Plutonic Rainbows

Coming from Bleep on April 29th.

Press Release:

Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia: the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we’re permanently and increasingly under threat. At the zenith we realise we have to come down again... we know that we have more than we deserve or can defend, so we become nervous. Somebody, something is going to take it all from us: that is the dread of the wealthy. Paranoia leads to defensiveness, and we all end up in the trenches facing each other across the mud.

On a musical level, I wanted to make a record of songs that didn’t rely on the normal underpinnings of rhythmic structure and chord progressions but which allowed voices to exist in their own space and time, like events in a landscape. I wanted to place sonic events in a free, open space.

One of the starting points was my fascination with the First World War, that extraordinary trans-cultural madness that arose out of a clash of hubris between empires. It followed immediately after the sinking of the Titanic, which to me is its analogue. The Titanic was the Unsinkable Ship, the apex of human technical power, set to be Man’s greatest triumph over nature. The First World War was the war of materiel, ‘over by Christmas’, set to be the triumph of Will and Steel over humanity. The catastrophic failure of each set the stage for a century of dramatic experiments with the relationships between humans and the worlds they make for themselves.

I was thinking of those vast dun Belgian fields where the First World War was agonisingly ground out; and the vast deep ocean where the Titanic sank; and how little difference all that human hope and disappointment made to it. They persist and we pass in a cloud of chatter.

Written in the late sixties, Lou Reed’s song ‘I’m Set Free’ seems even more relevant now than it did then. Perhaps anybody who’s read Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ will recognise the quiet irony of “I’m set free to find a new illusion”... and its implication that when we step out of our story we don’t step into ‘the truth’ - whatever that might be - but into another story.

This album is a succession of interleaved stories. Some of them I know, some of them I’m discovering now in the making of them.

Wave. After. Wave. After. Wave.

Sounds very pretentious. Hope the music is better than this nonsense.

I have a feeling this FBI versus Apple thing is going to drag on for years. There is simply too much at stake on both sides.

Wired article:

At first glance, the issue seems simple: Why shouldn’t law enforcement have access to information that could help us hunt down other terrorists or even to help prevent other terrorist attacks in the future?

But this simplification overlooks the reason why companies have built their systems so securely to begin with: namely, to prevent criminals, terrorists and hackers from gaining access to our private and sensitive information. It’s a huge technological breakthrough that engineers are able to build systems so secure that even their own architects cannot break into them. And it’s why major players in the tech industry—from Facebook and Twitter to Microsoft and Google—are lining up to support Apple’s stance.

People are beginning to ponder the idea that Donald Trump could actually be the next president of the United States. Historically, one wonders if the same fears surfaced when they elected a movie star to run the country.

The video game of Steven Spielberg's ET is considered to be one of the worst of all time and has even been blamed for triggering the collapse of Atari. Howard Scott Warshaw, the gifted programmer who made it, explains how it was rushed out in a matter of weeks - and how he feels about those events in California now.

"Things just started to unravel," says Warshaw. "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."

I remember hearing about the landfill story many years ago. I had no idea it was true.

Apple has shared a new Q&A page that explains why the company is opposing a court order to create a unique version of iOS that would bypass security protections and allow an iPhone to be unlocked by way of a brute-force attack.

Law enforcement agents around the country have already said they have hundreds of iPhones they want Apple to unlock if the FBI wins this case. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks. Of course, Apple would do our best to protect that key, but in a world where all of our data is under constant threat, it would be relentlessly attacked by hackers and cybercriminals. As recent attacks on the IRS systems and countless other data breaches have shown, no one is immune to cyberattacks.

Again, we strongly believe the only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.

Great piece by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic:

History is mostly silent to us now. Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.

Eli Stokols writing for Politico Magazine:

“The rules all changed this year. It was all about taking on the establishment,” said a Republican operative close to the Bush family. “When you’re the son and brother of former presidents, the grandson of a U.S. senator, how do you run in a year like this? It is just a year of personality, not message. All of a sudden, there was no path for him. They just kept falling back on his record as governor, which is all he has—and no one gives a shit.”

Surprising that it took the Republicans this long to figure that out. There was simply no way the public were ever going to tolerate a third Bush in the White House. It at least proves that money does not buy everything.

I made the decision back in July of last year that I would leave Japan permanently. It simply doesn't give me the same lifestyle anymore and I think there is a better long-term future back in England. I don't believe it was ever my intention to live here forever.

I need a greater degree of financial security than I currently have. I also am thinking more and more about saving and buying my own property. I have amassed a lot of stuff over the past ten years but I wonder how much of it has really made me happy.

Waking up each morning and enjoying the prospect of the day ahead is something that is more important to me as I get older.

This last year has really been like a farewell note to a country I enjoyed for many years. In some ways I feel sad that I cannot stay here but in truth, my interest in Japan has waned over the last five years. Maybe that's only natural. I don't think that many people have the same interest for their entire life.

A short excerpt:

All of this happened a very long time ago, before you and I were here. There once was a place in the world that looked a little bit like here but it was actually very different indeed. Autumn lay in the fields and along the empty road through the woods where no-one ever went anymore.