
I’ve just joined
NetNewMusic, the networking site for “the world of non-pop, contemporary classical/indy/avant-whatever musics”.
My profile page is a bit daggy right now but give me a few quiet days at work and I’ll start getting amongst it. At least there’s a few streaming mp3s up there for now.
The slightly-revamped main website now has a page
dedicated to writing, including a few of my articles available online.
Name and
subject indices have been updated to 12 August 2008. About time too.
Two of my art exhibitions now have pages up on
the main site, with some background information about the shows and a few photos to pretty it all up.
Mock Tudor No.2 (Why doesn’t someone get him a Pepsi?): “Every once in a while Don would scream at his mother
‘Sue! Get me a Pepsi!’ There was
nothing else to do in Lancaster.” My first live sound installation, generating feedback with two loudspeakers and a microphone. Presented at
Bus gallery in 2002.

Name and
subject indices are now updated to the end of May. Yeah, well I’ve been busy.
Has it really been that long? For the first time
in two years, the updated List of People Or Things I Have Been Mistaken For, Or Allegedly Physically Resemble, In Increasing Order Of Ridiculousness.
Tomorrow night: 11 June @ Stutter*
Natasha Anderson / Ben Byrne / Sean Baxter
Contrabass recorder/laptop/junk
James Rushford / Judith Hamann / Sam Dunscombe
Improv laptop and string textures.
Also: myself
Presenting the latest in my series of compositions for unstable feedback systems. My ageing laptop will create a digital simulation of nested analogue feedback loops, synthesising all the sounds live. Unless I can’t get it to work, in which case I’ll just play a CD and pretend it’s the computer doing it.
Horse Bazaar
397 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
8:30 PM
$5 on the door

Things were interrupted for a few days there, thanks to a dodgy internet connection and a drunk girlfriend. Both are OK now. The promised review of Nono’s
Prometeo should be below.
Also, work on the main website continues: a page for upcoming and past live performances
is now online.


Next month I’m presenting my piece
String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) in a new version, as an installation in the group exhibition
Redrawing, at
RMIT’s Project Space in Melbourne. With works by Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Fiona Macdonald, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, and Spiros Panigirakis. Curated by Fiona Macdonald.
The show runs from Friday 6 June to Friday 27 June 2008; opening night is Thursday 5 June, 5 – 7 pm. Hope you can make it. There will also be a floor talk by me and some (all?) of the other artists on Thursday 12 June 12 – 1 pm, followed by
a thrilling live performance of the
String Quartet.
As you might have guessed from the above blurb, my piece will fit in very nicely with the show’s premise of redrawing, of imitation as a creative practice. More to come about the show over the next few weeks.
Also also, while I’m in Melbourne it looks like I’ll be playing another live gig, at
Horse Bazaar on Wednesday 11 June. More about that one soon, too.

I’ve been packing all week, and because I screwed up my
order matching reference code (not heard of it? neither has Google) the next post won’t come until some time later next week, I expect. Have fun without me.
I’m back home in London this Sunday, so regular updates should begin next week. Expect some reports about what I got to see at the Other Film Festival in Brisbane, which was as wonderful as everyone kept telling me it would be, exciting laptop gigs in Brisbane and Melbourne, and lots of photographs of trees in New Zealand.
I’ve just arrived in Brisbane, after a week offline in New Zealand, gingerly approaching nature in various parts of the South Island.
It looks like I’m playing another gig, this Sunday at
the Forest in Boundary Road, West End (See post above), Brisbane, but the exact details haven’t been made clear just yet. Otherwise, I’m going to the
Other Film Festival.
It took a while for me to notice that
Flickr provides an analysis of how many times your photos have been looked at. I’ve never expected any of my stuff to have broad appeal, but it’s intriguing to see what people seem to be interested in.
With one exception, this is the fairly stable order of popularity amongst my pictures.

10! I still haven’t seen Patrick Keiller’s
London again, so I still don’t know how close I got to
guessing the particular location of the forgotten corner of the city that briefly appears in the film. Instead, I relied on Iain Sinclair’s description of finding the same place some years later, somewhere near St Andrew By The Wardrobe.

9! Trainspotters ahoy! The Tube’s inexplicable allure adds a cachet to even the most mundane snapshots.

8! Heh heh, I said ‘faggots’. I’m amazed this one isn’t the most viewed in the entire set, because half of my website traffic consists of kids on MySpace linking to
the smaller version on this blog.

7! The promise of violence. Because people like violence. Especially when
it’s close enough to enjoy but you’re safely out of the way.

6! The tastefully understated Colloseum photograph. One of very few taken on
my holiday in Italy. I can’t help feeling people are mildly disappointed when their searches turn up my photos.

5! See? This is exactly what I mean. This a security guard outside the Sagrada Familia and is tagged accordingly, so I hope people turning up this one are more interested in handcuffs than Gaudi.

4! The only thing more exciting than an old Tube station is a derelict Tube station. Aldwych station, once briefly known as Strand station, is now a ghost station and frequent stand-in for real Underground stations on film and TV.

3! Now here’s the anomaly. A blurry shot at a graduate art show off Brick Lane, which has suddenly rocketed up the charts in only the past week. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s been discovered by a cabal of Ballardian fetishists who like to pretend this is Rosanna Arquette.

2! A street stall of nested dolls for the tourists
in Riga. There’s nothing like Harry Potter, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden tags to boost the hit rate, although I guess this photo must have disappointed many feverish authors hopefully searching for illustrations for their slash fiction.

1! Ah, the
inanimate carbon rod of my photo set! These soothing wood tones and rich timber grain have brightened the
desktops of geeks around the world. A pinnacle of repose and tranquility, which I thought had an unassailable lead over the others until the James Spader wannabes turned up.