Not in fact a continuation of the Through Poland series, despite what you might expect. This is not so much a song, more an experiment with backwards recording, to test the theory that the Welsh language is actually just a bunch of people talking backwards for a laugh, and to create a completely palindromic piece of music. (There can’t be many of those around, surely…)
Apologies to any actual Welsh speakers reading this. Please don’t kill me.
Another backlog of FAWM entries to post here, starting with a twisty little instrumental.
Last one for the moment… this one’s a stab at the week one challenge, “write a song with a day of the week in the title”. Towards the end I got frustrated that the song was going nowhere, hence the throw-in-all-the-unused-lyrics-and-get-shut-of-it ending, which actually turned out quite well. This is the sort of occasion where FAWM excels… the cattle-prod-up-the-backside-to-get-a-song-finished treatment pays off sometimes.
![[Screenshot: Pimp My Chips]](http://www.pouet.net/screenshots/49056.png)
This week saw the release of the long awaited Ate Bit musicdisk, Pimp My Chips – featuring a selection of Spectrum covers of classic pop songs. Musical contributions came from Mofobaru, Simon, Nik-O and myself, and the full pack is well worth a download if you’re suitably Windows-executable-equipped. If you don’t, or you’re more of an instant-gratification-click-and-listen type (or a stick-it-on-your-mp3-player type), here are my tracks as friendly bandwidth-hogging MP3s.
This was an attempt to write an entire song in the time it took to upload the previous one. I managed one verse.
So FAWM is almost upon us again, and like so many other participants I’m finding myself hoarding song ideas and trying very hard not to inadvertently write them before February comes round. I can’t help but think that this is missing the point of a contest which is meant to push you into writing more music, so perhaps it’s just as well that this one slipped through the net and turned into a two-thirds-finished song before I could stop it.
I set myself a personal target of finishing it off in time to premiere it at last weekend’s pre-FAWM open mic meetup at the Green Note, and actually succeeded in finishing it off as well. At 1am the night before the gig. Which meant that I’d only had about half an hour of practice, and duly stumbled through the first two verses on stage before throwing in the towel and playing Graham The Caveman instead. (It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the first two verses were the old bit that I really ought to have learnt already.)
So, to quote Mark Lamarr, here’s how it should have sounded. For anyone wondering about the slightly odd subject matter, it was inspired by a moment on the journey to last year’s Forever party, where I was at Cologne Hauptbahnhof trying and failing to figure out some equations to do with raytracing, and thinking “oh, if only Paul ErdÅ‘s were here”. (Overlooking the fact that he’d died 10 years previously, obviously.)
Tonight I’m thrilled to be able to bring you an exclusive first glimpse of Are Great Things Born, the forthcoming album from Glencoe Horse.
![[cover art: Are Great Things Born by Glencoe Horse]](/images/glencoe_small.png)
…okay, so that’s a lie. Glencoe Horse (and their album) are a figment of random chance, generated by the following fiendishly complicated algorithm as introduced by Burr on the FAWM forum:
A general call went out to come up with an automatic online generator, and, well, how could I resist? My first attempt at an application in Camping (chosen so that I could take advantage of the wonderful HTML-parsing capabilities of Hpricot without the monster truck of Rails sitting underneath), it took about 3 hours to complete starting from no knowledge of the framework whatsoever, of which half was taken up finding out the best way to deploy it.
It lacks the human touch of the lovingly-photoshopped artworks that have previously come out of this concept (and replaces it with some rather horrific random colour schemes instead) but it’s still a curiously addictive way to pass a few minutes, with your finger poised over the Refresh key.
It seems like everything I create these days always has to be part of some bigger masterplan – an attempt to win a competition, or a massive software project, or a stepping stone towards some greater goal. I really need to learn to do things every now and then just as casual throwaway bits of fun, for no particular reason, Just Because.
So here’s one. It’s a bluesy piano sketch that pretty much took shape by itself through some aimless pottering around on the keyboard, and I can’t see myself adding lyrics to it, using it as the soundtrack to anything, recreating it on obscure hardware, entering it into a competition or any of the other random things I always end up doing. It just hangs together as an entity in its own right, so that’s how I’m going to leave it, as a celebration of Just Becauseness. (But having said that, if you have any better ideas about what to do with it, go right ahead and take advantage of that Creative Commons licence…)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
On the 6th of May, a bunch of intrepid FAWM survivors descended upon the Green Note, Camden’s loveliest live music venue, to catch up on songwriting banter and take part in the open mic session there. And so, armed with my shiny new (and small-enough-to-lug-around-on-the-tube) Korg K61P, I made my first ever public performance on stage with a musical instrument. (That’s if you don’t count a ZX Spectrum as a musical instrument. And if you don’t count piano recitals aged about 9 either. But still, eh?)
It’s taken a while to get the recordings sorted, but now thanks to the wonders of MP3 you can share in that glorious day.
That evening we also crashed the open mic at The Stage Door, Waterloo – so for completeness, the two songs I performed there were You See Colours and The Ballad Of Graham The Caveman. No recordings of those though, unfortunately.
