Modify that technology

It made sense that composers pretty much all wrote their own software or built their own circuits in the early days. Part of your individual identity as a creative artist is that your individual working methods and working set-up are highly personal and individual. It would have seemed absurd in those days to expect another person, especially a group of people not musicians and who didn’t even know you or your music, to configure a computer or synth for you. Such work was an integral part of the composing process. I find it has a very stiff and somewhat off-putting feeling by comparison, working now with fixed pre-written off-the-shelf software or hardware units. The music you’d find in an early technology would lead you to modify that technology to make it easier for the kind of music you found in it to emerge. So their was a back-and-forth. You’d evolve both the music and the tools so they worked best together on a specific piece. The music was always influencing me to alter the technology to serve it better, and conversely, the technology would suggest things to try and lead me to new places in the music.

from Interview with Laurie Spiegel at Tokafi.

Also worth reading this interview from the New Yorker, promoting the reissue of The Expanding Universe LP. 

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On the planned privatisation of public services in the UK

Marvellous – look how well the energy companies serve the public with efficient support services and low costs; look how well rail privatisation has served the public with cheap fares, safe infrastructure, and clear accountability; look how well private health insurance covers non-profitable services like A&E and emergency cardiac care; look how well rural communities are served by private bus companies who want to slash services even further. These reforms will allow financially aggressive large companies to cherry-pick the profitable sectors; they will reduce accountability; and they won’t function in true markets (when were we ever able to choose a state school for our children, or have free healthcare choice – the infrastructure to make this possible doesn’t exist, and won’t under these reforms). This is driven by ideology and the commercial interests of the Tories backers, and we will pay for their profits.

A comment by London Spy on – no really – a Daily Mail article (“Cameron plans to end ‘state’s monopoly’ and let people bid for public services”).

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Interview with Egyptian Lover

SS: Then the guy from Cybotron, Rick Davis, thought you were dead?

EL: He saw the headline: “Lady Diana Dies With Egyptian Lover”.

Bwahaha. (from Open Your Books To Page Freak in Stop Smiling Magazine)

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