artistry in choosing the order you present your songs in - the ebb and flow of your work. Many albums show clear signs of structure: a catchy opening or a slow build, then often two or more of the singles you’ve released before the album came out (another pattern that’s changing...), some less immediately commercial tracks, some surprises, some songs that comment on each other by their juxtaposition, and then all the extra tracks the drummer wrote and you wouldn’t have normally included but it’s his garage you rehearse in...

An album was a performance - it had to sustain your listeners all the way through. Who out there remembers an “album track” that didn’t grab you at first but grew into a favourite? Now it’s all too easy to skip straight to the songs that hooked you into buying the whole album in the first place, never giving the slow burners a chance. Or why buy all those songs you don’t know? Why not just get the two tracks you’ve heard already?

It’s something of an act of discipline nowadays for me to listen to an entire album. It's something of a novelty to even listen to music that isn't on shuffle, as with endless choice comes paralysis. But it’s something that I fight especially on two occasions: when I get new music I try to listen to it all in order at least once - to give them all a fighting chance. Then it’s off into the big melting pot of shuffle. The other occasion is when the album’s structure demands it - Hybrid’s work tends to reward linearity, and there are always the non-stop dance remix albums.

Oom tish oom tish oom tish

(1) As I picture this, the room that such a device is in has a deeply disturbing amount of purple velvet on the walls. (2)

(2) Note to statisticians and interior designers: the quantity of wall based purple velvet to qualify as "deeply disturbing", rather than merely "disturbing", is this: any.

Cache in hand

Kowloon Walled City Park, Kowloon, Hong Kong

A man stripped to the waist stretches up to the trees and unhooks a bamboo bird cage containing a few small fluttering splashes of colour. He adds it to two more in his other hand and strolls across the small plaza to some other trees, identical in every way, but shaded from the scorching sun. He reaches back up with the cages and re-hangs them.

An old woman sits on a low wall and begins loudly and rhythmically slapping her knees, gradually working down to her ankles.

Elsewhere a man laconically twists at the waist, half-heartedly attempting some Chi Kung before giving up and sitting in the shade. It's that hot.

From under a small pile of rocks, possibly some of the remains of the walled city, I casually extract a small plastic box, plonk it on the wall beside me and resume sipping from my bottle of water, as if I unearthed kitchenware from memorial parks all the time.

The box is a geocache, and I've got plans for it. I'm carrying a flower shaped keyring which I've brought from a similar plastic box hidden in a dissimilar tree in South London.

L'Isle de Citié, Paris, France

At the very point of the island, I'm strolling through a commemorative garden to the victims of the Holocaust, surrounded by a large group of people delicately working their way through a Tai Chi form. As I sidle towards the stone inscription, trying to read the two dates and subtract one from the other, a voice says: "Monsieur?"

Turning, I see a young man pulling on a lively fishing rod. He hauls up a respectably sized fish from the Seine, and after a moment's uncertainty about whether he is about to attempt to sell it to me, I realise he wants me to take a photo of him with his prize.

Later, I somewhat self-consciously climb some steps allowing me to reach the roof of a cafe, and slide out a plastic box from under the eaves.

Olympic Park, Sydney, Australia

I'm wandering about the deserted grounds of the Olympic Park, counting the legs on a monument here, finding the date on the bottom of a huge array of solar powered floodlights there. I'm wondering what the strange, distant noise is. Sounds a bit like the sea. Another wave of sound echoes distantly around, and I look towards the nearby stadium. Ah. That would be the sound of 10,000 people roaring their elation or disappointment at some sporting event. There's a match on.

I decide I'd better hurry up, and twenty-five minutes later I'm crouched half under a bridge by a riverbank, pulling out a cobwebby plastic box from the hollow where some power lines enter the ground, and only then remembering that Australia is home to eight of the world's ten most-deadly spiders. (Spoiler: I lived.) (Edit: Mis-remembering, I should say. It's only four out of ten, as far as google tells me. I feel so much better.)

Fulwell, London, England

My niece and I set off from her house with torches and giggles. A couple of weeks ago she introduced me to the strange art of geocaching. People hide boxes, and publish the GPS co-ordinates through the official website. Other people, like us, use a GPS device to help us find the boxes. Satnavs will do it, but more convenient still is the iPhone app.

