Tuesday 19 April 2011

What to do when I'm on


Well as any of you who read my first post will realise I still don’t have a life but the quest goes on.

I feel I should offer you some real entertainment to make up for inflicting the BrainSong on an unsuspecting planet.  I wasted yesterday listening to 12 hours of Richard Herring’s podcasts from http://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/as_it_occurs_to_me/
I don’t know how they will play to non UK listeners as there are a lot of local references, and if you are easily offended – no make that - if you are even hard to offend stay clear!

I do spend a lot of time listening to podcasts as I have no internet connection at my house and so am unable to hear radio.spiritplants.com.  I go to the local library most week days where I can get 2 hours internet a day on a system so slow it makes spiritplants un-listenable.

So when you are not at home or it’s my show that’s playing have a listen to some of the stuff at archive.org like :-

http://www.archive.org/details/XMinus1_A I can strongly recommend the episode xminusone_560215_SkulkingPermit

Claybourne was a sci-fi / supernatural thriller / soap opera radio drama, recorded and broadcast nationwide in New Zealand in the late 1990s the episodes are only 6 mins so ideal for those sort walks

A gentle sitcom that treats the listener as if they had a brain.

This is a detective show with scene descriptions that sound like 60’s beat poetry.

You don’t have to download them as single episodes you will find links where you can download a zip of them all.
More scary then my profile picture
(yes it is really green)

Sunday 17 April 2011

A hole in the brain

I am a recent (about 3 weeks) convert to 'intelligent design' but without the x-ian god baggage but relying on Gia. There is a bird in Australia that has a hole through its brain, from one ear drum to the other so it can get directional information from the frequency of it's spices call which is at a bad wavelength for this function, I can see (pun intended) how the eye can evolve from a light sensitive cell to the complex eye – but a hole through the brain? Half a hole is useless as is 9 tenths you need a complete tunnel.

I don't have much time for “organized religions” I feel the moment you declare a set of texts as “holy” and “the truth” then God goes out the window, she will not be constrained by a book. The “truth” can be seen in anything as long as you have the vision to see it as Crowley said “It is a fatal mistake to discriminate between the spiritual importance of meditation and playing golf”. Once you have your beliefs set in stone you can no longer evolve and even a casual glance at the universe reveals it to be based on change and evolutionary development. Not just the Darwinian species thing but the basic physical manifestation of matter it's self, look into the night sky (or even the day – and the Sun) and countless stars where Hydrogen evolves into Helium – Helium evolves into Lithium - Lithium into Beryllium - Beryllium into .... and on to Uranium - thus creating the very stuff we are made of. We are just the universe becoming aware of it's self, our belief in our individuality is just the result of our brains piss poor design, with it's new hardware upgrades bolted onto the preceding hardware. We are a monkey riding on a dog that's riding on a lizard – no wonder it's so hard to get anywhere (;>{

Talking of time I heard a scientist on the radio the other day say faciley “furlongs per cubic second” - cubic second! Makes my poor monkey brain boggle - 2 dimensional time I can just about handle, forward & back ok, left & right well ok in a multyverse with alternate dimensions BUT up and down - HELP!

Bing 'helps' with the Tarot

Friday 15 April 2011

The Fish Police

The first of my shows went out at the weekend and the 'controller' says "I've been hearing some good feedback from people who've had a chance to listen to your show", I was expecting stunned silence and then a cancellation notice.

Been looking at my fellow bloggers and I’m the only one to mention “The Fish Police” under favorite music so I will squeeze them into the show somewhere.  Don’t bother to google I tried and got 10000 results not one mentioning “The Fish Police” instead go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/articles/containing/fish%20police

The Fish Police at Ouch!

I have searched with "Fish Police" and have now found http://thefishpolice.com/ & http://fishpolice.bandcamp.com/


Haven’t had a lucid dream for months but finally went lucid last night - a nightmare so scary I was going to wake up but went lucid instead - v. interesting plenty of monsters - but all female for some reason lol

I did go lucid a few days ago but it was a dream i.e. I dreamt I was dreaming and in the dream I dreamt I was dreaming I went lucid - off to take an aspirin

Friday 8 April 2011

Creating the BrainSong


When I was around 13 my 3 year old sister was given some story records these came on coloured vinyl and played at 78 rpm, I would spend hours listening to them at 16 rpm. In the mid 70's I acquired a copy-cat machine (a looped tape with several playback heads), I would plug it into the radio and feed in the speech and with the use of nitrous oxide listen to the resulting echo's and auditory hallucinations. I think these were the original inspiration for the BrainSong.


The BrainSong was started in 2004 on an old 486 machine with a hard disk measured in mega bytes - 80 I think but it may have been 40 but I now can't quite believe I could have worked on a disk that small even though I can remember a time when all we had were floppy disks and not those 3 inch ones but the 5 inch really floppy floppys. I do know that the drive was not big enough for me to be able to record a full 30 minute radio programme so I would record to cassette tape and then take the samples from there, sometimes just half a sentence. The samples were then grouped by theme until there was enough to fill a 3 inch floppy – so I guess it must have been a 40 Meg hard drive. The samples could sit on the floppy for months before being used which is why I now can't remember which radio programmes most of them came from, the sources I can remember are listed lower down.

I would create around 10 to 15 minuets of audio and then back it up on to a pile of floppy's as a multi disk zip then remove the original files and start on the next 10 to 15 minutes. If you have not tried using floppy's for storing audio then DON'T! You can get about 90 seconds per disk

I eventually got a machine with a 40 Gig hard drive and assembled the 8 hour piece from the 300 plus floppy disks into 8 or 9 files and it was about 12 minutes to long as this was 2 or 3 days work I just could not bring myself to edit that much out – now remember I had been working on this for a couple of years and I'm not the most mentally stable person at the best of times – so my solution – make it a 24 hour long piece!

