Sean Booth in conversation with Andrew McKenzie (54 Min, Audio)

how are you doing sean i'm good i'm good i'm just kind of waking up actually i've been on nights all week all right okay well it's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it absolutely did you ever get to did you ever get to hear the in its full surround glory he's still sitting there waiting to be play i still not heard it so oh my god i don't know anyone with a setup who hasn't got kids and it isn't a real nightmare so right right i'll get round to it obviously okay it's just church because like no no one i know has got that kind of setup no only no one's even got five one really you know it's really not something yeah it's just not something you see in people's houses really but maybe it is it is if you're a bit more chubby but [Laughter] well but it would just be interesting to hear what you what you made of it all now that it's finally finally done absolutely i'm sure yeah totally well obviously keen to hear it but it's just a bit of a technical barrier as it were all right all right well i just think it's been there was one there was one website where people were sort of trying to work out who did what bit which was actually quite funny so yeah this is i i don't know i was kind of those discussions are a bit weird really i think it looks like and i think i think also it's slightly they're getting trolled a bit because we're massively deferring to you i think on right on all three releases and i think that kind of i mean that winds people up because we're the ones with the profile so yeah that's where all the expectation is if you know what i mean but it's it's it's a lot of fun now i think oh yeah yeah yeah i mean it's it's take a long time but i suppose we can say we've saved the experience or something yeah yeah yeah yeah but you're still busy busy busy don't know what yeah i'm just i've been programming all year i've just started building tracks about a month ago which feels good actually to be here but yes you know it's going well it's going well it's just kind of i really needed like a year just to program and not do any music so that was kind of strange um especially towards the end of it because i was getting proper itchy butter right right yeah it's good i'm kind of reaping the benefits so good for you good for you yeah yeah so i saw a weird thing the other day i saw this uh darren brown program which was intodominant of all places she had a gun to that as well just to troll the guy because he's such a faker you know yeah yeah yeah yeah john lacy lives there my my very good friend john lacy lives there so it just sort of reminded me that i have actually been promising to go and see him for ages and ages so if i do that i've also got to go to a couple of other places i thought i might pay you a visit that'd be brilliant if you yeah you'd definitely it would be really good if you were around i mean that's such a rare thing really so yeah so it's it's as my father would say as rare as rockinghorse in the uk quick get camera out [Laughter] the documentary crew coming out of the woodworking anyway but uh okay one you sound good so i mean even if you're just woken up you still sound good and well so do you so that's good even though you not feeling too great so i just it's it's i'm very i'm very sensitive to this weather the weather changing and stuff like that around about this time of year so and it's it's because what's what's like at this time of year is it true uh no uh but around about january it gets to be well the first the second year i was here it was it got to be minus 35 work for about three or four days which was pretty extreme i mean people were being warned not to go out you know kids are supposed to be not going out because their eyes might freeze and stuff like this so uh that's uh but it's it's be the weather's all over the place here now so and it's also like it's also a bit below sea level and stuff so that also makes a big difference i'm right it's the air pressure you know i'm i'm very sensitive to that so um that turned out i thought it was just me but it turns out that on german weather broadcast they actually put this kind of information on the weather broadcast and they say this kind of you know um allergy is going to be like this way and this sensitivity to this kind of thing is going to be this way this week and stuff like this so it's it's not actually that uncommon right but i've never had never yeah we kind of we have pollen count over here that's about as advanced as we get right right yeah but uh i mean so you've uh okay so you had a solid year programming now yeah more relaxed um yeah this is my god quite the learning curve i've done yeah great deal of dsp programming before so i kind of i've done bits and i've got i've got goodies i've got proficient but i'm not i wasn't doing stuff that was at the kind of level that i thought that it should be at um but i'm kind of i'm kind of there now i'm doing more interesting stuff than than anything else with commercial software you know right right right right well once you get past a certain sort of level then it actually starts it's sort of interesting in the beginning and then it gets to be kind of tedious and then it gets to be interesting again but you've got to go through the sort of hurdle this sort of war give it great yeah the trough is is you don't even notice you're in it either like most trucks so you kind of like you you just think you know he kind of did that like mentally for me it was more like a kind of light at the end of the tunnel thing whereas i was thinking oh god i hope but i couldn't you know i couldn't see how far away that was or anything i was just i was just kind of aware that at some point it become easier but um what gets me is that even building the most simple things um you have ideas in the build that sends you off on these weird tangents where you can see so you just sort of think god how come so many synth designers just get like you know an oscillator and a filter a bit of wave shape thing and then just like true it's true what kind of job satisfaction is there in that seriously i can't imagine i cannot imagine and it's like it's always 500 000 to the out there [Music] well i've been i've been looking at doing some some you know iphone and ipad things and whatever and just looking through the stuff that's actually produced is like your heart just goes down you know i mean you when you look at this sort of stuff and you go but this is hello world again and again and again and again and again you know learning in