It sounds too easy, but of course the devil - by which I mean the fun - is in the detail. GPS (at least on my iPhone) is only accurate to within a few metres. That's great for getting you close, but on a tree-lined path by a railway track in the suburbs, in the dark, that still leaves a fair bit of hunting to do. But there are hints, there are sometimes helpful photos. Occasionally there's a young woman who has already found the cache, and in those circumstances she'll provide assistance of the "hotter, hotter, colder" sort until, grinning and a little scratched you pluck a box from the crook of the tree's branches. (please note: my niece may not be near your cache, don't be disheartened.)

Sometimes co-ordinates don't lead straight to a cache. Many geocaches are lovingly created and elaborate treasure hunts, with multiple stages, called waypoints. At each waypoint you are guided to something which will generate a number (a year on a plaque, the values of the fourth and seventh letters on a sign, the number of letterboxes serving a Parisian flower market - anything!) These give you the co-ordinates of the next stage.

Often the creators of the caches work in some local history, offering background and context to the local features you're finding. It's a beautifully tangential way to learn about the place you're in. Even in my hometown there are hidden stories this hobby has shown me.

But, as Brad Pitt cried, "What's in the box?"

Depends. Caches can be utterly tiny - I've found several that are wee magnetic hollow cylinders the size of an earplug. These unscrew to reveal a tightly rolled strip of paper. The bare minimum for a cache to contain - a logbook, which you can sign, date and write a terse message on if you're so inclined, recording your finding it.

These "nanos" can be found stuck to municipal metal in all good towns. They're ideal for cities as they can be hidden pretty much anywhere. I've plucked these from park benches, road signs and even vents in sidestreets near Trafalgar square (to the sllght alarm and bemusement of my friend Jason, who then warned me that I'd just set off red flashing lights in a CCTV control room somewhere. So be it.) The armed police and bomb squad didn't descend on us that time, but the point is a good one - this pastime requires a bit of discretion. I'd counsel against anyone seeking to establish a cache in a railway station for example.

Beyond these tiny caches come a range of sizes. I've found old 35mm film canisters (under a fencepost by a graveyard, and ingeniously disguised as the hinge of a large wrought iron traffic light control box) and a variety of sizes of locking plastic boxes. There are even larger ones out their too.

As well as signing the logbook in the cache itself, you can log visits, upload photos and comment on the cache at the website.

Caches larger than an atom tend to include, besides their logbook, various amounts of "stuff".
Stuff consists of trinkets, mostly. Low value items for the main part, such as keyrings, pictures, postcards, buttons, shells, coins, lego figures and other small toys. The rule is that you can take something, but you should leave something of equal or greater value.

More interesting than these are trackables, travel bugs and geocoins. These are bought from the official geocaching site and take the form of either dogtags or a small coin or similar object. The important thing is that they have a unique code stamped onto them. The owners fill in a webpage for their trackables and give them a mission, usually and endearingly phrased from the point of view of the anthropomorphised trackable. Once they're briefed on their mission (and, presumably, once the smoke has cleared from that message self-destructing) the trackables are dropped off in a cache somewhere and the owners can follow their progress on the website.

A trackable's mission might be very open, like the flower I left in Hong Kong which just wanted to "...travel to as many caches as possible and clock up the miles on the way."

Or it might be a little vague, like the geocoin I found in the box under the cafe roof in Paris. I think something's being lost in translation, but I'll take the thing home to Scotland, it hasn't been there yet.

It might be very specific, like the wee squishy rugby ball toy attached to some trackable dogtags I found in Fulwell. Its mission is to go to specific rugby stadia, ending up in New Zealand in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup final. One of its goals was to go to a specific cache in Olympic Park in Sydney. I was just about to go to Sydney when I found it, and this coincidence brought home to me the message-in-a-bottle thrill of this particular part of geocaching. Trackable owners have talked of their kids' enjoyment (and their own) at logging in and discovering that an item has travelled, either a few miles or thousands.

I'm going home, currently sat in Charles de Gaul airport in the sweltering heat, positively relishing the thought of Scotland, where they know how to do October weather properly. Bring on the rain.
But this ending point of my travels, on tour with the amazing people of DV8 Physical Theatre, is coming at a good time, just before my son turns 7. I've been to some amazing places and seen the insides of some amazing theatres. On the scarce time off it's far too easy just to sleep, or mooch around and not really get out and see something of the places we've been touring. Geocaching has come at a perfect time for me, giving me an impetus to get out of bed, out of the hotel and into the place I'm visiting.

