Today, bitches, I go to London.
Basically if I have to go one more day without speaking English my head is going to explode. Even though it would be much cheaper to take a plane (which why? That's a bit like chicken breast being cheaper than whole wheat bread) I've elected to take the Eurostar, in part because it's an order of magnitude easier but mostly because it's much more environmentally defensible. As it turns out, your impact on the climate follows a massive power law dominated almost completely by how much flying you do. In other words, you could spend 364 days a year cultivating soybeans in a sealed plastic sphere filled with your own waste, and if on your day off you take a flight across the country then you may as well start a tire fire the size of Luxembourg. It's not quite that bad, but it's bad enough that I've decided I'm going to avoid flying whenever possible. Even if the train does decide to make a strange, extraterrestrial droning sound during the entire four hour trip.
As it turns out, adding rolling shutter to high speed terrestrial travel yields some pretty cool results.
Finally, after that brief and actually quite comfortable ordeal, I made it to King's Cross, St. Pancras.
My contact during my stay here is secret agent Henrique, whom I met though our mutual interest in Max and who was nice enough to put me up at his flat for a couple days. We met in a coffee shop called Shoreditch Ground, a very trendy coffee house in what turned out to be the tech-design capital of London, colloquially known as The Silicon Roundabout. Imagine Valencia Street crossed with Bedford Avenue, multiplied by Mountain View. Henrique's office (a web design agency with an in house recording studio and DJ booth, neither relevant) was down the street from a self-described iPhone atelier, a Vietnamese burrito restaurant (10£ each) and a dedicated SEO mom & pop called "There You Are". Shit one cannot make up.
Most of the afternoon, evening and early morning dripped away in the aforementioned studio, where Henrique absolutely blew my mind with his virtuosic Ableton Live skills and impressive collection of analog synthesizers. We jammed for something close to six or seven hours, which felt extremely novel coming from my Max background. A lot of the time my work favors accuracy over immediacy, so one could spend an hour coding, three hours debugging, then sit back with satisfaction listening to one LFO and a sine wave. It felt great to switch over to modulating where the most of the actualy signal chain is already in place and most of the fun comes from twisting, flipping and tweaking, listening to tones pulse and timbers waver over a gradually evolving beat.
Hungry for a midnight snack, we eventually wandered out into Shoreditch to get a bite to eat and to soak up the local culture. Four words sum up the aesthetic of the average Shoreditch denizen: Sweaty, Enormous, British, Drunk. Walking down the street to one of the very few restaurants with a vegetarian menu was like walking through a Gypsy petting zoo, the air heavy with Anglo-Saxon humidity and men's perfume. But I have to say I admire the passionate laissez-faire of the Shoreditch-district. Want to get a pint of lager, have a seat in the middle of the road and pass a guitar back and forth? Go for it, you'll probably be the least disruptive pedestrian fixture in London. I could do without some of the squalor, but it's hard to argue with the beauty of seeing man's inner spirit completely unchained. In short, if you've got something to say and you want to say it really, really loud, head to Shoreditch.
Next stop: more London.
Basically if I have to go one more day without speaking English my head is going to explode. Even though it would be much cheaper to take a plane (which why? That's a bit like chicken breast being cheaper than whole wheat bread) I've elected to take the Eurostar, in part because it's an order of magnitude easier but mostly because it's much more environmentally defensible. As it turns out, your impact on the climate follows a massive power law dominated almost completely by how much flying you do. In other words, you could spend 364 days a year cultivating soybeans in a sealed plastic sphere filled with your own waste, and if on your day off you take a flight across the country then you may as well start a tire fire the size of Luxembourg. It's not quite that bad, but it's bad enough that I've decided I'm going to avoid flying whenever possible. Even if the train does decide to make a strange, extraterrestrial droning sound during the entire four hour trip.
As it turns out, adding rolling shutter to high speed terrestrial travel yields some pretty cool results.
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| Pretty, right? Borderline impressionistic... |
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| Basically I'm Edward Hopper |
Finally, after that brief and actually quite comfortable ordeal, I made it to King's Cross, St. Pancras.
My contact during my stay here is secret agent Henrique, whom I met though our mutual interest in Max and who was nice enough to put me up at his flat for a couple days. We met in a coffee shop called Shoreditch Ground, a very trendy coffee house in what turned out to be the tech-design capital of London, colloquially known as The Silicon Roundabout. Imagine Valencia Street crossed with Bedford Avenue, multiplied by Mountain View. Henrique's office (a web design agency with an in house recording studio and DJ booth, neither relevant) was down the street from a self-described iPhone atelier, a Vietnamese burrito restaurant (10£ each) and a dedicated SEO mom & pop called "There You Are". Shit one cannot make up.
Most of the afternoon, evening and early morning dripped away in the aforementioned studio, where Henrique absolutely blew my mind with his virtuosic Ableton Live skills and impressive collection of analog synthesizers. We jammed for something close to six or seven hours, which felt extremely novel coming from my Max background. A lot of the time my work favors accuracy over immediacy, so one could spend an hour coding, three hours debugging, then sit back with satisfaction listening to one LFO and a sine wave. It felt great to switch over to modulating where the most of the actualy signal chain is already in place and most of the fun comes from twisting, flipping and tweaking, listening to tones pulse and timbers waver over a gradually evolving beat.
Hungry for a midnight snack, we eventually wandered out into Shoreditch to get a bite to eat and to soak up the local culture. Four words sum up the aesthetic of the average Shoreditch denizen: Sweaty, Enormous, British, Drunk. Walking down the street to one of the very few restaurants with a vegetarian menu was like walking through a Gypsy petting zoo, the air heavy with Anglo-Saxon humidity and men's perfume. But I have to say I admire the passionate laissez-faire of the Shoreditch-district. Want to get a pint of lager, have a seat in the middle of the road and pass a guitar back and forth? Go for it, you'll probably be the least disruptive pedestrian fixture in London. I could do without some of the squalor, but it's hard to argue with the beauty of seeing man's inner spirit completely unchained. In short, if you've got something to say and you want to say it really, really loud, head to Shoreditch.
Next stop: more London.
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