Milk’s Site

Thanks to the wonderful and , I have acquired (or shall be acquiring) a ticket to teh Whitby in a couple of weekends time. Which of you lot, pray tell, shall be in attendance?

Back in Dundee again after another 48 hours in Edinburgh. Arrived in Edinburgh and wandered down to the Hoose to meet after she’d finished her Beltane stuff where I was also offered the opportunity to have my arm removed by (to cure my Infestbanditis) and informed by about the current hullabaloo at Madras. We popped into ’s afterwards for a *cough* wee while for a smoke and catch-up before staggering home to collapse. On Saturday we headed into town for nosh and a wander around with and finally got to see her flat albeit briefly before we headed home for much required More Sleep. Later that evening was and ’s flat warming party. Peeps in attendance included , , , , , Stu/ew(?) (who introduced me to rum, yarr), John (who extoled the virtues of MIDI), , and his lady friend who’s name I still can’t remember, plus other nice people who’s names also escape me right now. Much gay fun, jolly discussion with big words and wastedness was had, and how can I forget the cock. Bed time at silly o’clock in the morning, waking at silly o’clock in the evening, some broken specs and then a scrumptious Indian take-away with a pasanda for myself later and it was time to say goodbye to Edinburgh and hello to Dundee again via the Megabus, on which I bumped into and chatted with Mr before napping for the rest of the journey.

A tip for any electronic dance music fans out there; check out The Mixing Bowl, a members-only BitTorrent tracker for non-commercially available recordings of DJ mix sets from the radio and other such sources which, for this week only, has opened up sign-ups and has ratio free downloading. So far I’ve grabbed a few Breezeblocks, the first ever Essential Mix, that John B mixmag cover CD mix and a rather good mashed up ragga[core] mix by Aaron Spectre (available here), plus I’ve discovered Armin van Buuren’s delightful A State Of Trance show which features a nice mix of the more modern forms of that style. Go join now! Time for a new hard drive me thinks..

The first five people to respond to this post (and follow instructions) will get some form of art, created by me. I make no guarantees about quality or type, but I will assure that I will give it good effort and that the art will be individual to you, so if you get a mixed CD or some sort of painting doodle, yours is the only one like it.

The only catch, of course is that to get art-ed you should extend this offer in your own journal as well.

Am away to head through to Edinburgh for the weekend but shall not be Ascending.

I’ve uploaded pics from last weekend’s Implant and Alternative Culture. I’d hired the camera out from work and tried to by artsy in a few of the shots although I’ll blame my inexperience using it (should really experiment in a more controlled environment at some point) and it’s general crapness for the poor quality in many of the pics. There’s a rather horrifying amount of dead pixels/noise when you get up close to them.

Cheers again to and for having , , and I round on Friday. Drinking was done, SingStar was sung and lively debate was had, always fun. Last night I popped down to ’s for more drinking and some filmage. Wow, I’d almost forgotten how messy student digs could be, although apparently that was a good day. I even did a small clean to satisfy my OCD until I thought sod it. We watched Aeon Flux, the anime Metropolis and Peter Kay’s Live at the Top of the Tower. I’d only seen some of the Aeon Flux animations before but when you compare the two it works quite well as any niggling, seemingly badly thought out character behaviours can be seen as a reflection of the wack-ass avant-garde character behaviour in the animations. I loved both the plot and animation style of Metropolis with the character movement reminiscent of the style of motion you can see in early Disney fair. Reminds me that I still need to check out the original Metropolis film at some point as well, although apparently there is very little similarity in plot. Joe hadn’t seen Live at the Top of the Tower before so I stuck it on and he seemed to enjoy. This was my third time bit it still cracks me up. His flatmates came back halfway through and afterwards we chatted about World Of Warcraft and things for a while before Joe and I watched the South Park WOW ep again, Joe commenting things like “that’s actually quite a good combo to cast” and “that would never work”, after which I watched them pwn and got to read the 13 page long hate threads directed at Joe. Note; leaving msgs for others in the bog using toilet roll tubes turns out to be rather an effective mode of communication.

P.S. being pwnd by myself at the previous Infest.

P.P.S. ftw. Check the mp3s here.