public and while i don't have so much against learning in public i mean it's it's it's not even it's not even at the level of really learning you know this is the thing like you read about how many iphone apps there are for music yeah yeah and it's like well if they're all the same is that such a good thing i mean it's mad it is absolutely mad but it seems to be just that the very least that people can get away with and then out it goes you know off into the world and there's yet another one but my my sort of objection to that really is it brings down the standard for everybody really stop people stop expecting anything interesting and they stopped really sort of looking and thinking oh well it can't do much i mean in some ways i thought i found the old iphone and smartphone dev thing kind of kind of exciting because it reminds me a bit of sort of early mid 80s the sort of spectrum games and the fact that there was like you know it was so it was such a kind of level playing field but it meant that it was ideas one out basically right but it's not quite worked out like maybe it's down to the way the marketplace works or the way the show is in store if that's got to have an effect i mean that's got to have an effect it's not yeah back in the day you get a game that was like a fresh idea and everyone would be on it whereas now you know i find an iphone app that's a fresh idea and it's it's buried you know and i'm just looking to found it at all really so that's what i've been looking into is just it's just basically not playing that game and just sort of setting something up and i'm still sort of getting everything together to sort of like do it and just the best way to do it and to make it so that it's not going to be something that sort of somebody opens once or twice and then goes well yeah you know some of it can actually be quite useful something that can actually sort of do something you know rather than just just be something that sort of like i don't know more uh using up more muscles on the thumbs or something i mean that you know or a kind of little amusement that just gets put away straight i mean that's what a lot of them are for me i've downloaded them because they it's partly that it doesn't help that they're like three quid or that's like the maximum i'll pay for an app on there you know like three quid that'd be for like a really good one and then like a one will be like 99p so you've got you've already got like this slightly i don't know like disposable attitude if you don't yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you kind of like you just sort of try it out for five minutes and then that's it and it's like i mean there's a couple of really like sunbox is properly really amazing and like uh jasooto the the uh modular synthetic thing on there that's really nice some fresh ideas in terms of like how it works and and it's you know it's actually useful as a tool and some sunbox is properly amazing tracker that does synthesis that's on it that runs on a phone or on a computer if you want as well and that's really nice it's just a nice tracker but it's kind of worked out pretty well on the phone but you know like no one's heard of it and if you look on any of the charts it's nowhere near you know right right right it's by far the most capable app on there but you know well there's a friend of mine described most of them as being cd romwe you know yeah yeah and and i think i think you had a very good point because a lot of it is you know they're they're using the same metaphors you know this sort of this interactive thing is come back again to haunt us but sean you and i are multimedia we are interactive fully interactive well interactive mean like [Music] it's like it's our idea you know like getting the public to actually do all the work for their assists just like the the implication that like if you watch a film that there's no interaction you know like that it's just pure like you just received there exactly that's a very good point very good point yeah and that's that's that's so true and a bit people just don't realize i mean there's a lot of energy is actually being used up uh where it's well it depends on the film obviously but i mean i think even on the worst kind of film there is a particular you've used up a particular you know a particular quality of attention and i think that's extremely important to realize you know it's not just happening i mean all these things are claiming your attention yeah and you're thinking as well to a point i mean it's like it's defining the car elements and then your associations are filling in the gaps and it's like that's right that's right it's about as interactive as you can get really yeah exactly exactly this this whole idea that you know that that there is truly passive consumption is uh well you know i mean it's it's maybe time to look at that again in some way because i'm not i'm not quite convinced i don't know i mean like as a kid like i my only proper source for info that was outside my social group was the tv and bits off the radio but mostly the tv so like you know all my ideas and who i am and everything comes from that it's not it's not it's not a total one-way process no no no no no and i i think that's i think people have been told this for years and years and they just ended up believing it but that doesn't mean it's make it true you know i mean i think there's been i mean even you know paintings for god's sake i mean i mean anything that's that's like that is is grabbing a part of your attention and it's using it up because it's like you only have so much per day i mean it's just a fact you know you can't have attention for absolutely everything for you know 48 hours you just you stop you stop focusing right i mean yeah you run out of ram dirty basically yeah yeah exactly yeah and uh then you get then you get into interesting stack overflow errors and god knows what else but leakage in my case it's all leakage yeah the thing is that when when people are told this then they they that they're being sort of i don't know they're being robbed in a certain way because they're not being treated as if they're in you know capable of recognizing something which is going on and i mean i think that's also part of the whole techno you know this this kind of push that everybody's going to have one of these things now and uh you know it's it's not it's like as we said before you know that the the level of these things when it comes down i mean everybody's going to start thinking that all these things can do is you know a few as you said