Microscopics

John Carpenter, film-maker and electronic musician, predicted the Yamaha Tenori-On back in 1981. In his film, Escape from New York, which was shot in 1981 and set in the bleak future of 1997, he predicted that by 1997 all government agencies would have their own Tenori-on visual sequencer. It still needed a little more work [...]

There has been a silent/ not-so-silence war being raged over the past ten years, the loudness wars, and Metallica are the first casualties.
Dynamic (audio) compression is good, it makes things sound warmer, larger, and evens out lumpy recordings. But if you over compress, you make everything sound the same volume, the subtle details are lost [...]

In the near future when we all have silver boiler-suits, we’ll pack up our Soylent Green sandwiches and head off early morning to the office or studio parked at the bottom of the garden. But what an office/ studio it will be.  Of course, once we shut the hatch, we can close our spreadsheets and [...]

I decided to treat myself for my birthday (Friday 26th) and bought a vintage phaser from eBay to add to my SX-150 in the Gas / High Skies studio. Of course the combination of the Post Office and being from 1975 killed it on arrival, but when it does make noise, it makes gloriously vintage [...]

My good friend Charles Webster brought me a small gift from his recent Japanese/ Australian tour to help beef up the Microscopics studio: a copy of the latest Gakken magazine which also comes with an analog synth as a simple-to-build construct kit. There’s no soldering, or hair-pulling, you just need a small screwdriver and about [...]

This is the awesome filmic picture of Saturn taken by the Cassini robotic spacecraft, part of the Cassini-Huygens mission sent by NASA and ESA to study Saturn. You must click the image to see it at full size to really appreciate it.

Saturn - click to enlarge
The original is from the great Astronomy Picture of the [...]

So now that YouTube has higher quality versions of the newer videos, you may think it would be easy to embed them on your site/ blog/ MySpace page, but it isn’t. If you embed the code they give, you will only be able to see the poor standard quality videos.
Lets try to link to the [...]

Rhapsody (Realnetworks) has announced it is going drm free and has converted its five million songs to mp3 format.
So now Rhapsody join Amazon, Napster and Zune to be wholly or mostly selling all their songs and albums in the universal and drm-free mp3 format. Apple’s iTunes store also sells some drm-free music, although it’s only [...]

iDJ magazine this month published their list of the top 100 essential dance records of the decade. Congratulations to Charles Webster whose ‘Born on the 24th of July’ album sits at number two…
 
click to zoom
This includes the track ‘Forget the Past’ co-written by Charles Webster (Presence, Phurry Phreaks), Sara Jay (Massive Attack) and Mat Jarvis (Gas, [...]

Napster today announced that it’s going MP3, and will be the largest MP3 store with 6 million tracks.

Napster, the pioneer of digital music, today announced the launch of the world’s largest and most comprehensive MP3 store at www.napster.com/store.
Napster’s download store is more than 50 percent larger than any other MP3 store and boasts not only [...]