birdwords-the-old

Birdw0rds has moved

Birdw0rds has moved to HERE.

birdw0rks dot com

Took an age over the weekend to re-format a few of the old pages, create a couple of new ones, relink everything, migrate it all to the newly-purchased birdw0rks dot com and start properly organising the better of what's become a driveload of mp3s. There're still a few teething problems with the site that I'm hoping Quaz will have a chance to look over at some point, but things're coming together. My own pretty-ropey back catalogue has swelled over the years.

I also activated the RSS feed to create the Birdw0rks Podcast - which will be where I post new w0rks direct to folks' pods from now on. (Hit Ctrl-U or "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced menu in iTunes and paste in the RSS URL to subscribe.) Stop press: it's now availalbe directly from iTunes.

First track on the RSS feed, as part of the flickr-oriented imagemusic project, is inspired by Shooz's "Healing Landscape" image:.

Am quite happy with how that ended up sounding after multi-layering and playing with a slew of rhythm loops. Again, ate away the time, but worth the struggle in the end. Direct link to mp3 here.

Second track, just added is Wild Ideas, inspired by AuntieK's image:

The next three tracks are all in the w0rks. As with one of these, occassionally the process of churning out the tune is painful and tense - a struggle to slot the thing together and technically get in into any kind of desired shape. Once you've been through that mire, however, you feel somewhat lighter as if you've had an annoying blockage removed; as long as you're reasonably happy with the sonic product, it's rewarding. Musical enima anyone?

Podalive

The New York Flickerite Podcast is back!

Episode 3 is available via the RSS feed and, now that I've just pinged them, is up on iTunes. Mp3 can be grabbed directly from here.

This episode features Shortcake26 and Aaron Edwards. Fat thanks to them for participating.

The Website's in poor shape, but is being revamped and will be reborn soon.

Took a poondaflesh with editing, splicing, compiling, mixing, re-editing, and so on, but got there. Next one will hopefully be out before too long once I've regrouped that flickerite pod part of the brain.

Birdw0rks podcast should also be up & running v. shortly n'all. Might aswell strick when the pods're warm...

Hen Meat: What Flesh!

A fun moosikal project has been taking a chunk of BigAl clay and scraping/thumping it into a steaming lump of birdw0rks. The result is here, at the new home for birdw0rks central, birdw0rks.com (very much in need of updating and editing, as it be...)

A direct link to Al's original ditty is here.

Aiming with the eyes shut

Am in one city for a week for the first time in a while. (I keep leaving the house checking to make sure I've a boarding pass...)

The New York Flickerite podcast is finally under way once more. Now that the clocks have retarded and the cool autumn nights are schlurping in, I am nudging myself toward long-overdue sonic editing. The ex-Evile One, Mr. Crotchcap is the first on the splice block. Once I have chance to capture the dulcet tones of the Fleecieone for voices from the crisper intros, we'll be set to roll proper again with Episode 3. There are at least 6 or 7 other bods that I did the photo wander and record thang with last winter and a fat number of hours to earlobe it through, but at least the pod is rolling.

Birdw0rks have finally hit iTunes too, with the Omelette available in full. According to CDBaby, I've also just earnt a juicy 5 cents via Napster plays, n'all. All proceeds from plakky copy CD and digital sales go to the UK M.S. Society, so if you're reading this and you fancy donating a little moolah to a good cause in return for some ropey, badly-conceived bird moosak, please click accordingly.

And a congrats to Her With the New Bump!

From the Longest Crawl

"Life......broken down into its constituent years, days, hours, minutes, plotted on a graph, the rhythms resemble one another from moment to moment, and year to year; we have good days and bad days, minor ups and downs as a rule, puncutated by wild, inexplicable turns of fortune; peaks and troughs where your life crashes, or springs into a period of uncontrollable growth and change. And if you're British, to help you climb the slopes, and help smooth the slide into the valleys, there's booze."

From Ian Marchant (who, I would predict, would come across as a bit of a prat in real life, but who, in the printed word, is pretty entertaining).

Return to the Aruss of Tex

Whuhh whuhh whuhhhh work has taken me back to the southwest for the first time in a while. A desert roam for a few days in Nude Mex and then east to the Arse of Tex for many miles flitting between the concrete cities on concrete highways.