in entertainment things in that space and make a few phone calls and browse the internet and that's it yeah like the popular music apps and aren't the useful ones at all they're the ones that grab your attention and are fun for five minutes no no no ah they're the ones that are like there are a few successful ones that are so simple so paired down that anyone can use it exactly yeah yeah and you kind of that that to me that's all that's also that's another type of problem area you know i mean it's like talking down to people spit like it's not really going to get everyone in anywhere if everyone's just got like nine drum pads with a bunch of drums but it's not it's it's i mean it's uh it's interesting that you spent all this time uh with uh with programming and stuff i mean but and that you also see that thing because i mean it's a while since i've actually done any programming proper programming but i'm sort of starting to come back to it for to do these iphone ipad whatever android whatever these and i'm just finding all this stuff coming back out again when i used to program you know 14 16 hours every day for this uh computer security company that we had in denmark and i'm just starting to remember just how deep you can go into this particular rabbit hole i mean it's it's uh and and there is stuff in there which is useful and there is stuff in there which can be i mean really good but to get there you have to get to a there's a there's a there's a certain i'm still searching for the right word for this but you have to get a certain state maybe does that make sense so you want to come out with good programming or together yeah yeah yeah to i mean just to appreciate it you have to actually get into you have to stop thinking with with the same metaphors and to get to get out of those metaphors you've got to get yourself into a certain state before you can be objective about it you know yeah i mean yeah i kind of like most of the stuff that i do that ends up being considered creative if that's a good way of putting it is is like tangents where i've been trying to i've started out trying to do one thing and then been distracted and and ended up doing something quite different right and and the thing that's quite different is a new thing and i found that obviously so it's like anything the more you know the more you can do and i think i think with programming you sort of i'm i'm really easily distracted in in a way that's a problem it's always a massive problem in school but when it comes when it comes to programming it's it's pretty good because i can i can find the time to follow that particular path and see where it leads and right usually i'd say more often than not anyway definitely um it leads somewhere more interesting than i would have been without going down there so i end up with you know i end up with no i haven't got i've built so many samples none of them are straightforward none of them have actually just got right you know they've all got these strange functions and quirks that aren't available anywhere else and and that's why they exist i wouldn't probably have finished any of them if they'd just been a straightforward sampler you kind of get to a point you're like well how do i get this how do i make this more interesting or what could i do with this now now i've got this effectively i've got this open machine in front of me and i can change anything so right what you know what do and i think it's kind of i don't know really you end up finding things that you like and then thinking god i really like the sound of that how come how come i can't buy this how come nobody else has tried to it's really obvious well i think i think it's because people don't get to that stage is that they end up in that as you call it a trough and they they just stay there because as you as you also said you don't realize you're there i could have spent i could have spent a year just learning how to do all the things you're supposed to learn in order and you roughly know what the order is and stuff you know and it's like and i mean yeah you can do that and i think it's important to to learn the various techniques i put them in inverted commas like is a bit of a thing i had a guy email me the other day about granular synthesis right about curtis rhodes yeah you know i mean i write curtis you know computer music tutorial classic and the guy's really nice but no you know this guy's going on about granular synthesis and you know curtis was the inventor of the technique granular synthesis and so i thought well that's a bit funny because like i remember before ever reading about granular synthesis we were doing similar things with samplers and sequences right not not the same but like lots of small loops all different positions in the same file but spread out across loads of keys lfos modulating the loop positions so it's kind of similar thing right and i was like and i started saying to him yeah but he says he just seems so limited just to talk about granular synthesis which is just like a really formally defined process which is like if you actually do it in the studio if you set up you know you program something to produce this effect it's a little bit like what why do it because it's like once once it's been formalized as a method then it that's kind of it it's not interesting anymore that's right that's right and now that's the i'm sure i mean and i did this you know not so much with the music stuff but i mean i did it with and it's this is this is one of the problems of procedural programming is that you end up with this kind of stuff happening is that people yeah they've invested so much time and so much effort in learning this particular thing that becomes their reality and they won't see it they will not allow the accidents to come in because they've been pressured so hard to keep them out if you're easily distracted you've got a blessing in disguise of course because then you're going to be interrupting what is basically a procedural process just to and you'll be you're going to be able to get out of it you know or at least that's how i'm imagining it right well even like even like using object orientated programming it's limiting in its own way because it forces you to um encapsulate yeah it's like even if you like even in the sort of max msp world um there's a big emphasis from the kind of learned sort of members of the community if you like that that you should encapsulate constantly that's right everything else everything's becoming modular modulized if you like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's