Plutonic Rainbows

The Supernatural Tales Blog are running a poll on their favourite Robert Aickman story.

The nominations are:

• The Swords
• Bind Your Hair
• The Hospice
• Ringing the Changes
• The School-Friend
• Ravissante
• The Inner Room
• The Cicerones
• Never Visit Venice
• Pages From a Young Girl's Journal
• The Houses of the Russians
• The Same Dog
• The Wine Dark Sea
• Meeting Mr Millar
• The Unsettled Dust

You can add yours to the list by heading over to Supernatural Tales and letting them know.

I've been using Dropbox since it first came out and I always knew it ran on Amazon S3. Not anymore. Apparently, two and a half years ago, Dropbox began to build their own storage infrastructure.

Vice President of engineering, Aditya Agarwal:

Just getting the bits out of Amazon and into other data centers was an epic task. Digitally moving petabytes of data from one machine to another isn’t exactly on the same scale as downloading a few songs for your laptop. Even the fattest Internet pipes only have so much bandwidth. Transferring four petabytes of data, it turned out, took about a day.

You can read the full article on Wired.

Found a bottle of vintage Obsession for a very reasonable price. It's one of my favourite fragrances from the 1980s. I don't imagine many people wear it now - the original formula is pretty strong by today's standards. I still like it because it hasn't really ever been copied faithfully. The modern-day version is pretty weak by comparison.

I found a copy of Madonna's debut album today - a Japanese first pressing with the matrix 32XD-318.

I've been watching Billions, the TV drama about the power struggle between a hedge-fund manager and and a U.S attorney. It's fun to watch. A bit of escapism. An hour a week spent watching ludicrously wealthy people fight each other.

Firstly, before I get to talking about this album in detail, what is with that title? Yes, it does sound like one of those new-age compilation discs that were everywhere in the early 90s. The kind of stuff you could order from mail-order catalogues or via the home-shopping channels.

However, that's where the comparisons end because this is a thoughtful, sobering meditation on mental illness. The music itself is something of a small departure for the artist, (Marc Dall) who doesn't impose so much rhythmic structure this time around. The album opens with 'Response To Stimuli' with dark, reverberating chords. It's a good introduction to the pieces that follow. The album features cold, crystalline keyboards and in other places such as on the beautiful 'On A Level' warm, billowing chords that work nicely against each other. There is also more than a nod to the Scottish band, Boards of Canada. Some of the pieces on this album have a kind of transient, haunting quality that the group are known for. 'Research Network' has a flutey opening that leads on to what seems like a gorgeous Roland D50 (think Clannad on their 1989 album, 'Atlantic Realm'). There are also hints of late 1980's Tangerine Dream - well at least it feels like that for me. In fact, listening to this album over and over, I'm reminded of TD, Steve Roach and BOC. Your mileage may vary. It's all beautiful, heady stuff.

I guess if I could best describe this album it would be to say that it has a fragmented, blurred feel that is totally engrossing.

The production and sound quality on 'The Composite Moods Collection, Volume 1' are excellent and I have no trouble at all recommending it to fans of ambient electronic music. It's my favourite album of the year so far.

Just a shame about that title.

You can order physical or digital copies at their bandcamp page. I'd also urge you to check out other titles from their label, 'Blackest Ever Black'.