I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

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You won’t see one of these I’ll bet

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I checked the tapedeck site to see if they had one of these in the list of cassettes and they don’t, so I sent them some photos.

I have 3 of these Teac cassettes and I can remember that when I bought them that they were pretty hard to get hold of back then. Now, well I doubt that there would be many of them around any more.

I’ve only got one of the blue ones and the other two are black and not in as good condition.

Beautiful though isn’t it?

Teac reel to reel cassette

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Messing about with App Inventor

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, TechLeave a comment

I’ve been playing with Google’s Android App Inventor site, and it is a lot of fun to mess about with. However, at the moment, it is unlikely to be useful for any kind of serious musical application building.

There is talk of being able to introduce extensions to App Inventor so you could do more with it. Things like using Pure data would be useful if you could integrate that into what App Inventor is about, and maybe that will come at some point, but at the moment musical applications will be somewhat limited and toy-like.

Still. Good fun to play with.

Pythonista 2.0 is a massive leap forward

There’s loads of new things to explore in the latest version. Here’s what’s new: Pythonista is now compatible with all iOS screen sizes — from iPhone 4 to iPad Pro, and everything in-between. For larger projects, you can now use multiple editor tabs to switch between related files more quickly. The Pythonista app extension allows…

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Processing 3 and the new sound library

The last time I used Processing I was messing around with the minim library for sound. Now, in version 3, there’s the new sound library and it looks (and sounds) amazing! I’ve only played with it a little but so far the example code looks really straightforward to read and understand. I might even start…

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Listening to myself

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently going through a process of moving all my old cassettes to digital. It will take a long, long, long, time. I assure you.

But part of the process is listening to music I haven’t heard in years. Mostly things I’ve recorded myself, some great, some terrible, some embarrassing, and all enjoyable in one way or another.

It is a good reminder of why I love music, why I love the creative process. A reminder that software and hardware are just tools for doing something creative and should be looked at as that.

I think it can be really easy to get lost in tools you’re using to the point where you focus so much on what the tool can do and can’t do that you forget what it is you’re trying to achieve. That’s the danger and listening to my old stuff made with simple hardware and usually no software at all made me realise that perhaps I need to think long and hard about where my music is going, or more importantly the fact that it isn’t going anywhere at the moment.

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…

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Getting to the end of Dune

Posted by on in Books and Audiobooks, ListeningLeave a comment

I’m a big fan of audio books and have been for ages. I used to have a lot of walking to do on my journey to work every day and it was a good way of listening to more than just music.

I’ve listened to all sorts of things from fiction to history to music theory, and over the last few weeks I’ve finished listening to one of the biggest stories. Dune.

I’ve listened to:

  • Dune
  • Dune Messiah
  • Children of Dune
  • God Emperor of Dune
  • Heretics of Dune
  • Chapterhouse Dune

It feels kind of odd to have finished listening to the books now. A bit like there’s no where left to go.

I know that there are the prequel books and a few others in the franchise too now, and I’ll probably get around to listening to those at some point, but for now it feels like an ending, and it is.

Goodbye Pamela

Sad news, Pamela Salem passed away last month. She played the character ‘Toos’ in the classic Doctor Who story ‘The Robots of Death’ with Tom Baker. Which is one of my favourites of all time. She then recently reprised the role in the Big Finish story ‘Robots’ with Nicola Walker.

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The Poetry Library

Posted by on in Places, PoetryLeave a comment

I spent a very pleasant hour recently in the Poetry Library at the Southbank centre. I’ve been a member of the Poetry Library almost since it first opened, and it is truly a national treasure.

It is such a peaceful place, such a great place to sit and read poetry (of course) and discover new writing.

When I worked full time in London I used to make a lot more use of it, but now I only get to pop in every now and then. Even so, it is a joy to visit it every now and then. I hope to get to use it more.

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If you want to find the National Poetry Library

Here’s a map to show you where it is. I’d certainly recommend it as a great place to visit

A visit to the Horniman

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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

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Listening to Laurie

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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…

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Sleepwalkers

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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.…

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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…

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When tapes go wrong

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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!

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…

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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…

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Remembering Bands from a long time ago

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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?

I love tape, so I love this …

I’m a fan of Deerful’s music so it was good news when she announced a cassette release. It’s a really nice EP too and very well put togeher.

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Old fashioned Cassette Recorder (biscuit tin)

I had one of these years ago. In fact, I had a number of these. But one that was very like this one. I think it was the Ferguson that was almost identical to this. It was excellent. Ok, not excellent, but really good for its time. I used it to record all sorts of…

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