I’ve been off work for the last three days now trying to recover from this dang cold. As per usual, it has ended up in my chest and left me coughing and wheezing, although the Beclazone seems to be helping things along nicely now. Due to this and trying to save cash, although it’s more for the cash now, as it was before hand, I’ll not be making it through to Edinburgh to see or for Absynth. Meh, living in Dundee is really starting to grate. But I thought I’d take the oppertunity to post something I’ve been thinking of posting for a while now. On my crappy wee Sagem myX-2 mobile it does the usual T9 predictive texting, but if you cycle through one character strings (i.e., ‘a’) then it also brings up words that begin with the letters that key can access which have manually entered into the phones dictionary, if you get what I mean. So out of interest I thought I’d list them here. They appear to be in chronological order of use although obviously there’s no indication as to how far apart each word was entered.

camden
abouts
cupar
bradford
connar
argle
btw
aww
clit
cunt
abertay
anime
curries
bitch
bitches
crashspace
afflecks
chungs
autoclav
crap
andi
absynth

dundee
damn
foofoo
dj
doh
fucked
fuck
flatmate
diy
eedjits
duller
eventhough (I’d be dyslexic :)
dvd
feck
fourish (why I entered this instead of doing “four ish” then deleting the space, I do not know)
feckin
eta
fraid
fimbulvetr

heya
heyhey
heyho
hellohello
heyo
gie
gf
grouchos
gah
ist
hae
hazaa
hoose
glowsticks

kip
lanacashire (where? no wonder it didn’t frickin’ come up)
khi
krista (who or what?)
leila
kthxbye (should actually be kthxbi)
luff
keirin
laters
kthxby

ooh
maowl
meh
mew
megabus
muchly
nuzzles
meow
meowl
msn
marowl
nya
mog
neal
napped
nitzer
mz
mosh
nini
nah
mope
midweek

snuggles
righty
sonted (a play on stoned. damn, when did that arise?)
snooze
snugs
setlist
probs
synthpop
selecta (bo!)
perth
shusht
shian
richy
pissed
slimes
pls
spacked
prolly
skinto
piss
splutter

txt
txting
txts
tefs
tek

yesh
yous
yus (again, eh?)
zim
xxx
wouldnt
westmorland
woot
westy
winterkalte
yoyoyo

Also, while I’m at it, my CUSTOM.DIC file from Word, which I add words to on more of a make-that-red-line-fuck-off basis;

Abertay
Alness
AltDundee
Amiga
Aphex
Audioscrobbler
Autechre
Autechre’s
Avant
abandonware
addy
afterparties
afterparty
aka
altdundee
amn’t
ascii
atm
Blutengel
Broadband’s
Buckfast
basey
beatmatch
beatmatching
blog
bloggers
blogging
blogs
bookmarking
bot
bumf
Cath
Citylink
Connar
choon
choonage
crosspost
Darkwave
Dundonian
DVDs
dancefloor
del.icio.us
dnb
doohickies
E.B.M
EBM
Electronica
Emo
eedjit
electronica
electropop
emo
Firefox
folksonomy
futurepop
Goa
Graphviz
gits
glitchy
glomped
glowstick
glowsticked
glowsticking
glowsticks
glowstringers
glowstringing
gonna
google
goth
gotta
Handfasting
Hardstyle
Hazaa
Heh
haha
hardstyle
hehehe
href
Irn-Bru
idm
indie
indignance
irc
ircd
JEPs
Kashfa
KaZaa
kawaii
kinda
Lambrini
LiveJournal
Lossless
linux
liquiding
livejournal
Megabus
MilkMiruku
Moog
Mortiis
majorly
meh
metalcore
mIRC
milkmiruku
milkmiruku.com
minidisc
mins
miruku
mosh
moshing
munters
musicologically
myspace
Nuff
nanotech
narked
natch
noodled
nowt
npov
ol
ostinato
outro
Prestwick
phat
phono
php
pic
pics
pished
powernoise
raws
rota
rss
Schnauss’s
Shwow
Ska
Skkatter
Slashdot
Slimelight
Snorelax
Subgenres
Sylvian
schadenfreude
scrummy
setlist
ska
spam
sprogs
subdomain
subgenres
synth
synthpop
synths
Tayside
Touch????’s
Twas
theremin
unfriend
unfriended
userinfo
utilikilt
Vorbis
vids
Wikipedia
Winamp
Winamp’s
Woopsy
WordPress
Wumpscut
wanna
weblog
whee
wiki
wikipedia
woopsy
wordpress
wtf
www.milkmiruku.com
xmas
Yay
zines

Hah. I finally took the time a few weeks back to seek out the track I keep hearing at Infest (heard it first last year IIRC, was most happy to hear it pop up again this year) that has the “concentrate, it’s in your reach” lyric sung by Brian Molko. Turns out it was Placebo, specifically a remix of Passive Aggressive by production duo Brothers In Rhythm (track 3 available to listen to here), one half of which is Dave Seaman, editor of Mixmag. T’is weird how someone can get away with dropping a progressive house track at Infest, but it just so works. Which reminds me, I really need to get the latest Mixmag for the cover mix CD, DJ Touche’s House Party Dynamite, which had me bouncing around like a loon in and ’s living room when was up a couple of weekends ago.