And I made bloody sure that when the 24 hour piece was assembled it was 24 hours :-}  I have tried to give the sounds the same type of texture that you get visualy with acid.  I like the way repeated words can morph into another word - there is a section of Gisberg saying LSD which begins very slow and speeds up - about a third of the way in I hear iot as "halo paul" for a while before it changes again.



Some Sources Of The Samples Used In The BrainSong

BBC Radio's 4 & 7
In Our Time
Something Understood
The Mighty Boosh
Sherlock Holmes
Material World
Frontiers
Quote Unquote
Unseen Britain
The Archers
The Chemistry Of Addiction
The Reith Lectures 2005
Beyond Our Ken
The British X-Files
Case Notes
Thinking Alowed
The Write Stuff
The Archers
3 Doors Down


TV Shows
Star Trek The Next Generation
The Power Puff Girls
The Simpsons

Records
Moondog
Timothy Leary - The Psychadelic Experience
Quinton Crisp - An Evening With
Frank Zappa - ?
Neil - Hurdy Gurdy Mushroom Man
Ron Geesin – As He Stands
Joe Byird and the Field Hippys


Wednesday 6 April 2011

It explains a lot

Here is some early background :- It explains a lot

I was born 15th February 1956 in Rushgreen hospital Romford Essex, my identical twin did not survive long after birth due to his skull being badly crushed. My first memory is in my pram in Wooly's (I think at that age all department stores were known to me as Wooly's), Teddy fell out and although I screamed and screamed I couldn't get "them" to stop and rescue him. My next memory is again in Wooly's, I was a little older as now I was walking, as I moved through the shoppers I suddenly felt Teddy brush past my face, I spun round and grabbed hold of him with a desperate vice like grip and buried my face in his fur, when to my horror my mummy grabbed me by the collar and pulled me away from my beloved Teddy (yes my own mother!), as I lost my grip I looked up at him and found a women in a fur coat! To this day I suspect this fiend was probably Cruella deVille who had kidnapped Teddy and killed him and skinned my lovely Ted to wear his pelt.

In 1960 we moved to a Shop in Clacton. It was two shops knocked into one and so I had a playroom as well as a bed room this was accessed by a set of outside steps. The shop was on the high street and only a short distance from the beach down a tree lined road that was great for conkers.

While playing pirates with my friend Ginge (above) we had a sword fight using our penknives, Ginge took a swipe and sliced my arm open across the inside of my left elbow opening the main vain and the blood started pumping out. I remember coming down the outside steps saying over my shoulder “I might not ever play with you again” and made my way into the shop obviously freaking out mum & dad. I was rushed to hospital where I claimed I had fallen on a drawing pin as I didn't want to get Ginge into trouble. The surgeon who stitched my vain back together pointed out the obvious holes in this account, but I stuck to my guns.

The year after 'Pirates' I went to stay with my mothers foster parents Granddad Moon & Nana Fluff in Romford. Their surname was Moon but for some reason I named Nana after the next door cat! Whilst out on my trike I fell off and hurt my arm, I cried and complained about the pain all night but was told “it's only a graze don't make such a fuss.” At the doctors the next day he took one look and said It's broken and I had my first trip in an ambulance, the ambulance men thought it funny I insisted on giving my Clacton address. The rest of my stay was wonderful as GM & NF were so guilt ridden I was able to twist them round my little finger.

Whilst at Clacton I made my mother proud of me for the first and I suspect only time. I came second in the school sports day wheelbarrow race, I was the barrow and Ginge the pusher. I know she still had the newspaper clipping when I was in my 30s.

The year we took the shop the first supermarket opened, disaster. Dad held on for another year before we lost the shop and had to leave. This meant I missed the last episode in a Flash Gordon series and to this day I don't know how he escaped the deadly crushing arms of the robot enemy.

At Clacton was the best pub I have ever known it was the Golden Lion and had it's own cinema that showed non-stop animation. The kids were parked there while the adults went to the bar. It was fantastic, not just the usual cartoons but films of Javanese shadow puppets and other wonders slipped in between the Popeye and Woody Woodpecker, I loved it, a big bag of flying saucers and non stop animation. It also had a sign in the car park reading 'please park prettily' which I found hilariously funny imagining cars parked in circles with fairy lights.

We went to stay with my fathers parents at their pub in the docklands (at that time actual docks) 'The Brunswick Arms' for a while (2 or 3 months I think) and then moved in with my god parents Chaz and Doreen in Basildon and I had to restart school. All I can really remember of the house is the home made wine bubbling away at night in my bed room. I remember we had compititions to see who could get the most kids on their bike at the same time and make it all the way down the hill. The school had a film club and I remember on night for some reason I had the wrong colour ticket and burst into tears, the teacher was mystified why I had started crying – I thought I was going to miss the film I don't see what she didn't understand. To this day I have no trouble crying – in fact the day before I wrote this Dave came round to find me crying at the final episode of The Woman In Black. The girls used to like to bring friends round and then put ST TNG episode “Skin Of Evil” because the eulogy for Tasha Yar always starts me off. I think it was at this school I was made to write with my left hand for a week because my hand writing was so bad they thought I might be left handed – I'm not, but I did/do use a smeary stile to cover up my complete inability to speal evan the simplist of words.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

Hi - I'm just off to get a life so I will have something to relate