Michael Brook, rediscovered

Friday, May 29, 2009

Many, many years ago I bought the first album by Canadian guitarist and atmospherics maestro, Michael Brook. I’ll never forget the rather dismissive description of him as “the electrician” by a friend of mine, when I dragged him along to see Brook supporting a Harold Budd concert in London sometime last century.

The comment was perhaps partially deserved, as Brook’s music did come across as a little synthetic and antiseptic in live performance.  But the same thing could not be said of the first solo, non soundtrack releases he has released in over 10 years, RockPaperScissors (2006) and its reworked version with producer / remixer James Hood, Bellcurve (2007).  Both are full of beautiful, captivating and incredibly esoteric atmospheres, bringing together Brook with collaborators such as Lisa Germano (on the gorgeous “Want”), Paul Buchanan (of The Blue Nile), and a Bugarian choir and orchestra, not to mention integrating a fantastic reading of Dylan Thomas by Richard Burton.

I’m really not sure which version I prefer, but both are currently on auto-rotation and very highly recommended.

A full collaboration between Michael Brook, James Hood and Lisa Germano would be heaven…

Antisocial networking

Monday, April 13, 2009

I’ve decided to terminate my Twitter account with extreme prejudice. I just find it disturbingly inane to the point of being creepy. I cannot communicate anything I would want to let anybody else know in 140 characters, and the people I’ve been “following” are not telling me anything interesting either. I also really can’t get why it’s a good idea to be “followed” by total strangers.

I’m not hiding from anybody. My email address is easy enough to find, and this website should give you a good indication of the value of my thoughts…

Unfortunately I need to keep an eye on Facebook for professional reasons, but please don’t try to engage with me there. You’ll be wasting your time.

Too pretty for its own good

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

So I decided to cough up for this year’s MacHeist bundle. Since there was at least two applications I wanted anyway (LittleSnapper and iSale) I was basically getting over 10 other quality applications for free. Some of them looked interesting, some less so.

The first one I tried was the radical new RSS reader, Times.  Times is a complete departure on the RSS reader paradigm. It presents pages, where feeds can be assembled in such a way as to look like a newspaper page. Here, for example, is a page with 3 feeds from Iceland:

Pretty, isn’t it ?

Unfortunately, that’s about all it is.  At a very basic level, Times is a nice idea. However, the user interface, in my opinion, crosses the boundary between inventive and non-standard too far. The process for managing feeds becomes tedious very quickly. The gratuitous “inner pages” on the left margin of the window might be ok if they were somehow functional, but they’re not.  The page idea would be great if the layout could be customised, but apart from some minor scope for resizing areas, it can’t be.

Page content (from feeds that is) is retrieved, where possible, but there is no way to read or respond to comments without exiting to the default web browser.

And, sadly, it is also fairly sluggish and unstable.

So, nice try, but no banana. For a moment it makes NetNewsWire look pretty tired, but the huge imbalance of style over functionality ends up making it look like one of those applications that give Macs a bad name.

(Oh yeah, obviously, it’s Mac only)