It's a sort of lucky dip tourism, taking me places I'd almost certainly never have gone to, sometimes utterly off the beaten track, sometimes firmly on it, but with the treasure hunt making it feel pleasingly parallel to the tourist route you're following. The people around you are sightseeing, or going about their daily lives. You have the added illicit thrill of being on a mission. Dates on buildings, numbers of letterboxes, statues, signs, sights: these things have extra meaning now, they encode the location of your prize, or the next step towards it.

Saltcoats, Ayrshire, the future.

My son grins and looks out for passersby as I casually stuff the small plastic tub he's filled with trinkets and trackables under the rock he likes to play on. This is his birthday present, and we'll watch together and see if his trackable travels far. We walk past this rock every day. Dozens of people do. Now it has a secret, a story to tell and a treasure to find. We'll watch, and see who might track it down.

If music be the love of food...

My music teacher at my first secondary school was the stuff of school legends, alas for all the wrong reasons. She couldn't control the class. Sagelike older students told of her having been locked in the cupboard by some fifth years. One especially good story told of a student suddenly standing up and shouting "I can't take this any more", rushing to the window, opening it and jumping out. Her classroom was on the first floor (North American chums - think "second floor"), so - somewhat understandably - the teacher was said to have shrieked and rushed out to find the head of the department. (He was made of much sterner stuff, and not infrequently was asked to grace our lessons with his glowering presence, in the hope of our knuckling down to actually working for a change.)

I digress from this poor suicidal student, still plummetting to her messy doom, or at least her messy broken bones - this was only the first floor, so her chances were perhaps quite good. In fact her chances were excellent, as immediately outside the classroom window was the rooftop of an adjacent one-storey section of the school building. As the story goes, she quietly climbed back in and studiously resumed her work, acting all baffled when the stoical head of department arrived with the hysterical teacher, now presumably questioning her sanity.

I have grave doubts that this story is true. There was indeed a suitable rooftop just outside the classroom, but I've no idea if the school was so lax as to have windows that could be opened sufficiently to let pupils do anything as reckless as throwing themselves out, or breathing fresh air for that matter.

What was also true is that the teacher couldn't control her classroom, a problem I had with my French teacher too. Both were lovely people, inasmuch as you ever got to know them, but weren't actually able to teach because classroom rowdiness made learning impossible, even for swots like me who were - initially at least - willing to try. In French I passed the time playing "Catchphrase"(1) with the boy who sat next to me - his name was Martin Laws.

In Music class I had no such intellectual distraction. My overriding memory of the class was that each day I had Music I would buy a King Sized Mars Bar and then make it my mission to surreptitiously eat the thing during class. I recall keeping it in the inside left pocket of my blazer, and I would periodically reach a hand in there and delicately claw out a small morsel of the gooey caramelly chocolatey bar, cunningly convey it to my mouth and luxuriate as it melted deliciously.

I'd make my way through the whole sludgy bar this way, turning an often tumultuously chaotic but more often dull music lesson into a haven of thrillingly illicit pleasure. Note that we weren't actually playing any instruments or (as I recall) listening to any music in these lessons, no - we were sat at desks learning (shudder) theory. I doubt I'd have been able to gradually scoff anything whilst actually playing the oboe, or even the deservedly humble triangle.

I prided myself on my clandestine porking skills, I never once got caught sneakily snarfing half-melted Mars, and I concluded that I was being extremely clever and discreet. I suspect, thinking back now, that my poor teacher had bigger things to worry about than the otherwise-attentive fat kid sat quietly eating five rows back, what with all the looming cupboards and fake suicides blighting her dream of harmonious pedagogy.

This has all sprung to mind as I sit on a train eating wine gums in exactly the same secretive way.

In any case, it's a fine way to eat chocolate. Go, now, if you have a copy of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and read the description, fairly early on in the book, of how Charlie would eat his annual (annual!) chocolate bar. This is what I aspire to: to rediscover the joy of food by eating it slowly and by savouring every bite, although not necessarily from the inside pocket of a scratchy blazer under cover of the mayhem of an uncontrolled Music lesson. Though perhaps that's how all meals should be served?