The things one generally misses about the deeesert are the lifting of the humidty helmet that you’re virtually unaware of elsewhere (the air’s particuarly light and fluffy (and the light particularly airy and fluff-free)) and the big sky, sudden-mountain, ebb and flow landscapes. Show off sunsets and mountain cloud displays tickle the retinas in NM. It’s generally a crappy place to live long-term, mind, due mainly to the cultural isolation and dip-spit local menalities. Yung Selks is finding this to her cost, natch. She gracefully loaned a few pages of oily newspaper for me to shelter under in Albusquirty while I was there, and showed me a good time out at a bus stop and in a 7-11. Her recent brain reboot and consequent fatique scuppered my plan to record her dulcet tones reading her brain leavings for future moosakal useage, but I’ll capture a chunk of her wordage on wav at some point. I did capture her nebb.

I catapulted south down to Lost Clueless to see the Outlaws and a visiting Fleeciebeast. We admired backyard motors-on-bricks, saw old mates in Historic-with-a-capital-H Mesilla, and flew into a storm from El Paso to Houston a couple of days later. When we finally arrived in Hobby, the streets were underwater, cars were floating, and the river police were rescuing dolphins from the Galeria. Rumours among the milling baggage claim mongers at Hobby had it that between 12 and 16 inches had spat down on the city that day.

TX is still the land of big hair, bigger highways, and y'alling. And it's been a tad of a shock to be back in full-on car cultchahh – makes yer glad to live in places where the auto isn't a necessity for functionality. While there’re many natural/semi-natural wonders around, strip mall is what one can easily imagine as the dominant feature of the Texan landscape.

Has been a few years since I've been in Austin, the liberal island in the sea of Texan Shrubness, and was good to dip into its downtown thang with Chumplick and see a few of the faces of the Chosen Family that I've not for too long. Few folk have sprogged sprogs, grown dogs, bought property etc. since I was last there. Only drawback was being driven into by a young woman at a pedestrian crossing. Her vehicle ended up much worse off than mine and was a pretty crappy start to her birthday getting slapped with a You’ve Just Run Into the Back of Someone Else’s Car ticket. Luckily no one hurt and we could both safely drive away after talking with the local plod and being given the reems of obligatory paperwork to crunch through.

Have also returned to the strange environs of Aggieland in Bryan and College Station: Nice Place to Leave for the first time in almost a decade. A few buildings have shot up, but pretty much unchanged there in Brazos Co. The Wranglers, cowboy hats, and Hitler Youthesque corps of cadets still abound on the TAMU campus. I ran into a good number of familiar faces from the past during a brief, transient skip through town and old work haunts.

Sat now, in Houston, trying to find a hole in the weather to fly through in order to return northeastwards.

Completely unrelated quote of the day from the lips of Bruce Robinson:
“When you look through the binoculars of American entertainment, it’s stuffed with fear. Hollywood is basically about Yanks running away from special effects.”

Bridges under the water, just

Time moves differently when your paddling - has a different temporal beat. Like any repetitive motion, perhaps, but there's summat unique when you're on the watter.

Unrelated:
While digging around looking for moose numbers in the public library, as you do, a very unhappy-looking Japanese girl sat opposite me, read briefly and hurridly from a book entitled "Keeping Love Alive", slammed it shut, and stormed off in a huff.

Green Roofs

A green roof is a lightweight, engineered roofing system that encourages propagation of vegetation while protecting the integrity of the underlying roof structure. While the primary purpose of green roofs is to lower temperature, there are a range of benefits over traditional dark-coloured city rooftops. Vegetation lowers absorption and release of radiation and precipitation is trapped in foliage which increases local humidity and allows cooling via evapotranspiration. This decreases the energy used for cooling the building below

A green roof increases the longevity of the structure of the roof primarily by decreasing temperature variability and weathering, and lasts twice as long as a conventional roof covering. Rain water flow is regulated, decreasing storm water runoff and pollution into sewerage systems and the roof provides sound insulation to reduced noise. Other benefits include providing habitat for urban wildlife, reducing glare, increasing the aesthetic appeal (and hence value) of the building, and providing recreational space and educational resources.

Great examples can be found at the Solaire in Battery Park City, and its newly-opened sister building next door, the Verdesian. Both buildings are designed, built, and maintained in environmentally-friendly and sustainable ways. Waste disposal, water management, and energy systems decrease energy use, improve air quality, an reduce water pollution and waste.

More info. can be found here, here, here, here, and here.