Hollow Earth

So the tears run like wine

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:24:00 +0000

Yes? Or no? I veer towards no - simply because beyond the Hot Mix 5 I've never been an Acid fan, right from Harthouse I was like, no. And more than that my favourite Chicago Trax have always been the ones without 303s - Steve Poindexter and the Muzique label. But! BUT! Truthfully this is no different from Glen Branca, and as an Art Music one-off, well, it is kind of amusing, even groovy.

Known Pleasures

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:48:00 +0000

Peerless design archaeology on CP1919, the source of the image on the cover of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures," from my pal Nic.

Vampire Weekday

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:40:00 +0000

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The Legend Responds

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:04:00 +0000

I got a lovely email from Scott and he follows up with a few remarks on his blog.

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Commotion

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:42:00 +0000

(The simply beautiful Puffin Designs packaging of Commotion Pro)

After fifteen years of working in Motion Graphics there are precious few examples of software I actually feel emotional about. I like the Adobe applications Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects but they appeal to that part of me with obsessive compulsive disorder - especially After Effects with its regimented array of tiny little boxes to tick. Also the 3D app Maya I am fond of, the way the application sits so close to the coding level gives it a feeling of open-ness - other 3D apps I have used Bryce 3D, InfiniD, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D are hateful.

People probably don't entertain the idea of being delighted with a piece of software- you wouldn't expect anyone to get excited by Word or Excel (though I know there are Excel fans out there) and I have always believed Apple has missed a trick by making iTunes so clunky and counter-intuitive - if there's an application that deserves to be rebuilt form the ground up it's iTunes. But if the software we all used was actually built better, designed more intuitively with personality (rather than always on legacy by committee) then people might surprise themselves by falling in love with it.

The one piece of software I have always felt an almost unnatural affection for is called Commotion. Commotion is essentially a fully-fledged Compositing application. That's to say Motion Effects designers at ILM would have used it in its 1.0 incarnation (it existed before COSA After Effects 1.0) to combine various elements of moving footage together to create a "composited" result. Compositing is the essential staple of the moving image business but an often invisible art-form. However Commotion became to be known as complementary to dedicated Compositors (like After Effects) and a supplement to Editors like Final Cut Pro (a DV edition of it was offered free with the first incarnation of FCP). People perceived its strengths as lying in Rotoscoping, Motion-tracking and Wire-rig removal - even though it was far more capable than that.

Commotion was originally put together by industry legend Scott Squires, a visual effects super at Industrial Light & Magic. Scott has worked on some of the biggest and most successful effects movies that Hollywood ever produced, often in the capacity of Visual Effects Supervisor - I suppose highlights of this career would include Academy Award Nominations for The Mask (1994), Dragonheart (1996) and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). Scott founded the company Puffin Designs to market the app. Puffin was quite swiftly bought by video behemoth Pinnacle (always in my mind memorable as creators of the Targa format and its associated video cards). Pinnacle was in turn swallowed by Avid who quite recently wound down development on Commotion by 2006, however by this stage it had become quite bloated and ugly. Truthfully, Commotion 2.2 (1999), before the sale to Pinnacle, was where it was at.

I won't go into great length about my user experience with Commotion. It's quite difficult to convey this kind of thing but suffice to say everything about it was elegant, intuitive, quick, efficient, rock-solid and inventively implemented to the degree that I still find it a useful tool. My favourite experience with Commotion came in 2005. Zombie Flesheaters, Jamie Hewlett's company who are responsible for the visual accompaniment to the Gorillaz virtual band, brought me in at the eleventh hour. They had tried to achieve an effect for the Manana film for the Demon Dayz concerts in Manchester of a drawing scribbling itself on. They'd originally tried to achieve this by filming Jamie in stop-motion as he did the drawing in question - however the Director of Photography had a been a complete klutz and it was poorly-lit and the picture not tight enough in frame. It had taken them three weeks and three Flame operators (these guys get thousands of pounds a day) at Soho post house Golden Square to try and clean it up, but it still looked like shit.

I parachuted in and suggested we use Commotion's ability to record and then animate on a stroke to achieve the shot. We simply scanned the end picture in at high resolution, I recorded a sequence of passes of myself rubbing out Jamie's drawing and to their absolute delight Commotion chugged away quietly and delivered the job in one night - ready for the live premiere ten hours later. Out of the box no other app would have been able to achieve this, not After Effects, not Shake, not Flash.

Just this last fortnight I was asked by a very eminent Design Agency to do a similar thing. Some exquisite typographic designs needed to be written-on in the manner of handwriting. This might have been achievable with vector masking in After Effects but really the implementation would have been inappropriate and unbearably fiddly. So I dug my old license of Commotion out of the basement. I found an old G4 400 Mac tower on eBay which I picked up in the van from Tottenham Court Road (the software must run under Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X) and payed the princely sum of £40 for it. It was a salutary experience recalling that I paid £2500 for my original Mac of this era (a loaded G4 500). With a bit of elbow grease I got the correct Operating system installed, found the old dongle drivers (Commotion used an USB hardware lock) and got the old war horse working again over a decade after I first used it.