just reduces connectivity basically of course you know me yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely this is used to drive me absolutely bonkers yeah yeah i mean i don't mind doing it i'll do it occasionally and i do do it where it's convenient but i don't want to have to do it all the time just to write patches presentable if you like right because it's still doing the same process if it's all on one sheet and it's just that that that way i might be tempted to connect something to something else that normally i wouldn't i wouldn't consider doing because i think once you once you've created an object or a class that's kind of it you know you have to then make another one if you want it to do a different thing and that to me that's not really that flexible you know duplicating modify all the time that's a little bit more like it's a bit more like traditional music composition really right and it's kind of this this is this is this is the this is the wall that me and this this creature called antiop if you remember if you know i remember anthony he ate that was that was part of the problem i mean just that that i'll i'll use we but um came up against was these these protected java classes were just basically black boxes and you couldn't find out what the hell they actually did and it turned out by reverse engineering them that they did all sorts of incredible things they did all sorts of wonderful incredible things and they were all not being used there was no api there was no nothing written down no documentation for all these hidden functions and properties and stuff that these were stuffed inside these classes and encrypted and by i mean i it was me that reverse engineered these things and then we did the quicktime libraries the apple quicktime libraries to find out what quicktime could actually do because apart from just playing a movie is like well you know and then we found out or i found out mainly um that it could do all this stuff and that's what became jitter that's actually what that's actually what happened you know yeah i mean i bought nato when it was out i mean you did yeah yeah that was in that in my arsenal and i used it to make a a release of foush as well which was a kind of desktop destroying kind of weird thing which is lush which you just couldn't you couldn't have done at all with with max at the time you know exactly and so someone like me used like a you know a proper novice programmer really it was it was it was great it was finally it was something to let me hack into a mac which made it you know which meant i didn't have to learn there i find it i find it very difficult to imagine somebody doing as anything as crackers as that today i mean it's uh it's just it just seems i mean writing i mean i remember there was this other thing this b112 or whatever it was i hope to do that one as well and uh do you remember that one no i don't know if i do but then again i don't remember any of the names of any of the bits no they were a little difficult to remember but it was it was this was before nato it was like it was so kind of impregnable and indy but really nice all the presentation for it was like one of that's actually one of the best kind of i used to love all the message board posts and stuff oh my god the whole thing was so well executed it was well it was all it was all coming from my server i allowed her to use my server in denmark to do this and i ended up getting death threats and things like this from people at mcgill university and stuff that's the thing is so protective of it and it's like i thought the whole idea with it was to use it for stuff that you weren't meant to use it for but when you get the further you get into their community the more you know you get these weird caveats that they'll say like oh well obviously everybody's got their own way of doing things but and then they'll sort of tell you their method and their method will be so standard do you know me like well well jimmy what's the point in even having that caveat in there it's like no it's just like silly i don't know i guess it's just to avoid people saying that's a where you're doing it you could have more flexibility whatever but i don't know like programming in a certain style in order to avoid critique oh yeah yeah yeah right right that's that's not you really know what time it is when when you start doing things like that or you should know what time it is when you're doing things like that because that's the end of the line really i mean caring what the what it actually looks like underneath i mean okay if you're working with a group of 10 people or something i mean everybody has to be sought to be able to read it but it doesn't matter if it's this big off robinson style thing that doesn't do anything at all it doesn't matter do you know what i mean it's not important don't do not say one's got more value than the other you know exactly exactly it's it i mean this i mean i suppose this is this is a kind of uh an attitude that uh that you don't find very much or i haven't found very much in the last i don't know 10 15 years or something and it's it's it seemed that that antiope thing was the real sort of the last real flowering of that that i that i saw and there was that yeah there was the false guys as well there was like um aust and farmers manual and then yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah saw them as like a definite branch you know but like you know you're right i mean since then it's it's it's style over uh ideas maybe i don't know in a lot of cases you know let me let me see what i can do with my my efforts to uh to bring some mayhem back into this uh that'll be i've got a few ideas actually but i'm not it's it's it's early days yet so i don't really want to sort of you know jinx it by talking about them but i mean i have got i have got a few uh a few crazy ideas i mean i mean i just looked at the architecture of both of these things i mean that or should i say the ios is under and the um and the androids and they're two pretty they're pretty different uh beasts and their their whole user base thing is actually quite different as well they have a different attitude because the android thing there's so many free things you know and it's uh it's a lot it's a lot looser in a lot of ways it's much more open source and all the rest of it whereas the the apple thing as you said is it's all kind of tied up in that apple store thing but yeah i think that and of course you're restricted on what you can actually put up there and whatever and uh they