Oh goodie. Zack Parsons has flipped his wig again and is running, well not an ARG, but certainly some weird shit delivered over multiple levels. Start here, read very carefully and make sure to click on the insect.
So, absolutely final?
Yes it is. When you promise Gary Numan that you’re winding it down then you WIND IT DOWN.
And besides, right here is the dilemma writ large – the demand for PLAY ONLY YOUR MOST ANCIENT MUSIC. Scene: Belgium. Tom bangs two rocks together while Stewart plays on his bladder
Actually, being in art administrator mode I have whipped up a spreadsheet. Column One, name of track. Column Two, duration in metric minutes. Column Three, Cliffordicity – high, medium or low. High means that people around the age of 50 will bump their walking frames along with the beat. That’s Friday night. Column Four – video, good/medium/poor condition. Playing live with Gazza means that there’s quite a lot in good nick. Last Column – rehearsal. As in what was the last time anyone actually rehearsed this.
Looks like there’s about 2.5 hours of stuff in decent condition but a lot of that is recent, serious music which ain’t gonna get granny into pink leg warmers. I think Friday is worked out, Saturday is a bit more tricky not for lack of material but just how to make it a club set. Take Pour Chiens Moyens for example, it’s 7 minutes long. I’ve got a version from the Big Day Out of 2005 which has a bit of a beat to it but… well… maybe not.
Actually they want stuff so old that there simply isn’t the parts to do it. Let me put this in perspective. I was talking to Pauline recently about how somebody wants him to remake I Don’t Like It. He’s found some MIDI files and a Roland Sampler that was once used to make the track. The sampler turned on … but the hard drive didn’t at first … the display is scrambled… the mouse is a SCSI mouse… this thing is a quizzical artefact of great antiquity.
He found some files that we THINK might work with Opcode Vision. Good luck with that.
OK so go fifteen years earlier. I am the king of backing shit up, but do you really think I can raise the dead? Take a track like Twenty Deadly Diseases. This exists as some vinyl which has the original recording which I have at various times tried to work out, except the whole track is so out of tune it sits between two real notes. I can make something that sounds a bit like it, but not really, then what? I remake it as an updated version and everybody frowns, as they did when I updated the other stuff. Let them frown at some of my stuff that’s only ten years old.
More hopeful – got a possible gig for 2013 (yes I know that seems a long way off but that’s how art goes these days) which involves what I do now rather than when half my current age. Can’t jinx it by talking too much but it could actually wrap up all the work on aerodrome and link into the cymaticsouth stuff I’ve been assembling in the background. The thought of wrapping all these loose ends into one project that will be properly exhibited is too good… surely that rogue planet will wipe us out first.