However much I try to pretend I can work with speech radio on, I can’t. It’s just got too many words in it. I need radio to fill in the bits of my brain that would otherwise dance around thinking about the London Zine Symposium and spring cleaning the kitchen cupboards and the dietary habits of cats. But it shouldn’t fill in the bits of my brain that are supposed to be working.
So, since I started writing at the beginning of January, I’ve been trying out lots of different ‘background’ radio.
In the past I used to listen to the birdsong on DAB, but it went off-air last year when Amazing Radio launched. I finally got round to trying out birdsongradio.com the other day and it’s a real disappointment.
They’re selling the recording as an mp3 and a CD, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the free streamed version is crap. But still, there’s nothing like having a peaceful outdoor scene interrupted by a woman telling you to “discover relaxation during your day” over and over again to make you want to punch someone, preferably that woman.
Dan got me started on Radio 3, which is great for working to at home, as long as you switch off before you get caught up in some bellyaching 2-hour German opera marathon. It’s not loud enough to block out other stuff happening in the office though.
Clare Teal is pretty good on iPlayer – I like big band music but rarely know the words, so the lyrics aren’t distracting. The problem is, it’s just one hour a week, so by the time you’ve dragged yourself away from Facebook, it’s practically time to put something else on.
My favourite background radio is easily Bobby Friction on the Asian Network. 12 hours a week of loud, inoffensive music, often in a language I can’t understand, with a DJ who doesn’t sound like an arse. Brilliant!
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Just the thought of trying to explain this one to my grandparents is making my head hurt. “OK, let’s start with Twitter. You know what Twitter is, yes? No? Oh.”
Dan has curated an album called sc140. All the tracks are tweets that people have posted on Twitter, using the programming language SuperCollider.
The idea was to see how much music you could fit into 140 characters of code, for example:
{LocalOut.ar(a=DynKlank.ar(`[LocalIn.ar.clip2(LFPulse.kr([1,2,1/8])
.sum/2)**100*100],Impulse.ar(10)));HPF.ar(a).clip2}.play//
…which translates into this:
There are 22 tracks in total from a variety of artists. The album’s doing well – it’s got support from The Wire magazine and now there’s an article about it in New Scientist.
“My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, then she’d definitely love it,” said Stowell, who has recently had media training, and knows a good soundbite when he hears one.
Download the full album for free.
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The best hour’s radio I’ve heard in a long time is this week’s In New DJs We Trust from Radio 1. Jaguar Skills mixes hip hop, dance, answerphone messages, beatboxing quizzes and made-up interviews. It’s relentlessly silly.
Here’s a clip - or you can listen to the whole thing on iPlayer before Thursday night.
]]>The BBC came along to film the event and the video’s now up on the BBC Technology website.
Nick Collins (Click Nilson) had covered his jacket in stick-on letters, spelling out POTPAL LATPOP PALTOP ALTPOP PAPLOT etc. It looked fantastic, but the letters had a tendency to transfer to anyone passing within six feet of him.
By the end of the evening, we were retrieving anagrams from people’s shoes, trousers, hair, faces… If you watch closely at the beginning of the video, you’ll notice Dan has a ‘P’ stuck to the back of his t-shirt.
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