are censoring they're actively censoring things so they took away the dalai lama app uh in the chinese uh app store and they they've they said the sense of the there was a palestinian thing that they took they took out and uh so they're setting themselves up as a sort of like a kind of mother american american it's just america in it basically it's like a big they're like america's corporate ambassador now well i think i was reading something about that they actually have more money than the american government yeah yeah i mean like remember before iceland fell apart i remember reading an article on how google could afford to buy iceland if they wanted really yeah that's mad didn't it good god well it wouldn't be much a bargain then but uh yeah well yeah actually yeah now there's all this geothermal power and stuff like this so yeah i mean iceland is amazing at the moment i think like unreal it's not getting any press in the uk either which is really yeah you know what's happening there right i mean you must do but i mean it's just great because it's just not there's just been no mention of it on the news massive news blackout on it because i think they just don't want loads of other people doing the same thing because so badly you know well it was the funny the funny thing about it about the whole thing about i mean i lived there for 12 years and the the funny thing about it was that when i first moved there it was a completely flat society so there was there was basically like no pyramid thing at all there wasn't an upper-class lower-class middle class there's none of that at all i mean the president was in the phone book right now you could literally go and knock on the door of the president or anybody in the cabinet and they dance they don't answer the door and you know what happened the the start of the really kind of it's a very corrupt country anyway but um the thing that really sort of broke it was uh when the greed really started was that they showed a television program this is true is they showed a television program uh on a national icelandic television about the medici family and all these uh people from the same family who own iceland air which is the only profitable thing on the entire island um they looked at this television program and they went hey we could do this so overnight there was an art market was created there'd never been one before nobody's ever been paid for a painting in iceland and so overnight overnight everyone became an artist everybody in their granny so you could walk down the main street uh you could walk down you know in reykjavik and throw a stick and you'd hit three artists i mean it was it was just unbelievable and that's what happened is that there just became this there was this i.t gold fever which happened around about oh about 10 years ago or something and that bubble burst i mean terence conrad was coming over to build a like a cafe on the main street and stuff like this i mean there's no way i could have possibly have afforded this right yeah and then yeah yeah i mean it's silly because there are foreign people as well yeah and it all just it all just mushroomed and just before i left i mean it was like everybody knew that you know something bad was going to happen nobody knew it was going to this you know as bad as it got nobody really could predict that as i don't think but it really was quite clear that it was like something bad was going to happen and uh the prices of rent and like everything and nobody talked about anything else other than money nothing it was it was a you i mean people were oh i must run i've got to go to this other job and all the rest of it because it's such a small society i wouldn't have imagined it changed that much i mean they're usually fairly resilient to that kind of let me know oh but the thing the thing is that icelanders i mean there's an old joke about them is that is that uh icelanders would live in a cardboard box if they had to but it would be the best equipped cardboard box in the world all right every single icelander's got an electric back scratcher somewhere in their cupboard everybody's got a clairol foot spa everybody's got all these things which they've just got to have the latest gadgets they've just got to have them and they are very much i mean the thing is that you know because iceland's you know in the middle of nowhere and to get from there to anywhere you have to you know it takes at least three and a half hours to get anywhere anywhere and so what they do is they go to the airport and they arrive at the airport at four o'clock in the morning so what do they do start drinking why because it's cheaper there because they want to drink it's because and this is the this is the mentality is that they've been trained for such a long time that of scarcity you know that's that's the really big thing that's like you get this with your mother's milk in iceland that there's not enough to go around and there may not be anything tomorrow so grab it now that's the biggest lie at the moment is this thing that some people for some stupid reason think that overpopulation is still an issue even though for like 15 years it's been gradually slowing down we reckon it's going to top off at about 9 billion more more than enough stuff to go around like well you know it's just like scarcity is basically created in it right yeah it looks just going to rinse you for cash i mean it's like the old energy thing is a massive con like this whole pro or anti like everybody arguing about the the ecological angle getting it wrong because the whole point of it is that like if energy becomes really really cheap how do you make money from energy you know i mean that's that's the only reason that that we don't have free energy because i mean you could you know you could just have wave power and everyone but you only need apparently 0.2 percent of the kinetic energy available in ocean waves would be enough to give us all the power that the world needs at the moment like all of it you know even for chucking people around on planes and stuff and i was like well i don't know it's just it's like obviously well that's that's why it's kind of artificial do you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah yeah that's not a real thing anymore they have to enforce it you know this is why iceland's a very interesting case is because everything's so concentrated there you know like that they have everything but there's maybe only one person that does it so you've got like they'll be a surrealist and they'll be you know a dad eyes and stuff like