Mary Rose Cook

I go to gigs/concerts/shows a lot. Gigs are just better than records.

There is the sound of the audience booing or chatting or whooping or heckling or clapping. Listen to the effect that the audience had on Bob Dylan at his “Royal Albert Hall” gig in 1966.

You can see the musicians making their music in front of you: how that ringing guitar sound is produced, or how he pulls of that riff, or how the drum player and the bass player have to make eye contact before the time signature change. I saw Battles play at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year and saw that Ian Williams does actually play the keyboard and guitar simultaneously.

The musicians play with more conviction because they are performing and they are having an effect not just on the air but on the people in front of them, and the low lights and emotional atmosphere give them license to scream the scream they felt when they first wrote the song.

The songs are different versions from those played on the record six months before because they can be adjusted in response to a changing idea of what sounds good, or at the discovery of a richer melody or simpler arrangement. The album version of Sunset Rubdown’s Us Ones In Between has the piano marking out the melody and the rhythm. However, this live version has the piano nowhere and the song completely driven by a guitar string being alternately tightened and loosened.

Perhaps most tellingly, if a band has a live album, it is usually my favourite. Here are some examples on a special Playmary I made.

Audio recordings capture a good portion of the musical advantages of live gigs. YouTube is great for gig videos, but the experience is too diffused by video-hopping and varying sound quality and the ten minute limit: songs are good, albums are great.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading.

Famous bands are well documented and, just as importantly, well distributed. It is easy to buy a Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan live album. What if every gig was recorded and then put up on the ‘net? A lead going from the sound desk into a cassette recorder and, later, a lead from the cassette recorder to a computer would be enough. A quick upload to a website and it would be available to everyone.

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Playmary is my audio autobiography site. You create an account and upload songs that you are listening to a lot, or that symbolise what is going on in your life.

Up until now, you would click on songs to play and pause them, and when one song ended, the next would play.

I’ve added some new code that lets you move through the playlist with the left and right arrows, and pause and play the current song with the space bar:

Code adapted from the source in this article.

The only downer is the space bar is a shortcut for scrolling in Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Dan W and I couldn’t think of any conventions for play controls in the browser. j/k/l seems too obscure, and I really want the controls to mimic iTunes. Hmmm.

I helped organise this Autumn’s London Barcamp. It was at the IBM building on the Southbank. We provided food, drink, some rooms, a bit of floor to sleep on and a blanket. Then, each of the 200 people who came did a twenty-minute session on something they know about. We had nine sessions running every half an hour from 10 a.m. on Saturday to 5pm on Sunday and there were lots of interesting discussions in the corridors.

I saw some ace talks about PubSubHubBub, the boardgame Go, custom fonts on the web, erotic writing, the design of the TV programme LOST, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator in Javascript, the art of improvisation, live-coding a Scheme interpreter in Ruby, and the dinner game Werewolf.

My session was on 10 Fucking Awesome Bands You Should Be Listening To.

A malleable gender and sexuality. Living in a punk/DIY/anti-captialist environment.

These are some things I’m not working on, anymore, but that might still be cool.

• Kisses: compare the magnitude of stuff
• Lollipops and Gumdrops: music recommendations
• Ear Defender: decide what music to listen to
• Switch off the light before you leave

In preparation for December, I made a Spotify playlist for Ten Years of All Tomorrow’s Parties. It contains an album for each of the bands on the line-up. The following bands were not available on Spotify, so you can check them out at their Myspaces.

The For Carnation,
Papa M,
Fuck Buttons,
Sleepy Sun,
Sunn o))),
Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra,
The Magic Band,
Porn,
Tall Firs,
BEAK>,
Polvo,
youm.

A new app I’ve been working on. It’s a wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities, or a digital scrapbook. You fill it with your favourite pictures, pieces of text, songs and film clips. Or, you could make a Slender for a wedding couple, or a new baby, or your Mum, or your girlfriend, and give it to them as a lovely present. I’ve made one for The Common Place, a social centre I was involved in when I lived in Leeds.

Actually, you can’t sign up, yet. Soon.

I have made a new collection on Kisses that compares the likelihood of different causes of death.