No Way Back

I've been busy on the music front, with a cover of the classic old house classic No Way Back:


The footage was shot with a 5D MkII, mostly using a Tomioka Chinon 55mm f/1.4; the music was performed with Ableton Live, mostly using a mixture of VST Korg Polysix and real physical MicroKorg and my actual larynx. What I really need is a soul diva to do the vocals. Vince Clarke needed Alison Moyet.

Here's the original, which was by Adonis, with Mr Gary B on vocals:


The song dates from the time when jacking off didn't mean what it does today, although it did mean what it does today, but... actually I'm not entirely sure what the whole jack thing was about. Like most British kids my age I was first exposed to dance music by Now That's What I Call Music Volume 11, which ended with a string of contemporary hits from Bomb the Bass, Coldcut, Jack N'Chill, and the Beatmasters. My favourite was House Arrest by Krush, and one of my fondest musical memories of the late 1980s is the bee-bee-bee-bee noise from Bomb the Bass' Beat Dis.

Sample-based house music taught kids to hum noises and random phrases and beats and wikky-wikky vinyl sounds rather than melodies. It took musique concrète forty years to cross from the edge of the avant-garde to the pop charts; what revolutions are lurking under the surface right now? Hmm?

I like No Way Back because it's just simple enough to be minimalist, but not so simple that it's impossible to sit through. Unlike for example Phuture's Acid Trax, which was hugely influential but isn't much fun as a listening experience. Of course, it was designed so that you could dance to it whilst off your head on fantastic happy drugs, but I can't dance at the moment. I'm sitting in front of a computer, typing, and clicking on things.

I can't take fantastic happy drugs because then I'd just start typing nonsense like atatogaojhta and tyoijathjaptrajpg, but it wouldn't matter because my mind would be glowing and all would be love.

More of Ulorin

I have a habit of shooting lots of photos and then never using them; life intervenes. So here's more of Ulorin Vex from ages ago. All shot with a good old classic old Canon 5D, which I should write a blog post about at some point, and a Canon 50mm f/1.8 because it works and I had it with me. And some coloured gels in front of the lights. You can gels that fit in flash units, but I used these little bastards, squares of plastic that you can cut up and gaffer tape to studio strobes. But be careful to turn off the modelling light, otherwise the bulb will melt them.

The 5D was so good that I sold it and bought a 5D MkII. I can't say that the extra nine megapixels have transformed my photography, although I can crop like a maniac now. The video is nice. And the sensor cleaning technology works like a charm. It's a shame the batteries are so expensive.

I actually came this close to buying a 7D instead and it was only a credit card glitch that stopped me; I eventually reasoned that I would probably still be using the camera ten years from now, in which case the 5D MkII would date slightly less. The big sensor will always be unusual even if the resolution is surpassed by whatever media devices we will be carrying around in 2021. We'll have computers grafted into our skulls by then; we will take photographs by looking at things with our eyes and blinking.

NB there are other camera manufacturers. It's a damn shame that nothing rhymes with Ulorin. Florin? That's all I can think of. I wanted to call this post "More 'o' Ulorin" but it doesn't rhyme.

Here's a duck, I call her Jennifer:

The Torture Garden: Kumi II

Those lovely chaps at the Torture Garden - and they are lovely... and when I saw chaps I mean people, I'm not talking about those leather semi-trousers that cowboys wear. Start again.

Those lovely chaps at the Torture Garden decided to use one of my photographs of Kumi: The Human Explosion in a flyer, look up there up above there up up. Here's the original:

And while I'm on a roll here are some more shots from the same session:

All taken with a Canon 5D and, get this, a Pentax Takumar 55mm f/2.0, a tiny manual focus lens that I wrote about yonks ago. It's a lovely old lens, one of the few old Takumars that doesn't interfere with the 5D's mirror. There's an f/1.8 version that's apparently almost the same. They've both small and cute. I like small, cute things.