this it's just extremely it's extremely concentrated that sounds like a small northern town as well to be honest i mean yeah yeah yeah very much so very very much so i mean apparently on the fair islands it's even worse but uh my experience is with iceland obviously but there is a real i mean that's why it was i mean it's it's changed a lot i mean i haven't been there for quite some time now and uh i understand i mean i'm still in contact with a few people in iceland and uh they tell me that it's just it's just not the same place that's you know that that i went to when i first moved there you know you couldn't pick up a telephone and order a pizza and now it's almost difficult not to i mean they have they have these pizza wars you know when you every every morning your mailbox is stuffed with like you know like 20 different companies trying to get you to buy pizzas and stuff and the it's it's like now a small a small town in i mean iceland is basically now very much like a small town in the us all the children all the children are getting very fat they're wearing american clothes they're starting to use american expressions not english expressions they're all watching american television they're all the americans left because there was a huge american base there and the government begged them to stay and they wouldn't stay and you know they even let this guy off murdering somebody on the streets of reykjavik just so that the american government would reconsider that uh not to leave because they were a huge a huge source of income because of all the shipping and all the airspace and all the rest of it right yeah so um and basically three families ran off with all the money and just left everybody there you know but this is also you can trace this directly to this idea of scarcity because the the icelanders will definitely take three pounds now rather than wait a couple of days and then get 300. right they say they say that icelanders don't drink anybody and don't drink any more than anybody else they just drink it all at once yeah yeah that's but that people want to apply like outside iceland are quite keen to accuse them of gluttony because it makes them feel better yes of course of course i mean it's kind of i read a lot of that but but yes i mean you know the guys used to go the men used to go away on the boat and basically it was these those seas are pretty dangerous and they didn't know whether the men were going to come back or not okay i mean there are still to this day i think i don't know because there's been a lot of immigration there was a lot of polish people went over i think they've all gone now but there was a lot of polish people went over uh but before that there were something like six women for every man on the island so and the first women woman president in the world was there the first parliament was there you know i mean these these people are honest yeah yeah yeah yeah they called the the other thing it's called it was the very first parliament in the world and uh they're not backwards and coming forwards you know i mean they really aren't um and yet at the same time they've always been told that there won't be enough and they had this i you know i mean i remember the first time i heard about iceland was the card wars was when uh britain and uh iceland were at war with each other because of the fish now but this this isn't about this and never even heard of that actually there was this 1971 i believe 71 or 72 and the the british boats were coming up and they were cutting the nets of the icelanders and the icelanders are coming up and cutting the nets of the um of the english boats and stuff like this and basically it's it's our fish no it's our fish no it's our fish and there was diplomatic relations were cut off and like all this kind of stuff and uh for isaac there's an extremely serious matter because of course that's all they got right and uh this went on for quite some time this went on for probably now this is my memory so we were all better off really but uh about a year i think it went on right it was it was a very very it was very and then the next time was what was the next thing oh that was uh fisher and spassky playing chess that was the next time i remember hearing that though and then there was reagan and gorbachev met there um but uh otherwise you know bjork is the only thing who's the only thing that's really put them on on the map you know yeah yeah i mean yeah that's and that's also you know that's also a kind of uh uh the icelanders seem to think think that um you see icelanders aren't honored in their own country so you know you have to make it big outside the country before anybody will look at you in iceland and there's a famous story about robert de niro walking down the street and freaking out because nobody was actually recognizing him saying hello to her and all the rest of it and it was just it was just like oh yeah well probably didn't you oh yeah i saw him in a film you know i mean i walked past it i was i mean i was walking down to the post office one day and i walked past hillary clinton she was there for a chance she she was there for some confident feminist confidence or women's conference or something and there she was with these these guards you know and you know bobby fischer moved there because he was iceland was the only country that would would take him um i don't know if you were following that at all but uh he tried to go to japan and they wouldn't have him and he wanted for tax reasons in america and he wouldn't go back there and finally iceland said well you know you put us on the map and uh we'll have you and they put him up in a five-star hotel and basically paid for his existence until he died and uh i used to i used to walk past him almost every day walking down the street and as i said there was no there was no i mean it wasn't a big thing i mean i used to live across the road from burke you know i mean i i et cetera et cetera and that's one of the things that uh is now being lost because they're they're starting to get this idea that they can mean something in the in the big world whereas before they knew that they didn't and so they didn't try and bother but now there's this you know cigarosa playing to i don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people when they play these stadiums and all the rest of it i mean ken thomas uh you know ken thomas no i don't uh he's a producer he produced their records but he also was involved with psychic tv way back when and i've known him for quite some time but he produced the last