MP3:
A Stranger's Just A Friend (2:08)
Scruffy's Song (4:05)
Help Me Make It Through The Night (3:02)
Walking In The Sunshine (3:01)
Blackboard Of My Heart (3:24)

A dead ringer for Mick Ronson you would have thought that British singer-songwriter Jeff Briggs would have capitalised on his looks by joining a Spiders From Mars tribute band. But he was quite content to play on the British cabaret circuit churning out cod country and western fodder including these two privately-pressed discs.

The first presents a quartet of country covers including Jim Reeves' A Stranger's Just A Friend (the only selection worth including from this disc). The song is bad enough, but delivered in such a curiously flat, disinterested vocal Jeff's more likely to have made enemies than friends. He appears on the cover with a German Shepherd but from the way he's holding the poor pooch perhaps he was taking his idea of friendship a little too far!

The later 'Memories' EP takes Jeff's apparent dog fixation further. Here there's not only a mutt on the cover but we are treated to the self-penned Scruffy's Song which is a seriously skewed spoken word affair made from the point of view of a dog. A cut-price synth (replacing the electric piano on the earlier EP) plays a kitsch medley of Hearts and Flowers/White Christmas while Jeff as the doleful dog ('Scruffy') whines on about being rejected by a family because he got too big to look after. Or as Scruffy so beautifully puts it: "It wasn't very long before 'Isn't he lovely' had turned to - 'Go away!'" For some unknown reason the dog shares an accent with Slade front man Noddy Holder that only adds to the unintentional comedy. They say that the British are a nation of dog lovers but even the most ardent Crufts-botherer would baulk at this one.

By this point Jeff was in-house entertainer at Swansons Hotel, Jersey in the Channel Islands and it's so wonderful to think that he actually stood on stage performing this. Did he actually wear a dog skin? Someone must have liked the song enough to buy this disc and even got Jeff to sign it (and on the back of the sleeve the original owner has usefully added 'Swansons Hotel, Jersey 17.9.1980'). Whether or not there are more gems by Jeff out there waiting to be discovered remains to be seen. His song writing skills certainly leave a lot to be desired, although, more by accident than design there is a lot to enjoy in Scruffy's Song. If you're out there Jeff we salute you.

- Contributed by: David Noades

Images: Friend Cover, Memories Cover

A Stranger's Just A Friend
Media: 7" EP
Label: Sirius
Catalog: SP513
Date: 1978
Credits: Producer Dave De la Mare, Eclipse Studios, Cleveland

Memories
Media: 7" EP
Label: Sherpa
Catalog: TR1677
Date: 1980
Credits: Recorded by Tony Spence, Music Workshop, Jersey

With a tightly detailed classical style, Colette Calascione paints mysterious ladies bedecked in opulent apparel. Especially striking is her luminescent and gentle handling of fabric and flesh.

Looks can be a powerful agent for changing how we think about sound. Pairing liquid, organic speakers with equally fluid and dynamic visualizations, the launch of Muon last month in Italy made this principle readily apparent. I’m all about lo-fi, cheap gear here on CDM, but if you absolutely must launch luxurious aluminum speakers with spectacular animated visuals at a posh party in an Italian salon, I sure won’t complain. Pass the prosecco, please?

Muon Project Page, documentation videos at chrisoshea.org
See coverage at ze | d | esign, toxi’s project blog, MoCo Loco, elsewhere. (Yeah, CDM’s motto is: cover things last. Was a bit busy with Maker Faire!)

Liquid-y Speakers: The speakers themselves were beautiful enough. Designed by UK speaker research center KEF Audio and Ross Lovegrove, a champion of organic, 21st Century design and one of the most respected designers on the planet, the key to the design is super-formed aluminum. The process does for metal something like what vacuum forming does for plastic: you heat sheets of aluminum so they can be molded into unique forms. The speakers themselves are formed out of single, 6-foot pieces of metal, into an acoustically-conceived, flowing form. I haven’t heard them, but we’ve already discussed (at a radically lower price point) why speakers really don’t have to be — or even shouldn’t be — rectangular.

Liquid-y Visualization: And that’s just the speakers. Part of the beauty of digital media is that they can make the invisible and the impossible visible in a dynamic way. So Muon creators employed London’s responsive media firm Moving Brands, who in turn brought in two of our favorite people — responsive media guru Chris O’Shea (see his blog Pixelsumo, and artist and Processing ninja Toxi (aka Karsten Schmidt). Working with creative director David Eveleigh-Evans, the team created a dynamic animation on a huge LED screen that could visualize the sound coming from the speakers and reflect in motion what the speakers do in product design.