Oh, and there’s also that bad-ass techno track that spun, DK – Murder Was The Bass (the reworked mix). I’m also dead certain I’ve heard that at Infest before. Does anyone remembering me muntering on about something that sounded like the theme to the computer game Speedball? My memory is weird like that. The thing that really annoys me about EBM, both old and new, that it’s driven by that whole “we’re a band!” thing and that its acts focus on making tracks for an album, where as the culture surrounding other electronic dance music styles such as house/techno/trance/hardcore/dnb is much more focused on its acts producing 12″ releases with song structures specifically suited to beatmatching and club play, i.e., with nice 32 bar intros and outros that feature parts that you don’t really have to worry about when it comes to matching things up harmonically wise like drum loops or key agnostic synth stabs or whatever. That’s why any DJ who can beatmatch EBM or any similar DJ unfriendly styles and make it sound good gets mucho respect from myself. But anyway, where was I? Ah yes, going to bed.

How time flies. I was working on a super-dooper mega long post, but I thought it would be best to publish it in chunks to give me more time to procrastinate over finishing the later parts of it, so this is what happened to me circa four weeks ago and onwards, i.e., from the weekend after Headway.

came up to visit Dundee the four weekends ago. We shopped until we flopped on the Saturday and I picked up some new clothes including an amazing EGL style coat in Matalan plus a cool mutton sleeve-esq shirt and some half length trousers in H&M. I probably spent too much and got several funny looks and some behind-my-back comments from locals because of the audacity of my trying on female clothes *shockhorror*. Sunday was mainly spent wandering around the Dundee Botanic Garden, a first for both of us. The weather was just perfect for it, and although it felt good to specifically dedicate some time to nature, something I’ve not done in too long a time, the occasional thunderous roar of jets and drone of propellers from the near-by airport, sounds I’d otherwise enjoy listening to, was somewhat distracting. That and the other people. Note to self; visit Tentsmuir again at some point.

The The Cooper Temple Clause gig on the 14th was fun. The first support band, Luxury Car, were of that modern dance-punk style which is rather hip atm, albeit with slightly more crazy synth sounds and angstier vocals. I enjoyed most of the tracks although the lead singer didn’t look like he was having much fun. According to the synth guy, the bassist was wearing a furry lion hat he’d randomly found at an industrial festival they’d attended recently. (He vaguely reminded me of that boisterous fellow in the neon yellow road workers jacket I saw around at Infest, but I couldn’t be that sure there was a connection as I can’t say I remember the hat, not that I was looking). The second band, The Matchstick Men, we’re much more bouncy and pop orientated in style and reminded of me of They Might Be Giants (with the close vocal harmonies) and Bis in parts (the guitar riff in ‘Vacant Stare’ reminds me of a track by The Shadows). The studio stuff that appears on their MySpace sounds much more electropop-qse, but filling out their sound with guitars when playing live is an expected tactic really. Anyway, I liked. The Coopers were awsome, and although I don’t know their stuff well enough to give track names without looking, there were quite a few ditties I recognised including Film Maker and Who Needs Enemies, although the mofos didn’t play Murder Song, much to the dismay of Jo, Andy, Rich and I. A small moshpit formed during some songs which I entered when it was large enough for to be enjoyable. The Dundee onion website has some pics and Jo also took a few phonecam snaps which are available to view here. All in all it was a fun evening, although feck did my neck hurt afterwards.

The weekend after and I was through in Edinburgh, again, to visit and attend teh Absynth, where I spent most of the night busting funky moves to some Wikkid Beats on the dancefloor where I managed to avoid wacking my head against the low stone roof at either edge of the room which was nice. An enjoyable night again, although where oh where are the afterparties at in Edinburgh? I don’t do talking in clubs; I don’t have time to when there’s good music that demands to be danced to, not that I can make out what people are saying most of the time anyway. Oh, and please, if you’re going to play a Helium Vola track, play something other than ‘Omnis Mundi Creatura’. That is one of Ascension’s overplayed tracks already, danke :P

Go watch this. What’s he saying? Now look away and listen again. You can read all about the how’s and why’s here, but basically it’s down to the fact that we automatically lip-read (to an extent) when another person is speaking. I found out about this a while back through attending a call to help a lecturer get sound working so they could demonstrate it to a class but was reminded about it today after listening to Mike Oldfield’s ‘Amarok‘, which features a Margret Thatcher impersonator talking about endings, which prompted me to read up on the Iron Lady (her PMship finished in the end of 1990, just a few months after Amarok was released), with the ‘See also’ section linking to the Thatcher effect, which gives a link to this where the two phenomena are combined to create the “McThatcher Effect”. But anyway.

I’m trying to finish some real life posts but I’m feeling rather crappy atm and will most likely be taking tomorrow off of work to recover in bed. Oh yeah, my bed is now rather fucked as the metal frame has buckled on one side leaving the mattress slightly but noticeably sloping from left to right (oh shusht, it’s the side I sit on most often). T’is most distracting. Would probably make sense to invest in a double bed now although it would be a bit of a squeeze in my current bedroom. And meh, the cost..