the last sega rose record and he used to tell me about them going on tour and they and it was like i thought i was hearing stories about led zeppelin you know i mean it was like they've gone back to this whole thing of like each person having their own tour bus with their own friends on it and their own personal cooks yonsei the singer is a raw food person what do you need a chef and again it's this whole thing it's like what they did was they put themselves into an enormous amount of debt by taking all these advances because they they they've been raised on this whole idea of scarcity and so what i'm my point i'm eventually getting around to that point is that iceland's a very good microcosm for what's happening in other places just as iceland collapsed and then greece collapsed or whatever and then you know you find that other places will happen iceland's a very good place to watch because it is so intense and when something happens in iceland it only takes two or three minutes to spread through the entire place whereas it would take if it was in france or it would take you know months maybe a year for these things to spread yeah that's like yeah like why you're gonna know you like like if hillary clinton visits you might see her you know because it's small enough basically it's like right literally just that in it physical constraints it's kind of but it's funny what you're saying because it makes me think yeah so the way that the way that their culture sort of works with this enforced scarcity it's kind of it's good to look at yeah yeah because it's yeah i guess we're going to be getting a lot more of that soon because it's just you just get talked well you get told things are expensive because they are i mean you know what is that i mean it's kind of like yeah i don't know i just the whole energy thing is doing my heading at the moment because it seems like that's the root of all our problems really right well i mean one thing one thing i saw not so very long ago was the whole idea of the bell curve being upside down now so in in the old days um you know people wanted the the bell curve used to go up in the middle and down at either end if i don't you've been able to picture this or even sure yeah yeah nobody wanted anything that was free and nobody wanted anything that was really expensive everybody wanted the best thing for the best price i mean my parents certainly did i'm sure yours did and and all the rest of it you know because the most reasonable thing nothing to do it's the thing that you yeah right that will last the longest and do the best job but not the stupidly expensive one right there okay and now and now the bell curve's gone the other way apparently according to these these experts that uh i'm looking at a little bit and now people want either they want it for free or it has to be very very very expensive and people don't want the average anymore that's recession though i mean that that usually happens then because you get the luxury goods do better and the cheap goods do better and the middle stuff just gets ignored and you know yeah it's it's i think that you just always get that in recession um that will probably like shift back right yeah well uh one thing we i i really like to ask you what what's your attitude towards this whole cd thing about they're not going to be making cds and all the rest of it by the end of next year and whatever you're going to think i mean i don't know about that that's interesting i'm not i mean we make more money on downloads and physical so it's not going to be a bad thing you make more ah right okay well the the thing is that uh there was that this about a month ago or something there was an announcement um and it turns out that the major record companies are not planning to be manufacturing cds in the same way as they do now they'll be doing special sort of things but basically they're they're moving over down the mages yeah the mages need that because that's what i'm saying the margins are so different right you can imagine i mean it's just there's just no shipping or anything you know it's just like yeah yeah sure you know and this is it's hardly there it's not even a real transaction is it it's just no probably don't even need a listener anymore i mean i kind of well hey hey have you ever heard of carter mead no oh you've got to check you've got to find out about him yeah somebody somebody 25 years ago told me about this guy he was growing silicon ears and noses to be used in customs and stuff like this and he actually used it really and uh i can send you that i have some stuff i can send you not electronic stuff but i can i can send you it if you're if you're interested but anyway i thought you'd be interested in him anyway i kind of yeah it's um i i don't like i haven't the the physical thing with music i mean i kind of look you know physical media i kind of like packaging a lot more than the actual disc the difference horrible it's kind of aesthetically disgusting to me isn't it kind of yeah i'd like to just get rid of that but it'd be i don't i still don't mind you know physical artifacts they can packaging can be really lush so right so i think it'd be sad to lose packaging because you lost the disc but at the same time i also prefer records to cds just right i don't know aesthetically nicer and yeah angry and i kind of so yeah that's that you know i i kind of mourned the loss of vinyl a while ago when sennheiser bought neumann and just destroyed all the lathes that was nice thanks a lot guys [Music] i bet they're kicking themselves now though but uh yeah i mean yeah uh this friend of mine in in denmark henrik he's uh he he's my sort of contact in that sort of area and he says that it's coming back especially at denmark he's just coming back in a huge way but it's actually become very very i mean very very important now for a lot of companies to be putting out the vinyl again well they sell i mean this is the other thing vinyls sell better than cds um if you and if you package them in certain ways um they're they're nicer i mean they're just actually a nicer thing to own you know what i mean i don't really want the cd a lot of the time because i don't know cd packaging has never really been that great there's no certainly not in terms of the standard formats that we end up using because of the numbers we're doing yeah right yeah you know they're they're i mean they're nasty things aren't they really every time horrible really you know who who's great idea was that yeah let's find him and i would give him a good talking too yeah well but you