someone who's doing some things
Here’s where I stayed at the beginning of May. It’s a converted rail freight car. It had no electricity of independent lights. The only light was from candles, so it was rather lovely inside. Cosy, friendly and really quite wonderful.
Another Pi related Kickstarter purchase and one that I’m looking forward to trying out soon. I’ll be getting to grips with it soon and seeing what I can use it for. I’m hoping that it’ll be like a little PDA but maybe a bit more up to date.
Which is a massive shame really. I’m going to miss it. Last time it was an amazing experience and a huge amount of fun too. I’m a big fan of storytelling. It’s important. It is just so fundamental and core to how we understand things.
I’ve always found the storytelling at Beyond the Border to be incredible. The range of stories and tellers is so rich that I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed in all of the years that I’ve been there.
Maybe disappointed with the weather, but even then, not that often.
I hope it’s as amazing as ever this year. I’m just so sorry not to be there.
I thought I’d share this too, just a quick picture of my current modular array. More on this as it evolves.
This is the Blokas Pi Sound board attached to my Pi 3 with 7″ touch screen. I’m looking forward to getting some time with this soon. I’m keen to see how it works with the Android app too.
My plan is also to see how I can use Pd on the Pi as well, possibly other stuff too, like Supercollider. Who knows. This card opens up a lot of possibilities.
This is something that I’ve been putting off for a long time now. Mainly as just about everyone I’ve spoken to about modular synths just tells me it sucks every last penny from you and you’re never really finished in any meaningful way. Which is a shame. So you can understand why I might decide not to go down this route. However, after a series of events and triggers I have finally given in with what can only be called a modest initial set up, and one that is in keeping with my largely mobile aspirations.
The set up is inside a lunchbox. So it’s pretty small, and almost all of the modules are from Music Thing Modular, so it is a fairly esoteric modular set up.
I hope to have some kind of output to show for it in the not too distant future, but for now I thought I’d at least post some pictures.
Last year I skipped record store day as I’d been queuing at Sister Ray Records in Soho for about 3 hours and at the end of the process I’d got 1 7″. That was all. I wasn’t terribly happy about that at all, as you can imagine. So I said to myself that I wouldn’t do it any more. I’d give it up. And I did, I didn’t go in 2017. Then I saw the list for this year, and on it was a David Sylvian album that I really wanted to get, and that I knew I would be really annoyed not to own.
So I decided to do it again. However, as I was going to be out late in London the night before I thought that the most civilised way to accomplish the task was to get a hotel room nearby and stay in town. So I did. I stayed at a very nice hotel on Brick Lane which was very reasonably priced too. It meant I could get up really early and walk down to Rough Trade East before 6am.
And my forward thinking paid off. I was probably around the 100 mark in the queue and got inside at about 8:30am. Not bad. I also got everything that I wanted too.
The most important of course being “Dead Bees on a cake” by Sylvian.
So maybe I will go again next year, at least I’ll give it a chance anyway.
