This is the most fun I’ve had (online) in ages. Cut and Splice is an online exhibition of sound art over at the BBC Radio 3 website. It comprises mostly of pieces acting as “a visual music system, which allows users to compose new pieces of music”. In reality this means beautiful Flash/Shockwave screens which you can interact with by drawing shapes, moving stuff or just dragging your mouse around randomly to create your own unique piece of music. I’m particularly taken with rechord‘s Cubop which makes rather soothing electronica out of something I do often enough – draw rectangles with my mouse – and tinhoko‘s rhapsody where pixellated container ships and bizarre octopi enlarge and change while you scatter coloured squares around making music as you go. Don’t bother unless you have a spare half hour and some speakers. I took some photos while I was doing this – see them on my Flickr.

The flipside of Dave’s excellent post below is this new article, For The Music, on The Morning News about The Stone, a DIY venue in New York run by avant-gardist John Zorn. A venue about music and performers and not about alcohol revenue or promotion? It’s sad how revolutionary that is these days.

Make your own Bayeaux Tapestry with the Historic Tale Construction Kit

I haven’t been able to stop looking at this for like a week.

Funny stuff.

I just searched Google for something (quite innocent!) and it returned results with the following 2 headings:

1. Trousers to his manga gay porno an old codger is wacking off when…

2. Free Banana Tits

what??

http://improveverywhere.com/mission_view.php?mission_id=42
If I find out there’s a diskant version thats been bolstering the crowd at Lords gigs I am going to be unhappy though.

NWA’s Straight Outta Compton and Fuck The Police with all non-explicit content removed. The inverse radio edits.

Here’s a genuinely good thing my flatmate (hello Dave) pointed out to me:
Mogwai have got the boys behind inconsistently published/consistently hilarious magazine Chunklet to answer the usual barrage of moronic questions they receive at the hand of their Q+A section this month. Let’s hear it for unparalleled levels of abusing your own fans! No seriously, it’s great.*

http://www.mogwai.co.uk/qanda.html (click on ‘4’ underneath ‘2005’)

*Ish.

The Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics Of All Time

The Top 10 Worst Black Metal Records Of All Time

And to prove that I don’t get all of my stupid links from Popbitch:
The Top 1 Most Sexy Croatian Keyboard Virtuoso

A Few Things Of Note

– I’ve tidied things up a bit here, you may have noticed. Hope you like it.

– Congratulations to Stewart and Beard for winning the EMAP Fanzine Award for best music fanzine presented by, of course, Steve Lamacq. The new Beard zine is well worth buying and not just because there’s an interview with me in it, ahem.

– Those of you missing listen-to and/or looking for a new Friendster/Myspace fix should sign up to Audioscrobbler which tracks your listening habits if you play music while online and links you with other people with similar listening tastes. Typically, I recognised a few of mine from zine/blogland. My page is here – feel free to mock me.