know did you well i was uh i remember seeing of all things tomorrow's world years ago and they were they were actually considering three different formats and one of them was actually a strip of card with a like a barcode a very complicated barcode printed on it and you fed it into this thing and there was just basically a very small laser read the thing and that was it no motor spinning anything around and no none of that kind of stuff and of course it was our old friend phillips who are always first with the technology but also the crappiest implementation oh god oh god anyway sorry you just said okay and they said oh well we can't we can't do this the excuse no we can't make a digital sound like this because everybody with a photographic dark room will be making them lucky now that's gonna be one of the best excuses i've ever heard how many people do you know with this photographic dark room that just happens to be lying around doing nothing waiting to churn out bootlegs certainly this is pre-pho or copier than i guess yes yes yes yes this is a long time ago this is like 75 or 76 i remember seeing this on tomorrow's world what's his name raymond whatever his name was a couple of things on tomorrow's world that never surfaced one of them was he held up this thing that was the size and shape of the sugar cube and said and it looked like it was made of perspex and he said in the future all you'll have 400 albums on something this big and just like between his thumb and fourth finger there was another one where yeah and there was another one where they said oh look at these speakers they're powered by flames and it was this thing right and i swear it was like it's about a six inch globe um kind of um like a cage mesh basically like not that fine but like a mesh and inside it was a flame and and it was the flame was flickering and sound was coming out of it so i have no idea what that was really like to know how that worked but wow yeah because i did a track which was about uh this thing about it's called the vowel flame and it was this flame which actually reacted to certain sounds and uh it was this very mysterious thing that they used to use in victorian times for seances and stuff like this okay right i wonder i wonder if it's some sort of relative to that maybe maybe yeah i don't know i mean i guess the flames gonna show you think maybe it was i don't know how the this thing was working seriously don't cause i saw it when i was quite young and i didn't know any physics really and i just looked at it and thought it doesn't make any sense how can a flame make sound you know just but man i don't know how i need to find out what that was but i'll probably never find out yeah well if you do if you do remember me i'll i'll i'll need to know that as well as soon big flame so anyway uh let me see now oh my god we've been uh talking quite a long time um okay i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to stop now um so um i really enjoy talking to sure and um yeah yeah well let's let's do it again sometime but uh i'll uh i'll be in contact i'll be in contact of course as soon as i know anything about uh coming to england because i mean it's been such a long time since i did it and i do um there's some reasons this ken thomas for example i mentioned before isn't very well so i need to go and see him and a couple of other people so um i am i am going to come over it's this question of getting the money together basically and uh and england's not exactly a cheap place to go if you've been if you'd be living in estonia for a while so um let's check so but i'll let you know as soon as uh and and do do let me know if you ever managed to hear [Laughter] hear the damn thing as well yeah yeah you know totally obviously i will immediately that i've i've digested it i'll be in touch all right very good but we'll speak again in the near future all right we could look forward to seeing you know keep watching yeah you too shut up bye bye okay guys yeah um thanks very much for everybody to who took part uh which is mainly maybe mainly sean and i but no it's good it's good better and um yes well uh i want to remind that we have to speak soon about the russian stuff in the next in the next couple of days um yeah okay we could we can do this it's just that uh i have quite a few things to sort out i'll do you i'll your text i'll be doing tomorrow and uh just just just let me know what your reaction to that is and then we can uh we can take that further and if that's if that is actually john on there which i think it might be um he he can expect uh he doesn't seem to be speaking but i mean uh he can expect some uh some more text work uh as well it is me thank you ah right okay there we go yeah looking forward to it i like what i see so far it's great thank you you do you do yeah it's great i'm trying to be concise but i'm just i'm i am finding myself running away at the mouth a bit but uh you'll have to forgive that no do it uh i'm i'm not sure how i should be really pitching this but so i'm just going to carry on and do it and you can you can be an editor or something i don't know okay because i think i think what i think what i'm saying is actually quite is is relevant to what uh to what you need and i also think i'm i'm not doing that bad a job of actually explaining it in a way that people will get it i agree okay that's great i'm nice nice to hear that the feedback so within just within i mean i'll send you a mail or something when i've put some more stuff in there and uh i hope it's going fast enough for you yeah actually i get updates from google sends something automatically whenever it's edited so wow okay all right okay that's great okay i didn't i didn't know because you can set that yourself coming too that's right yeah yeah i don't know i don't know yeah thank you thank you all right very good john and uh alexis with spock we'll speak again in the near future and um and whoever the other person is uh thank you for joining us for this last few minutes and uh we'll see everybody or we'll hear everybody in about uh a month's time on the first um in fact uh this may work out to be that uh i might actually be in russia the next time that this uh yeah yeah we do this january is russian christmas time so oh yeah right right right well that that should be an interesting and interesting call yeah yeah jingle you know jingle sound yeah we need to put video and everything on that i think so yeah yeah good okay thanks very much to everybody and um hope you've enjoyed it and i'll speak to you yeah soon okay bye bye bye