Tickets went on sale today for the Meltdown festival – I totally forgot – Yo La Tengo – Gone. Bugger – Still there is lots more.
Free jazz legend and avant-garde icon Ornette Coleman takes over Southbank Centre as the 16th director of Meltdown. Featuring major artists, unique collaborations, rare appearances and UK debuts, this year’s Meltdown line-up reflects both the pioneering spirit of Ornette Coleman and his widespread influence.
Saturday 13 June
The Roots with guest David Murray and more
produced in association with Jill Newman Productions
Royal Festival Hall
Saturday 13 June
David Murray & The Gwo-Ka Masters
+ Jamaaladeen Tacuma
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Sunday 14 June
YOKO ONO PLASTIC ONO BAND
Featuring Sean Lennon, Cornelius and more
Royal Festival Hall
Monday 15 June
Baaba Maal
Royal Festival Hall
Monday 15 June
The Freewheeling Yo La Tengo
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Tuesday 16 June
Moby
Royal Festival Hall
Wednesday 17 June
Bobby McFerrin
Royal Festival Hall
Thursday 18 June
Patti Smith and The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall
Friday 19 June
Ornette Coleman: Reflections of The Shape of Jazz to Come
+ Master Musicians of Jajouka
Royal Festival Hall
Saturday 20 June
Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra with guests Carla Bley and Robert Wyatt
Amazingly Warp records is 20 years old – DJ Mink, Two Lone Swordsmen, LFO – some bloke called Aphex Twin and a whole lot of bleeps and donks later – they’ve decided to release an official Warp20 retrospective album, the definitive ‘Best of’ from the last 20 years.
Vote for your favourite Warp tracks on Warp20.net. The top 10 (by different artists) will be combined with those chosen by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett to make a 20 track album. On the site, you can leave personal memories and messages about your choices and the best will be printed in the album’s artwork. I’ve never seen Aphex Twin described as ‘if this was the theme to thee exotic shampoo ad id never tire watching it and im sure it would sell by the bucketload’
Each user has 50 votes in total, but you cannot vote for the same track twice. Voting will be closed on Friday 8th May.
Crowd sourcing sucks for crowd? Looks like PSFK can go tell Warp this is a rubbish idea – me – I think it’s marvellous.
If I was ever on mastermind I would like to think Italian horror movies from the 70′s would be a specialist subject I could have a fair pop at – They can be at time surprisingly well crafted, great for their time and they have killer dark wobbly prog funk soundtracks which quite frankly get me pretty excited.
One of the classics of the of the ‘giallo’ genre is ‘Suspiria’ – a tale of a pretty ballet dancer who starts at a new dance school where dark forces are murdering other students. Dario Argento directs, and yes the effects are pretty hammy and yes the blood looks like nail varnish – but the shoestring budget is pushed well into breaking and the gorgeous lighting and colour hues really do work.
So if you do fancy a slice of this horror pie then I suggest you catch the screening as part of the Curzon Midnight Movies and Cine-Excess of a restored print of SUSPIRIA introduced by the cult film director himself - Dario Argento and composer Claudio Simonetti (“Goblin”).
Nokia took a major step closer to creating a mobile phone/oyster card as it launched the 6216 handset. It is the third Nokia handset with Near Field Communication (NFC) built in, but this one goes the extra step but putting the security protocols onto the SIM card.
So now, Orange can come out with a SIM card that allows your phone to behave just like your Oyster card or even a debit card. The phone could now pay for things on the underground/buses, vending machines, corner shops etc. If there was an over the air (OTA) way of topping up your phone then you would never be stuck getting on a bus with no credit – This is huge stuff in the world of contactless payments.
This technology could be used for creative ways – to trigger content but ‘touching’ the device on things. See the proof of concept below using an Iphone – check the very bulky NFC reader attached to the Iphone – If Nokia can roll out the NFC reader onto all handsets then this could be a major coup.