In the intervening years we have had hardcore roto apps like Curious gFx come and go (bought by Adobe), we've seen Shake been killed by Apple (Shake has marvelous masks which you specify the width of the feather) and while some contenders like Silhouette remain current, the mainstream alternatives offered in After Effects and now Photoshop Extended have failed to deliver what the charming and elegant Commotion offered in spades.

Man From Uranus

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:26:00 +0000

Link

Belbury Poly and Laurence Norfolk: His Name is Legion

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:48:00 +0000

Tonight at midnight.

iPad cock up.

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:03:00 +0000

I was interested in seeing this iPad thing, but it seems that Apple (in unbelievably cack-handed manner) haven't properly checked the promotional video they've uploaded. So Jonathan Ive talking about it here looks like the above picture to me. I'm on OS X 10.5.8 with Safari 4.0.4 and QuickTime 7.6.4 so my setup couldn't be more vanilla. Whichever Digital Video Professional supervised this ought to be fired, and seeing as how Media Arts Lab have been looking at hiring me, maybe they ought to get me in for that interview?

Spike Milligan: The Fresh Fruit Song

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:46:00 +0000

Grumbling in the Hood

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:52:00 +0000

Lots of grumbling about the (now temporary) Dissensus look.

Bringing to mind (this care of sufi) grumbling in 2004.

And grumbling in 2006.

As soon as the Aqua-Soft skin is implemented for vb4 I will upload it as an option.

If someone can find a better vB4 skin I will gladly upload it - but, honestly, there isn't one.

EDIT: The reality is that the forum software HAS to be updated and sometimes that throws the skins out of kilter. As for the idea that the forum is losing members as a result, honestly I couldn't care less. It's always been my attitude that people use it if they want to. No-one ever got asked to post there.

Moon Wiring Club perform "Minuke" by Nigel Kneale

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:52:00 +0000

Tonight at midnight.

Re-Up of Woebot FACT Mix 61

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:15:00 +0000

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Nine Circles: Twinkling Stars

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:48:00 +0000

Stealing Records

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:35:00 +0000

Republican upstart Scott Brown admits to stealing LPs.

Dury on 7"

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:08:00 +0000

When me and my brother were kids we used to cane this compilation called Jukebox Dury. I think we assumed it was a Greatest Hits kind of deal, but actually it's an A-sides/B-sides compilation - hence "Jukebox". Usually this sort of thing is shit because as any fule kno' the B-sides are rubbish, but not so in this case. The Blockheads B-sides are actually solid gold.

Last year I picked up some dude's package deal of Dury 7"s for a tenner (75% of what's up here) and then filled in the gaps. Some beautiful Bubbles sleeves in there.

Ian Dury on Film

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:10:00 +0000

Puzzled how Dury here reminds me so strongly of someone I know but can't exactly put my finger on who it is. It's either a combination of a few people or I'm forgetting somebody. Eerie. Dury is great here, can't but stifle a laugh at his "whack a few Greek kids" jibe. His cockney puts other people in a spin too - note the presenter's truly gauche "Can you say Oi Yoi again please?" remark at the end (shields face in embarrassment). This is echoed in Manager Jenner's excruciating repetition of "geezer" in the Dury X documentary: "...er yes, well you see this geezer..." (again cringeworthy).

Great period-piece doc, but ugh Ian really done lost his mojo didn't he? That sequence with the trio of girl singers, that song expresses the same sentiments as "Wake Up and Make Love to Me" but has undergone the Gold-to-Lead alchemical reaction.

These last two have been heavily pillaged for their period visuals in the appalling but just-about-watchable new movie Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll. Best things about the film are the fantastic costumes and styling - sheer perfection. The art direction is also cool, thanks to (first obligatory name-drop) my old buddy Richie Bullock who along with Sufi contributed to the first comic book I did. Props to Ian's old friend Peter Blake too for the graphic sequences. Andy Serkis, aka The Golem, is also good at inhabiting Dury but ultimately fails to bring him alive. It's the script that's the real villain, it's toe-curlingly trite. The child actor who plays Baxter also lets the show down - he's a nice kid clearly so let's blame the casting director - he's just not got the vim for the part. (Second obligatory name-drop) I once met Baxter twenty years ago. We were both on the ferry to Amsterdam and we hung out a bit there - he was a great guy though what with the passing years and the cloud of smoke around us at the time, I can't remember an awful lot about him.

The Woebot Mailing List

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:16:00 +0000

Link

RSS Feed

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:12:00 +0000

Once a blogger, always a blogger. Just a note to say that if you're reading this on Facebook or Twitter that i'm actually coming from here. If you want to get hold of me drop me a line.

Warning: Warning

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:10:00 +0000

Quite possibly the maddest most forward-looking record ever released! Warning were clearly the great-grandfathers of The Mover and Sunn o))). Words can't do this justice. Thanks once again to the god-like Mutantsounds.

