three

living in the past: a music special

Mar 01, 2023

Five things about old music and one about new music - this one’s going to be fairly Youtube-heavy

one: drums

At a gig last week I was reminiscing with Daniel about a musician we’d both enjoyed back in the early 2000s. Back then Andrew Dymond, who also called himself Andre Diamant, was also known as Duracell. He played extraordinary, energetic and explosive sets at small gigs, where he used drum triggers to play covers of old computer game theme tunes, more or less entirely on a drum kit.

I was sorry to look him up as a result of that conversation to find that he now suffers from hyperacusis (a noise sensitivity disorder that sounds like it can make everyday life extremely unpleasant - let alone making music) and he no longer drums, though apparently he creates mbira music on Youtube.

The forum thread linked above has a lot of information, and more importantly lots of links to Duracell in his prime, such as the one below. I was fortunate enough to see him back then at a gig at the (sadly missed) Luminaire in Kilburn, north London, and he was just as extraordinary as I’d been hoping.

Some apt thoughts from that forum thread:

1 It’s rare that this type of setup (drum triggers and sequencing + 80s game music) moves beyond novelty but this is precisely that.

2 Such a physical performance - afterwards it felt like a herculean feat

3 There’s a 2008 documentary about him and other one-person performers, which is available to watch here - I’ve only seen the first few minutes so far, but it looks very good

two: mark

Mark (MJ) Hibbett has played one thousand gigs, and Daniel (again) and I managed to join him for the thousandth, at the King and Queen pub in central London on February 2. If you’ve heard of him for one thing, it’ll be for Hey Hey 16k, a delightful song that he released in 1999 which celebrates the olden days of home computers.

Since then he has carved out a career as a modern English troubador, creating sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful and sometimes elegiac folk music. He (obviously) has some more gigs coming up this year, and is always worth catching. In the brief time when I co-ran an indie club in the mid-2000s, Mark was the only live act we ever got it together enough to present live at the club, and I’m glad we did. Being both a nerd and a data guy by trade, Mark has also released a dataset about his gigs, along with GRAPHS.

three: megablast

At work we were talking about game soundtracks and I couldn’t not post the greatest thing I heard in 1991 when someone at school lent me a pirated Commodore Amiga disk that had the words “XENON 2” written on the label in felt-tip.

The game was great, but the opening credits, and the music, were astounding. The Bitmap Brothers did extraordinary things with the limited resources at hand in the computers of the early 1990s, but the masterstroke was teaming up with actual pop stars - Bomb the Bass in this case - to produce a soundtrack that would make use of the state-of-the-art sound hardware in the Amiga and Atari ST computers. The charting version of the song (“Megablast”) is below the game soundtrack video.

four: the perfect concert piano

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, one of those terrific pieces about a very specific thing. The headline is: How do you pick the perfect concert piano? Inside the Royal Conservatory’s $300,000 bet, but if anything it’s even more interesting. It takes us into the world of piano movers, piano choosers, the history of the Steinway company, Glenn Gould and so much more.

five: frustration, creativity, jazz

The piano thing above reminded me to write about this talk which I showed to some colleagues this month. We were talking about inspiring product managers and I said that when I want inspiration as a PM I turn to Tim Harford, which is true. I love his delivery: I was at this talk (at the 2016 Mind The Product conference) and he had the audience spellbound from start to finish - and you will notice that for maybe 98 per cent of the time there is nothing at all on the screen behind him. No videos, no gifs, no headlines and certainly no walls of text.

The talk itself is inspiring too. Its title is How Frustration Makes Us Creative, but it’s about so much more than that: Keith Jarrett, London tube strikes, Brian Eno to name but three. You can also listen to a version of the same talk as a podcast from Tim if you prefer audio to video.

six: Rippa

I recently subscribed to

Ciaran Thapar

's Substack

ALL CITY

which is excellent. In this recent issue he talked about a former mentee of his, Rippa, who is making a name for himself as a recording artist. I enjoyed this track of his (Youtube version here) and you can - and should - read the full story from Ciaran’s newsletter below.