Since I discovered this Pharrell and Rick Rubin interview I think I must have watched it 5 or 6 times in its entirety. I posted it to my Tumblr when I first found it, but its grown and grown on me.

There’s a bit where they are talking about the sub-genre of Funk – Go-Go. Pharrell, lists off all the areas of the country where you could find it being played in clubs.

It’s wild to me that I remember when genres and scenes were geographically isolated too – with hardcore punk. But Pharrell calls this phenomenon a ‘world’. He also makes reference to the song Rubin Produced LL Cool J’s Rock the Bells. “All the chains? and that music? You had no idea what you were doing to us in Virgina”.

I went to a 40th birthday over the weekend and for about 2 hours of the night it was wall to wall Jungle and Drum n’ Bass. LOL. Me and my friends were talking about how mass culture seems to have unravelled post internet. An argument I’ve made a few times my self.

But then again… compare these two songs:

The thing that they have in common, is that they both came out within months of each other in 1996.

The Spice Girls were this huge cultural juggernaut, ‘girl power’ flattened everything in its path. They were the culture – the mass culture.

But at the same time Super Sharp Shooter with the Ganja KRU came out and to jungliests, Super sharp shooter changed their world.

Obviously there must have been some overlap between ravers and pop fans, but really they are literally, figuratively – worlds apart.

Yet both tracks to my mind are equally as influential as one another on UK culture, and music more widely.

I wonder if art/music/culture creates the world around it juts as keenly as it is created by the world that the art inhabits? We will recover, culturally from the shock of the internet i’m sure. All these people going about their lives living in different realities.

It’s probably closer to what pagan societies must have been like? Dunno.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Working on the new show.
• Final lecture of part 1 of the new centre course with Wassim
• Been getting a lot of ducks in a row
• Been building a wall for ducks
• I finished the first draft of the BAYC litepaper overview – its just over 15k words. I think I might split it up across 5 posts and post one a day for a week.

Dipping the Stacks

Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds | Vi Bilägare

The results speak for themselves. The worst-performing car needs 1,400 meters to perform the same tasks for which the best-performing car only needs 300 meters.

Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2 – Et tu, Cthulhu

Point-and-click adventures make up a fairly broad genre with many different art styles. I’ve focused my attention on a sub-genre that hews close to the style of early 1990s Sierra and LucasArts adventure games.

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism

How an unforgettable performance in Red Alert 3 became legend.

Why Japanese Iron Kettles Cost So Much

For centuries, Japanese artisans have made kettles by pouring molten iron into molds and hammering them out once they’ve cooled.

The Four Dirty C-Words of the Internet – Paul Jun

There are four c-words that have become very problematic: content, culture, community, and creator.

Reading

Still reading Wired Love: a Romance of Dots and Dashes. But I’m nearly finished.

Still reading The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell. A passing familiarity of the Great Gatsby is required in the fiction editing section, but not necessary. Really good book.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Himera – Sharing Secrets

Really into this album. It has Hanna Diamond as a guest on it which is why I found out about it. Its a wild mix of hyper-pop, rave, and video game music.

The track Umbrella is a good example of what you’re in for.

This is the track with Hanna Dimond on:

The whole album is very sonically coherent and it sounds like complete sonic vision thats been delivered. Totally uncompromising. I really like it. It’s also super autumnal and despite all the electronics, it sounds like the forest and mushrooms and dreams and rain. Very cool.

Remember Kids: