Formula: Remove the vowels from a word and make it all caps.
MSTRKRFT
SBTRKT
CHLLNGR
DFRNT
PVT
TNGHT
PTTRN

Formula: Famous people spoonerisms
Wevie Stonder
Com Truise
Jichael Mackson
Nid & Sancy

Formula: Lil [X]
Lil B
Lil B
Lil C
Lil C
Lil CB
Lil D
Lil D
Lil E
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil G
Lil J
Lil J
Lil L
Lil M
Lil O
Lil P
Lil Q
Lil T
Lil T
Lil T
Lil V
Lil X

Formula: The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers
The Strangers

Saturday 28th April 2012, 6.30pm
Bwyd Sonique
Live audio-culinary performance. Witness the creation of mouth-watering and olfactory-gland-tingling food and drink while discovering the hidden musicality of the kitchen – the insistent rhythm of stirring, the drones and hisses of heat-on-pan, the chatter and bubble of boiling water. Audiences will be nourished, entertained and enlightened, through a performance that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted.

Friday 22 & Saturday 23 June 2012, all day
Analogue Web Portal
Real Institute launches its ground-breaking web service with a special interactive performance.
Utilising a team of specially trained experts, two pencils, a large booth and some pointy arrows, we enable you to visit the now legendary INTERNET in Real Time via our specially developed Analogue Web Portal. Someday all internet access will be made this way.

Update: well, that didn’t last long. File that brief experience under ‘early adopter opts out, doesn’t think application will catch on’

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Background
This is an experimental project, but I reject the use of ‘experimental’ as a credible musical genre. It might be the case that the album ends up being filed under ‘bluegrass’ or ‘hip hop/R&B’ or ’2-bit wet-tech physicswave’ in all good record shops, time will tell. But the process is an experiment in the truest sense. I intend to compile an album of non-genre-specific music, and to do this I need contributions from the public. Taking my cue from classic/conventional rock/pop production, I’ll use guitar, drums, bass, vocals, maybe even a splash of keyboard, and maybe the occasional background vocal. You, the general public, will provide the separate components. I will then be responsible for compiling and mixing.

Method
If you have access to separates from your recording session, then great, this is what I’ll be using. The album will be produced in a conventional way by arranging and mixing separate audio tracks from various instruments, only the difference between this project and a normal album production process is that none of the submitters will have heard any of the other submissions. You might send me a 4 minute hi-hat track from your nu-metal band, and I might decide to use that along with a kick drum taken from a country and western ballad, a snare from a free jazz combo and floor toms from a bunch of psych-rock revivalists. That’s none of your business. This might sound like a terrible idea to you, but that’s okay because you’re not doing it. I think it’s a great idea and will sound fantastic, which is why I am doing it.

I’m asking for uncompressed audio separates that fall into the following categories:

1. Guitar (electric or acoustic, lead or rhythm or whatever)
2. Bass (electric or acoustic/upright)
3. Kick drum
4. Snare drum
5. Toms
6. Hi-hat
7. Ride cymbal
8. Crash cymbal
9. Other rhythmic percussion (eg. tambourine, triangle, conga, bongo, handclaps etc)
10. Vocals, lead (spoken/sung/shouted/screamed/rapped)
11. Vocals, other (background etc)
12. Keyboard (piano, harpsichord, analogue synth, computer based etc.)

What I do want:
Good, clean, professional quality audio separates ideally with no bleed-through from other instruments that might have been recorded at the same time. I realise that this is pretty tricky where drums are concerned, in which case I’m after drums that have been recorded with separate mics on each piece of kit, rather than the whole kit being recorded simultaneously with a single mic. If this proves to be too difficult then I’ll settle for whole kit recordings.
Tracks taken from a single credible piece of music.
Anything between 3 and 6 minutes in length (give or take – I mean, 2:50 would be okay, but 25:00 wouldn’t be).
Original music that you own the copyright to.
Material in any genre or style, as long as it fits into one of the categories above.
Tracks from amateurs and professionals alike. Separates are welcome from all.

What I don’t want:
Your solo version of a popular hit recorded in your bedroom on your phone.
Complete stereo recordings of your whole band.
A 5 minute solo jam. As in, don’t just noodle away aimlessly on your Fender Jazzmaster and submit that – I want the audio to have been recorded for inclusion in an ensemble piece, not intended as a stand-alone.

How to do it:
Upload your uncompressed audio file (no mp3s, please) to a third-party file hosting site such as Rapidshare, YouSendIt or Mediafire etc and email the link to me at cloudsource@simonproffitt.com. Or else get in touch for my address and you can post me a CD.

Other info:
In the first instance this is just an experiment. By submitting a track or tracks, you are agreeing to let me use the piece unaltered as a component in a new work, and you will still retain ownership of and copyright to your specific bit. You also agree to let me make the results available as low-quality mp3s. You are not giving me permission to do anything else with it, unless I specifically ask first and you say it’s ok. If it turns out that the results are spectacular (and I strongly suspect that they will be) and a major label wants to release the album in a massive worldwide distribution in multiple deluxe formats (as I strongly suspect they will), then I’ll make sure permissions are sought and contracts are signed and profits are shared. But I’m not doing this to get rich, certainly not at the expense of talented musicians like yourself, I’m doing this because I’m a restless, creative explorer.

In conversations I’ve overheard over the years, especially inter-generational conversations, fellow (or less commonly ex-) villagers are defined, characterised, identified not by physical appearance or profession but by family tree and/or place of residence.

- You know X?
- X… is that Y’s lad?
- It is, aye. He married Z.
- A’s daughter?
- No, you’re thinking of B. Z was C’s sister.
- Lived opposite the butcher?
- Aye, that’s the one.

Invariably, the given names of all involved parties are preposterous, and so the conversation becomes pure comedy. X is never the son of John Jones. Rather, X is the son of Bodge Wang. Or the elder brother of Stinker Pink. Or Figgy Brouhaha turns out to have lived next door to Soapy Rodeo. I exaggerate – the surnames of course are beyond anyone’s control, so are generally more sober than the given names. Interestingly, though, the given nicknames are universally acknowledged, regardless of generational membership. Such that legal first names are, quite often, completely lost, unknown, unknowable perhaps, even sometimes to the person themselves, their birth certificates AWOL in some distant, cobwebbed drawer. And, more often than not, the nicknames’ origins are similarly lost. Some are obvious and (I imagine) fairly self-explanatory, but others seem to have no credible explanation, even to those intimately acquainted with the person in question.

Here, after a number of conversations between my father and grandfather, is a list of real people, some of whom are sadly no longer with us, but all of whom were well known to both, and all of whom resided within the same 2 mile radius. They are all male. Some of these names have become so familiar to me over the years that they are even more recognisable than my own name. When said aloud, they are so fluid that the boundary between forename and surname is meaningless; they become a discrete and irreducible linguistic unit. I offer no commentary or speculation on the names themselves, they are simply presented as-is. But please, if you know anyone on the list, or if you find yourself on this list, please leave a comment to let the world know how you came to be so called. It will be interesting to see whether any themes emerge.

125g fresh blueberries
200g Tesco frozen summer fruits (equal mixture of blackberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries)
Half a large organic cucumber, peeled
1 level tablespoon white granulated sugar
200ml semi-skimmed milk

blend and drink

Results
Colour: 99
Texture: 99
Taste: 99
Overall: 99

Pure refreshment. The only thing stopping the Third Unsuccessful Attempt to Discredit Odlyzko’s Response to Montgomery’s Pair Correlation Conjecture from scoring a perfect 100 is that some of the ingredients were purchased from Tesco.