I need to check the tech but I would imagine that if two handsets ‘touched’ each other – you could pass on your business card or your social networking profiles – A way to share all your twitter/facebook/myspace names by touch would be just amazing.
John Pettengill from Razorfish gives a rundown on why the current way of making web sites = mobile sites is dead wrong. I totally agree with this – Different user experiences and scenarios lead into different requirements and tuned experiences.
Futher into the presentation John does focus a little on apps as the way to solve a lot of these problems – I slightly disagree with this at the moment as mobile websites are much more relevant then apps, mainly due to that fact that robust OTA app stores are only available on iphone.
The Radiophonic Workshop were pioneeers of electronic music but you probably have never heard of them or ever even seen one of their records – but you certainly have heard their music. The insane sonic assault that is the Dr Who theme tune was brought to life by one of their team – Delia Derbyshire.
Some of the surviving members of the workshop – Peter Howell – Paddy Kingsland – Roger Limb – Dick Mills – Mark Ayres – are coming together for a special gig as part of the Short Circuit festival at the Roundhouse in London.
The Radiophonic Workshop get together again to explore Radiophonics past, present, and future. Old and new innovative electronica for a large arena combines with live performance and multimedia projections. An event not to be missed.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded in 1958, and closed its doors 40 years later. Throughout its life, and since its closure, it has been enormously influential on generations of musicians, with the names of composers such as Delia Derbyshire, John Baker, Brian Hodgson, Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland and Peter Howell taking on almost legendary status.
Find out who else is on the line up for Short circuit.
How many sites have we seen where you can upload your face and it probably dances around the screen. I’m guessing – a lot. How many of them have been great campaigns or at least had some reasoning? Probably one or two – tops.
So uploading your face is so 2008 and augmented reality is so 2009. Again just thinking how many great augmented reality campaigns are out there? – I’ve seen plenty of 3D cars and not much else, so the question is – are we as an industry fixated on technique and technology?
I would answer that question with a resounding ‘yes’ – A lot of agencies need to be seen as bleeding edge so they can claim the scalp that they were the first to use that tech. However, trying to retro-fit a piece of technology into a creative idea is hard – damn hard. Trying to do this and also hit the double whammy of wrapping it in a great insight or business requirement is asking the near impossible.
So whats the answer? Don’t do it?
Absolutely no – Here is the thing. Interactive advertising doesn’t build brands – It doesn’t come up with great strap lines – It doesn’t really exist (!) for long. And thats the point of it. It can just be a bit of fun – so don’t take it to seriously and enjoy it for what it is – a two minute distraction that actually involves people interacting with your brand and not – ‘the big idea’.
The Schweppes – Experience Matters campaign has been running for a few weeks now and was intrigued to see a banner ad for the campaign – The call to action was clear – see more comics at schyouknowwho.com. Sure I thought – I might actually understand what this campaign is about if I visit an experience.
I arrive at what looks like a wordpress blog – with two images. Thats it. Was I expecting an all singing all dancing experience? Not really – But I was expecting to ‘see more comics’ or at least have some level of engagement.
All that media money spent on banner advertising to get me to see two press ads – Not a great user experience in my opinion. I would be really interesting to know if the digital agency (?) or the advertising agency agreed to this strategy.
‘The Physical Internet’ as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable ->
1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.
2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.
3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.
Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.
An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.
Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.
A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.
Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.
Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.
I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.
Twitter has a delete button right. It lets you delete those random/drunk/nasty/misspelled tweets forever. But are they really really deleted? Well the answer is yes and no. When a tweet gets published, it gets sent to the twitter servers and the twitter search severs. When a tweet is deleted, it only gets deleted on the twitter severs.
So yep, you’ve guessed correctly that by comparing the tweets on the twitter vs twitter search database you can retrieve deleted tweets.
A very clever chap called Tom Scott figured all of this out and created Tweleted to let you have an easy way to retrieve those deleted tweets.