Major Dissensus Upgrade

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:25:00 +0000

(The old look - Click to enlarge)

Today I upgraded the vBulletin software which Dissensus runs on from version 3.8.2 to version 4.0.1. It cost me a few bob to do but the developers Jelsoft have put a load of work into moving the software forward and crucially for me the new Default skin has been given a radical overhaul. Now it actually looks just about OK! In the past the only vaguely usable skin was done by a user called Timan at Aqua-Soft. The problem with that skin though was that it was based on the Macintosh OS X UI and, though a longtime Mac-user (since Mac OS 8), in the end that was too much of an obnoxious proposition for me.

Once upon a time the mega-talented Anil Bawa Cavia designed a skin for the forum which we dubbed nick(s)kin in honor of the legendary Nick Kilroy, however the problem was that each time Jelsoft redesigned the vBulletin software - and this is necessary to keep up with the web - a skin becomes out-of-sync with the board's various templates and consequently ceases to work. If it was up to me we'd still be running that old skin. I'm hoping there won't be too many issues with the upgrade. I've waited until v 4.0.1 to let them take the edge off the errors in the code.

Minor Threat and Fugazi

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:14:00 +0000

Shamefully, even though I was a Fugazi fan and had records by Black Flag, The Minutemen and Bad Brains (I mean it's hardly an exhaustive selection of that era's American Hardcore but...) I had never heard any Minor Threat. However I always suspected they were going to be worth checking out. This Christmas I sneaked into Glasgow's Mono Records and found that Dischord, Ian MacKaye's label, had remastered the original vinyl and reissued them.

Minor Threat is a very different proposition from the music which I've been collecting recently. Mainly I've been buying peripheral No Wave things and have been heavily revisiting Neue Deutsche Welle*. My plan was to try and build a better picture of the scene as it existed, quite a task for someone who doesn't speak German. This involved pressing acquaintances for the full extent of their knowledge, downloading humungous quantities of old deleted stuff (over 300 releases now clocked - more than it sounds), combing through what I had amassed and finally using the continental network of dealers to track down particular items second-hand.

In the past I would have been sceptical of the moral value of downloading like this. However, although operations like Vinyl On Demand, Was Soll Das Schallplatten, Kernkrach and NLW Backagain put out great authorised NDW reissues, their remit is constrained by the same foxtrot with the past that characterises UK reissues - you can't put out something which you assume 95% of your audience is au fait with. In the UK we are clearly neophytes and consequently the picture these (fantastic) reissue companies unwittingly paint of the past is distorted. Furthermore the reissue of a great number of the most important releases would be made impossible by the constraints of publishing and licensing even if the artist were happy. The true market for these discs must be in the double digits, and therefore financially pointless. I ask myself, in 30 years would I be happy for my own recordings to be traded for free, and the answer would be yes. I'm sure I'd be amazed if anyone gave a enough of a fuck to bother looking for them! No doubt you are sick to death of these worn-weary arguments.

While No Wave and NDW are like vegetable sorbet, the Minor Threat is actually the gastronomic equivalent of a shot of wheatgrass, or maybe more accurately macrobiotic sweet-corn, that's to say bracing but also comforting. It embarrasses me to reflect though that it is this almost conventional "Mom's Apple Pie" quality to the music which must have edged Minor Threat ever so slightly off the hipster's agenda. Minor Threat is not a "sick" band. They are not celebrating alienation, they are rallying feverishly against it. Straight edge is/was the marvelously improbable movement ever. It's sweet isn't it, and that's a good thing. Have a peek at this great video on it and the band's role in it. I have a lot of truck with it actually. As much as I'm glad for all the great things drugs have given culture, Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)", I don't buy my generation's awkwardness at people criticising drug culture. Drugs are certainly worth experiencing but very quickly they're boring. Minor Threat implicitly criticised the key aspect of drugs that their proponents could advance in their favour - that they create intensity - by being vein-poppingly intense.

Fugazi are certainly the lesser of the two units. I had actually sold all my old Fugazi records, but following my MT epiphany I picked them up again. I remember seeing the band supporting Sonic Youth on the Daydream Nation tour and at that time I was pretty keen on them, I suppose their chest-pounding teen-appeal is easy to understand (patronises younger self). "Margin Walker" and "Repeater" I bought when they came out. I dunno, I suppose their recordings are somehow less obtuse and bugged-out that Minor Threat's, a bit portentous even.

Still there are moments of superb rhythmic tension here, noting especially the taut-as-a-drum-skin bridge between "Turnover" and "Repeater", maybe this was the last "funky" rock group? And actually if you cross-read them as lumpen, as heirs of The Amboy Dukes (MacKaye a big Ted Nugent fan) then.....yeah. I was also extremely impressed to see MacKaye here testifying against an all ages ban at venues in Washington, f'sure motivated by his own financial interests but nevertheless still sticking it to the man.

*Minor Detour

New Reel

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:33:00 +0000

Not The Beatles Remastered

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Link#1

Link#2

Variations #4

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:51:00 +0000

The latest in Jon Leidecker's landmark series on Appropriative Collage (aka Sampling) is up.

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Broken Music Exhibition Catalogue

alias@hollowearth.org (Matthew Ingram) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:20:00 +0000

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