How They Did It

The animation isn’t just a pretty visualization; it organically reflects what’s happening with the sound. Performing a spectral analysis of the sound (via a Fast Fourier Transform or FFT), the software uses amplitude levels in different zones of frequencies to produce particle objects, which spring and bob based on polarity, turning the peaks in amplitude in sound into a pulsating pool of fluid. The model itself is actually 3D, but it’s squashed into 2D space (or you can imagine looking at the 3D space from above). The other essential element is that the software looks at a history of amplitudes over time, so that overall changes can be adjusted (a bit like the simple “peak” meter on a consumer stereo EQ).

If you imagine an EQ meter using a pool of mercury instead of simple bars, that’s the basic idea.

(...)
Read the rest of Muon: Spectacularly Beautiful Speakers, with Gorgeous Sonic Visualization in Processing (296 words)

---

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Music, 2007. | Permalink | No comment

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

Finally, RePeter worked out his next mixtape. Yeah! Great job after 2 years! RePeter serves todays grime and electro, facing their masters from back in the days. Listen! - Source Site:http://repeter.menschlabor.info/mp3/001_RePeter_No3.mp3

Robosonic Eclectic: Morton Subotnik, They Might Be Giants, and robotic musical instruments on the same bill? That … doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen this weekend, starting tonight.

With a lineup that includes They Might Be Giants, JG Thirlwell, Mort Subotnick, George Lewis, R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson, Lemurplex is kicking off what looks like a really packed couple of weeks of music and research into new instruments here in New York this weekend. Check out the TMBG video and JG Thirwell clip for a teaser of what’s to come. I’ll be there, so say hi if you, uh, know what I look like. (And thanks to all of you who’ve been saying hello at various events. It’s always great to know who’s out there reading.)

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots

Lemurplex, incidentally, is a terrific place to go learn this stuff if you can find a way to come to New York — not only musical robotics, but music tech in general. See also Harvestworks, which regularly has people in from other lands around the world for residencies / learning / etc. Not everything happens in New York, of course; I hope to put together an up-to-date list of educational venues beyond academia around the globe soon.

Flyer after the jump.

(...)
Read the rest of NYC: Rocking Robots, They Might Be Giants (0 words)

---

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Music, 2007. | Permalink | One comment

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

ABL:radio regular Unjust is back this week with a hard-rocking mix of jacking house and timeless techno from the Windy City to the Big Smoke. Composed of classics acquired during her crate-digging sessions at Records Wanted on Essex and in her native Florida, Just Undo It is inspired by Unjust's opening sets at the Bunker, and evokes a distant summer when the city streets gleefully ran with the blood of a thousand boombox-shattered eardrums. - Source Site:http://www.abrooklynlife.com/2007/05/ablradio_just_u.html

- CBS has acquired the UK-based social networking site Last.fm for USD $280 million in an all-cash deal. According to TechCrunch the deal sees Last.fm’s management team staying in place and the site maintaining a separate identity. Yeah, right.

- Village Voice's Tricia Romano writes her last Fly Life column ever. As she puts it: "I'm ending it the way I started. I'd need three columns to do everyone justice, but I don't have that. Party over: out of time". Romano is becoming a more-generalist staff writer at the popular NYC paper.

- Apple launched iTunes Plus yesterday. Now you can buy DRM-free music encoded at (well..) 256 kbps AAC for just USD $1.29 per song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog in the same versions, (128 kbps AAC with DRM) at the same price of USD $.99 per song, alongside the higher quality iTunes Plus versions when available.

- The UK-based duo Swayzak will finally release their new album, Some Other Country, August 28 via !K7.

Vacation season is upon us, and it looks like someone on the WFMU air staff is going to Rivendell!  Out of the basement and onto the blahg, it's another installment of WFMU's weekly roleplaying game, "If I owned a Burger King-issued chalice with Viggo Mortensen etched into it, which WFMU DJ might I be?"

You've really gotta view that pic at full size for full appreciation.

Winner gets a slick slice of modern swag, FMU-style!

Here's your bonus mystery chunk of the Wild n' Wooly WFMU MP3 Library, just for playing: [mp3 for download, 1 wee meggie]

This LOTR goblet may belong to any person who has ever had a regular show on WFMU.  To help focus you, here's a list of like 6,000 people to whom it definitely does not belong:  Trouble \ Joe Belock \ Hatch \ Diane Kamikaze \ Irwin \ Fabio \ Bryce \ Maria \ Bill Zurat \ Liz Berg \ Stork \ Scott \ Billy Jam \ Charlie \ Rich Hazelton \ Mike Lupica \ Bronwyn \ Vicki \ Gaylord Fields \ Monica

31st May 2007: On the 40th anniversary of the release of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band EastWest has announced that its Fab Four Virtual Instrument is now in stock and ready for shipping. Just as ...

31st May 2007: reKon audio has released VST Lead2 Editor, a realtime MIDI synth editor that allows you full control of every sound shaping parameter found on the Clavia Nord Lead2 rack and keyboard synthesizers, fro...