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(1) Catchphrase was an 80s TV show presented by Roy Walker, where a visual puzzle suggesting a well known saying or phrase was lovingly rendered in state of the art (2) computer animation. The picture was revealed a bit at a time to contestants who had to guess what the phrase was, for fantastic prizes. There's a particularly good clip (here) where the partial revealing of the image makes the picture look extraordinarily rude. In French lessons, without any computerised graphics Martin and I would play on paper and, if I remember rightly, just draw a bit of a picture at a time. We probably didn't make noises like 'beeeowng' or 'doodle-oodle-ooodle-oodle-ooh'. Probably.

(2) Where we define "the art" as making pictures with "fuzzy felt"

Alien Time

Last year I was working on "The Planets 2010", another show with astronomy elements in it. I love this stuff. This show was a recreation of Holst’s "The Planets" by schoolchildren, with the wonderful Dave Trouton leading the project and composing new versions with the kids. I made effects to illustrate some voiceovers about what we know of each Planet. Holst’s music was inspired by astrology, but we’re inspired by science and are trying - with limited resources and boundless enthusiasm - to show some of the beauty of the planets and some of the fascination of the science.

One of the facts always quoted is the length of a planet’s day and year. I had no idea that Venus’s day was 225 earth days long for example. But it drove home the geocentricity of all of our measures of time. The 24 hour day is based on the earth’s rotation, and the year on our orbit. Distance has the earth as a reference too of course - the Astronomical Unit or AU is the distance from the Sun to the earth, and the light year of course is bound up to the earth year.

I wondered what common frame of reference we could use to discuss time with an alien civilisation, should we bump into one on the way to the shops, and want to arrange to meet for coffee later. We could make an assumption that their own units of time derived from their own home planet’s characteristics, as ours do from the earth’s. What could we use to translate our time to theirs and vice versa. If they gave us fifteen squargs to hand over all the jaffa cakes on earth, or face obliteration. Would we need to panic and all run down to the shops immediately, or could we write a leisurely letter to McVities explaining they’re going out of business in thirteen point two years?

I suppose we would need to look to atomic clocks to get a common frame of reference - an atom of caesium will resonate at the same frequency for us as for them, and then we’re left with establishing numerical units. How many squargs in a floop?

I note with suspicion that whenever the Daleks had a countdown in their charming units “Rels” the pacing of the countdowns suggested that the rel was either a) suspiciously close to one earth second or b) A variable quantity of time which was proportional to the amount of danger the Doctor was in. I’ve worked this out on a napkin and can cheerfully announce that the Dalek “rel” = 1.3 “plotdevices”.

Wordle

I forget how I first discovered it, but wordle is one of the hidden treasures of the web.

It's a Java web application which does something very beautiful with a simple idea: paste in a bunch of text, then count the instances of each word, and display a "cloud" of the words used in the text making the words used more often proportionally bigger than those that are rarer.

The result is magical - it pulls themes out of text, making "word clouds" which beautifully capture the ideas in a piece of writing. Wordle's creator Jonathan Feinberg has allowed many options for fonts, colour scheme and layout and allows folks to freely use the resulting pictures for whatever purpose they like.

I've decided to illustrate each post in my blog with a wordle cloud, in the hope it'll help me realise what I'm on about.

I've used it for a few things in the past - professionally as a way of quickly exploring a script for a show I'm working on, socially for making cards for friends.

I've a couple of tips to offer:

- when pasting in a play text, spend a little time in a word processor first removing the character names, as they're likely to occur most often and will swamp the more interesting words from the actual spoken text. You can usually do a "find and replace" on a given character name, replacing it with a space. Stage directions might be trickier to remove but a bit of time culling those means you're seeing only the spoken words in the final word cloud.

- A wordle I made for the NTS workshop show "Bint Jbeil", with the play's title artificially "inflated".

Conversely, if you want to highlight a particular word (either to fudge the results or to give the cloud a prominent "title" you can copy and paste the word many times to ensure it's the biggest in the cloud.

So go and check out the wordle site, make one of your own with whatever chunk of text you've got lying around... There's a huge gallery of public word clouds as well which will give you a sense of the various layout and style options.

It's truly one of the great gifts of the web - sites exist like this which offer something free, unique and inspiring.