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Bellowing off my head
Bellowhead: newish English folk band (essentially Spiers/Boden+backing, but with "backing" being musicians who you'd listen to on their own) with a goodly helping of vigour. Conforms to the modern vogue of biggish bands with brass sections a la Bottine Souriante, and jolly good fun. Very good live set at Cambridge. If you haven't already heard them ( Read more... ) -
Arpeggione and stuff
We had a lovely evening last night, where Helen and I sat down after dinner and played some music together; we really don't do that often enough. It was particularly nice to revisit Schubert's Arpeggione sonata and a Mozart violin/viola duet that we've got: both lovely pieces which I'd forgotten about ( Read more... ) -
SD card with USB connector
Today's link is a very nice bit of design - SanDisk have come up with an SD card that incorporates a USB connector! -
Internet stuff I've been playing with
What with the free time I've had recently, I've been playing with online toys a bit.- Have finally decided to see what all this IM fuss is about. Well, I say that: I had an ICQ account back in '97(ish) whilst I was a student when it was new and shiny, but wasn't all that taken with it. Quite useful for keeping in touch now we're overseas though. ( Read more... )
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Britten on performance
This is the first of what will probably be two or three posts today, split according to content. Firstly, the "I read something interesting" post: whilst flicking through a magazine[1] over breakfast, I read David Willcocks being quoted, talking about Benjamin Britten.
When preparing a performance I would often ask Ben, "Is that how you want it?" ( Read more... ) -
Worldprocessor
Worldprocessor: various statistics and images superimposed onto the Globe. Some are interesting, some are odd, some are incomprehensible, but some don't half make you think. -
Radio Britfolk
There's a web radio station playing British folk music here. Doesn't work with Firefox didn't work with Firefox the way it's set up on my computer in either Linux or WinXP. Firefoxy problems are mentioned in the site FAQ (On the PC we are having problems with Firefox: mostly it doesn't work, so if you can please bear to use IE, then that would be ( Read more... ) -
*Plib* *hoot* *chirrup*
One of the things I've noticed about our Swiss apartment is the soundscape. It's a dormer apartment, y'see, which (combined with its location) gives some great variety of sounds that vary with time of day, day of week and even time of year. The crickets chirruping on sunny evenings are always good, as are the sheep when they're out. Farm machinery ( Read more... ) -
Marching Emperors
Went out last night to the local Orange Cinema - an outdoor screening of La Marche de l'empereur, the French film released this year about the breeding habits of Emperor penguins. It was lovely to see video footage of icebergs, snow and stuff again, and the anthropomorphisation of the penguins was done pretty well. Somehow some of the ( Read more... )