I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Month: September 2010

A visit to the Horniman

Posted by on in Exhibitions, PlacesLeave a comment

I was at the Horniman Museum recently and took a look at a few of their temporary exhibitions including this one on the Tuareg.

The exhibition is called Tuareg: People of the Veil, and although only a small exhibition I really enjoyed looking around it at the textiles.

The Horniman is one of my favourite museums and I’ve spent many happy hours there over the years. It always has something interesting going on and is very good at serving it’s local community as well.

Places like the Horniman are really important. They may not have huge multimedia exhibitions running all the time, but they have exhibits that you might not see anywhere else. Places like this should be protected. They’re important.

If you’re interested in finding the Horniman museum …

More posts about museums

Troy at the British Museum

A few thoughts on the Troy exhibition at the British Museum.

by ashleyelsdon

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Listening to Laurie

Posted by on in ListeningLeave a comment

I found this tape the other day when I was clearing out old cassettes (a job that’s going to take me a while I think).

I’d forgotten I even had this, so it is great to listen to Laurie Anderson as I’ve been a fan for many years now, and interesting to hear her talk about her work in the present tense from so long ago.

Seeing Laurie Anderson’s film “Heart of a Dog”

I’ve been wanting to see this film for ages now so when it came up at the Tate Modern I was really pleased. But when I got there the added bonus was she was there too. Which was amazing. She gave a little talk at the beginning and then answered questions at the end. It…

by ashleyelsdon

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Sleepwalkers

Posted by on in ListeningLeave a comment

I’ve only just bought this album as it only came out today. It’s the first album from David Sylvian since his difficult Manafon album.

Although this is a compilation people have already been saying good things about it, so I’m really looking forward to giving it a thorough listen. Probably tomorrow now.

Sleepwalkers

If you’ve been to this site before, then you are probably aware of my fondness for the music of David Sylvian. Sleepwalkers was and is a compilation that came out years ago. A few months ago a new updated version was announced, and I decided to get it. Here are some pictures of the release.…

by ashleyelsdon

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When tapes go wrong

Posted by on in Stuff, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve been clearing out old tapes, and when I say old I mean old. Some of the tapes are of my own music so I’ve been converting a few tracks to digital and finding songs that I’d completely forgotten about.

Sadly, one tape seems to have decided to give up and of course it had to be one which had lots of long forgotten treasure (for me anyway).

There’s only one thing for it. I’m going to have to open it up and see if I can splice the tape together, and I haven’t done that for years!

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Remembering Bands from a long time ago

Posted by on in ListeningLeave a comment

I decided to start digitising my huge collection of old cassettes. A daunting task. I’ve been putting off doing it for years. Really years and years.

But it needs doing. I started off with a tape of a load of bands that I put on in the nineties at an open mic type event in South London that I used to run once a month.

It is fantastic to listen to some of these bands and their songs again. Songs that have been forgotten by most of the people that heard them.

I don’t even know most of the people who played at those gigs. I wish I hadn’t lost touch, but it is a fact of life that we move on and people drift and do different things and stop being in bands. A shame, but that’s the way it is.

I suppose in a way listening to all this old stuff is a way of reliving the past, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with that. Also you start to remember why some of those songs never got anywhere!

It’s fun to do, and who knows if I’ll get through all of those tapes?

Finding my first cassette recorder

When I was about 11 or maybe 12 I really desperately wanted a tape recorder, and for Christmas I got one. It was a fergusson and it looked like this. I found it again at a very weird museum a few weeks ago. It took me right back. I used to use it for recording…

by ashleyelsdon

Experimenting with little modular things

I’ve been exploring some of my tiny modular devices. Above you can see. I posted this picture a while ago on Instagram. It was a fun thing to play around with, and I think that these devices go very well together. I can see myself doing a lot more little sessions like this. I’ve been…

by ashleyelsdon

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Getting that TC going again

Posted by on in Mobile ApplicationsLeave a comment

I found that I had an old Palm TC lying around doing nothing, and after a decent charge it powered up just fine. So I’ve installed iziBasic and ViziBasic on it to see what it can do and more importantly what I can do with it.

I’ve got some new ideas for a few palm OS apps (not webOS). These will almost certainly follow in the footsteps of my older apps which are all sound toys, but I want to see if I can do anything with infrared communication between apps.

Let’s see what I can come up with then.

So NinerPaint is coming to iOS 

NinerPaint was a totally amazing app for Palm OS. It was one of the best Palm OS apps around. Now it’s coming to iOS, and, it’s coming back to Palm OS as well. This is brilliant news. As soon as it’s available I’ll let you know.

by ashleyelsdon

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Palm Apps from the past …

Posted by on in Mobile ApplicationsLeave a comment

If you’ve been reading my PalmSounds blog for a long time you’ll know that in the past I’ve dabbled with making my own Palm OS apps with a little bit of success. The apps I made were never going to be totally amazing music production apps, but they were free toys and a little bit of fun to play around with.

Anyway, I’ve moved them all here now and you can get them in the ‘PDA Obsessions‘ page.

I do plan to do some more apps using old Palm OS and some other mobile OS stuff too, most notably Android, but more of that in another post.

For now I hope you like the old Palm stuff. Give me some feedback if you do.

Here are a few other PDA related posts

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Little Girls with 99 Lives

Posted by on in ListeningLeave a comment

I bought this CD EP without ever having heard Ingrid Chavez before. I knew very little about her music I just knew that David Sylvian was on it and I am a long time fan of his.

I was pleasantly surprised by just how beautiful this EP is. It starts of in a fairly conventional form and gets progressively more experimental with each track, which is fine with me. However, it never gives up any of the lyrical elegance that struck me when I first listened to it.

Since listening to it several times over the weekend I’ve bought a few more Ingrid Chavez tracks, and her music is really growing on me now.

Ingrid Chavez, Little Girls with 99 lives, signed copy
Ingrid Chavez, Little Girls with 99 lives, signed copy

Record Store Day 2018

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…

by ashleyelsdon

David Sylvian as a Philosopher

I got this book a week ago and as it’s so short I’ll probably read it very soon. I’m looking forward to it to see just what kind of arguments are made for this. We’ll see.

by ashleyelsdon

A signed copy of Steve Jansen’s ‘Slope’

I already have this album, I got it when it first came out, but when I heard that Steve Jansen was selling off the last remaining stock and signing them I thought I ought to buy it again. It’s always lovely to have a signed copy of things and this album especially so. I hope…

by ashleyelsdon

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Going Ape

Posted by on in Climbing, Uncategorized1 Comment

Over the summer I spent a great day at a Go Ape site at Bedgebury. When you first take a look at a course like this it can look daunting, but when you’re up in the trees it is great fun, and we had perfect weather for the day.

Climbing trees is a wonderful activity except in the rain of course, but even then it can be fun. That’s probably a post for another day. It is probably good exercise too, but that’s not why I enjoy it. I just love getting off the ground and being up in the trees. There’s nothing quite like it.

Spending a few hours at Go Ape is just pure fun and I’d recommend it to anyone so long as you’re not afriad of heights that is!

If you have no idea what I’m talking about then check out the Go Ape web site and see if it takes your fancy.